Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus

Psalm 1
Acts 1:1-11
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-35

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+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen. 

TODAY we keep one of our feasts of title in the parish, the Feast of the Ascension.  The most dominant image in our church is de Rosen’s mural of Jesus ascending to the Father.  We keep this feast on the sixth Thursday, or forty days, after Easter, and Pentecost is 10 days later (pente means “fifty”), but in many (probably most) parishes, Easter is a big deal, Pentecost is a big deal, but Ascension Day gets lost in the mix.  Some of the short play the ascension gets may be because we’re a little embarrassed about a story about Jesus flying up into the air.  Science has led to the “collapse of the three-decker universe”^[1] where Jesus descends to a hell at the center of the earth and ascends to his father somewhere in the sky.  But to deny the truth of the Ascension for that reason is to fall victim to a false choice.  Despite the surprising amount of religious art and iconography, the Ascension isn’t primarily a literal, spatial event.  Bishop N. T. Wright puts it this way: 

[L]et’s not be fooled, while we’re on the subject, by the naïve literalism of certain paintings of the ascension, and for that matter certain hymns, which speak of Jesus going “to his home above the skies,” as though Jesus were some kind of primitive space-traveller.  Heaven . . . is not a place thousands of miles up, or for that matter down, in our space, nor would it help us if it were.  It is God’s dimension of ordinary reality, the dimension which is normally hidden but which we penetrate mysteriously, or rather which penetrates us mysteriously, in prayer, in the scriptures, in the breaking of the bread.^[2]

The Ascension is a story about Jesus, the God who became a man to come into our world and our story, being raised to a wholly new form of life.  It’s so important to Luke that he puts the story at the end of his gospel (Luke 24) and at the beginning of his second book.  But what about for us?  Last Sunday, Fr. Randy said “life brings us to ‘so what?’ places,” and this is another one.  Jesus ascended; so what?  I would contend that if the ascension never happened – if Jesus had been born, lived, died and even rose from the dead, but did not ascend – Christianity wouldn’t have happened.  Tim Keller said this in a sermon on the ascension: 

Just as it is ridiculous to build a beautiful house if nobody lives in it, and just as it is ridiculous and no use preparing this incredible, beautiful meal if nobody ever eats it, and just as it’s silly to build a wonderful bomb to blast through a mountain so that you can build a road . . . without a detonator, so the birth, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are of no use without the ascension, for the ascension is the detonator for everything else Jesus Christ did.  The Ascension is that which takes what Jesus Christ was and did on earth and releases it into the universe and into your lives with all of its healing power.^[3]

I want to suggest four answers to the Ascension “so what?” question:  Presence, perspective, power and purpose.   

First of all, presence – “[A]s they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”  (Acts 1.9b)  Since Easter, we’ve been reading about resurrection appearances.  After Jesus rose from the dead, he appeared to lots of his followers in some sort of mysterious but bodily form.  Sometimes they didn’t recognize him; he could pass through locked doors; he could eat a fish, but he seemed to be able to vanish suddenly.  However weird Jesus’ body was, it was still a body, and a body can only be at one place at a time.  But an ascended Christ isn’t bound by space and time; his is a living presence that is everywhere, and nothing is outside his grasp.    

We live in a city.  Now, even assuming you come to mass every Sunday, you pray the morning office when you wake up, and you pray the evening office when you get home at night, the vast majority of your time is still spent on the bus or the train, in an office or a classroom.  The ascension means that the same Jesus who is present to us in the mass is present for us on the street, in the park or in the boardroom.  You don’t have to be in a temple or this church to access Jesus.  He is present any time, any place you find yourself. 

And his presence should change our perspective – The ascended Christ isn’t just present with us geographically, but existentially.  He’s with you wherever you are, but he’s also with you inside whatever you’re going through.  Ephesians tells us the ascended Jesus sits at God’s right hand, the place of authority, and it’s his of right to order all things.  That says something about the significance of our circumstances.  Of course we are anxious and confused when bad things happen, when your child gets sick, when you lose your job, when the retirement fund gets cut in half; but the ascension says we shouldn’t despair because Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father, he understands what it’s like to be us (Heb. 4.15) and he loves us perfectly.^[4]  That changes our perspective.

“So what?” number three is power – “[Y]ou will receive power when the Holy Spirit has com upon you.”  (Acts 1.6-8a)  In Ephesians, Paul talks about the power available to believers, and he makes a stunning comparison.  This “incomparably great power” that raised Jesus from the dead is the same power that works in us.  (Eph. 1.18-20).  That’s why, in John’s gospel, Jesus says “anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.  He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.  And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father.”  (John 14.12-13)  Jesus healed broken people; he fed the hungry; he set people free; but he always did it in one place because he was limited in space and time.  Because Jesus ascended, and now we’re empowered by the same Spirit, we can do even greater things than Jesus did because now we are all over the place, in every city on every continent.  So here’s your homework:  When you pray and dream about what God can do through us in this neighborhood and in this city, why not dream big and pray big?  Don’t ask “What can we do?” but “What can’t we do for the peace and flourishing of our city?”

Lastly:  The Ascension tells us Jesus is more present with us than if he still had a physical body; it gives us divine perspective; it gives us access to the same power Jesus worked with; but it also transforms our purpose.  LeBron James plays basketball for the Cleveland Cavaliers.  Friday night, with his team on the brink of losing the first two games of the Eastern Conference Championship Series, down two with one second on the clock, hits a three-pointer to win the game, and the building just went wild.  Nike runs ads about LeBron – he’s one of the two best basketball players on the planet – and the ads have one tagline:  “We are all witnesses.”  No way you see him hit that shot and not want to tell the world you saw it.    

When you meet Jesus, you don’t come away unscathed, you come away a witness.  I thought about putting a title in the bulletin for this sermon, calling it, simply:  “What Are You Lookin’ At?”  The angels were a little harsh with the apostles in verse 11.  “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”  (Acts 1. 11) Translate the angel-speak into our vernacular, and what they said is:  “What are you looking at?  Why are you just standing there?”  The point of experiencing God is never just the experience itself; we don’t worship just for ourselves.  The experience of God changes us and makes God’s purpose our purpose. 

There was something fundamentally anomalous about their gazing up into the sky when they had been commissioned to go the ends of the earth.  It was the earth not the sky which was to be their preoccupation.  Their calling was to be witnesses not stargazers.  The vision they were to cultivate was not upwards in nostalgia to the heaven which had received Jesus, but outwards in compassion to a lost world which needed him.^[5]

The apostles saw the ascension and went back into the world “like thunderbolts,”^[6] and so should we.  Experience the power of God in this worship, receive Jesus in the bread and wine, but be impelled to go into the world like a shot to witness to what you’ve have seen and to share in Jesus’ work.  Jesus is still saving the world and renewing God’s creation, and he still does it one person and one gracious act at a time.  It’s just that now he sends us to do it for him.  In fact, he sends us to do it as him.  So when you give someone a cup of cold water, when you buy a hungry man a meal, when you stand shoulder-to-shoulder with someone who is oppressed, when you take some of a friend’s pain on your own shoulders, it’s not just you that does it.  Your hands are Christ’s hands; your feet are Christ’s feet carrying on his ministry in the world.  We are the body of the ascended Christ, and the Holy Spirit gave us all diverse gifts (charismata) to “flesh out” that body, to continue the incarnation of the redeeming God in our neighborhood, our workplaces, our city, our world.  The ascension – quite literally – changed everything. 

+  In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.