It was just about 150 years ago. Fort Sumter had fallen in Charleston Harbor. Virginia had just voted to secede from the United States. Everywhere there were signs of war – the American Civil War.
On May 23, 1861 – the very day that Virginia left the Union to join the Confederate States of America – three men got in a boat at Sewell’s Point in Norfolk and rowed across the James River to Hampton. Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory and James Townsend had been working on an artillery placement to bombard Fort Monroe, one of the last places in the South still under federal control.
Fort Monroe is still there today, looking a lot like it did 150 years ago. Big stone walls encircling 63 acres inside. And inside it on May 23 were brand new military units from the New England states under the command of Benjamin Butler – a Massachusetts politician and lawyer with nothing to distinguish himself as a military leader.[i]
The three men had been working to build up the Confederate defenses. As they rowed across the James, Baker, Mallory, and Townsend could probably hear the celebrations in Hampton. People out celebrating secession. But these men were not heading to the party. They were headed to the fort. They wanted to get into the only spot of land still under the control of the US government. Because Baker, Mallory, & Townsend were slaves and they hoped that whatever war was coming would be a war to free the slaves.
That’s not what northerners thought they were doing. There were some abolitionists, particularly in the northeast who thought there was no greater moral cause than getting rid of the institution of slavery. But they were in the minority. Even Abraham Lincoln, who eventually would produce the Emancipation Proclamation, didn’t think that what he was doing was trying to free slaves. He was trying to limit the expansion of slavery into the west. He didn’t like what slavery was doing to the country, but he wasn’t about to stir up the great majority of the populace by declaring war on slavery.
But everybody knew, if only deep down, that the slavery question was tying the country in knots – that it was now splitting it apart. The seeds of the dilemma had been there in the founding documents. A free nation had written slavery into the constitution. And for decades the nation struggled to reconcile its ideals with its reality. Everyone knew, if only deep down, that something had to give. Baker, Mallory, & Townsend were risking being caught or sent back for whippings or worse because they believed that if something had to give, it ought to be now.
When the three slaves showed up at the fort they were let into the gates and the next day they were brought before that Massachusetts general who had just come to Fort Monroe one day before. He questioned them about where they had come from and what they had been doing. They gave him some very useful information about what the battery across the river looked like and where the Confederates were encamped.
The policy of the US government officially was to send fugitive slaves back to their owners, even if the states had seceded from the union. The South might not be recognizing US law, but the US government was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave act of 1850. And Butler was no radical abolitionist. At his previous post in Annapolis he had volunteered to put down any slave insurrections there.
Butler recognized, however, that something new was happening here. He was surrounded by hostile territory. These three men who had shown up at the door were giving him useful information. And the landscape was changing rapidly. He was still trying to get straight in his head what he ought to do when word came that a southern officer was on the causeway demanding the return of the three slaves. What was the general going to do? More on that in a minute.
The disciples were trying to choose a successor for Judas, the one who had betrayed Jesus. As they deliberated they had one criterion for who should be considered for the position in the circle of 12. Whoever it was had to be someone who was with Jesus from the time of his baptism by John until the day of his ascension [Acts 1:22]. Those two events were the marker events of Jesus’ earthly ministry. Which tells us that the ascension was a big deal, even though we don’t tend to emphasize it much.
I know the Ascension was important, though, and you know how? Once, when I was a youth, I went to a conference youth event called YACS – Youth Active in Christian Service – and we had it at a place known as Holy Land, USA. Holy Land, USA is closed now, but it’s hard for me to know how to describe it. It was created as a kind of low-budget theme park by a deeply committed Christian farmer in Bedford who decided to convert a hundred acres of his land into a scale model of the Holy Land so that people who couldn’t afford to go to the real Holy Land could go here. It also had a retreat house on it.
It was a very interesting place. They had the Dead Sea, which was a kind of muddy pool where cows bathed. You could see the Negev desert, which, unfortunately, was covered with trees. And you could see the Mount of Transfiguration, where high-voltage power lines crossed the summit, which gave the transfiguration a whole new meaning.
The Ascension, though, was very important at Holy Land, USA. You know how I know? Because every morning I woke up and looked out the window to see the Mount of Ascension. I knew it was the Mount of Ascension because it said so in letters that were 6 feet high made of stone blocks spread out all over the hillside. There was a sign, too, but it really didn’t need it. You couldn’t miss the Mount of Ascension because it was a big deal.
It is in the Bible, too. You might wonder why that is. What more does Jesus’ ascension into heaven add to the meaning of his resurrection? Well, I think there are two things that interest me here. One is that it’s an interesting kind of kingship that Jesus assumes by taking his seat at God’s right hand. You would expect the power to be there – in heaven – but Jesus emphasizes to the disciples, in the last words he ever says to them, that they will receive power with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has been with them for his earthly ministry and has done deeds of power. He has been with them for forty days following his resurrection. Now the power is going to come to them through the Holy Spirit.
The second thing that strikes me is that in this story Jesus calls his disciples to an open ministry – a ministry that is open to the world – beginning in Jerusalem, but expanding in ever-wider circles to the ends of the earth. The disciples are called to look beyond themselves to those outside – to create a new community from the diversity of all the people of the world, not just among their own group. This will be hard for them to understand. They will resist it. They won’t get why this important. But the Holy Spirit is going to bust up some walls.
The Holy Spirit is going to move like a wrecking ball and a lightning bolt through this community of disciples. What does that power look like? Pentecostals will tell you that the power of the Spirit includes speaking in tongues. There are some snake-handling churches out in Appalachia will tell you that that is the Holy Ghost power. But the thing that stands out here is that those who have the Holy Spirit become witnesses to Christ in the world. Read verse 8 of chapter one in Acts again. Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses.”
And that power is going to be open to the world. The disciples were called to be witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Only two verses earlier they disciples were asking about when Jesus would restore the Kingdom of Israel, but Jesus is more interested in the Kingdom of God. He calls the disciples to remove the blinders which prevented them from seeing anyone beyond their own nationality and creed. For them it was a call to take the risk of moving out to discover a world that was made up of Jews and Gentiles, male and female, slave and free, Greeks and Romans, baysiders and seasiders, migrants and locals, born-heres and come-heres, Hokies and Cavaliers – look out! And it rocked their world.
Let me take you back to Benjamin Butler. Here he is riding out to meet a Southern officer who is demanding the return of the three escaped slaves who were being held in his fort. Butler didn’t have explicit instructions on what to do. The few instructions he did have were orders to send back fugitive slaves. He didn’t have any great love for abolition either. He thought abolitionists were disturbers of the general order. But old Benjamin Butler – who was a cranky, disagreeable man with more than a few character flaws – sensed that something had changed.
He met Major John Baytop Cary on the causeway and they rode their horses together through the farmland leading back to Hampton. Cary knew Butler from before the war and he said, “What do you mean to do with those [men]?”
“I intend to hold them.”
“What about your constitutional obligation to return them?”
“Virginia is now a foreign country,” was Butler’s reply. “I am under no constitutional obligation to a foreign country.”
Cary protested that the US had claimed Virginia could not legally secede from the union so if he was to be consistent he would have to return the slaves.”
“But you say you have seceded, so you cannot consistently claim them.” And then Butler, maybe on the spot, made a decision that changed the whole character of the war that was to come. There was a principle in war that property could be taken from an enemy if it could be used to help them in their fight. Such property was contraband. And since the South had claimed that slaves were property under the law, he would use that claim against them. Benjamin Butler said to Major Cary, “I shall hold these [men] as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”[ii]
Just like that, Butler had begun a new policy that meant the war was going to be about freedom for the slaves. The next day 8 more slaves showed up at Fort Monroe. The next day there were 47. Two days later they were arriving every hour. Over the next four years thousands upon thousands of people would get their first taste of freedom as contraband. And Butler, who was not a saint and who did not go to war to free the slaves, did just that.
What does the story of Baker, Mallory, & Townsend have to do with the Holy Spirit? I was reading this story in a book by Adam Goodheart called 1861 and it struck me that here was a man who grew up in a nation that was torn apart by an evil that no one could even talk about with a civil tongue. Just to mention the name of the institution of slavery was to invite such strong passions that no one dared do it in mixed company.
But by 1861, slavery was an evil that was ready to be unraveled. It was demanding to be unraveled. And no one, besides the abolitionists, was ready to pull on the thread. There was too much fear. Too many people believed that they didn’t have the power to do anything about it. And many, many more people were afraid of what it would mean to recognize the freedom, much less the equality, of black people in the United States. The power turned out to be right there in the decision of three men to seek freedom and in the spontaneous creativity of a man on a causeway to get it for them.
So is it that you are looking at and saying, “I can’t”? “I don’t have the power. I don’t trust the world beyond. I’ve got to hold on to what I’ve got. I can’t take a risk. Maybe Jesus has the power. But I don’t. I’ll pray for Jesus to take care of that problem. I’ll pray for Jesus to do something.”
The best scene in the Ascension story is when two men in white robes show up. They show up while the disciples are still watching Jesus ascend up into the skies. I think it was the Holy Spirit talking when they prodded those future apostles with a question. “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up to heaven?” Surely it would have been the Spirit, the one who enlivens and enables us…us…to continue the work of Jesus and to preach the good news of life…surely it would have been the Spirit who would remind these disciples that if they were looking for Jesus they were looking in the wrong place. The next great adventure was in the age of the Church, the body of Christ – on earth. The power was given to them to be witnesses of unity and communion in a broken and divided world. The power was given to us. Thanks be to God.
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