Yet, With a Steady Beat

Lord, take our minds and think through them. Take our mouths and speak through them. Take our hearts, and set them on fire. Amen.

When I was a young child, I was expected to learn a musical instrument, specifically the piano. Piano lessons became a part of my summer routine. I quickly realized that the piano was not my instrument. In my 4^TH grade elective music class, I learned to read the music sheets for the percussionists, and fell in love with, to my mother’s and grandmother’s horror, the snare drum!

With direction of my teacher, other more experienced drummers and practice, I learned the basic sticking patterns (known as drum rudiments). For example, with lots of practice, I learned how to hold one stick, and apply the proper pressure, to make a single stick roll, or how to balance both sticks to create a drum roll.

Within the structure of music education and practice, from the 4th grade concerts to the high school concert and marching bands, I was able to find real comfort in being able to maintain the steady beat, set first by the conductor, that the other musicians would rely on to bring forth our shared musical experience into the world. In reflection, my early commitment to following the steady beat of study, practice, discipline and community, informed my lifelong formation in Christ.  Similarly, the life of a Christian is guided and informed by the steady beat of the structured Church calendar, in which the study, practice, discipline and the community life of the Church are expressed in our liturgies. It is the Church’s calendar that sets the rhythm, the steady beat, of our lives as Christians.

Today we celebrate the risen Christ’s Ascension into heaven after having appeared to his disciples for 40 days after his Resurrection. While the Ascension of Christ doesn’t get any airtime in the secular marketing world, the gift of the Church’s calendar is the consistent reminder, that in all of the seasons of our earthly lives, there is more to the sacred mystery of our faith than Christmas and Easter. Listen to the rhythm of these words in Eucharistic Prayer A: “Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again (BCP, p. 363).

And in Eucharistic Prayer B, there is a similar rhythm: “Therefore, according to his command, O Father, “We remember his death, We proclaim his resurrection, We await his coming in glory;” (BCP, p. 368).Embedded in the “Christ will come again,” and the “We await his coming in glory,” is the awareness that God lifted Christ up and carried him into the heavenly realm in the  first place. Without the apostles’ witness to Christ’s Ascension, the assurance that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead (BCP, p. 359), would have no meaning.

Because we hear and respond to these words week by week, we must guard against the unintentional disengagement from the very intentional meaning of those words which expand our understanding of the Ascension.

Our lessons today include our gospel in the twenty-fourth chapter of Luke and the first chapter in the Book of Acts. Both texts are attributed to Luke. The gospel text emphasizes Jesus’ final words to his disciples, in which he reminds them that he is the fulfillment of the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms. Jesus then opened the minds of his disciples to understand the scriptures.

Jesus told the apostles that beginning from Jerusalem, the place where Jesus was killed, repentance and forgiveness of sins was to be proclaimed in his name to all nations and that they were witnesses of those things. Jesus then hinted at the day of Pentecost, when he instructed the disciples to anticipate being clothed with God’s promised “power from on high” (v. 29), a reference to the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  

While Jesus was blessing the disciples, they became eyewitnesses to a risen Christ being carried up into heaven. Witnessing this event caused the disciples to worship Jesus, an act of which God alone was worthy. The apostles’ worship acknowledged Christ’s divine nature and his elevation, seen with their own eyes, into the heavenly places. And, when they returned to Jerusalem with great joy (not grief and fear this time), the apostles continually blessed God in the temple. Ending the gospel with this Ascension account seems to vindicate all that Jesus said and did in his earthly ministry.

In the first chapter in the book of Acts, understood to be a continuation of Luke’s gospel, the writer presents another account of the Ascension positioned at the start of the apostles’ ministry.

The purpose of this Ascension account seems to be the authorization of the apostles’ to proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins.

As in Luke, Jesus advises the apostles of their coming baptism with the Holy Spirit which will empower them to be Jesus’ “…Witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). In Acts, Christ was lifted up and taken out of the apostles’ sight by cloud. As they gazed towards heaven, two men in white robes said to them, “Jesus…will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). The apostles were given explicit knowledge of Christ’s second coming.

And because of the apostles’ eyewitness accounts to the Ascension, we 2,000 years later, vow in our Baptismal Covenant to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers[1], and boldly proclaim that Christ will come again and that we await his coming in glory.

As we move through these last days of the Great 50 days of Easter, and celebrate Ascension Day today, be reminded that we, as Easter people, are also people of the Ascension. It is because of Jesus’ ascension that our hope of eternal life with God, rooted in the resurrection, is affirmed and the hope of God’s kingdom come, is assured.

In the multiple seasons of suffering, death and resurrection throughout our lives, Christ’s Ascension calls us to lift up our heads in order to look heavenward with hopeful expectation of Christ’s return.

Guided by the steady beat of the Church calendar, which grounds our lives in Christ and roots us in the life of the Church, we will be led to Pentecost Sunday when the promised Holy Spirit, will open our minds to greater understanding, enlighten the eyes of our hearts, and empower us for God’s mission of restoring all people to unity with God and each other in Christ (BCP, p. 855).

In the meantime, in this in-between time as we await Christ’s return, we must seek to follow God’s steady beat in our lives; practice the rudiments of our Christian faith, patterned by Jesus; commit ourselves to the study of scriptures; live our Baptismal Covenant in real-time with real people; and submit to the discipline required of all followers of Christ. 

Strengthened by God’s steady beat, let us lift up our heads and give thanks that God heals us and makes us whole, through Jesus Christ, even as we live and move in this death-dealing, broken world. So, lift up your heads, ye mighty gates, and look heavenward, as the one body of Christ, with the joyful invitation, “Come Holy Spirit, Come!”  Amen.

[1] The Baptismal Covenant, The Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 304