Sermon for May 21, 2023 – Ascension Sunday
Much like Trinity Sunday, the festival of the Ascension can be endlessly problematic and unfortunately lends itself to no simple or single “explanation.” Each year, clergy far and wide attempt to make it easier to try and wrap our minds around an event that defies the very laws of physics. It is clear in these texts today the church struggled to voice a reality that was beyond all experience. We do not believe that Jesus ended his earthly ministry with the equivalent of a rocket launch, rising a few hundred miles above earth. Nor do we think Jesus was the first to be “beamed up,” to heaven, to borrow an image from Star Trek. However, something significant happened that day.
The truth is, whatever the experienced reality of that day, the disciples once again experienced something they had never encountered before, and thus they were left in the unenviable position of not only making sense of what just happened, but they also had to return to Jerusalem to share their story with others. It is not a long walk from Bethany to Jerusalem, a few miles up and over the Mount of Olives. I wonder what they talked about. I wonder if they were scratching their heads trying to find the words to even begin to tell others what happened.
Since we cannot travel back in time to view their walk back to the city, we can only look to scripture to see how the early church tried to make sense of the Ascension. They carry some subtle and not so subtle differences, but they both provide us a lens from which we can try to understand just what the disciples experienced on that day and what it means for us in light of an absent, but ascended messiah.
In the Lukan narrative of God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ and in the Holy Spirit, the story of Jesus’ ascension marks the end of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances to his disciples and the prelude to the sending of the Spirit, thereby marking a transition point from Easter to Pentecost. In our liturgical tradition of the church, Ascension is all of that and more, for it also has become a festival of the exaltation of the risen Christ.
The beginning of the book of Acts is, of course, not the beginning of the story; especially as biblical scholars have attributed the same author to both the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts. So, as Luke blazes a trail through the uncharted territory of the first century church, he relies, on “the first book” of his Gospel to tell how this crew of eleven arrived at this moment of staring into heaven. Instead of just picking up the story where the gospel ended with the disciples continually in the temple blessing God, Luke provides the reader Theophilus with an update. Like a “Previously on Game of Thrones…” plot summary, the first portion of our Acts reading this morning recaps Jesus ascension. Luke ends his Gospel with Jesus’ blessing the eleven disciples and then being “carried up into heaven.”
However, in Acts, instead of the disciples’ minds being opened “to understanding scriptures,” they receive the promise of the Holy Spirit. Thus, in short order, Luke moves us from the first book’s focus on the work of Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, to the second volume’s focal point, the work of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.
For the disciples, and indeed for us, this is both good and bad news. The bad news is Jesus is no longer among us bodily on earth. We have been preparing for this for the past few weeks as we have heard Jesus’ reassuring words and images of sheep and shepherd, mansions with many rooms where we will dwell with God, and the promise of his continued presence through an Advocate that will dwell in us. Jesus has ascended to heaven, and as we say in the Nicene Creed, he sits at the right hand of the Father, from which he will come in glory to judge the living and the dead; which is all well and good in the great by and by, but for now he is gone from our sight. The good news is that God is still with us in Spirit and in truth, even as we look to next Sunday when we celebrate Pentecost, the gift of the Holy Spirit to the early church, the continuation of God’s presence, comfort, and power among us.
The opening book of Acts is a two-layered transition. The top layer is a transition from the Gospel of Luke to the Acts of the Apostles. But lying just underneath that surface is a far more important transition. In it, we are moved from passively waiting for Jesus to come and fix things in the end times to actively participating in the work of the Holy Spirit now. We are called to be witnesses of God’s power and love to the ends of the earth; we cannot do so if we are staring up at the sky.
So, we find ourselves along with disciples in yet another place of transition, like Advent, a brief season of waiting in the tension between promise and fulfillment. We may be in a place of waiting, but like our other seasons of waiting this is not a time of inaction. The disciples of Christ are called to live faithful and obedient lives and to remember that the wonder of God’s love and presence revealed so radically in the cross and the empty tomb still has fresh surprises of joy in store for us all. The disciples of Christ are called to witness, little realizing how the Spirit looks to transform all that they do into the magnificent occasions for the outpouring of God’s love. In this manner the Ascension points to Pentecost and to all the marvelous ways of the Holy Spirit.
And so, I will leave you with this poem from the Spanish Christian mystic Saint Theresa of Avila that perhaps best captures the place in which we are standing with the disciples:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
Amen.
