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Sunday May 8, 2005 - Easter 7, Year A

Today is Mother's Day, a day
when we give thanks
for our mothers, and grandmothers, and those women in our lives
who have cared for and nurtured us.

Thursday
was another holiday, though you might have missed it.
It was Ascension Day,
and it's one of the major feasts of the Christian year.
But for most of us, being on a weekday
and not associated with any secular holiday
which might remind us of its existence,
it gets buried
under the everyday busyness of our lives.

And add to that
the fact that its one of the more unbelievable stories
in the New Testament, one which it's difficult
to know what
to do with.

If you went to Sunday school as a child, you might have seen
the same sort of painting that I remember...
At the bottom of the picture
a group of men stands around, looking confused.
Directly over their heads
is a fluffy white cloud
and standing in the middle of it,
his feet a good three feet above their heads
is a golden headed man dressed on blue and white,
with beams of sunshine forming a halo around his head.

Other representations,
like the sixteenth century woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer,
don't show his body at all - just the cloud and Jesus's feet
as they disappear upwards into the otherwise cloudless sky – and of course, a bunch of bewildered disciples.

That may have been fine for medieval Christians,
with their views of a flat earth
and God safely in the heavens above,
but in the days of space travel and the Hubble telescope
Jesus flying away in a cloud
is simply
not
believable.

So what do we do with the Ascension, then.
Just abandon it, as an embarrassing folk story
that we have grown out of?
Is there any alternative?

I think that maybe there is,
and that where we might find it
is in the story itself.

The disciples
have been waiting, waiting to find out
what comes next.
It's 6 weeks
since Jesus died, and just a little less
since they first saw him
resurrected. For five and a half weeks
they have met together,
and he has appeared to them
and talked with them,
but the talking has gone on
for a long time
and some of them
are ready
for action.

Jesus is here again, and again he's talking,
about waiting and witness and a holy spirit.
And then, Luke the storyteller, the one who wrote the book of Acts,
Luke says,
"As they were watching, he was lifted up
and a cloud took him out of their sight."
And they stood there, looking up
into the sky.
But they weren't left alone.
Because as they stood there, squinting into the sunlight,
two men appeared, two men dressed in white, two men
just like the ones who had been at the tomb
that first Easter morning, two men? Two men, asking questions.
"Why are you standing
looking up at the sky? You're looking
in the wrong place. Jesus, when he comes back,
will come back in the same way as he went."

So what's that all about?
As far as we can tell, Jesus disappeared into the sky in a cloud -
– and so if he's going to come back the same way as he left,
surely the sky is the right place to be looking.
They're looking in the wrong place?

But maybe
what its pointing to
is that whenever we try to describe what God is doing,
whenever we try to pin down God,
we can only manage to approximate things.
We're limited
by our own
imaginations.
And so the best
the disciples could come up with
when Jesus disappeared from their sight
was that the cloud had taken him,
upwards into heaven.

Maybe
what the messengers were tying to tell them,
and Luke in turn is trying to tell us,is that there are some times
when the normal rules
don't apply,
there are some things
that are beyond description,
there are some things
that human words
just can't describe.

What's clear
is that Jesus disappeared.
After 5½ weeks
of resurrected life,
eating and talking and sharing,
he was gone,
and the closest the disciples could get to describing how it happened
was to remember that Old Testament prophet Elijah,
whisked off to heaven
in a chariot of fire and whirlwind,
and imagine
it was something like that.

Jesus was gone,
suddenly, inexplicably,
and the closest they could describe it
was as if a cloud
had carried him away.
But to take that metaphor
and make it literal,
to take that image
and hang on to it
like a lump of stone
is to miss the whole point.
Jesus was gone, gone to be with God,
and his coming again
would be as sudden and as unexpected and as inexplicable
as his leaving –
and they were to wait.
They were to wait, because God would come among them again, soon.
Not in the form
of their dear friend Jesus – not now –
that was, and is,
still in the future –
but in his breath, his holiness, his spirit,
which would come on them and in them and around them,
as suddenly and unexpectedly
and inexplicably
as Jesus had left.

And that Spirit,
that coming of God among them
would take them places
that they could never have dreamed of,
it would lead them into experiences
beyond their imagination.
The ascension of Jesus
was just the beginning,
just the beginning
of a whole new life with God.

Most of the time
when we think of God,
we go back time and time again
to the mental pictures which have formed
in our heads. Pictures shaped
but the stories we were told as children,
the paintings on the wall,
by the experiences we've had in church
and the experiences
we've had at home.
All those things
form our imaginations, they tell us
what to expect
in life
and in church.

But sometimes
they betray us. Sometimes
our imaginations get misshapen
or maybe just
the formed too small. Our experiences
lead us to set up boundaries,
to draw lines
between the known
and the unknown,
the safe and the risky.

There was a book published back in the 1950s
which some of you may remember. It was called
"Your God is too Small",
by J.B.Phillips
and while I don't agree with everything he writes in it,
his title
rings true.
Our God,
or at least the God of our imaginations
is too small.
We try
to make God
fit into the way
we see things,
we try to make God
fit into our lives.
But God is bigger than that.
Which is only natural,
because that's the way we as human beings function,
that's the way
we order our worlds,
that's the way
we make sense
of everything around us.

But God is not limited
by our minds,
God is not limited
by the limitations of our language,
God is not limited
by the bounds of our imaginations.

When the two messengers
told the disciples
to stop looking up at the sky,
they were telling them
to stop expecting
God to work
in predictable ways,
to be ready
for a God who might come to them
suddenly
and unexpectedly
and inexplicably,
and who might work in and through them
in ways beyond their
imaginations,
but not beyond
the imagination
of God.

And that's what happened.
They went home, and with their families and friends –
all 120 of them – gathered to pray.
And ten days later
those same 120
were seized by the Holy Spirit,
and spoke all sorts of languages
and preached and healed
and three thousand
joined them,
And they grew and grew,
and two thousand years later,
millions of people
follow Jesus Christ.

It's way beyond
what any of the apostles could have imagined
as they stood that day
looking up at the sky,
but not beyond
God's imagination.

We are limited
by our own imaginations
But God's imagination
is so much greater
than ours.
God's imagination sees
beyond the walls that need painting
and a congregation measured in dozens
rather than hundreds.
God's imagination sees as many people gathered today in this place,
as gathered to pray that first Ascension day,
and comes among us
calling us to be witnesses
to Jesus Christ,
to tell the good news
about the love and forgiveness and joy which our God offersto share in everything we say
and every thing we do
the good news of a God who offers hope and possibilities and life
beyond our imaginations.

We can be like the apostles, as they looked up at the sky,
seeing only what we expect to see,
doing only what we have always expected to do,
safe in our own worlds,
and our nice, predictable, small picture
of God.

Or we can take our chances
with a bigger God. One whose Spirit
stirs among us, calling us
to new possibilities, new dreams,
one whose imagination
can take hold of our imaginations
and lead us on as individuals
and as a community
toward a new life
of faith and hope and promise.

 

Sermon ©Raewynne J. Whiteley 2005