Singing into the Realm of God
This Sunday we find ourselves in what I always call a little “season of absence.” In our church calendar—if not in an actual service, this year—on Thursday we observed the Ascension of Jesus. This is the moment described in Luke’s gospel, which hundreds—thousands—of pieces of Christian art depict as the disciples standing around looking up, sometimes showing only Jesus’ feet hanging down as he is lifted up to heaven. It is a season of absence because the disciples are waiting for the Holy Spirit, which John the Evangelist calls the Advocate, to descend and fill us with power and conviction to continue the work of being Jesus’ hands and feet in the world.
The great American poet Emily Dickinson wrote this about the Ascension:
Oh Jesus—in the Air
I know not which thy chamber is—
I’m knocking—everywhere—
Like all the artists who paint the Ascension, Dickinson’s sense of space and time bumps up against God’s space and time, God’s cosmology. She has this in common with the first eyewitnesses to the ascension and with many of us. In God’s space and time, the ascension is not about where Jesus goes or when he comes back.
Ascension is part of Jesus’ divinity; if we believe, as we say we do in our creed, that Jesus came from God, begotten before all worlds to use the language of the old creed, then in his resurrection Jesus must return to God.
And so we are in a ten-day season-within-a-season in our church year, a season of absence, of waiting for Pentecost. What we know is that in our scriptures beginning with the Book of Acts, Jesus no longer wanders around, appearing to the disciples here and there saying “this is what I meant. This is what the kingdom looks like. Let me explain it to you one more time.” Those days are gone.
So what do we do now? That’s always the question when someone we loves leaves us, right? How will we navigate this new reality?
The disciples—us included—must move into a new way of being followers.
We cannot become the body of Christ unless Jesus ascends into heaven. Remember that in St. John’s version of the Easter story, when Mary meets Jesus in the garden, he says to her: “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father.” This suggests that when he has ascended, we can hold on to him, in the sense that he will become present for us in a different way.
Ascension is a feast of departure and also a feast of promise, the promise of Pentecost. In fact, I might argue that the whole four-fold movement of Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension is really all about Pentecost. Each one of those pieces—his earthly ministry, death on the cross, triumph over death, and ascension into heaven—carries us toward the Great Feast of Pentecost and the long green season of the Church learning to be the Church.
There is a lot going on in this reading we heard from Acts. Paul and Silas and the others come to Philippi in Macedonia, a Roman Colony. Among other things, the story is about the conflict between the civil religion of the region and the practices of the early Christians. The story asks us to explore whether one can be Roman and Jewish and Christian all at the same time. These three identities existed in many people at the time Acts was written. There was complexity of culture there in Macedonia as there is in our world today. Christianity is an identity that is not squashed by our identity as citizens of this world, but neither is our identity as citizens of the world—voters, spouses, shoppers, teachers—erased by our identity as Christians.
Paul and Silas disrupt the civil religion by performing an exorcism on the young woman who had a spirit of divination. She was possessed by a kind of spirit that allowed her to recognize the way of salvation but not to choose it for herself. We don’t know the end of the girl’s story, but it likely doesn’t is not a happy ending. Scripture skips over her but I want to honor her for just a moment. Even before she ceases to be useful to her owners, she is extremely vulnerable and marginalized simply by being a young, enslaved woman, presumably separated from her family. She and Paul and Silas each experience how leaders in society protect their established systems and punish any kind of disruption.
Not following Roman laws was a serious crime in Macedonia. So Silas, Paul, and their companions are beaten, bound in chains, and incarcerated.
And what do they do there? They pray and sing hymns to God. This is its own subversive practice. Christian history is full of stories of people who pray and sing at times when most of us would be enraged or despondent. It does give us perspective, though, on what we do here on Sunday mornings. We pray and sing hymns to God, and we do it despite what is happening in the rest of the world. Worship often our best answer to despair.
The image of these upstart Christians singing and praying in jail at midnight provides a link between God’s time and space, and ours.
Something grabs the jailer’s attention—we don’t know if it’s the singing or the aftermath of the earthquake which he somehow managed to sleep through, or the terror of thinking that all those in his custody had escaped. But he asks that age-old question: What must I do to be saved? What must I do to feel hope and peace in the face of impending disaster? What must I do to have the capacity to sing and pray during difficult times? The jailer becomes a believer, and the story ends like many stories from Acts end, with a whole household being baptized amid much rejoicing and feasting.
So on this Sunday between the Ascension and Pentecost we hear something about what it means to be Jesus’ hands and feet in the world once he has gone. It means that we get to keep doing what Jesus did: act out our faith when authority is exploitive and corrupt, create healing spaces for those who are vulnerable. When God tries to grab our attention, respond. Sing, not just for celebration, but when we are struggling. It is our prayer, and it is how we inhabit God’s time and space.