Dare to Dance Again: The Absence/Presence Rhythm
Acts 1:1-11
May 16, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/hR-JvU0iBpI
At one time in church history, Ascension was a high, holy day, equal in importance to Christmas and Easter. Ascension always falls 40 days after Easter which means that it always lands on a Thursday. Just as we gather for worship on Christmas Eve, no matter what day of the week it is, earlier Christians would have gathered to celebrate the Feast of the Ascension on that same Thursday every year. Now, most Christian traditions move the observance to Sunday, if they attend to it at all.
The fact that it was once so prominent in the calendar makes me think that a smart preacher will approach today’s sermon like she would on Christmas or Easter. Which is to say that I know my words will be inadequate in the face of mystery, but I will try to say something anyway.
In one Amish community even today, Ascension is more significant than Easter, but not nearly so festive. A Protestant pastor asked an Amish bishop if they celebrated the day with a worship service, with a potluck meal, with communion? “No,” he responded. “We don’t really think of the day as a celebration at all, but more like a time of mourning.” Recalling Jesus’ parable about the time when the bridegroom is taken away and the people fast, he said “It’s a time for lament because that’s when we remember that Jesus left us behind—that’s when he left us here.” There is no feasting, only fasting.[1]
The Ascension acknowledges loss. Jesus no longer dwells in physical form among those who love him. Where there was once a flesh and blood presence, there is now only absence. We usually perceive absence as loss and therefore something painful.
In the words of Barbara Brown Taylor, “Absence is the arm flung across the bed in the middle of the night, the empty space where a beloved sleeper once lay. Absence is the child’s room now empty and hung with silence and dust. Absence is the overgrown lot where the old house once stood, the house in which people laughed and thought their love would last forever.”[2]
Absence can be painful. It can also be valuable in revealing what is precious. Many of us carry within us the voices of departed loved ones. Every once in a while, sometimes regularly, messages accumulated across a lifetime come to us. Phrases like “money doesn’t grow on trees” or
“Leftie loosie, rightie tightie” or
“I don’t care who wins as long it’s the Cubs” or
“I am proud of you.”
We hear their voices within us or we notice that we do something the way they did it. Their habits become ours. And so, the absent one becomes keenly present in a paradoxical way.
Adam and Eve, and therefore all human beings, were created in the image of God to be in relationship with God. The incarnation, Jesus in human flesh on earth, was the next step in God’s process of uniting with humans. The Ascension acknowledges the loss of the physical Jesus from the earth, but it celebrates the presence of Jesus at the right hand of God. It is the culmination – “now there is ‘one of us’ where we all shall be, where from the very beginning of creation we were intended to be.” [3]
There are some people, some preachers and theologians, who attempt to magnify God by denigrating humans. The Bible speaks differently, proclaiming that we are made in God’s image, a little lower than the angels. Theologian Justo Gonzalez writes, “if the one who sits at the right hand of God, is ‘one of us’, that is a human being, then every human being is worthy of the highest respect. Not only we Christians, but every human being, is like the one who already sits at the right hand of God.”[4]
At Christmas, we attend to the mystery that is God coming to earth in human form. At Ascension, we can attend to the mystery that is a human going to heaven in God form. (Or something kind of like that. I told you that my words would be inadequate.)
As Jesus ascends, the disciples gaze upwards and the angels ask “Why are you standing here starting up into heaven?” The Franciscan priest Richard Rohr observes, “most of Christianity has been doing just that, straining to find the historical Jesus ‘up there.’ Where did he go? We’ve been obsessed with the question because we think the universe is divided into separate levels – heaven and earth. But,” Rhor says, “It is one universe and everything within it is transmuted and transformed by the glory of God. The whole point of the incarnation and risen body is that Christ is here – and always was! But now we have a story that allows us to imagine it just might be true.”[5]
Let’s step back for a minute and see this story in its context. We heard it from the beginning of the book of Acts today, but it is also found at the end of the Gospel of Luke. Acts is the sequel to the gospel of Luke and the Ascension is the hinge between them. Acts 1:1 says that the first book was all about what Jesus began to do and to teach. That was only the beginning of the ministry. The gospel contained the acts of Jesus in the flesh and the second book, the Acts of the Apostles, tells the next part of the history, the ways that Jesus’s work goes on beyond his physical embodied presence.
I’m running out of words again, so let me try with a picture. This is diagram is the work of Richard Rohr. It is an attempt to show our growing, evolving understanding of God. At the top of the hourglass are expansive ideas of God, probably too big for the human mind to grasp.
At the very center of this diagram is Jesus, the human being. The one we call Jesus existed before the beginning of the creation as part of the Trinity. Jesus of Nazareth became the Christ, the Annointed One, in his death and resurrection. The Risen Christ is Jesus, but bigger and beyond Jesus’ individual form and lifetime. Richard Rohr says that that “the Risen Christ is Jesus released from all space/time restrictions. He is beyond space, beyond time. He includes all of the spiritual and the physical world, reconciled within himself.”[6]
The physical Jesus no longer dwells among us, but he lives in us through his teachings and the habits of his which we have adopted as our own. The physical Jesus was limited to first century Palestine, but the Holy Spirit is present in all times and places. The physical Jesus was continually inviting his disciples to join him on mission. And here, at the time of the Ascension, he does that one last time, saying “You shall be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.” They will pick up the story, the story which begins to be told in the Acts of the Apostles, the story of the work of the Spirit carried out by human beings. That is the story that you and I are invited into, the epic story which we are already part of, as the hands and feet of Jesus.
Many of you know much more about opera than I do. You probably know the history of Puccini’s Turandot. Puccini is the composer of La Boheme and Madame Butterfly. In 1922, he was suffering with cancer, but still working on his opera Turandot. Many people urged him to rest, thinking that he couldn't possibly finish it anyway. When his illness worsened Puccini wrote to his students, "If I don't finish Turandot I want you to finish it for me". Then came the fateful day in 1924 when Puccini went to Brussels for treatment. He died a few days later.
In 1926, the world premiere was performed in the opera house in Italy. It was directed by Puccini's student, Arturo Toscanini. Everything went beautifully until the orchestra reached the point where Puccini was forced to put down his pen.
Toscanini stopped the music, put down his baton, turned to the audience and said, "Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died". The curtain was slowly lowered and the audience departed, lamenting the absence of the composer.
The next night, the performance began at the top again, but this time, when it reached the place where Puccini died, the music continued, because another composer had picked up where he left off and finished the work.
We might say that it is a work that will never be fully finished, as others in subsequent generations have also written and continue to write new endings.
Jesus said, “greater things than I have done, you will do.” We are his students. He has trusted us to carry on his work, to embody his teachings, to be together, the Body of Christ, in Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/may-10-ascension-lord-luke-2444-53
[2] Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Lanham, Maryland: Cowley Publications, 1995), p, 76.
[3] Justo Gonzalez, Luke in the Belief Commentary Series, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2010), p.281
[4] Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).p. 26
[5] Richard Rohr https://cac.org/heaven-earth-one-2016-10-27/
[6] Richard Rohr https://cac.org/heaven-earth-one-2016-10-27/