Year B: May 16, 2021 | Ascension Sunday

May 16

Ascension Sunday, Year B: Acts 1:1-11
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
May 16, 2021
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman

To watch a video of the sermon, please visit this page.

“John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” – Acts 1:5[1]

Change is in the air.

You can feel it on the wind. You can practically smell it.

Friday morning I stopped by our local Starbucks. Everything looked like it has for the past fourteen months, but even with no other customers in the shop, something felt different. The music sounded louder. The baristas appeared more relaxed. Instead of carrying it over in one of those clear boxes like they have for the past year, one of them actually handed me my drink—with her hand! When another customer came in to pick up their order, they didn’t have that familiar cloud everyone’s been carrying. It was strange—good strange—but still strange.

Our whole neighborhood seems to be connecting with that same, calmer energy. Cars have been passing a little more slowly. More kids and teenagers are hanging out on their porches or playing street basketball. Even Neela, our super-anxious, dog-hating dog, hasn’t been nearly as reactive as usual on our walks. It could just be my own perception. Or maybe it’s the early inbreak of summer with our recent streak of sunshine and warm weather. But no matter what it is, the world just feels different. It’s like something new is in the air, like society’s hearts and minds are beginning to recover the ability to breathe deeply.

This past Thursday—forty days after Easter—was the celebration of Christ’s ascension. This is a holiday I never even knew existed for the first half of my life. We read and talked about the Ascension at church and in Bible class, but I’d never heard of anyone celebrating it until the summer after my senior year of college. It may not be a big deal in the United States overall, but as one of the Major Feasts of the Liturgical Calendar, it’s something we really should take time to observe.

The Ascension is one of those “huh” events in the Bible. Although the early Church clearly thought it was important enough to pass on to later generations, from a modern worldview, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Flying people are something from dreams and movies, not real life. Is “ascension” some sort of ancient metaphor that we just don’t have the context to understand? Or maybe Heaven is somewhere in outer space. If so, was Jesus using alien superpowers to take the quickest route home? Theologians have been trying to come to terms with this odd story—or, more often, avoiding it—for thousands of years. I’ve never really seen a satisfying explanation. And I don’t have one to offer you today, so the mystery will just have to keep waiting.

This morning, both our first reading and our Gospel gave us stories about this last of miraculous event surrounding Jesus. They’re quite similar. And they should be, because according to early Church tradition, Luke the Evangelist wrote both of them. That same tradition tells us that in addition to being an author, Luke was a trained Greek physician as well, and many preachers point to the technical details found in his two books as corroborating evidence of that claim. Because of his attention to minutia, it’s interesting to note the one obvious difference between the two presentations. In his Gospel, Luke tells us that Jesus is about to send “what [the] Father promised,” but the author never specifies what that promise is. However, in Acts, which you might think of as a sort of sequel to Luke, that promise becomes explicit: “you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” I know it isn’t Pentecost quite yet, but this subtle shift of emphasis toward the Third Person of the Trinity intrigues me.

I’ve been thinking about spirits a lot lately. I often wonder about the evil or unclean spirits the Bible talks about Jesus casting out. A lot of the symptoms look like epilepsy or things we might categorize as some sort of mental illness—a disorder that medicine of the time simply couldn’t explain or easily treat. And there might be a good reason for that, because major medical theory of the ancient world did draw a “spiritual” connection among most illnesses—neurological, genetic, or contagious.

Today, we know a lot more about disorders versus communicable diseases and things like transmission vectors, even if we can’t always control the spread of bacteria and viruses. But all of that’s a pretty recent discovery. The idea of germs didn’t really gain prominence in the West until the late 1800s. For nearly all of recorded history, most societies thought that disease spread not just by air but in air. Essentially, a bad smell indicated something about the air itself was rotting. If you happened to breathe in too much of the corruption, it might lodge somewhere in your body and begin decomposing the healthy tissue around it. It sounds bizarre to us now, but polluted air can cause physical damage to our lungs, and a good number of diseases do have certain odors associated with them when left untreated, so it wasn’t necessarily a bad guess. We still hear related concepts floating around in folklore and home remedies: some people refuse to leave their windows open at night for fear of “catching a draft.” Others promise a few days of good, fresh mountain air will cure whatever ails you.

But the connection between dangerous air and evil spirits doesn’t become clear until we begin looking at the words behind them. I wish we could talk about their differences, but there aren’t any. They’re the same words. The primary translations for what we read in the Bible as “spirit” are actually “air,” “wind,” or “breath.”[2] “Unclean” can simply mean “foul,”[3] and “evil” is generally more in line with our idea of “oppressive” or even “painful.”[4] Considering the widespread disease transmission model during the Roman era—not to mention that Luke, as a physician, would have been thoroughly trained in that system—the most straightforward translations of the terms behind a majority of the events we read about involving mysterious spirits are most likely a medical diagnosis—something more akin to “foul air” or maybe “bad breath.”

Coming back to our passage in Acts, the same logic can apply when we read about the Holy Spirit, God’s “Sacred Breath.” In fact, just like “unclean” and “evil” have more straightforward definitions, “holy” can also have a less religious translation as well: “purifying.”[5]

So, with all that in mind, what if there really is something in the air? What if that’s what Luke and Jesus are trying to tell us?

Almost immediately after Jesus’ first statement about the Holy Spirit in our reading, the disciples begin asking “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” With two thousand years of history between us, we often think of their questions as a little naïve, but they do make sense if you think about them in context. The disciples had been living with Jesus for several years. Their bodies had bruised from bumping into one another. They knew his scent. They had literally breathed the same air. Their experience of God was intimate and physical. So why wouldn’t God’s kingdom look like a human one? And especially as the Chosen People, why wouldn’t it look like the stories from their past?

But something’s up. Something’s in the air. Jesus is about to leave, and their immediate, everyday experience of God was about to change. After generations of disorder, the world was beginning to turn right side up again, and they were going to need to readjust their balance, to reorient themselves for this new reality. It would take some time to prepare for this different stage of life, this altered relationship with God. And just like healing rarely happens in an instant—especially if Jesus isn’t standing right there beside you—they’re going to need some patience. They’re going to have to wait. So before he ascends, Jesus, healer that Luke emphasizes he is, gives the disciples a prescription to follow: the wind is changing, so calm down. Go back to Jerusalem, and wait for the air to clear.

Hold your breath just a little bit longer. The corruption that’s settled in your bodies—the disorder and decay endemic to your hearts and minds—there is a cure for that, and it’s coming. The stench of the past and the failure that weighs you down from the inside—it’s about to blow away. John baptized with water, in a river carrying fish and leaves and flowing with debris, but you’re about to be immersed in air. Not just clean air. Not just healthy air. This is healing air. Purifying air. Prepare for it to fill not only your lungs but the totality of your being.

And so it is for us. We’ve sat through fourteen months of disruption. We’ve worn masks, social-distanced, and literally held our breath when passing strangers—sometimes even loved ones. The time is coming when we can all take a deep breath, a time of hope, a time of joy. It isn’t here quite yet. There’s still some waiting ahead of us. But you can feel it on the wind. You can practically smell it.

Change is in the air.

“John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.

[2] πνεῦμα (pneuma) | https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/πνεῦμα

[3] ἀκάθαρτος (akathartos) | https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ἀκάθαρτος

[4] πονηρός (poneros) | https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/πονηρός

[5] ἅγιος (hagios) | https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ἅγιος