Sunday

My barber is comfortable with silence, which is a blessing, and, as I sat there unable to do anything but look out of the window, I started paying attention to life going by.  Clumps of teen-agers—all girls or all boys—walked past the window loudly, the boys punching each other in the shoulder as they laughed, the girls whispering and then bursting out in loud laughter.  A young mother and little daughter walked by, each with her own ice cream cone, when suddenly the three-year-old dropped hers on the sidewalk, stood a moment in shock, and then wailed in grief until her mother gave her her cone and the little girl instantly giggled in joy as they continued out of sight.  An elderly couple meandered by arm-in-arm, clearly enjoying each other’s company after all these years, each with a Yorkie on a leash out ahead of them with little red bows on the tops of their heads.  Life kept parading by and I had to stick my arm out from under the sheet and brush a tear away.  Across the street, all this was being watched over by a life-sized alabaster statue of an angel with her long hair and long gown blowing to the right and her left hand raised in blessing.  She’s part of the “Beautify Evergreen Project” of putting statues on Main Street.  

I teared-up because there was nothing special about this scene.  It’s just normal everyday life.  It happens all around me every minute, but I don’t often just sit and watch and appreciate.  It occurred to me that angels may be on the street all the time; I just don’t have the eyes to see.  

When I was a teenager, my high school put on Our Town by Thornton Wilder, generally considered the most American play ever written.  Thornton Wilder grew up Congregationalist— his older brother, Amos, was an ordained Congregationalist minister who taught New Testament studies at Harvard Divinity School and was the founder of a school of thought called “theo-poetics” or “the poetry of God.”  The director of our high school Our Town was my sophomore English teacher, Ms. Fluke, who wasn’t much older than we were at the time and whose claim to fame among us was that she had gone to high school with Bob Dylan up in Hibbing, Minnesota.

The play is about ordinary life in a small American town called Grover’s Corners, and we watch the residents live their lives on stage, much as I watched people as I got my hair cut.  The theme of the play is the divinity of ordinary life, and the set-up Thornton Wilder uses is to have one of his main characters, a young married woman named Emily, die.  Once she’s dead, she learns that when we die we get to come back as an invisible spirit and observe one day of our lives, just to say goodbye to life.  In the most famous scene in the play, in her mother’s kitchen at breakfast time when she’s 12, Emily’s invisible spirit says goodbye to life in the final act.

Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me.  Mama, fourteen years have gone by.  I’m dead.  But, just for a moment now, we’re all together.  Mama, just for a moment we’re happy.  Let’s really look at one another!  I can't… I can't go on. Life goes so fast.  We don’t have time to look at one another.  I didn’t realize.  So all that was going on and we never noticed.  Take me back to my grave.  But first: Wait!  One more look.  Goodbye world.  Goodbye, Grover’s Corners...Mama and Papa.  Goodbye to clocks ticking...and Mama’s sunflowers.  And food and coffee.  And new ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up.  Oh, Earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.  Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every minute?
Stage Manager: No.  The saints and poets…maybe they do some.

For me, getting in touch with wonder and appreciating life as divine is a good part of what the ancient Christian festival of Ascension is all about.  Like Emily saying goodbye to her life, Ascension Day is when we imagine Jesus saying goodbye to his disciples.  In the story, the disciples are filled with wonder as Jesus is absorbed into God in the form of a cloud.  

They stand gawking.  Suddenly two persons appear in white robes—presumably the same angels in white robes who met the women at the empty tomb and asked them, “Why are you looking for what’s living among the dead?” at the end of Luke’s gospel.  Now Luke starts his second book, The Acts of the Apostles, with those same two persons in white robes asking, “Why do you stand here looking up at an empty sky?”  With that the angels bring the disciples’ gaze back down to earth to appreciate this life.  

This is chapter one, verse one of Luke’s sequel, The Acts of the Apostles, which starts with us bidding Jesus and his ministry a fond farewell as we now turn our focus to the birth of the Church and its ministry, which is the historical beginning of our church and our ministry here at Sixth Avenue United Church of Christ.  That comes next week, on Pentecost Sunday, when the Holy Spirit comes.  But let’s pause today to say goodbye to Jesus—no longer trapped in the time and place of Nazareth 2,000 years ago, but now a universal spirit in all times and all places.    When someone dies, we put a lot of significance on their “last words.”  So does Luke.  In Acts chapter one, verses 6 through 8 of The Message translation, we read:

When they were together for the last time they asked, “Teacher, are you going to restore
the kingdom now?  Is this the time?  Jesus told them, “You don’t get to know the time.
Timing is God’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit.” These were his last words.

Oh-my-God!  Here it is once again, that thing we keep reading in the Bible, that thing that Jesus says over and over again from Christmas to Easter and now on Ascension: “The end of the world is none of your business.  You don’t get to know the time.  That’s God’s business.”  These were Jesus’ last words.  Earlier he had said, “No one knows the time and the hour of the end.  Even I don’t know.  Only God knows that” [Mk.13:32].  So do the people who are always predicting the end of the world think they’re smarter than Jesus?  Evidently.  But we can rest assured in Jesus’ last words, “You don’t get to know the time.  Timing is God’s business.”

Beyond that, the Ascension is a story of wonder and awe as Jesus is absorbed into God.  Who can explain that?  Last Sunday’s gospel reading was Jesus promising us that he would not leave us orphaned, that he would send us the Holy Spirit, and then we would understand that he is in God and we are in him and he is in us [Jn.14:20].  That’s poetic…even mystical.  In his important book, God in Search of Man, the great Jewish theologian, Abraham Heschel, wrote:

Wonder does not come to an end when knowledge is acquired.  Modern man fell into the
trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has
only to be organized to be mastered.  But to the prophets, wonder is a way of thinking.
Our happiness lies in understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.
Grandeur or mystery is something that confronts us everywhere, at all times.  It must be
kept alive in us if we are to remain true to the dignity of God’s creation.

It’s not that wonder and science are incompatible.  If we get what science really is, it only increases our wonder.  When I go to the Grand Canyon, the more I know about the millions of years it took to evolve, about how sedimentary rock is created, about what color is, scientifically, the more wonder I experience.  What’s so dangerous and traitorous-to-God about fundamental-ism is that it replaces wonder with dogma.  Fundamentalists stand before the Grand Canyon and say, “I don’t need to be in awe because I know that God created the Grand Canyon on Monday, the week he created the world 6,000 years ago.”  That betrays the dignity of God’s creation.

So science inspires more awe.  Yet we understand that God is not proven scientifically.  I mentioned that Thornton Wilder’s brother was a UCC minister who taught Bible at Harvard in the 1950s and ‘60s and started a school of theology called “theo-poetics.”  Theopoetics says that instead of trying to develop a “scientific” theory of God, we will find God in the poetry of our own life experiences.  In other words, we learn more about G_d in the ancient story of Ascension and the modern story of Our Town than we do in church dogmas and doctrines.  The theopoetic approach to the Bible is that, just as a poem takes on new meaning depending on the context in which a reader interprets it, so the Bible and personal experiences of the Divine take on new meaning depending on the changing situations of our lives.  

To simplify:  we experience God in our daily lives the more we get in touch with wonder and learn to appreciate that our ordinary daily lives are divine.  That’s what brought tears to my eyes in the barbershop: my sense that the life I was watching go by on Main Street was divine, was part of God.  Think of the difference it would make to how we treat Earth and each other if we thought of life as divine, instead of just a tool for our technology and profit.

I said at the start that I’m going through a change.  One such life-change that everyone experiences sooner or later is when our parents die.  There’s a fundamental shift in your consciousness as you realize that now no one stands between you and eternity—you’re on your own.  It makes you more spiritual.  I think of my parents when I read Jan Richardson’s poem, Blessing in the Leaving, our Call to Worship.  Even though my folks are dead, I experience them in me and me in them, and so I think of them as “ascended,” as absorbed into God, just as Jesus was and just as I will be someday.  In her Ascension Day poem, Richardson writes:

It’s a mystery to me, as the distance between us grows,
how much larger the blessing becomes.  
As if the blessing depends on absence,
as if it finds its form not by what it can cling to
but by the space that arcs between us.
As this blessing makes its way,
first it ceases to measure itself by time.  
Then it releases how attached it was
to the place where we lived.  
Finally this blessing touches me and
then lets me go on with my life,
leaving each hindering thing behind until
all that breathes between us is blessing,
and all that beats between us is grace.

When I was a child, my relationship with my parents was framed by the house that we lived in—“the place.”  In those days—“the time”—we had fights.  I did things wrong as a kid and they made mistakes as parents.  But since they have died and ascended, those “hindering things” have faded, and what increases more and more in their absence is the grace and the blessing as I realize deeper and deeper that they are in me and I am in them and we are in God.

When Thornton Wilder was writing his Tony and Pulitzer Prize winning play, Our Town, he had terrible writer’s block and could not figure out how to end the play.  It went unfinished for months until one night in September, 1937, he took a long walk in the rain with his lover, Sam Steward, who was also a writer.  He later said that when he got home from that walk he wrote the end of the play—including Emily’s farewell to life speech—in one sitting that very night.  During the walk in the rain with his lover, he got in touch with the wonder of life...with clocks ticking and hot baths and new ironed dresses. And so the play ends with these words spoken by the main character, the Stage Manager, whom some people say speaks for God:

Now there are some things we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very
often. We all know that something is eternal.  And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and
it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars.  Everybody knows in their bones that something
is eternal, and that that something has to do with human beings. There’s something way
down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

Our connection to eternity is a wonder.  The blessing in Jesus leaving is that all the hindering things are gone and now all that breathes between us is blessing, all that beats between us is grace.  Ascension Day is not a call to look up into the empty sky in search of the Divine.  It is a call to bring our gaze down to earth and find the Divine in each other, in whom Jesus Christ now lives.