The Ascension of Our Lord: May 20, 2004.

Acts 1:1-11

Psalm 47 or Psalm 93

Ephesians 1:15-23

Luke 24:44-53

The Feast of the Ascension marks the fortieth day after Easter, as Jesus is taken up to heaven in the cloud. It's a neglected feast, taking us by surprise on a Thursday, of all days. Our congregation celebrates it with a few other neighboring parishes, so we scrape together a quorum. But Ascension is also a day with big hymns and lots of drama. Brimming bouquets of whatever spring flowers we can find in the woods (usually the trillium are out) bring poignant tribute and joy to the sanctuary. Everyone looks forward to the helium balloon "cloud" suspended high over the paschal candle. We follow an old (now discouraged) tradition of extinguishing the Easter candle during the Gospel and thrill to the curls of smoke twining and rising. I've always wanted to have a jazz clarinet, or oboe perhaps, riff something appropriate as it disappears. One year I got a confirmand to make an Ascension altar hanging with old watered-down latex paint in sunset/sunrise colors and a leaping/rising figure in outline. On Ascension, we certainly get to "use our hands" to help see and proclaim Christ alive in the world and the church, but we also get to preach.

First Reading

Luke gets to tell the story of the Ascension twice today. In the Acts of the Apostles, the ascension is an event of the church and serves as the opening act to the Apostolic Age. The story places the disciples in Jerusalem. It opens the door to the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. Jesus goes up so that the Spirit can come down.

The story works differently in the Gospel version, where it is an intimate event of closure for Jesus' closest friends and companions. The ascension takes place in Bethany, a neighborhood where Jesus spent a lot of time with friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. It closes out a period of forty days when Jesus continued to walk, eat, and teach his disciples in some kind of bodily way. But this story also brings for those close to Jesus a certain kind of comfort and closure some weeks down the road from the shocking and violent way that their friend and Lord was put to death, and the equally disturbing and confusing events of Easter's empty tomb when they couldn't care for the body. Finally here they get to see God's vindication for Jesus. They may continue to grieve his physical presence and the good old days, but they see in a glorious way what happens to him--how God has cared for him and raises him up now to new life in the splendor of heaven. In this more tender than churchly story, Jesus departs from a neighborhood he loved to hang out in, with a great deal of blessing. Jesus goes up, so that those who grieve can go on with some confidence about what has happened to their loved one, and perhaps some added confidence about where they are bound as well.

Personal Reflection

I read Ben Witherington's exegesis on these lessons (New Proclamation, 2002) in preparation for last year's Ascension sermon just two weeks after my mother's death from lung cancer. I was there, and I had no problem knowing what had happened to her. I'd heard her last choking breath and seen the last pulse in her neck, just as I'd seen her light up cigarette after cigarette for fifty years. I'd washed these struggles from her body and clothed her for her trip to the funeral home in resurrection wear: her favorite white stretch pants and a white T-shirt with a blazing sun rising over water. But I have to say I didn't have much sense of God's vindication, even at the release of her suffering. And I didn't really know where she was. Truth to tell, I could still feel her with me. I could still feel my fingers in her hair. I could still hear her voice. I could still go to the closet and smell her, finger a sleeve and swear I could feel her arm filling it. Yet, even in two weeks' time that sense was fading, and I could well imagine forty days being about as long as you could hang on to this kind of presence. I could resonate with the blessing of having this time, forty days into Easter, to mark the end of this stage of grief and loss.

To make a long story short, it turns out that the Orthodox Church does offer a tradition for observing a period during which a person is only nearly departed, with a time of farewell at the end of forty days. The liturgy is called the panikhida. When I asked a friend from the former Soviet Union about some of the folk traditions surrounding the forty days in her Georgian community, Elena described it this way: "You keep a candle lit for forty days. You set out bread and water--food for the dead person--at meal times, just as Jesus ate for forty days with his disciples. They are still there with you. You don't touch any of their things. You drape the mirrors and windows with mourning. You don't watch TV; you just tell stories about your loved one. Then, on the fortieth day, you have a party. You undrape the house. You invite the neighborhood and friends. You blow out the candle. You break a window to let your loved one's spirit go out of the house. Then, you start giving away their things."

I love the window-breaking thing. But I couldn't do it to the thermopane. We did invite friends and the neighborhood to Tedi's house in Mineral Hills. They'd seen the single (electric) candle blazing in the porch window and wondered what that was about. We had all of Mom's traditional party foods. We told the stories and laughed in a way we just weren't ready for at the time of the funeral. I told the story of Jesus' ascension, and a long-held church tradition of the fortieth day, but omitted the formal liturgy of the panikhida for this particular crowd--lots of kids in their 20s who used to hang out on Mom's porch who hadn't seemed touched by the formal church funeral and unchurched folks who didn't even come to the funeral. And then (OK, I know this is environmentally terrible) we took a bunch of helium balloons out of the house. With a word of final blessing, we let them go. We watched them until we couldn't see them anymore. When we came back in, Mom's friends helped me begin breaking up the house by taking things they would cherish.

I needed the funeral, an event of the church. But I needed this, too, a fortieth day in the old neighborhood with those who loved her best.