Ascension

Feast Day. 

Ascension comes on either Thursday or Sunday, that strange moment with clouds and angels and a levitating Christ. With promises that seem counter intuitive, "I'm leaving, but...I'll be with you always," "Go to all the nations, but...wait here in the city."

And, I wonder what kinds of questions the disciples must have gotten afterwards, "'Ends of the earth,' huh? Are you leaving today? Tomorrow? Do you want help packing your donkey?"

"What's the plan? What do you mean you don't have a plan?"

"You're just going to hang out together? How long are you going to wait for?"

"Shouldn't you have some idea of what you're doing?"

I wonder if they got the same kinds of looks that a presenter gave our kids on day two of their short term trip training, when the 'easy' question was met with silence. 

"What are you going to Haiti to do?"

*crickets*

"Okay..." He glances out over the room to make sure that they are still awake, as if perhaps they are simply being taciturn, "When you're in Haiti, you'll wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, and then...?"

A few of them shrug minutely, and I can see the "Something," that they are trying to formulate into a more coherant response before it comes off their lips. It was a well practiced answer a few weeks ago, when things were even more uncertain than they are now.

"We are going to Haiti sometime, to do something, with some group of people."

Did the disciples get this look? This puzzlement washing over confident faces as the people around them began to realize that they fully intended to continue following the orders of a man who was no longer around. This, "How on earth did you get anybody to sign up for this gig?"

How on earth did they get anybody to sign up for this gig? We're easily six hours into a ten hour training, and I see the truth of the risen Christ in these kids, the desire to heal and to be healed, to reach deep into a messy world, to find the Divine in the faces of teammates who they are just meeting and already-friends in Haiti.

Passion that would put them on a plane right now, and temperance that would sit in this cold room for hour after hour of waiting, learning, and letting information wash over them, light their imaginations.

Because, we gather afterwards for a feast of sorts, hamburgers and playful laughter as a fundraiser to help send Haitian kids to leadership camp, much the way that the church here helps to send these kids to Haiti, John Day, RFKC, middle school camp, retreats. What goes around comes around, and they are more interested in time together than any hoorah over "doing the right thing."

These kids who were drooping and exhausted before we even started jump in to learn new games, play old ones, and create oddly twisted versions for no other reason than that they can. Why not play four-way, blind Connect Four with the pieces all mixed together? Why not try Operation with your eyes shut or have a fight with thrown ping pong balls?

Because, this is Holy.

There is Grace here and Truth, sacraments lived out in that casual, irreverent way that Baptists have for decades. Love Feasts of hamburgers and pop. Water thrown and sprinkled and dumped in a way that is not baptism into the faith, but baptism into the here and now, into the fact that we are alive, together. The confirmation of laughter and teasing and trying again.

Healing, not when they anoint one another with oil, but when they administer the questions on these well used conversation cards and make the space to truly listen to answers given, when they make the simple act of hearing a sort of common prayer. Holy orders, gathered around these small tables to continue to prepare for Haiti in the simple building of relationships, to breathe in the commonality of their sent-ness.

"[T]he truth of Ascension is to be lived out in an earthed spirituality that joyfully embraces the deep pleasures and wonder of our lives and world, that grieves and seeks to heal and mend where disruption and despair are known, that affirms “the natural world of sea, rock and earth as being redolent with divine glory, and recognizes Christ in the faces of friends and strangers." [1]

The movie starts, and they don't move for a long moment, this circle of them gathered in the back of the room, as if there's a spell that might be broken by standing up, a wisp of the Divine, once sensed, that might fail to return. As if we've wrung the last bit of everything right out of them.

The sort of stillness that doesn't move again when the lights come back on, bodies and brains that are as exhausted as if we had yanked them several time zones ahead, made ten o'clock at night hours later than it objectively is.

But, they clean up without question. Ping pong balls gathered before we could think to ask. Volleyball nets that we struggled to put up in the late afternoon wind untied and wheeled back across campus. Garbage bagged. Food put away. Rooms returned to normal. These kids who serve as if Jesus washing the disciples' feet was the most natural sort of leadership in the world.

Play. Serve. Lead.

Heal. Laugh. Learn.

Together.

It's Ascension week, where we celebrate the messiness of humans being left to once again stumble through the holy and the mundane. Looking forward to the fire and the power that was to come. Gathering the way that the disciples might have, had they lived in 21st century, northwestern USA, rather than the 1st century Roman Empire.

Spending time together while we balance the "go" with the "wait."

"Redolent with Divine glory."