The Memorial Church congregation sends Harvard seniors off with a emotional blessing Sunday. Photo by Anna Burnham/Memorial Church Student Program Coordinator
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By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, May 21, 2023)
So it's the seventh Sunday of Easter today, the last Sunday of Easter. Next Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. It's also the Sunday after the ascension, and we're using the lessons from the Feast of the Ascension. You heard about the ascension in our readings. Jesus is lifted up, taken away from the disciples. And it's also Senior Sunday. As we mentioned, we're saying goodbye to a lot of you. Seniors and other graduates of the university, others who have been here for the year and are moving on to other things. So in many ways, in most ways, it's a farewell service today. A service that says goodbye, to some of you we're saying goodbye until the end of June, to some of you we're saying goodbye for longer.
About two and a half weeks ago, Sophie Choate gave the senior secretary's, choir secretary's, address at morning prayers, and she made me cry thinking about saying goodbye. When I got this job a couple of years ago, I tried to figure out what this job was and what it would be like. And I've spent the time since then figuring out what this job is and what it's supposed to be like. In some ways it's a church job. This is a church like other churches, but in other ways, it's different. And Colette and I were talking this year, one of the ways it's different, is there's a lot of saying goodbye in this church. Every year we'd say goodbye to a crop of folks we've come to know and to love, and that's hard.
Ascension two, the Feast of the Ascension is about saying goodbye. It's about saying farewell. The story of the ascension that we get today comes from the 24th chapter of the Gospel of Luke and that 24th chapter of Luke is very compressed. A lot of stuff happens in that 24th chapter. It begins with the resurrection. The experience of resurrection that the women had at the tomb. And Jesus is not there. They're told that Jesus has risen and they go until the disciples and the disciples don't believe. But then a couple of the disciples are walking to Emmaus. They're getting out of Jerusalem because they're scared and they meet the stranger on the road, and it's only when they break bread together that they realize it was Jesus. And then he disappears, and then they run back to the disciples again and tell the disciples. And while they're telling the other disciples, then Jesus appears to all of them. And then after that, they go out to this place near Bethany, as we hear in our lesson today, and Jesus says goodbye to them, is lifted up, taken away from them.
When I was an undergraduate, I studied abroad in London, and I was a real church nerd. And this is probably not a surprise to many people in this congregation, but that was a great semester abroad for me because I'm Anglican. I come out of the Anglican tradition. There's lots of Anglican churches in London, as it happens. And so I spent a lot of time in my study abroad semester going to church, and that semester ended around the same time. It ended right around the Feast of the Ascension. And I remember walking home from church having gone to this Ascension Day service. And I was walking back to the apartment I lived in, walking along Bayswater Road near Hyde Park. And I remember suddenly having this twofold realization, which is a little bit unsettling for me as a church nerd, as a person who would spend their spring semester, junior year, going to church a lot. I remember thinking about this Feast of the Ascension and Jesus's body being lifted up into the heavens.
And then I asked myself the follow on question, which was, well, what happened then? What happened next after this body was lifted up into the heavens? Where did it go? In ancient cosmology, in the way the ancient people who were hearing this story for the first time thought about the nature of the universe, up there was a place and Jesus could go up there and live up there, but that's not the way we think about the universe anymore. None of us has this ancient cosmology. None of us believes that Jesus's body is in orbit somewhere around the earth or floating around in space. Jesus is lifted up into the heavens and the gospel makes a very serious point of saying, "Bodily lifted up." This was not a spiritual ascension. A bodily ascension, lifted up into the heavens, and it made sense to them because there was a place up there where bodies could go, but we don't really think of it that way anymore.
And so the second thing I realized is that, oh, then the body has to go away up there, that ascension, this departure, is about saying goodbye. It's about letting go of this man Jesus. And what I realized in that moment, walking along Bayswater Road in central London, was that the resurrection and the ascension do not really solve the problem of loss for us Christians. Rather, they try to put us into a different relationship with loss. And that indeed from the first experiences of the first Christians, saying goodbye, letting go, has always been a big part of the job of being a Christian.
So some of you are going away for a while. Some of you are going away for a few weeks. Those of you who have been coming to church know I like to talk about Greek word origins and etymologies. And in some of the other Morning Prayers Talks, we had some people joking about my etymologies. Well, since you're going to be gone for a while, I've got three etymologies for you today to tide you over until the next time you hear me preach. I had this intuition when I was looking at chapter 24 because it includes the resurrection and the ascension. There's lots of lifting and raising up that happens in 24. And so I had this intuition, and this thought, what are all the different words that are used to talk about Jesus being raised up, lifted up? Because in ancient Greek, there's no word like resurrection, which has this kind of heavy theological valence to it in English. It's just Jesus got up, that's the way it sounds in Greek. So I was curious, well, what, is it the same language we use when we talk about Jesus going up into the heavens?
So here are the three, the three etymologies you can have. The first is from the beginning of chapter 24, when Jesus is raised the word for resurrection there is the verb agero which just means to get up. Usually to get up from sleep, but also to be raised up in that way, to be aroused like roused from sleep. That's agero. In the passage we have today, there are a couple of different versions of lifting or raising. One, Jesus raises his hands to bless them. That word is aparo. Interestingly, the author of this passage tells the same story again at the beginning of the Book of Acts, and when he talks about Jesus being lifted up into the heavens there, he uses that word, the same word for lifting as an act of blessing. Jesus taken up into heavens there.
But in today's lesson, from the end of the Book of Acts, when it says that Jesus is taken up, carried up, the translation we had today, carried up into the heavens, the Greek word that Luke uses here is anaphero which means to lift up. It can also mean to lift up for sacrifice, which is interesting, but not what I'm going to preach about today, because the third thing it can mean is to bring up or to bring to its end, to bring to its conclusion. Anaphero has the metaphorical sense of taking a thing to its proper end and to its proper conclusion. There is this sense of ending at the end of the Gospel of Luke. Jesus has done all this work and he has been raised, but even though he has been raised, he is still saying, literally saying, goodbye to them and his work is coming to an end as he is lifted up into the heavens.
Or is it? Is Jesus' earthly work brought to an end? Because as he is being lifted up, he doesn't just like get carried away, he says some things to the disciples as he's going. He says to them, "I am sending to you what my father promised you." Another way to translate this line is he says, "I am sending my father's promise upon you. My father's promise is now yours to bear. My father's, our God's, promise now belongs to you, and you are the bears of that promise." And what is the promise that Jesus has been telling people about since the beginning of his ministry? The promise of God's infinite and enduring and unending love for them. That promise he says is yours to bear, so go, and preach repentance and forgiveness to all people everywhere. This is what Jesus says as his ministry comes to its earthly end, he turns to the people who are saying goodbye to them and says, "This promise now is yours to keep for me. Go do it."
We, who call ourselves disciples of Jesus, we are the end of Jesus's ministry. And I mean that in the sense that we are the goal of it. We are the means of it. We are both its purpose and its perpetuity. We are the life of Jesus in this world. Jesus says goodbye to them, and he's asking them to deal with his absence. He's asking them to deal with this loss. And it's important what they do when he makes this ask, because they don't just stand staring up into the heavens pointing at where Jesus went or worshiping the heavens and they don't build a shrine in the place where Jesus went up into the heavens. They do what he said, they carry it forth, because Jesus had told them to go, they go out into the world preaching repentance and forgiveness to everyone, to friends and to enemies, to all nations in the temple every day, blessing God, praising God.
"Here is how to live with my loss," Jesus says, "Keep my ministry alive. Give this promise, that I have given to you, give it away." And as Jesus fades from their sight, they carry his ministry into the future. A future they could not have imagined, among a people they could not abide or understand because they refuse, in that moment of his departure, they refuse to let all that Jesus meant to them drift lifelessly away into the sky. I fear that we who call ourselves Christians are too often guilty of burying our memory of Jesus or of letting it drift aimlessly into the sky. We try to preserve it as if in a museum or we adorn it and confine it to an hour on Sunday morning. But for this memory, the memory of this man who loved his enemies and served the poor and forgave sinners and healed the sick, for that memory to live, we can't just worship it in here, we also have to take it out there.
And that doesn't mean standing on street corners shouting. That's not what I'm saying. It means we have to make Jesus' causes our own. We have to give them life in the world he has loved. Ascension, the Feast of the Ascension, which we observe here today, is not about Christ floating up in the sky or out in space somewhere, it's about Christ here in our hearts. It's about Christ there, out there, in our world. Ascension, the Feast of the Ascension, this departure reminds us that if Christ lives in any meaningful way, he has to live in us and in those whom we serve. Those whom we serve. To you who are departing this church for a short time or a long time, to you, to whom we are saying goodbye, I hope we have served you well.
Please know how much you have done and how much you have meant to us. Please know that you have been such a gift to this church, that you have made this place come alive with Christ, that you have made us come alive with Christ. And it is hard to see you go, but you have to go, we know. So here's what we who remain will do. We will hold you in our hearts as you go, and when others come after you to grace this place again with their presence, please know that the spirit of love and welcome we offer them will belong to you as well because it will have come from you, and we will offer it to them in your memory. Go in peace with our blessing. Amen.