May 21, 2023

Easter 7

Epiphany, Winnipeg

Acts 1:6-14; Psalm 68:1-10

First, I’ll say a belated Happy Ascension Day!

Second, I’ll ask – and be honest – how many of you took note that this last Thursday was the feast of the Ascension? I’m guessing that most of us – including me – didn’t really take note. There was no Ascension cake and there were no Ascension cards. We couldn’t complain that Easter Sunday was barely behind us and they’ve already got the Ascension decorations up at Canadian Tire….

It's not like that everywhere. A Dutch friend of mine talked about a tradition call Dauwtroppen, when all kinds of people in the Netherlands get up at dawn and go for a walk in the dewey grass, or they head out and cycle through the countryside. In a lot of countries in Europe, as well as places like Columbia and Namibia and Indonesia and Haiti, Ascension Day is a public holiday. Kids get the day off school, some people get the day off work, pastors have to lead another service and preach another sermon. It’s a big deal.

But I think that in our part of the world it’s more commonly known as Thursday, usually sometime in May.

So what’s with this Ascension thing?

On a sunny Sunday afternoon in September of 1981 my parents drove me to Camrose, a small city in Alberta – well, a big town in Alberta – to drop me off at Camrose Lutheran College where I would begin my university studies. I was seventeen, I was a bit excited…. And I was way more nervous or afraid than excited, to be honest. I was pretty sure that this was somehow the beginning of my adult life, and I was pretty sure that adult life was probably a good thing, but still…

I was in a community of around eight hundred students, and I knew precisely nine of them. High school studies had come easy to me, but I knew that in university I’d be a lot more on my own. I knew that I was likeable enough and I’d probably make some new friends, but I also had that nagging worry that now, in a new place, new people might just find out the truth that I was actually kind of a dud.

And then, just after supper, mom and dad said, “Bye Paul, we love you, call whenever you want.” Dad gave me a great piece of advice: “For now at least don’t take your studies too seriously.” Then we hugged, and I watched while mom and dad who had always looked after me got into our family’s gigantic Buick LeSabre and drive away. Just like that.

And I wasn’t so excited any more.

So…Ascension?

Jesus’ closest friends, a mix-and-match collection of women and men, including his mom and his brothers, have been through the grief and the fear and the trauma of his arrest and his execution. They spent those few days after Jesus died trying to figure out what just happened, and they shed tears and tears and more tears. Then they lived with the confusion and disbelief of hearing that word that Christ is risen – but that kind of thing doesn’t happen, right? And now, after being with him again for forty days, they’ve begun to see that it’s not too good to be true – Christ really is risen – and they’ve settled in to life with Jesus back with them. And then, one morning, he just kind of goes away. He’s gone. Sure, he talked about the Holy Spirit, and yes, he gave them a job to do…but then he left…taken up into the clouds. They’re alone again.

Today we hear and we celebrate this strange event where Jesus just goes away. Christ is risen; He is risen indeed! But on Ascension Day he just keeps on rising. And for two thousand years now we’ve had to figure out our life together without anyone telling us to do this and then do that in any great detail. He drove away in the Buick and now we’re on our own.

Leave behind those Ascension events for a minute now. Think if you can about what we said and heard as we proclaimed the psalm together a few minutes ago: All together we announced that God is a loving parent who cares for orphans; we made it quite clear that God protects widows and those who have no protection. We preached that God gives a home to everyone who is homeless, and God leads prisoners right out the wide-open gates of the jail. God gives rain far and wide – makes the dew appear every morning? – and God provides everything for those who have nothing.

We proclaimed a God who cares deeply about earthy things; earthy everyday things like those people we remembered in the psalm, and the real people we know of today on a Winnipeg street or a people at war with each other in Sudan or a people dividing in an Alberta election….We proclaimed that God who cares about a young person who wonders whether they fit in or an older person wondering if there’s still a place for them to fit. We proclaimed that God, who sends the rain and tends the sheep, is the same who cares about the morning dew and the creatures of field and forest…who cares about a province on fire, and flooded Italian towns, and a world getting hotter and hotter.

And of course, we bore witness to a God who makes all the beauty and wonder of creation, and who really cares about our celebrations and parties and our loves and the people and places where we know that we are at home.

Earthy things; that’s our God’s concern.

And then Jesus was taken up into heaven, away from all those earthy things.

There is another voice in this whole turn of events. Way back, about 40 days ago, a handful of women are standing in the morning dew outside Jesus’ tomb, and they’ve just discovered that it’s wide open and it’s empty. Suddenly two men all dressed in white appear and say “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Jesus is risen – remember how he told you that?” And they remember, and right away they go and tell the others. Today, another handful of Jesus’ friends have just seen him taken up into the sky, and while they’re gazing up into the clouds, suddenly two men all dressed in white show up and say, “Why are you standing there looking up to heaven? Jesus will come back.” And they stop looking for the living among the dead, they stop looking for Jesus in the sky, and they go back to their lives – back to being together and praying together. They return to their daily lives of being fishers or carpenters or tailors or farmers or engineers or clerks at Superstore or lawyers or bus drivers or homemakers or students…. They walk back through the morning dew to the lives they’ve known, to the lives that now are filled with a promise.

The same questions come our way too. Why do you seek the living among the dead? Jesus is risen. Why do you stand looking up to heaven? Jesus is coming back. And for now, your life is right here. Our life is right here.

So this is what happens on Ascension Day: we recall how deeply God cares about the world…Jesus has told us about that again and again… Then Jesus goes away and sends us into the world, to care about all those things and those people and this life that God cares about too.

And then Ascension speaks a promise to us that we are not being left to fend for ourselves. We’re not left alone. Because Jesus promises that we will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, who will teach us but maybe not just tell us what to do all the time. Jesus promises us the Holy Spirit who will be a comforter for us and who will bring us together to be a comfort for each other; the Holy Spirit “who calls, gathers, and enlightens us,” as Luther teaches in the Small Catechism. The Holy Spirit, who will give us all that we need for our life together and for our life and our caring for the world.

And for the rest of our lives we, with the Holy Spirit among us, will work together to figure out what to do next.

Happy Ascension Day!

I recall that year after mom and dad drove away. I did in fact find a few new friends, and it turned out that I wasn’t really a dud or if I was it didn’t matter because my friends cared about me. That’s the way it is when the Spirit calls us together and lives right here among us. Those friends gave me good, good company. We grew up together. We did dumb things together and, well, we did dumb things together, even things we wouldn’t want those parents who dropped us off back in September to know. I found a community of faith in a new church in town and in a chapel on campus where we’d get together and pray and sing a few times a week. We’d get together to be awkward and confused and not sure what’s next in life and we’d hear and even believe that the spirit of the risen Jesus was there with us, and we’d all work on figuring it out together. No one was there to tell us what to do and decide for us, but the Spirit of the risen Jesus, the spirit who put together that community of people, and who puts together this community of people, the Spirit breathed among us gave us all we needed to live and to serve in that world where we lived.

We were certainly not alone. We are certainly not alone.

AMEN.