Yours Are the Hands

on being Christ’s body & on the rebirth of the church – a sermon for ascension sunday

This might be, like, the nerdiest church-person thing that could possibly come out of my mouth, but I actually stopped being cool somewhere around the year 2000 so I’m just going to say it anyway:

I have never been more thankful for the liturgical calendar.

If that phrase is new to you, now you know…the church keeps a calendar. But instead of moving us from May 24 to 25 to 26 and so on, the liturgical calendar moves us through the seasons and stories of our faith. The liturgical calendar takes its name from the word “liturgy,” which means “the work of the people,” and our work as God’s people begins in worship. Different colors, themes, and scriptures accompany each season of the liturgical calendar, which begins not in January but in late November or early December. Advent is the first season. The color blue comes out to accompany these 4 Sundays of waiting and anticipation which lead us into the next season – Christmas. White is the color of Christmas, signifying the purity and light of Christ. Then there are some lower-key “Time After Epiphany” Sundays, all dressed up in green, before we move into Lent, which are the 40 days the church spends in solemn preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus, which we remember with great reverence during Holy Week. Purple is the color of Lent.

And then, come Easter Sunday, we are back to white as we celebrate life. The resurrection of Jesus is such a spectacularly powerful, hope-filled event for our lives and for the world that the church sets aside a full 50 days to celebrate it in our liturgical calendar. And toward the end of Easter, we find Ascension Day. The ascension falls exactly 40 days after Easter in our liturgical calendar. That was last Thursday, but the ascension of Jesus is such a significant event that we often observe it on the Sunday immediately following. So, we call today – the last Sunday of Easter – Ascension Sunday – the day when we hear the writer of Luke and Acts tell of Jesus’ last appearance to the disciples before returning to the heavenly parent.

So, I’ve always appreciated the way that the liturgical calendar marks the rhythms of our life together as God’s people. But I find myself even more grateful for it in the middle of this coronavirus crisis because time is doing weird things lately. I know you can relate! I often wake up in the morning not having any idea what day it is. I’m pretty sure last Friday was actually 62 hours long, and that the month of April alone included approximately 472,000 days. I don’t think I’m even fully, consciously aware of how my brain has already kind of divided the whole of life into two pieces along a coronavirus-shaped hinge. There’s life pre-COVID-19, and there’s now. The chronological time that our regular calendars mark feels all out of whack, and so I find some sense of grounding in our liturgical calendar, knowing that God’s time is somehow revealed there.

The disciples, in our reading from Acts today, were having a different kind of struggle dealing with chronological time and God’s time. Jesus had been crucified only about six weeks before the ascension in Acts. With his death came the death of the people’s hope that Jesus would be the one to overthrow Roman rule, ushering in a new reign of freedom for those who had been suffering. But then Jesus was raised, and he’d been appearing to the disciples for forty days, talking about the kingdom of God. Their chronological clocks were still ticking, and so they ask Jesus as they had many times before, “Is THIS the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus tells them that their time is not God’s time, and then he blesses them. He assures them that they will receive God’s power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them. He tells them that they will be witnesses to his radical love not just in Jerusalem, but to all the ends of the earth.

And then he is lifted up on a cloud, carried away out of their sight and into heaven.

Yep. You heard me right. The person who wrote Luke and Acts tells us that Jesus was lifted up on a cloud and carried away into heaven. We’ll talk on some other day about how differently our first-century ancestors viewed the heavens and the earth, about how science isn’t actually the enemy of the Bible, and about how you don’t have to throw away your intellect in order to be a Christian. But for now, here’s the question I want us to sit with together:

What does this story mean for us? The earliest followers of the Jesus movement believed it was important for people to know that Jesus had not only been raised, but that God carried Jesus away into the heavens as he was blessing the disciples below.

Church, what does this mean for us?

St. Teresa of Avila was a 16^th century Spanish nun who had an especially powerful connection to the mysteries of God. There’s a poem attributed to her that gets to the heart of the matter more beautifully than I could. She writes:

Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which he looks with
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

Beloved of God, when the writer of Luke and Acts tells us that Jesus ascended into the heavens, he is telling us that the power of Jesus’ love was carried not just into one specific place somewhere far away. The power of Jesus’ love was carried into the whole of the cosmos, touching everything that is with the grace of God. The power of Jesus’ love ascended not just into the heavens. It ascended into you. It ascended into me. It ascended into God’s people so that we might embody the grace, mercy, compassion, justice, gentleness, and love of God that Jesus embodied so fully while he walked this earth.

Christ has no body on earth now but ours, Church.  

The liturgical calendar is going to move us into Pentecost next week. Rushing winds and tongues of fire carry the Holy Spirit to God’s people on Pentecost, and the church is born. And it’s perfect timing. This coronavirus pandemic has changed everything we thought we knew about what it meant to be Christ’s body on earth. It’s unsettling, to say the least. My internal chronological clock is not just ticking; it’s screaming! It’s screaming to get back to the way things were. So thank God that the liturgical calendar is throwing us a bone here, giving us an opportunity to reflect not only on the birth of Christ’s church at Pentecost, but on the re-birth of Christ’s church today.

It was only 10 weeks ago that congregations like Grace were still gathering together in the same buildings. That simultaneously feels like a lifetime ago, and like it was just yesterday. Life in the church is changing almost as quickly as the news updates we hear about the virus itself. We’re tired. We’re stressed. We miss our people. Time feels out of whack and we’re confused and crabby about it…or at least, I am. So what do we do?

I think we do what God’s people have learned how to do over literally thousands of years of practice. We hold close together. Though we remain physically apart, we allow ourselves to be re-membered into the one body that we have always been, people of Grace – people of God. We allow ourselves to be re-membered into Christ’s body here on earth as we become something new for the sake of the world.

As we experience this time of rebirth:
Let us keep our eyes – which are Christ’s eyes – open for every opportunity to look with compassion on those in need.

Let us reach out our hands – which are Christ’s hands – to bless this aching world in deep and meaningful ways.

Let us root our feet – which are Christ’s feet – in needs of this present moment, trusting that the power of Jesus will guide us into our continued becoming.