Ascension Sunday May 24, 2009

Ascension Sunday
May 24, 2009

Every few years we get a Sunday like this.
By the church calendar today the day we call “Ascension Sunday” and by the national calendar, it’s the Sunday in Memorial Day weekend.
You might think—ah, it’s accidental, just a calendar coincidence. Yet there is something, something important, that ties these two together.

Last Friday afternoon I forgot it was the first day of Memorial Day Weekend and took 93 north from below Concord. Bad idea! You could hardly enter the traffic. Car after car, truck after truck, camper after camper, most loaded to the gills with summer stuff—kids, tubes, tents, bikes, boats, ATVs —you name it.
And what a day it was! Clear, not sweltering but warm enough for a beach barbecue—a day bursting with the promise of summer. Pure fun, yes?
Well, no, not really. Because what gives all those people time to get away for this weekend of summer good times is this nation’s annual honoring of men and women who have died in service to our nation.
So not pure fun: Most of these men and women died young. All left behind people—families, lovers, friends— who lived out the normal spans of their lives pierced by a double-edged set of emotions: grief and pride.
Tomorrow is their day with parades through the center of towns, veterans marching with their hands over their hearts and their minds filled with memories. High school bands marching behind them whose members, unless they have a brother or sister, a mother or father, a boy-or girl-friend in Iraq or Afghanistan—have only the faintest idea of what this is all about.
Memorial Day is a day when poetry comes into its own, because only poetry can begin to weave the mix of feelings together. A day when the simplest gesture is the most meaningful—a family placing a little flag and a bunch of lilacs on a veteran’s grave.

I wonder—maybe one reason the feast of the Ascension gets lost in the great liturgical span between Easter and Pentecost is that like Memorial Day it is emotionally complicated.
Just to remind us what happened, here’s how the Acts of the Apostles tells it:
“When [the disciples] were together for the last time, they asked, ‘Master, are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?’
“He told them, ‘You don’t get to know the time. Timing is the Father’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when the Holy Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all over Judea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.’
“These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared—in white robes! They said, ‘You Galileans!—why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly—and mysteriously—as he left.’”
This is the moment when Jesus’ followers and friends have dreaded. They confronted with the fact that Jesus is really finally gone.
And yet, in the account of the Ascension in the Gospel of Luke, it says, “they returned to Jerusalem with great joy.” Another emotional paradox: sorrow and joy.

In Latin America, there is a custom.
In commemorations of people who have died in the fight for social justice, someone will shout out the name of one of the deceased and the crowd will shout back, “Presente!” “present!” The person may have died, but their inspiration and the difference they have made will live on. Even in their absence, they are vitally present.

This shout of “presente!” is the lesson of both the Feast of the Ascension and Memorial Day: absence can turn into powerful presence.
In all the Memorial Day celebrations around the country tomorrow, the focus will be on this mysterious presence of those who are absent.
Not only in grief—and of course, over years, decades, centuries, personal grief for these deaths disappears—but most especially in the stories of service and acts of heroism. These stories say to us: Look around. They are gone, but their lives and their deaths still matter; this country still stands, we now are here after them, struggling to live out the ideas on which the country was founded.
Likewise, when Jesus’ followers turned their eyes down from the heaven and looked around them, they saw something quite new and totally unexpected:
What they saw was Jesus’ presence all around them, even though his body was utterly and finally gone from the earth.
Jesus’ presence was there in one another—they could gather together and remember what Jesus had said and done.
Jesus’ presence was with them every time they sat at table and took bread and wine, blessed them, and passed them around, remembering Jesus’ words, “This is my body . . . this is my blood . . . that was given for you.”
And Jesus’ presence was with them in their passion to live a completely new way of life of generosity, service, and forgiveness.

I mentioned earlier that perhaps poetry may be the most effective way to express the tangle of emotions that occur when absence becomes presence.
I’ll close with a brilliant example by the American poet Galway Kinnell, in a poem called “Promissory Note”:
If I die before you . . .
then in the moment
before you will see me
become someone dead
in a transformation
as quick as a shooting star’s
I will cross over into you
and ask you to carry
not only your own memories
but mine too. . . . .