Ascension Sunday

Acts 1:1-11; Eph 1: 15-23; Luke 24:44-53

Rev’d Dr. Deborah Meister, ODM

What do we do once those we love are gone? That is the paradox of Ascension Day. To the Church, it is a feast: the celebration that Christ has returned, victorious, to heaven, bearing our humanity back to the place of everlasting light and love. No longer to be scorned, hunted, feared, but to be worshiped and prayed to and adored. But for us, Good Friday, Easter, and Ascension follow the trajectory of human grief: the sharp, sudden loss which numbs and breaks us, followed by a time in which all the things of our daily life evoke our beloved’s memory and renew our loss; followed by a gentler time, a time when our beloved no longer haunts our steps, but dwells gently in our heart. Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to do much with the Ascension, theologically: our lived experience of loss ends at this point, and our life goes on without the beloved as an everyday companion. Our primal experience of the death of those we love is absence, and so we do not know what to do with the Ascension, a loss which allows Jesus to be present in new and life-giving ways.

To help us understand, I’d like to take you through one of my favorite stories, The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono. Giono tells of Elzéard Bouffier, a shepherd who lived in the French Alps in the early 20th century. (It’s fiction, though.) When our narrator first encounters him, Bouffier is living in a barren land, dry, overgrazed, sere. But each day, while his sheep are grazing, Bouffier gathers acorns, and each night, he selects 100 of them to plant the following day. When the narrator returns, after ten years, he finds the landscape transformed. Where it had been dry, now there is a forest of young trees. The silence of dead land had been replaced by the burbling of streams, the murmur of insects, the songs of birds. After another decade or so, people began to return to the land. Giono writes, “Everything in the village now spoke of hope. The former inhabitants barely recognizable because of the goodwill and happiness that had taken over their lives, had been joined by others…In place of the abandoned houses overgrown with weeds were rebuilt homes surrounded by vegetable gardens and flowers… In the center of the town was a fountain, from which water flowed into a pool. And someone had planted a linden tree, the symbol of resurrection.”

Here’s the thing: no one knew where the forest had come from. The shepherd whose labor had given them renewed life seemed to them just another inhabitant of the area, an old man with a fondness for trees. But when the narrator returns, he tells the forest ranger the story, and they go to spend time with the shepherd. That is our role in the world, post-Ascension: to tell the story, to tend the earth, to take people to meet with our Shepherd.

So often, the church acts as if that were the job of the clergy, and it’s true that we have been set aside for the task. But we are set aside only as anchors and examples; the work of sharing, teaching, and living the Gospel is for all of us. Martin Luther called it “the priesthood of all believers,” and it is the work of our lives. During the ten days between Ascension and Pentecost, the disciples wait for the Holy Spirit to be given to them so that they will be empowered as witnesses, but we have the Spirit from the time of our baptism.  For us, the only barrier to sharing with others “the hope to which he has called us” is our own hesitancy to do so.

And yet, we are the planters of seeds. We are the tenders of the forest. Not just we, who wear fancy robes, but all of us together. We plant seeds of hope when we sing or paint or vaccinate a child. We plant seeds of courage when we protest injustice or research new fields or join with other volunteers to protect a town from flood or from fire. We plant groves of mercy when we feed the hungry or care for the sick or reply to harsh words with gentle patience and understanding. Each of us in our own vocation, walking through our days with Christ in our hearts, bearing him into the stuff and encounters of our world.

And yet, that necessary and pragmatic witness — teaching, feeding, healing, caring — is the foundation of our testimony: it is necessary, but not sufficient. It’s not the role of the church to be a kind of chaplaincy to those hurt and broken by modern life, but to embody an alternative culture^[1], not defined by the terms of our age, but singing the counterpoint of divine life. When we enter a church or Cathedral, we are constituting a different kind of community, what Stanley Hauerwas calls an “outpost or colony of heaven.” (Resident Aliens)

“Colony” is a fraught word these days, but Hauerwas uses it with care.  A colony is a community of people who are unlike those around them because they “belong” somewhere else. For us as Christians, our true homeland is in heaven; the letters of Peter refer to us as “aliens and exiles” as long as we are on earth. And the danger for us is not that we will “conquer” others through abhorrent means (although the church has done more than enough of that in the past); the danger is that we will not be different enough to present a compelling alternative to the big-society narratives of power, money, and domination. That we will not allow ourselves to live from from the heart.

That’s why we center our common life on beauty and on ritual: by coming together to do things which are a bit strange, we immerse ourselves in the Otherness of God. I’m not sure we think about that enough; so often, we speak and preach about how Jesus is present, human, like us in every way except sin, that we can lose sight of the fact that we are inhabiting a space of Mystery. A place where people rise from the dead and walk around with holes in their hands and feet, were a man goes soaring up into heaven and never returns, where fire dances on the heads of the disciples and languages babble and ordinary people like you and like me can dare to dream of different kind of world.

But that dream — that strange haunting presence of an idea that the world is meant to be kinder, gentler, better than it is — is sorely needed right now. All around us, we see the consequences of its absence: starvation and violence and war and the deliberate destruction of human freedom. It turns out that Christian weirdness really is the leaven in the loaf. Our steadfast refusal to allow what is and what has been to define all that is possible is the only thing standing between the people of this earth and unbridled predation.

And so, this Ascension, we need to believe in a deeper way: not a way that seeks to explain the miracles, but which allows us to be transformed by them — by the radical possibility that we will be saved precisely by what we cannot explain or understand, by the truths we can see only in glimpses from the corners of our eyes. The tangible truths of this world have led us far astray; it is time to commit our hearts to the work of planting a different kind of seed, to cultivating our community as a true outpost of heaven. To living the tenderness of God today. I will leave us with a verse from the poet Edwin Muir, which seems to be a kind of prayer:

Light and praise,
Love and atonement, harmony and peace,
Touch me, assail me: break and make my heart.
(“Soliloquy”)

^[1] cf Ross Douthat, “Make Catholicism Weird Again,” New York Times, May 8, 2018.