Ascensiontide

Propers: The Seventh Sunday of Easter, AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Welcome to Ascensiontide, a strange sort of sub-season, often overlooked, within our greater Easter celebration. It ranges from the 40th day of Easter—the Ascension of Our Lord, when Jesus returned to heaven to rule at the right hand of the Father—to the 50th day, Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the Apostles as wind and tongues of flame.

It is a time of waiting and uncertainty. For centuries the paschal candle would be snuffed following the Gospel reading on Ascension Day, so that we would wait for nine days in darkness and in prayer, as did the Apostles. And this points to the real value of an Ascensiontide: namely, that it gives us permission to acknowledge our feelings of being abandoned by God. Jesus has ascended, the Spirit has yet to arrive, and we are left to wait alone in silence.

Now, speaking theologically, God is always omnipresent. His presence never leaves us. If we fly up to heaven, He’s already there; if we fall into hell, He’s waiting to catch us. Bidden or unbidden, God is always present. What’s lacking is our awareness. We do not feel the presence of God, the same way that someone can feel alone in a crowd. And this is part of the spiritual journey. It’s not the dark night of the soul—that’s something else entirely—but it is something that all Christians, and likely all humans, encounter.

The fault is not with God but with the limitations of our minds. The same stimulus no longer generates the same response. And in fact this might not be a fault at all, but a necessary mechanism prodding us to dig deeper into our religion. For indeed, the only way that a finite being can remain in communion with infinite Being is if we are forever learning, forever growing. We cannot exhaust the depths of God; He is always more, more than we could ever imagine.

This is why one must beware emotional religion. I’m not saying worship should be boring. Worship must be beautiful, good, and true, and that’s never boring. But there are those for whom religion is primarily an emotional high. They feel good, and that’s what makes God real for them. But the problem with emotional highs is that sooner or later you come down from them.

When the music doesn’t move you in the same way, when the fog machines start to look cheesy, when worship just doesn’t get you there in the way that it used to, is God gone? Is your religion over—been there, done that? Or is this the sign that it’s time to move on, not to abandon the faith, but to delve deep? This is why religion cannot be entertainment. We will never out-entertain the world. Religion is here for when entertainment is no longer enough.

My prayer life has changed a lot over the decades, a lot since I’ve become a pastor. And so has my image of God. It’s always Jesus, mind you—Jesus is the visible Image of the invisible God—but what that means for me, for my life, changes, grows, deepens. It has to. How else can God do something new? Someone once said that if the you of five years ago wouldn’t consider the you of today at least a bit of a heretic, then you aren’t growing spiritually. And that’s a little tongue-in-cheek, of course. But it’s also more than a little true.

The Apostles at Ascension stand gawking up at the sky, staring at the clouds, not knowing what to do next. And the angels have to tell them, “Hey, get out of here. You’ll see Jesus again. But He’s doing something new, something in you.” In a sense, God has to leave in the flesh so that God can return in the Spirit: the Spirit who makes us His flesh, makes us His Body. And again, it’s not like God really leaves. God is always with us. Christ is always with us, to the end of the age.

But any relationship with God will always be a dynamic between the Hidden and the Manifest: between the infinite, eternal, transcendent, unknowable God hidden in heaven; and the present, active, immanent, loving God manifest here on earth. The infinite God manifests in finite ways, different ways, because we are finite, we are different. And only by God coming down, stooping down, as it were, can we know Him, can we love Him, can we be in relationship with Him.

That’s what revelation is. That’s what the Incarnation is. It’s God come down; the Hidden made Manifest.

So now the Apostles have to wait. They don’t have the advantage that we do; they don’t know what’s coming next, the new thing God is about to do. And we get this curious little episode in which they decide they need a new Apostle. There were 12, right? 12 Tribes of Israel; 12 signs of the Zodiac; 12 Apostles. It just fits. But with Judas dead there’s a vacancy. Jesus ascended; He’s not here to pick a new one. The Spirit has yet to descend; they’re not even sure if She’s showing up.

So they cast lots—which honestly is kind of funny. I mean, one of the reasons we love  the Apostles is because they’re so very human. They mean well, except when they don’t, and they bumble through like strong, brave, wise, clueless screwballs. Just like us. Casting lots does have precedent in the Hebrew Bible. But honestly, in this context, it’s like flipping a coin. They’ve got whom they consider to be two excellent candidates for apostolicity: Joseph Barsabbas and Matthias.

Joseph and Matthias have been there from the beginning, apparently. It’s pretty much the first we’ve heard of them, but we are reliably informed that they were present for Jesus’ ministry from the moment of His Baptism in the Jordan River, through His Resurrection, all the way up to His Ascension into heaven. And the one guy is called Joseph the Just: I mean, it’s right there in his name. But without Jesus, and without this new manifestation of God’s Spirit, they’re at a loss for how to choose between the two. So they roll the dice, literally, and hope that God works in that. Say a prayer, flip a coin, and just go with it.

So that’s how we get our new Apostle. And nothing against Matthias—I hope he’s praying for me in heaven right now, the patron saint of take-the-shot—but we never hear from him again. He’s basically a footnote in the biblical narrative. And speaking literarily, just following the text, it appears that the Apostles made the wrong call. Because in the Acts of the Apostles, Judas’ successor, who makes their number complete, is clearly Saul of Tarsus, whom we know as St Paul.

Paul is Judas’ opposite. He starts off hating the Christians, hating the Church, until God manifests Himself as the very person Paul is persecuting, the risen Jesus Christ. And from that moment forward Paul is the hero of the Acts of the Apostles. He wasn’t there from the beginning. He didn’t see the Baptism, the Resurrection, or the Ascension. He wasn’t trusted by the community; they feared and loathed him. But God did something new. The Apostles chose Matthias; God chose Paul. And it took the Church a while to square with that, because we weren’t ready for it.

We all have times when we feel abandoned by God. And I don’t mean tragedy; I don’t mean suffering. I mean something far more mundane. There are times when we simply won’t feel Him there, when our spirits have run dry and stale. But that doesn’t mean that He’s gone. It just means that it’s our time to sink deeper roots, like those trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in due season. Maybe that’ll mean trying something fresh and new. Or maybe it’ll mean returning to something old and familiar with clearer, wiser eyes.

Spirituality is rarely a straight line. It’s more like a spiral, forever returning to things that we thought we had known, only to find there new depths, new meaning, new life—a sort of resurrection, if you will. It’s not that God gets bigger. He’s always there, and always God. But our ideas of Him grow along with our soul, as manifestations of the hidden, incarnations of the infinite; so that in knowing the God made visible we may come to love the God whom we cannot see.

This is precisely what Ascensiontide is for: for waiting, for praying, for not knowing, and for being open to whatever it is that God is doing next. Ascension reminds us, in short, that faith and doubt are two ends of the same stick. Faith is simply trust in God; and doubt is the humility to admit what all we do not know. We hold firmly to that faith end of the stick, so that we may poke our way forward with the doubting end.

Thus are we open to the Spirit and the Word of God. And thus may He use us to resurrect this fallen world.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

 

Credit where credit is due: much of this homily draws from an Ascensiontide presentation by Liza Anderson.