God Has Gone Up With A Shout

May 1, 2008 by djackson.

“And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.” - Acts 1.9

Today is the feast of Ascension! I began the morning by reading the appropriate lectionary passages and praying the beautiful collect suggested in the Book of Common Prayer. Then I went to work and have spent the day teaching classes, advising students, attending chapel and brewing coffee. The psalmist can say what he pleases; for me, the Lord’s ascension has been marked not with a bang but a whimper.

But I shouldn’t regard this as something unusual, or even bad. The early church operated on the same program. William Willimon notes that in Acts 1, “the response to the ascension of Christ is a church meeting where a vote is taken.” Indeed, the whole thing looks pretty prosaic: Peter calls the conference, points out that the starting roster is one man shy and suggests sending down to the minors for a replacement. The scouts give equal ratings to a brace of rookies and in the end the brain trust of the body of Christ flips a coin to decide who gets a trip to the Big Show. “After the excitement of the resurrection and ascension,” Willimon quips, “this seems a pedestrian way to begin the story of the church.”

Well, yes. But it seems the gang had learned a lesson that many believers continually forget. As one of my students pointed out to me this morning, initially, the disciples had sought to re-route the routine, dared hope for an end to the endless round of history. “Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?” Paraphrase: You finally gonna get us outta this dump? “No,” the Lord replies, “and don’t go messing around with hermeneutical horoscopes along those lines either. What I will do is give you strength enough to deal with life as it is until it becomes life as it should be.”

“Life,” griped Edna St. Vincent Millay, “isn’t one damn thing after another. It’s the same damn thing again and again.” As Macbeth more poetically expressed it,

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.

Or according to an anonymous bit of English doggerel:

It ain’t the huntin’ on the hill that hurts the hosses’ hooves,
But the hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road.

We’d rather this not be so. I’ve noticed among American Christians a resurgent gnosticism that would like to believe the church could ultimately offer a rarified existence unfettered by budget decisions and plumbing problems and disagreements and the like. I’m sympathetic. Something in my desert father soul would rather have spent Ascension Day meditating on the sea shore that sits not a hundred yards from my desk. At such times we tend to say that we yearn for the purity of the early church. Well, the early church was by comparison to us quite pure but it was not antiseptic, untouched by the taint of roll-call and voting and whose widows get the lion’s share of the potluck. The early church was pure - well, purer - in its purpose: the formation of an alternative community of love and mercy and the relentless desire to draw others into that body. That, indeed, was the source of the kind of power that let them stick it out, not only through the persecutions (which at least had the advantage of drama) but through the pedestrian tasks as well. Indeed, such a sense of purpose not only enables us to endure the dreary, it actually transforms the routine. Tasks that otherwise last no longer than it takes to complete them, then must be done all over again, actually puncture eternity when we offer them as small but salient sacrifices in the coming of the kingdom.

Anyway, I have to go and teach my next class. Why? Because it is my job. And because my students expect it. And because it is how I earn my paycheck.

And because the Lord has gone up with a shout!

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