In celebrating the final Sunday of Eastertide as Ascension Sunday, our attention is drawn to Christ’s leaving—as Luke tells us he was lifted into heaven on the mountaintop before the disciples and other followers in what must have been quite the scene.
But you may have noticed in this morning’s gospel lesson that Jesus is just as interested in what it means for the disciples to stay behind—the other side of this ascension story, that in the end is just as important.
They are worried and confused. They thought Christ had been raised to stay with them for good, or that, if anything, when he returned to God, he would take them with him. But that’s not how it would be. Instead, he tells them that he must go, and they must stay. Or rather, he must go, so they can truly stay. It’s not simply in Jesus’ leaving, but in their staying—our staying—that the next chapter in this unfolding drama of God’s love will begin.
I.
And this is the great tension of the story of Christ’s Ascension: Christ is no longer here among us, casting out demons, healing the sick, raising the dead, showing us the way. No longer here to tell us just how to navigate the chaos of these times, or repair the tears in the fabric of our common life. Christ is no longer here among us in that way. But the story of the Ascension is not one of abandonment so much as it is one of empowerment. Yes, Christ has ascended and left us to finish the work. But we have not been left unprepared or ill-equipped to meet our moment, for a part of him remains here with us. And we know something of this, too.
I think of parents dropping children off at the first day of school—or maybe even more, taking them off to freshman year. Sending them off to begin this new chapter of their life. Giving up some control and entrusting them, in some way, to others. But also trusting them—the child or young adult—and trusting that something of what you have instilled in them up to that point has stuck and will guide them, and that they will be somehow prepared.
That first day of kindergarten, especially, can feel like an abandonment—to you and to them! But wasn’t it necessary? Didn’t you tell them, when you got down on one knee and looked at them, one teary, bleary eye to another, You can do this. You have what you need. I’m not far away. A part of me will be right here with you, and I love you.
This is the way of things. And it’s how anything good lives on in the world: it must be handed down from one generation to the next—something we as a church celebrate and focus our attention on with each Mentor Sunday. This is a Sunday, no doubt, when we celebrate and bless these sixth graders as they mark this exciting move from the children’s ministry into the Youth House and all the growth and change that represents.
But it’s also a Sunday when we celebrate the gift of the church and the promises we make with each other. We tell these sixth-graders, again, as we did for so many of them at their dedication, and have other times along the way, and like we did just two Sundays ago for our graduating seniors, that this is your home. Wherever life takes you, we will always be here for you and with you.
These are promises that are only possible for us to make as a church when we commit ourselves to each other and to this place and community for the long haul. In other words, when we commit to stay. When we commit ourselves to what Eugene Peterson has called “the long obedience in the same direction,” which is the life of faith that can only be lived to its deepest depths with others.
II.
In the monastic tradition, among the many vows new monks take, say, for poverty or obedience, is a vow of what’s called “stability.” Simply put, this is a vow to stay. To stay in the monastery in which they are placed without expectation that they will eventually move on. In the words of Thomas Merton, “By making a vow of stability, the monk renounces the vain hope of wandering off to find a ‘perfect monastery.’ This implies a deep act of faith: the recognition that it does not much matter where we are or whom we live with…Stability becomes difficult for [someone] whose monastic ideal contains some note, some element of the extraordinary. All monasteries are more or less ordinary…Its ordinariness is one of its greatest blessings.”1
A vow of stability is meant to free a monk of the fantasy that joy and fulfillment are more readily available elsewhere, and allow them to open themselves to seeing and celebrating the presence of God that surrounds them wherever they are.
Stability, in this sense, is really what we might call rootedness: to be grounded in a place and a people, and to trust that some blessings can only be discovered and enjoyed over the long haul. That the work of God—in life and in the world—is slow. Sometimes painfully so. But if we are open to it, often beautifully so.
Trust that is true is really at the heart of congregational life. Congregations are nothing more than a group of people committed to unearthing the blessings of God in a particular place and over time. Or perhaps not unearth, but a people committed to doing the long work of planting and nurturing and watching things grow—not just over the course of a season but over years, and even generations. The fruits of experiencing the different stages of life together. Growing up together. Raising children together, walking with each other through career changes, life events—births, deaths, diagnoses, celebrations, hardship, and tragedy. Growing old together and when the time comes, sending each other home. And the real beauty is that in a congregation, all of these things are happening at once—creating a mosaic of life in all its stages and forms.
We taste the fruits of getting close enough to someone that we feel the warmth of true friendship, but also the risk of having the capacity to hurt each other deeply. But in our staying, our rootedness, we commit to each other enough to work through it; to reconcile, to come to understand the meaning and cost and beauty of grace and forgiveness—things that don’t happen quickly and are very much out of step with culture as a whole. These virtues of our faith are really only possible when we stay; when we’re rooted in a place and to a people.
III.
It’s true that this kind of living isn’t always the most romantic. It takes discipline and imagination to see the blessings of life together through all the times of conflict and seasons of transition and change. Stability, as Merton reminds us, like faith and like love, is, in the end, not rooted in the extraordinary but in the ordinary. The mundane, the everyday.
Nor is staying, as we’re talking about it, just about the length of time; it is mostly about how we approach the time we are given. It’s inevitable that life and the Spirit will call us to go and leave—there are seasons in life for all these things. Staying is about truly being where we are. It’s possible to live in a place or know people your whole life and never really know or love it or them. Staying is a posture, a way of standing in the world and in your own life that is open to experiencing the gifts of community. Open to offering oneself but also open to receiving others, and finding that the Holy Spirit is there among us when we do. When we’re at our best, a congregation is a place and a people in which all of these fruits are nurtured and shared and celebrated, when we commit ourselves to the long work of love.
IV.
In the tradition of the desert fathers and mothers, these early Christian monks who wandered out into the desert in the 3rd and 4th centuries, tired of the distractions of modern city life, it’s said that someone asked Father Anthony, the patriarch of these monks, “What must one do in order to please God?” The old man replied, “Pay attention to what I tell you: whoever you may be, always have God before your eyes, whatever you do, do it according to the testimony of the Holy Scriptures; in whatever place you live, do not easily leave it. Keep these three precepts and you will be saved.”2
In other words,
1)keep your eyes open to the presence of God,
2)live in light of scripture, and
3) don’t easily leave the place where you are. Stay.
These just happen to be the final words of Jesus to his disciples before he ascended into heaven. After “opening their minds to understand the scriptures” and how this is how it must be, he tells them to keep their eyes open for the Holy Spirit, which is on its way—that continuing presence of God that will direct and guide them. And then he tells them to stay. To stay in the city and wait for these things to be revealed.
Of course, the time would come for some of them to leave and spread the good news to those in far-flung places, but even those calls were rooted in a vow to stay. The New Testament bears witness that the good news wasn’t spread through sermons, healings, and flash-in-the-pan miracles, but rather through the miracle of the ordinary: the blessing of congregational life. People bound by a shared experience of God’s love and common belief that God is working to renew the world and that they are called to share in that work, starting with their own community.
And the same is true today. The good news of this renewal is most fully shared when people commit themselves to each other and to their community in the season God has set before them, trusting that the same Holy Spirit that lifted Jesus into heaven remains here with us as we do.
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1 Thomas Merton, from The Sign of Jonas, quoted in Gretchen Rubin, “Monks Take a Vow of Stability. Maybe You Should, Too,” Slate. https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/01/monks-take-a-vow-of-stability-maybe-you-should-too.html
2 Thomas Merton, Wisdom of the Desert