Homily for Feast of the Ascention- May 16, 2010

“After Jesus was taken up into the heavens, the apostles returned to Jerusalem, a mere Sabbath’s Day away. Entering the city, they went to the upstairs room where they were staying.”
It is important to read between the lines and it is not difficult to do. St. Luke, who wrote Acts, is giving us a very common theme which speaks to us today. He is saying, “Look, this is a shattered community. They have lost their leader. And not only lost him, but
lost him most shamefully, because their leader was roughed up and given a criminal’s death. And so they do not know what to do. They remember some of the words of Jesus, as they go to this upper room to figure things out, and to hope that His words might be true and that something might happen. But for the moment, we have to appreciate that they are in the “in-between time”. They are between the Ascension of the Lord and Pentecost – between loss and promise.
The scriptures tell us how they handled this, and that is very important because all of us are at one time or another are exactly at that place – between loss and promise, between things that we have lost and things that have not yet unfolded, and we’re in that limbo of “in-between time”.
An example of this is when someone close to us dies. We are in a vacuum. The pain of the loss is there, and the future does not seem to be anywhere, and we’re in-between. Those going away to school for the first time – going away to college - you do not know the place or your fellow students well enough; you don’t know your way around. And there is the security of home and the insecurity of the college, and the homesickness sets in. You are in the “in-between time”…between pain and promise.
There are some who have lost their jobs, and they know what being in-between means. All of a sudden all of those things that were important are striped away, and they do not yet have a new job. And perhaps worst of all – even worse than death in many ways – is suffering through broken relationships, whether it’s a divorce, or a break-up of a friendship, or estrangement from a child who is living a life that you do not approve of - living through addictions or prison or whatever.
So we see this “in-between time” of the apostles is something that you and I know from our experience.
Will I ever get better? Will this mental or emotional or physical illness ever leave me? Will I ever be free? We all know these questions.
St. Luke suggests three things to do, the same things that the apostles did. The first thing they did was to gather in prayer. They did not know what to do except that they had to pray for guidance, even when it was difficult to pray. And I can imagine that it had to be. All that they knew was that their leader was dead. He had promised the Spirit, and the Spirit had not yet come. They didn’t know whether they had a future as a sect or as a religion, or whether they should just split up and go back into the mainstream of life. And even though they did not feel like it, they prayed. So, this is the first thing that St. Luke, who wrote this story, gives us on how to handle the “in-between times”.
The second thing is that St. Luke implies: “Look for and savor the message of simplicity.” What does he mean by that? He says that when you have loss in your life, things are striped from you. If you lose your job, your name on the door is striped from you - your conversation, your social circle, is gone. It is not something that you talk about at a cocktail party. Suddenly your connections are gone, and so is the daily routine of going to work. You’re without many of the people who know you and respect you. Suddenly you’re without identity. Things are being striped from you.
Sickness strips the ability to come and go as you will. Broken relationships, a divorce, physical or mental illness – all these losses ultimately strip you. And St. Luke says that when things are striped away, as bad as it can be, it has a tendency to force us to go down to the bare-bones values of our lives. We have read stories about people, and we know people who have met great tragedies that in the end helped them to focus on what was really important. We are divested of our cumbersome symbols; and hopefully, being striped this way, live more simply.
I read of one of the bishops in a diocese in Brazil, Bishop Pedro. When he was consecrated, he would not wear the usual miter and the ring, and would not carry the crozier. Instead, he said, “My miter will be the straw sombrero of the poor. My ring will be works of mercy, and my staff will be service to the people.”
Striping down his life to the bare essentials, he could have lived in a beautiful house, and he would have lived in great honor, but voluntarily he chose to live close to the values that really matter: people and relationships, and loving one another.
Let’s take another example. Do you remember Boris Becker of West Germany who twice won the Wimbledon tennis tournament years ago? He suddenly realized that he was becoming more than a famous tennis champion. He suddenly realized that Germany was making him a source of its new pride, and he found himself being idolized. And that was very seductive – whether you are 59 or 29, much less 19. But for his young age, he said this, and I quote: “the German people wanted me to live for them. They worship me too much. When I entered my own home town, people stood there and gazed up at me as if they were expecting blessings from the Pope. When I looked into the eyes of my fans at the Davis Cup matches last December, I thought I was looking at monsters. Their eyes were fixed and had no life in them. When I saw this kind of blind, emotional devotion, I could understand what happened to us a long time ago at Nuremberg.” (He was making a reference to the time when Hitler mesmerized the German people.) And then he said: “Heroes live very short lives.”
So he striped himself of all these honors and stepped back from that kind of adulation and the kind of personality cult that we read about in People magazine. He wanted to be authentically himself. So, in this striping away time, one is forced to say, “What are the values I really want to live by?”
So when the apostles went to that upper room they had to ask that question: “What are we basically about, when all is taken away… you take away my house, my car, my income, my health, whatever… what really counts?
The “in-between time” is a grace-filled moment for answering that question.
And the third thing is to live in the seedtime of hope. Jesus had said: “If you go there, the Spirit will come upon you.” Was that true or not? They didn’t want to believe it and yet there was that tantalizing hope. They were tantalized by a hope for renewal and surprise.
Most of you at least know the name or heard of Edwin Booth. In 1865, Edwin Booth was the Lawrence Olivier of the stage. Actually one of the great dramatic actors the world has ever seen. But he had a horrible life, and he lived under a cloud. He lived in the “in-between time” for a long time. His father, Brutus Booth was an alcoholic and drank himself to death. He stranded his family 3000 miles away in California, and they had to work their way back to their native Maryland. The only way that Edwin knew how to do this was by becoming an actor.
His first wife, Mary Devlin, died after two years of marriage. Talk about soap opera, one thing after another. He remarried and his other wife became mentally ill, and he went bankrupt trying to pay for her medication. What else could happen to him?
What else happened was something that embarrassed him his whole life long – his own younger brother assassinated President Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth was Edwin’s younger brother. Edwin was pro-Union, a pro-Lincoln patriot, so not only did it offend him, but this was his brother. And everyone knows what it means to have a member of your family embarrass you, which is a great understatement. After all, his brother killed the President of the United States, one of our greatest. And for a long time, in that seedtime, in that “in-between time”, he did the best thing that he could in order to compensate. He became that great actor. But the Spirit surprised him one day.
He was in Jersey City, and there was a tall young man being pushed by a crowd, nudged to such an extent that the young man started to fall onto the railroad tracks. Edwin Booth, who happened to be there, dropped his suitcase and immediately ran over, and just in the nick of time, literally snatching this young man from death. The young man recognized the famous actor from his photographs and simply said, “Well, this was a narrow escape, Mr. Booth.”
And for as long as he lived, Edwin Booth took pleasure in the knowledge that the person whose life he saved was Robert Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln’s eldest son. So the Spirit came when he least expected it and he had a sense of decency again.
It looks like a little, harmless story that St. Luke is telling, but he’s saying that the time between the loss and the promise is difficult, but the word of God has left us a program for the “in-between time”.
We must pray. We must pray even when the prayer that we make is “I can’t pray.” We must pray in faith even when the content of our prayer is “I can’t believe and I don’t think God exits at all.” We must pray to a higher power. The “in-between time” is very difficult, but a transition time in our lives.
Secondly, we must look for the value-message in the stripping away. Every loss forces us into looking at things in a different way. How often have we heard: “If I had to do it all over again, I would spend more time…I would listen to my children more; We could spend more time together; I would appreciate each day in this world and look at the flowers more?” And so forth and so on. When we’re striped away and we’re faced with the essentials of life and death, there is a great grace there. So, in the “in-between times” we must sit back and look for the spirituality in our new-found simplicity that will help us realign our values to be whole and healthy human beings.
And thirdly, it is a seedtime of hope. The word “seed” is good for those of us who putter in gardens. We drop the seed in the ground, and we can look every day as children do, and nothing seems to be happening. But something is happening. Unknown, invisibly, something incredible is happening, something we could watch with time-lapse photography. What is happening is that the seed is dying. But the very process of dying, as it must die, that little shoot comes forth and that’s hope.
So, those of you who are in the “in-between time”, or will be and every one of us go through it, I pray that we be patient with the dying, but have tremendous hope for the future of our lives. The Spirit that entered Edwin Booth’s life is a sign that the Spirit will breathe where it will, and therefore, in the “in-between time” of our lives, we have a right and reason to be hopeful people.
God bless you.