“Jesus in the Clouds with Diamonds”
Acts 1:6-14
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 4 May, 2008
Seventh Sunday of Easter
Ascension Sunday
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 I thought I would never hear the end of it. When we had one of our church dances last year, I made a special request of the DJ and subsequently endured a great amount of teasing, mostly from Ms. Lois Carrigan. I asked the DJ to play the Beatles’ “Octopus’s Garden.” Yes, fine, I’m a Beatles fan. And yes, fine, I was a little girl when I started listening to the Beatles. And yes, my favorite Beatles song was (and still is) “Octopus’s Garden.” It was the perfect song for a little girl. Fun tune, nonsensical words. Whatever the song is really about, the fanciful words and cheerful tune were (and are) enough to set my imagination running.
I made my mother play that and other Beatles songs over and over at the piano, and we would sing together. When I wasn’t standing at the piano with my mom, and when I was taking brief breaks from “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” I would listen to the Beatles ad nauseam on the record player. I especially loved the Abbey Road album, but I knew some of their other albums fairly well too. A certain song off the Sergeant Pepper album comes to mind this morning, both as I ponder my childhood and as I contemplate this morning’s Biblical story of the Ascension of Christ. How do the Beatles and the Ascension of Christ relate, you ask?!
“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is the song I have in mind this morning. Yes, I know that the song is supposedly about drugs. However, John Lennon insisted until the day he died that the title of the song did not come from the name for a certain psychedelic drug that he admits to taking during that time period. Instead, the song title was derived from a drawing by his son Julian.
Four-year-old Julian came home from school one day with a picture of his classmate Lucy “against a backdrop of exploding, multi-colored stars.” John asked what the picture was called. “It's Lucy...in the Sky with Diamonds, Daddy,” Julian replied. I found a web site that showed that original picture by four-year-old Julian Lennon, and... it looked a lot like what I imagine the Ascension of Christ did.1
Can you imagine being there? With Jesus’ disciples at his Ascension? First, he was resurrected from a violent death and appeared among those whom he loved, not as a ghost but as a living human once more. Then, after spending some time with them, Christ was, as the scripture tells us, “lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” Understandably, the disciples were baffled by another strange happening involving their beloved Christ. They had perhaps just begun to get used to the idea that he was back with them... and then this! No wonder the two men in white robes found them “gazing up to heaven”!
If the Ascension was difficult for Jesus’ first disciples to grasp, it has not been much easier for us. Although the celebration of Jesus’ ascension into heaven has become a holy day in many churches, we still seem to have difficulty understanding what it was or what it meant. I looked through several centuries worth of art on the event, and artists portrayed Christ’s Ascension in various and strange ways. Not surprisingly, one of the strangest interpretations was that of Salvador Dali. While many artists show Jesus being raised up in a standing position, Dali’s Christ is on his back, and his feet are the most prominent body part visible. He is ascending in the midst of a glowing orb while an angelic face awaits him in heaven, with glowing red clouds bursting around him. While Dali’s artistry is obviously better trained and more adult than four-year-old Julian Lennon’s, the spirit of his piece is rather like that in Lennon’s picture of his classmate, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” Dali’s amazing piece does seem to have the spirit of “a backdrop of exploding, multi-colored stars.”
The Ascension of Christ seems like just such an imaginative event. Regardless of what Luke had in mind when he wrote about it, Christ’s Ascension into heaven is one of those stories that triggers my childlike imagination, a little like “Octopus’s Garden” or “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” -- the song -- did for me as a child.
“As they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” Just as I did not know what the Beatles had in mind when they wrote their most fanciful songs, I do not know quite what Luke was talking about. But I do know that this scripture -- more than many others -- sets my imagination running. “It must have been beautiful!” I muse. “I wonder what it would look like!”
When Jesus preached his parables, performed miracles, or even suffered Crucifixion, I could imagine fairly easily what those events would have looked like. ...But the Ascension?! The Ascension is one of those “magical” events that cannot be simply pictured in a Sunday school book or even by a world-renowned artist.
So, what did, and does, the Ascension of Christ mean? What is this fanciful event all about? I am not the only one who has difficulty picturing the event simply. I read several commentaries in preparation for this sermon, and even Biblical commentators, whose vocation it is to study the scriptures in depth, seemed to have difficulty with this particular piece. They could not explain what the Ascension itself meant or may have looked like, and often went on tangents describing the historical period in which the event may have taken place, and the reasons Luke may have had for writing about it here... and the fact that there are few gospel accounts of an Ascension.
One commentator did briefly explain that the Ascension “marks the transition to the period when the apostles, as Christ’s witnesses, function as preachers and teachers on his behalf.”2 The Ascension is a way of “terminating the post-Easter appearances of Christ,” a way of saying that after the event the church would experience Christ in a new way, i.e. through the witness of followers rather than directly through Christ’s own words.3 This idea makes some sense to me -- a pragmatic device that allows for the ministry of the church to begin in a new way. Prior to being raised up, Jesus himself told the disciples that they would “receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses... to the ends of the earth.” In a sense, the Ascension made way for the birth of the Church, which we will celebrate next Sunday on Pentecost. But this explanation does not answer everything. It does not stop my imagination from running to try to picture Jesus “being raised up to heaven.”
Perhaps this is as it should be. While I believe strongly in an accessible faith, I also believe in an imaginative faith -- a faith that does not require Jesus to look just like the Sunday school pictures, that does not require one interpretation of every story. I believe in the kind of faith that allows our childlike imaginations to run free, to picture the Ascension as Julian Lennon pictured his classmate Lucy, or as Salvador Dali pictured the event itself. When our faithful imaginations die, so, often, does our faith.
Now let us pray.
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1 http://www.snopes.com/music/hidden/lucysky.htm, 3 May, 2008.
2 Fred B. Craddock, John H. Hayes, Carl R. Holladay, and Gene M. Tucker, Preaching Through the Christian Year: Year A (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1992), 283.
3 Ibid.
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