{"id":901,"date":"2014-06-01T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/?p=901"},"modified":"2019-11-12T10:56:31","modified_gmt":"2019-11-12T15:56:31","slug":"ascent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/2014\/06\/01\/ascent\/","title":{"rendered":"Ascent"},"content":{"rendered":"

Luke 24: 44-53<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the full service.<\/a><\/p>\n

Click here to hear the sermon only.<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In a moment we shall again stand together to proclaim the mystery of faith.\u00a0 We shall offer a great thanksgiving.\u00a0 Responsively, we shall offer the Lord\u2019s presence to one another.\u00a0 Responsively, we shall encourage one another to lift our hearts to the Lord.\u00a0 Responsively, we shall recall the right goodness, the good rightness of great thanksgiving.\u00a0 Friends, we are rooted and grounded in a history of joyful blessing.<\/p>\n

Our Lord\u2019s ascent(c)invites our assent(s).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The gospel is rooted and grounded in a history of joyful blessing, even as it is read and spoken in order to root us and ground us in love.\u00a0 St. Luke, the author of the reading for today, has every intention of bonding us to the long parade of women and men who lived with happy hearts, in joyful blessing and great thanksgiving.\u00a0 Our Sunday service of ordered worship has its own roots deep in the past, carrying us in memory all the way back into the first century.\u00a0 You come from people who were thankful people, joyfully praising God.\u00a0 They give us a clear example, these earlier witnesses, of a balanced faith, a faith honest to God about sin, death and meaninglessness, but a faith yet confident, joyful and thankful in life.\u00a0 Luke ends his first book, the gospel, and as he starts his second, the Acts, with a hymn to ascent.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Now we may pause a moment to be grateful for the form of Luke\u2019s message.\u00a0 He does believe in doing things decently and in order.\u00a0 Luke provides, by his own assessment, dear Theophilus, an orderly account.\u00a0 It is his view that the words of the Old Testament in law and prophets and psalms, when written of the Christ, are fulfilled in an orderly account of the life of Christ.\u00a0 It is Luke\u2019s further view that Christ opens minds to understand Scripture. Luke makes plain the prediction, embedded in a right reading of inherited Scripture, of cross and resurrection and repentance and forgiveness and the preaching of all the above.\u00a0 It is his understanding that disciples are thus witnesses of all these things.\u00a0 They will be blessed as they bear witness.\u00a0 We will be blessed as we bear witness.\u00a0 You will be blessed as you bear witness.\u00a0 His ascent invites your assent. Luke\u2019s gospel ends with our reading today, an orderly ending to a well ordered gospel.\u00a0 Jesus blesses and leaves.\u00a0 The disciples give thanks and stay.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Some of the ancient manuscripts that we have of this passage say simply, \u2018he blessed them and parted from them\u2019.\u00a0 Others read, \u2018he blessed them and parted from them and was carried up into heaven\u2019.\u00a0 It is not clear, at least to this interpreter, which reading is stronger, which more probably original.\u00a0 Yet it is significant, at least to this interpreter, to see and know that more than one version of this passage exists.\u00a0 The addition, if it was a later addition, of \u2018was carried up into heaven\u2019, makes this passage a suitable and qualified Ascension passage, unmistakably congruent to the account in Acts 1.\u00a0 Luke\u2019s penchant for the orderly may have inspired a follower of his to do likewise, and clean up one aspect of the conclusion to the gospel.\u00a0 To Luke it mattered to put things in order, to get things right.\u00a0 His spiritual descendents may have had the same passion.\u00a0 The true desire to get things right reveals, makes naked, a sense of joyful blessing.\u00a0 A passion for true goodness, good beauty, beautiful truth, in life, work, politics, music, art, architecture, religion, hospitality and friendship reveals, unclothes, such a spirit.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We are thankful for Luke\u2019s orderly account.\u00a0 We may be a bit mystified by the mythic account of Ascension.\u00a0 We may be less than certain of the meaning of such symbolic imagery in our own time.\u00a0 But we can be utterly confident about the effect of Ascension, on our forebears, and so on us.\u00a0 The religious consequence of the Luke\u2019s conclusion to the Gospel is and invitation to lead a new life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For all the dimness of creation, of the created order and the history within it, for all the trouble in life, in the gift of life and the history that comes with it, for all the fracture in body, in the body of Christ and the history that comes with it, still, at Ascension, there is hope, and promise, and life.\u00a0 Sometimes the gospel and we its very human interpreters need to shore up our sense of the way things have gone wrong.\u00a0 I suppose Lent and perhaps Advent too are markedly important seasons for emphasis upon the Fall\u2014the way creation has somehow been loosened from the divine grasp.\u00a0 Other times the gospel and its very human interpreters need to short up our sense of creation as God\u2019s creative act, in thanksgiving for what is right.\u00a0 Eastertide and Ascension may be such times.\u00a0 Today, in gospel and Eucharist, is such a day.<\/p>\n

Such good news. After a frightfully long, old time religion winter, which seems to have ended about 40 minutes ago\u2014today, sun, light, warmth, color, growth.<\/p>\n

With you, I try to read the news and listen to the events of the day.\u00a0 As you do, I try to overhear behind the immediate din of sounds and bites, something of the heart of people and of our people.\u00a0 This spring, sometimes, I overhear a pained and painful sense of doubt about the possibilities in life.\u00a0 A doubt that things can change very much.\u00a0 A doubt that anything new could ever emerge.\u00a0 A doubt that people can repent and turn around.\u00a0 A doubt that systems, so entrenched and contentious, can ever be made orderly.\u00a0 A doubt that any of the older differences among us can ever be bridged.\u00a0 A doubt that any common expression of faith can be trusted.\u00a0 A doubt that any common faith or common ground or common hope can ever, with authenticity, emerge and survive.\u00a0 A doubt that minimizing one\u2019s own visibility or audibility, for the sake of something bigger and someone else, could ever be faithful or reasonable.\u00a0 A doubt that the general public could be trusted to shoulder significant sacrifice.\u00a0 A doubt that anything I do or you do would ever make a difference.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When this cloud of doubt gets so thick that it eclipses both the sun and the moon, it is time to hear again the Ascension gospel.\u00a0 Such a thick cloud comes from a theological weather system<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

in which the cold front of wrong has chased out the warm front of right,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

in which the low pressure of the fall has displaced the high pressure of creation,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

in which the radical postmodern apotheosis of difference has silenced the liberal late modern openness to shared experience, to promise and future, to common faith, common ground, common hope,<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

in which the creation is seen from the cavern of the fall, not the fall from the prairie of creation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is a pastoral problem.\u00a0 It is not a political conflict, it is a theological contrast. \u00a0It is not a matter of church coloration or religious style, it is a matter of creation, of God\u2019s creation and the truth about creative goodness.\u00a0 \u00a0Just how balanced is your balance between creation and fall?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Our New Testament lessons are primary sources for the time, occasion, community and condition in and for which they were first written.\u00a0 They are secondary sources, at best, for what may have come before.\u00a0 Luke 24 shows us Luke, and his community, in joyful celebration of the mystery of the Lord\u2019s ascent.\u00a0 At his ascent they do assent, perhaps following decades of loss, displacement, and martyrdom.\u00a0 Having lived through the long old time religion winter of most of the first century, and all its rigors, they acclaimed a faith in a high, divine goodness, through it all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Others over time have done the same.\u00a0 At this time of year I always think of Churchill and Wesley.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

These two Englishmen have something for us, this Ascension Day, \u00a0June 1, 2014, after a long winter.\u00a0\u00a0 Think of England in May 1940.\u00a0 Think of London in May 1738.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Winston Churchill knew something both of fall and of creation.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

At the right moment, in May of 1940, \u00a0Winston Churchill faced down the more polished, better heeled, more popular and more experienced old Britons of his newly formed war cabinet, and steadily led his country away from their desire to compromise with Adolf Hitler.\u00a0 With Belgium defeated, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.\u00a0 With France cut in two, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.\u00a0 With 400,000 men stranded at Dunkirk and escape virtually impossible, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.\u00a0 With the whole German air force poised to incinerate England\u2019s green and pleasant land, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.\u00a0 With Lord Halifax ready to seek terms, and Lord Chamberlain ready to let him, Churchill clung to a love of freedom.\u00a0\u00a0 Re-read this summer John Lukacs\u2019 Five Days in London, May 1940. <\/span>\u00a0\u00a0He concludes: \u201cChurchill and Britain could not have won the Second World War.\u00a0 In the end, America and Russian did.\u00a0 But in May 1940 Churchill (alone) was the one who did not lose it.\u201d\u00a0 Ascension faith is about love of freedom. <\/i>In his ascent we find the courage for our own assent.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>\u00a0John Wesley knew something both of fall and of creation.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i><\/p>\n

At midlife, one enchanting night in May of 1738, John Wesley heard something said in church that warmed his heart for good.\u00a0\u00a0 He had been on Aldersgate street that Sunday evening, going to chapel service more from duty than from passion, when he heard a preacher read Romans 8 and also Martin Luther\u2019s commentary on that passage.\u00a0 There is something so fragrant and so full about damp London in the springtime.\u00a0 As he left church, Wesley felt something new, a freeing love<\/i> in the heart, which is the creation and work of the Holy Spirit, which blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it.\u00a0\u00a0 Ascension faith is about freeing love.\u00a0 <\/i>In his ascent we find the courage for our own assent.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There are for sure a lot of things wrong.\u00a0 But there are also, and more surely still,<\/i> a lot of things right.\u00a0 Hear the good news.\u00a0 The gospel concludes with joy. You are witnesses of the goodness of God, witnesses who come from a long line of people who joyfully bless, and routinely give great thanks.\u00a0 \u201cFaith is an event expressing the conviction that the things not yet seen are more real than those that can be seen\u201d (L Keck).\u00a0 As you, as I, as we together walk toward our last adventure, our own look over Jordan, it is this joyful thanksgiving, which carries us.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/i>The communion homily today is an altar call for you. \u00a0And the path toward the communion rail is our own sawdust trail. I propose that you come to communion, ready to accept the gift of faith, to give assent in the hour of dominical ascent. \u00a0So come, to experience freeing love.\u00a0 <\/i>So come, to receive a love of freedom.\u00a0 <\/i>So come, to give thanks for the freedom to love.<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0 Such is the gift of ascent upon this Lord\u2019s day.\u00a0 So come, on the feast of the Lord\u2019s ascent, ready and willing, joyful and happy to assent to a new life of faith, hope and love.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

~The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Luke 24: 44-53 Click here to hear the full service. Click here to hear the sermon only.   In a moment we shall again stand together to proclaim the mystery of faith.\u00a0 We shall offer a great thanksgiving.\u00a0 Responsively, we shall offer the Lord\u2019s presence to one another.\u00a0 Responsively, we shall encourage one another to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2679,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[22],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2679"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":902,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901\/revisions\/902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/sermons\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}