Rev. Molly Phinney Baskette ~ First Church Somerville
Sunday, May 4, 2008 ~ Ascension Sunday
Acts 1:1-11
"Mean Time"
I feel like I've lived my entire adult life in ten-day increments. For
nearly two decades now I have been saying to myself, "If I can just make it
to a week from Tuesday, things are going to slow down, and then I will get
to real life." Then next Tuesday arrives, and some projects are finished,
and some trips are behind me, and some relationships wrongs have been
righted, and some things that were broken have been fixed, but in the
meantime, a whole new crop of worries and chores and unreturned phone calls
and relationship clamors have sprung up in their place, and things that were
whole became broken. And I gird myself and say, "If only I can make it
through till next Friday..."
What I imagine life will be like ten days from now, is hard to say exactly.
Quieter, certainly, with big empty pockets for prayer or play or sleep or
service. More efficient, and more noble, less impeded by the detritus and
maintenance of everyday life. I can always imagine that in ten days, I will
finally get around to world peace. But in the meantime, there is the dry
cleaning to pick up.
Ten is about the right number of days to promise a shift into a different
sort of reality. Within ten days, we can imagine, things can change, a
little or a lot. It's the hope I always hold out, no matter how many times I
am proven wrong.
You may have heard of Pentecost, the church feast-day we will celebrate next
Sunday. The banners will miraculously turn from white to green, just as the
trees outside are, dropping spring blossoms and welcoming summer's leaves.
Pentecost commemorates the flowering of the church: on the day of
Pentecost, the followers of Jesus received the gift of the Holy Spirit. From
this point on, they had power like that of Jesus, and all they would need to
do is say his name and they could make paraplegics walk, make the blind see,
restore schizophrenics to sound mind. After Pentecost, the apostles began to
let women lead, they held all their wealth in common so that none were poor,
and they saved life after life after life after life. In the words of Acts,
they were "turning the world upside-down." This is Pentecost.
But you likely haven't heard of the feast of the Ascension. The Ascension
happened fully ten days before Pentecost, and it remembers Jesus Christ's
rising bodily in a cloud into heaven before the amazed eyes of his
disciples. So forty days after Easter, Jesus leaves the disciples for good.
And fifty days after Easter, the Holy Spirit arrives to confer upon them the
power to heal and preach and feed in the same way that Jesus did. In the
meantime, ten days. Ten days for the disciples to wonder: what do we do
now? What can we do now? With Jesus gone, and the Spirit not yet arrived to
start its shift, do we have any power to do anything whatsoever?
These are ten days, when it appears, we are under our own steam. This is
fine with some of you. You likely feel that you are under your own steam
much of the time anyhow. It is not easy to feel that the power of God is
with you. You may not feel that Jesus is a personal presence in your life,
and the Spirit, well, you have caught glimpses here and there, but as far as
making the blind see, there is not a lot of evidence of that in your life.
So the ten days that the disciples endured, without any kind of divine
accompaniment, just feels like ordinary life. You don't miss Jesus, feel the
fear and confusion that his apostles felt to see him taken up into the
heavens without them, because he has not been taken from you in the same
way.
You might or might not know what it is like to feel bereft of that closeness
with God. But every one of us knows what it is like to have to wait to see
how things play out, having no control nor even the illusion of control over
the outcome of something that is preciously important to us.
The exam is taken, and the grade has not yet been recorded.
The blood has been drawn, and the test results have not come back.
The application has been proferred, and no envelope, either fat or skinny,
has arrived in the mail.
The prayers have been said outside of the surgical wing, and now you are
clanging around the fluorescent-lit waiting room.
The presidential hopefuls have declared their candidacy, the next leader of
the nation has yet to be revealed.
The three little words have accidentally escaped your lips, and now you are
waiting to hear them back from the one you love.
The chemo trial has started.
The pregnancy test is positive.
Hospice has been called, now all we can do is wait. Now all we can do is
wait.
There is nothing you can do to make the next thing happen that you want to
happen. You can't make him love you. You can't make her healthy. You can't
make the college or employer accept you. You can't rush 40 weeks of
gestation. You do your part, and you let it go. You can't make any more
plans. Or you can, but what would be the point?
The old clichŽ goes that if you want to make God laugh, you should tell Her
your plans.
This sounds suspiciously like Jesus' advice to the disciples right before he
ascended: go to Jerusalem. Hang out there and wait for God to deliver the
Holy Spirit. In other words, don't make any plans, for now. Just go and be
together.
And that is exactly what the disciples do. My son and I have a code-if he
gets lost and can't find me when we're out in public, he is to go back to
the last place he saw me, and I'll do the same. In this way we can find each
other again. That's what the disciples do-they go back to Jerusalem, and
they go to the upstairs room where they were used to meeting with Jesus.
Thomas a Kempis told us we are to be imitators of Christ. He got to
ascend-"taken up" as if lifted by an unseen force above. But we mere mortals
have to take the stairs. A colleague of mine one said "you have to take your
Sabbaths where you can find them." It's the same with Ascension, with
Resurrection-take it where we can find it. Do it as we can, not as we can't.
So the disciples, men and women, took the stairs, one creaky step at a time.
They all pile into that upper room: Peter and John and Bartholomew; Mary
Magdalene and Mary Cleopas and the mother of Jesus. It was probably crowded,
more than a little fragrant with all those bodies in there. They don't make
plans when they arrive. They just pray, and wait.
My Bible's notes tell me that the cloud into which Jesus disappeared
signifies, as a cloud always does in scripture, the "presence and the power
of God." This is ironic considering that when we say we are in a cloud, we
mean we are confused or can't see the way out. When we say we are under a
cloud, we mean that things are not going well. But it would seem that
according to the good news of the gospel, especially under a cloud, God is
present, God is powerful, God is doing something that may be as yet
invisible to the human eye. Whether we are making plans, or waiting
planlessly to see what will happen next, God is at work.
Our brother Ian's mom, Beth Tosh, had plans. She planned to retire young and
tour the country by RV with her husband, Ian's dad Rich. And then the cancer
diagnosis came in. They didn't abandon all of their plans. They'd drive to
North Dakota or Arizona but would come back every 6 weeks for chemo, and to
see their children, and play board games and eat and laugh. They did not
defer the kind of life they could have any longer, because they didn't know
how long they had. Last Tuesday, Ian and Melissa got the call that the time
was near, and rushed to his parents' home, and for a day and a night they
all orbited each other in the quiet, hushed, dark of the house, in the cloud
of unknowing, at the hour of death. Praying, and waiting on the Spirit.
Our sister Opal Gray never planned to live to be 100 years old. And yet here
she is. On Tuesday, she will gather in a room with the people who love her,
and break bread, and give thanks. One beautiful woman of faith dies at age
59; another beautiful woman of faith is alive and well at 100. Perhaps the
only conclusion to be drawn from this is: plans have a place, and prayer
has a place, and often we can't tell in the moment what good either one will
do. In the meantime, we hope to ascend as Jesus did, and wait for the Holy
Spirit.
This Friday, 20 people from First Church will ascend to the upper room of
our denomination's retreat center in Framingham. We will take the postits
and newsprint on which we've accumulated our dreams over the last 5 years of
life together in this church, and try to turn them into a cohesive and
practical outline for our immediate future: a one-year-, three-year and a
five-year plan. I can hear God laughing already.
The fact that we are even doing this retreat is something of a miracle. Five
years ago, even though the energy was very positive, the financial markers
said that if something dramatic didn't happen, in five years we would be out
of money and would have to sell the building or close the church or both. So
five years later, it is a miracle not just that we are here, but that YOU
are here, that we are here together: reading scripture and studying the
Bible with Althea and Gary; hosting vegan coffee hours with Tim and Thom and
Thom and Michelle; and taking mission trips with Jules and Bonnie and the
Steves; teaching children with Debbie and Kelly and Hugh; having game nights
with Christy and Shane; and raising money for Somerville's homeless with
Kent and Melissa and Jenny and Liz. And making plans for the next five
years. Did this happen because we planned, or because we prayed?
The disciples ascended the stairs, one creaky step at a time, and all
crowded into that room. It wasn't exactly like being taken up into heaven in
a cloud, but it was all they could manage at the time. And something began
to happen to them in that upper room. Made like him, like him they rose. The
scriptures say they were all there-men and women, little old ladies and
college kids, nobility and fishermen-and they were constantly devoting
themselves to prayer. Ten days later, they start turning the world upside
down.
What are you doing next Tuesday?
