Seventh Sunday of Easter / Ascension of Our Lord (transferred)
Sunday, May 8
Listen to the audio of today’s sermon: Sermon 5-8-16
[Luke writes:] 1In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning 2until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. 3After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. 4While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; 5for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
6So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” 9When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. 11They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” – Acts 1:1-11
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
This week the White House announced that Malia Obama will attending Harvard, but not until after taking a gap year first. The news coverage was politely supportive, but underlying it was the need to defend taking a year off. Not that any of us have any business commenting on her personal life, but I think there was an unspoken question hanging in the air about whether taking a gap year was an okay thing to do or at least wondering what it was all about. Perhaps it’s because we are mostly a society that doesn’t take breaks well. We tend to be people who are pushed from within or by others to do more and more. And that doing is usually supposed to follow set standards. You go from one school to the next school or on to the workplace. You are expected to be attending school or contributing to the GDP. One person suggested it was because of the name – “Which parent would raise his/her hand to send their kids into a gaping hole?” – She prefers “bridge year” or “launchpad.” But there were several thoughtful responses about how transformative a gap year can be, including statistics that suggest students who do a gap year are overall more successful in college.
It strikes me that this odd ten days of the church year between Ascension and Pentecost are gap-time. The disciples have been experiencing the resurrected Jesus for 40 days, according to Luke. They had been through a terrible ordeal, blown away by Jesus rising from the dead and living among them off and on for several weeks. But now he leaves them again. Is it easier this time because they have seen what is possible, because they have seen the dead raised? Or harder because they have lost again the one they love so much?
And mysteriously they are commissioned to be apostles, to spread the good news to all the nations, but they are told to wait for the Spirit. It’s not as if the Spirit has been absent – it was hovering over the deep before the formation of the world, and disrupting people’s lives with God’s grace and God’s call to ministry ever since. So what’s the hold up? What will be different about the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost? If it were me I’d be eager to get up and go, deal with the task at hand. Instead Jesus imposes a break. Only 10 days in this case, but a break – a gap week – nonetheless.
We simply don’t know what to do with this unstructured gap in time between Jesus’ leaving them and the coming of the spirit. Just like we are so often unsure of what to do when these breaks are imposed on our lives. There are times when certain things demand that we pause from our normal busyness and wait. Like the wait between knowing a child is on its way into ones family and the time that child arrives. Or like the in between time when a move to a new place or a new job or a new commitment is decided and the time it actually happens – living with one foot where you are and the other in the air getting ready to land in a new place. Or the pause required by deep loss – after a death, a shattered relationship, a dream given up on – we need time between the immediate busyness of the event itself and the time when we will be able to transform our grief and take the next step forward – a pause the world often doesn’t make space for. Transitions are rarely quick and easy – whether we plan for it or it is imposed on us, transitions often require gap-time, moments to become more aware of the liminal space in which we stand between the already and not yet. These gap times demand our emotional energy and often require that we set aside the many details we tend to on a daily basis.
Yet many of us resist. We listen to the subtle, often unspoken messages that we must always be doing, we must always be pushing, we must always be producing. I imagine the apostles already wanting to tally up how many converts they’ve baptized and how many miles they’ve traveled, how many churches they’ve started. Or maybe put more positively they are full of Easter joy and are bursting to share it, like so many of this weekend’s graduates fully trained and credentialed eager to offer what they have to the world. It seems like it breaks the momentum of the story to pause.
And yet, that’s often what happens in the history of God’s people. Noah and his family spend more time on the ark between the end of the flood and the time the ground is dry enough to walk on than they do actually during the 40 days of rain. Abraham and Sarah wait years between the promise of a child and the birth of Isaac. The Israelites spend 40 years between their escape from slavery and their entry into the promised land. The prophets promise God’s redemption that they wait generations to see realized. It’s the rhythm of God’s very self, who rested on the seventh day of creation and invited us to do the same every seventh day, every seventh year. In the nature of the created world, in our human nature is the need for pauses to rest, to reflect, to prepare, to gather ourselves together before we launch ahead.
I wonder just how the disciples spent those ten days. But I suspect they had learned in all that they had experienced in the previous weeks that the time was better spent in community with one another. It was, I imagine a time they spent in personal reflection and communal conversation. Our whole lives are suspended between the promise God makes to us through baptism and the fulfillment of that promise for us and for the whole world. Through individual times of transition that come and go we live always in the already but not yet of God’s transformation of creation. Washed again and again by the reminder of that baptismal promise and fed by the bread and wine of Christ’s body and blood we are freed to enter those times of waiting, those times of transition, those times of preparation, with the confidence that we are surrounded by the community and that our waiting is an opportunity for God to work in us what is needed for going forward.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
Stewarding the Word 