While Listening to John Coltrane’s Ascension

While Listening to John Coltrane’s Ascension

“What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from….”   T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, section V

Storyteller Luke offers two views of the Ascension of Jesus at the end of Luke 24: 36-53 and the beginning of Acts 1:1-11. Luke-Acts is his two-volume interpretation of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ, the anointed One. It is the end of one story and the beginning of the other: the end of the story of the Word that became flesh to dwell among us and the beginning of the story of the community he formed to continue the works he does, “and greater works than these will you do!” after he leaves us on our own to begin again.  It is a hinge moment between two times, two eras, which Eliot reminds us always takes us back to where we begin. “To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from…”

We begin with Love, we return to Love, and Love is all around as my mentor of some twenty-five years would always remind us. Jesus returns to God’s Household of Eternal Love – Eternity. As Blues legend Willie Dixon reminds us, “You cannot think of eternity/Think of it like time/You try to think, you try to count/You just mess up your mind.” [Willie Dixon – Eternity, 1992]

It is evening of the Day of Resurrection in Luke. After talking with two companions on the way to Emmaus and breaking bread with them; after appearing to all the disciples and asking for a piece of fish! ‘“Have you anything here to eat?” he asks. They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence,’ to show that he was not a ghost. [Luke 24:41b-43] A kind of Felliniesque detail in a tale that is nothing but pure fabulism, dada and surrealism rolled into one truly momentous historic hinge between there and here.

As he blesses them and ascends up into the sky, he issues the final instruction: “…stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high!” And then he is gone! A sort of ‘wait here for further instructions’ kind of moment. Place all this in the context of Stay At Home. You need to go no further. The power from on high will come to you. It’s not a journey. Here at the end you are at another beginning if you simply stay put. The same Spirit that descended upon Jesus like a dove in the River Jordan he promises will come upon you to empower you to become a new people. Once you were no people, now you are a new people!

IV

The dove descending breaks the air

With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare

The one discharge from sin and error.

The only hope, or else despair

Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-

To be redeemed from fire by fire.  [Eliot, ibid]

And are we astonished that at his leaving there is no hint of despair? We are told “…they returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” Rejoice always and pray without ceasing as St. Paul, once Paul of Tarsus and persecutor of these very people watching their Lord ascend, had put it in his Letter to the Thessalonians! BTW the Temple is where the Storyteller Luke begins his tale with all those old folks like Zechariah, Simeon and Anna. The end is where we start from. We come from God’s Household of Eternal Love. The Temple. And as Luke narrates this tale, the Second Temple and all of Jerusalem lies in ashes at the hands of Caesar’s Rome.

Another storyteller, Baruch 2, describes the destruction of the First Temple by Babylon. It’s another fabulist tale of sorts describing angels descending from heaven., emptying the Temple of everything therein and carrying it all back to whence all things come so that when the Babylonians thought they were looting and destroying the Temple – it wasn’t there at all! The angels kept the essence of Israel’s life and hope out of Babylon’s hands.

What if Luke’s Ascensions recall this story in Baruch 2, this memory, and functions to keep Jesus and the Temple out of Roman hands at the destruction of the second temple to come? Rome runs rampant, but the destroyer cannot touch either the messiah, the Christ, the anointed, or the Temple. The heart of Jewish life and hope are now out of Rome’s reach! Has Luke’s community come up with a solution for the crisis and tragedy that had already taken place? That they had already witnessed?  What will be our solution as the present crisis ends? Have the angels already salvaged the essence of what must remain when our ending becomes a new beginning?

Listening to Coltrane reminds me of sitting in Trinity Church, Wall Street, on Ascension morning like this one, and hearing the music of Larry King the organist and his choirs and recorded sounds in quadraphonic swirl around the sanctuary depicting Larry’s interpretation of these events and feeling lifted, ascended to a new place, a new beginning as we returned if only for a moment to that place from whence we all come – the Household of God’s Eternal Love! It was a Close Encounters kind of experience!

In Storyteller Luke’s second account in Acts the boys stand there, looking up into the heavens as companion Jesus, with whom they had shared so much bread and wine and healing and teaching and wonders and marvelous tales of farmers and pearls and sheep and goats and so so much more, disappears from sight. So much more. Suddenly two men in white appear. The same two men in dazzling clothes who earlier that morning stood with the women at the empty tomb. Or, was itforty mornings ago? Or, has it all been one long moment, one long agonizing and at the same time astonishing moment? Those two men looking as if they just stepped out of a scene in Saturday Night Fever dressed in white to announce, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He has been raised!”

Here they are again as the boys just stand there looking up, gazing into the clouds as he was now out of sight. But they just continue to stand there like statues gazing and gazing until interrupted by these two men in dazzling clothes who ask, “…why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." As much as to say, “Remember what he said? Get into the city and stay there until…” And, ‘Get your heads out of the clouds to care for the world he cared so much about.’ And then: “The dove descending breaks the air/With flame of incandescent terror

Of which the tongues declare/The one discharge from sin and error./ The only hope, or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-/To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

Back they went. The wind blew. The fire descended from on high. The house shook. Their hearts and souls shook. It was the hurricane force of God’s mighty enlivening and life sustaining Ruach! Breath! Wind! Spirit! The end became a new beginning! The dove that had landed on God’s Beloved in the River Jordan was landing, and the landing was filled with power from on high! Redeemed from the fire of the city’s destruction by fire, by wind, by breath. And they began to speak as never before they had spoken! O, the stories they could tell! But then, that’s another story. We will get to it. For now it is enough to remember: Stay where we are. Get our heads out of the clouds and out of heaven. Stay focused on the mission here and now. For now, it is enough to remember: “What we call the beginning is often the end/And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from….”  So, this is what happens as one ponders these tales while listening to John Coltrane’s Ascension. Try it. I promise you will never be the same again! And in fact, we never are! Amen. It is so. Amen.