Ascension - Week Three
LIBERATION LECTIONARY - ASIAN NATIVE HAWAIIAN PACIFIC ISLANDER MONTH
“I could not turn back the time for political change, but there is still time to save our heritage. You must remember never to cease to act because you fear you may fail. All things in this world are two: in heaven there is but One.” - Queen Liliʻuokalani
Ascension Day
Andrea Chung
Scripture : Philippians 3
Read Philippians 3 this week. Key Verses: Philippians 3.10-16
“My goal is to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead. Not that I have already reached the goal or am already fully mature, but I make every effort to take hold of it because I also have been taken hold of by Christ Jesus. My friends, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus. Therefore, all who are mature should think this way. And if you think differently about anything, God will reveal this also to you. In any case, we should live up to whatever truth we have attained.”
Lesson: When We Rise
It’s Ascension Day. What is the story of Ascension Day?
In addition to reading this week’s chapter assignment, it is important to remember the story of Ascension is a mark of narrative transition: after the Resurrection, ahead of Pentecost. This remembrance is worthy of surfacing annually, as a practice akin to Advent and Lenten reflections. Ascension Day is often overlooked, perhaps because it is a single event that does not necessarily usher in a season. Advent leads to Christmastide, Lent leads to Eastertide (What many Black traditional churches call Resurrection). The Liberation Lectionary situates Ascension season between Resurrection and Pentecost. You can find the Biblical story of Ascension in the Gospels, and in the first chapter of Acts.
Matthew 28, does not mention an Ascension, but the disciples did meet Jesus on a mountain in Galilee. Mark 16, referenced briefly at the end of the chapter. In Luke 24, the story says that Jesus also opened the minds of the disciples to understand.
After his resurrection, Jesus had appeared to the disciples, walked with them and shared meals with them, taught them and discussed many things with them; he was taken up into heaven before their eyes. Why is this an occasion to us who believe? The ascension of Jesus means that his work on earth is finished. “I go to prepare a place” Jesus said. And “If I do not go, then the Comforter cannot come” - meaning that the Holy Spirit would be arriving as the intended lasting presence of God.
The ascension should remind us that if there’s nothing left for Christ to do to accomplish our salvation, then there’s nothing for us to add to earn it. There’s nothing we can add to or subtract from God’s plan of salvation based on our performance in any way: not our academic prowess, physical skills, or emotional intelligence. There is no impressing God - we already believe God cannot be more impressed with us, because of Jesus’s testimony - and the fact that Jesus has completed it all simply helps us to remember that. This is good news for people who think they are meant to suffer for the sake of being perfect at Christianity.
Ascension is also an affirmation that our work has only just begun. Jesus' work is done and the picture of him we are given is that he is doing the work of reflection, preparation, prayerful intercession and sending protection. We are up now. We are the ministry makers, the co-creators and the colaborers. We are the mind and body for what God has planned. While we are meant to have this same mind as Jesus did, we are also empowered by God to make use of the gifts God has given us to serve the risen Savior by not being afraid to keep working, to look ahead and stop staring up in the sky.
We can rise up just like Jesus in every aspect of our lives. We can look to Jesus’s ascension as an example for what comes next after Resurrection. When our work brings new life into a space - everything is elevated. Just like the work of Jesus, the work of God’s people prepares a place of love and rest. The work of God’s people summons a Spirit that connects us across varied spaces and different identities. The Ascension of Jesus is more than a monument to a work being done, it is a mark for the start of a work that we are guaranteed to finish. May this truth help us to remember how working together can cause us all to rise up.
This Ascension Day, we remember the finished work of El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Known more famously as Malcolm X.
On May 19th, 1925, Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha Nebraska. His father was murdered by a racist mob. His mother was institutionalized after “Some kind of psychological deterioration hit our family circle and began to eat away our pride” as he recalls, following the loss. And Malcolm was sent to various places to be raised. He spent some time with his half sister, who was much older than he, and felt a deep maternal connection to him. She described her love for him as a kin to Mary’s pondering adoration of Jesus.
As a young man, he joined the National of Islam during a prison term in Massachusetts. By the mid 1950s he was the leading spokesman for the Nation. He married Betty Shabazz (whose birthday is May 28) and they had four girls together. Troubled by a complicated and eventually toxic relationship with the NOI, Malcolm returned from the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca determined to follow ancient customs of Islam, removing himself from the doctrines of the NOI.
He was harassed by the NOI and the FBI. He was loved and hated, embraced by some and gossiped about by others. He was assassinated after speaking at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City, on February 21st in 1965. “Malcolm’s murder deprived the world of a potentially great leader” Said Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - who met Malcolm for the first and only time during the Senate debate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After holding a press conference in the Capitol on the proceedings, King encountered Malcolm in the hallway and the two shook hands.
At his funeral, the actor and activist Ossie Davis gave a eulogy which became famous for anointing Malcolm with the endearment used so often still today. “However much we may have differed with him—or with each other about him and his value as a man—let his going from us serve only to bring us together now. Consigning these mortal remains to earth, the common mother of all, secure in the knowledge that what we place in the ground is no more now a man—but a seed-which, after the winter of discontent, will come forth again to meet us. And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince—our own black shining Prince!—who didn't hesitate to die, because he loved us so.”
Black x Gold Solidarity - Undeniable Ancestral Connections
On the same day four years previous to Malcolm’s birth, Mary Yuriko Nakahara was born in San Pedro California. She taught Sunday School at her local Presbyterian church. After the Pearl Harbor attack, her father was tortured by the government and died. At the order of President Roosevelt, the War Relocation Authority moved twelve thousand Japanese people to internment camps. Yuri's family was detained in Jerome, Arkansas for two years.
Yuri later changed her name to drop the name Mary, which she referred to as “a slave name”. In 1946 she married Bill Kochiyama. In the 60’s, Yuri met and befriended Malcolm X, then joined the Pan-African Organization for Unity, which he founded. On February 21st, 1965, she was by his side when Brother Malcolm was assassinated. In 1971 she converted to Sunni Islam.
She was a racial justice activist, especially for comrades targeted by the FBI. In 1988, internment survivors were each awarded 20 thousand dollars, she made that victory a platform to demand reparations for Black people.
The connected work of Malcolm and Yuri elevates our visions of solidarity. When systems of oppression try to convince us that neither race and ethnicity is worth our time, we can look to the Spirit who comes to settle herself between us, to connect us. We can look to the promise that the work we are doing will never go undone. Like the scripture reminds us this week - we must rise into the crowns that have been bought and paid for. We already are what we ascend to become.
Prayer / Poem: A Congregational Prayer for Ascension
“O God of earth and sky, as Jesus came among us in Bethlehem to raise us up to heaven, so today we recall his departing from us so that he would be in all places, through us. Though now the Lord is hidden from our sight, enable us to abide in him by the power and grace of the Holy Spirit, in communion with all of your people, until Divine mercy and grace fill your whole creation. Amen.”