Sermon 5/8/05
Up, Up, and Away - Acts 1:1-11, Luke 24:44-53
(view lectionary notes for this text)
Ascension Sunday just isn’t one of those High Holy Days that really gets me going. There’s no big buildup to Ascension Sunday. It’s just a bump in the road between Easter and Pentecost. There are not many catchy Ascension hymns or Ascension Sunday pageants, complete with costumes. But still, here it is, and today is, among other things, Ascension Sunday. In searching for help with my sermon this week, the first source that I came across was aptly titled, “What do you do with an Ascension?” (1) I felt relieved to know that I wasn’t alone in my thoughts. What do we do with this day? It’s tempting to pass over it - to think of something else to talk about. But there it is, both in Acts and in Luke – Jesus ascending into heaven. What do we do with it?
I think we find ourselves wondering what to do with the Ascension in part because our thinking, our understanding, has changed from the days of Jesus. We spent a lot of time in our lectionary bible study last week talking about why we might not connect to these passages about the ascension of Jesus. In Acts, particularly, we see Jesus literally being swept up, up and away into the clouds, out of sight of the disciples. For the faithful in the first century AD, this wouldn’t have seemed very odd or supernatural. Heaven was believed to be literally above the earth, which was, to them, the center of the universe. If you went up high enough, you would literally find heaven. In the same way, you would have to ‘descend’ to get to hell – it was down, beneath the earth. So for Jesus to return to God, early believers could only imagine that Jesus had to literally go up into the clouds, and there he would find heaven. Today, we still might point up to refer to heaven, or look up when we’re talking to God or talking about God. And we might still think of hell as a somewhere way down there. But in our rational minds, we actually think differently. I think in a sense we view heaven as that which contains all that is greater than we are – figuratively above us. But rationally, we’ve learned since the days of Jesus about the universe and the earth and what you find when you go up, up, and away into the clouds. So, spiritually, we’ve adjusted our thinking as well. Perhaps today we don’t view heaven as a physical place that you could get to if you just travel high enough. I’d be a lot more willing to travel on airplanes if that were the case! Instead, we maybe think of heaven, a place where we will be united with God, as something of a different realm altogether – literally outside of this universe – a place you travel to not physically, but spiritually.
So how do we connect with this event, when our whole mind set has changed from what it was in Jesus’ time? We’re left with a scene of Jesus returning to heaven to be with God. In Acts, our passage comes from the time between Easter and Pentecost – the time we are now in – the Fifty Great Days of Easter. During this time, Acts records, the resurrected Jesus has been demonstrating “convincing proofs” of his identity and speaking to people about the kingdom of God. Luke, the author of both the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, also writes that Jesus opened the disciples’ minds to understand all the scriptures. In both readings, from Acts and Luke, Jesus promises that the disciples will soon be receiving another power, the Holy Spirit. And then, he ascends into heaven.
So what? What does it mean for us? Sometimes, perhaps, we even forget that Jesus was recorded as spending so much time on earth after his resurrection. 40 days of time with the disciples. Can you imagine having an extra 40 days with any loved one you have lost? But out of this 40 days, we have barely a description from Luke of what has been going on. So what message can we receive from Ascension Sunday? Bruce Epperly, who wrote the article I first found – “What do you do with an Ascension?” – focuses in on one verse of our passage from Acts. We read that two men in white appear by the disciples and say, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” For Epperly, this is the key verse – the one that can mean something to us and help us make sense of Ascension Sunday. He writes, “the heart of this passage is that we have work to do here in this lifetime, in this precious and unrepeatable moment and life and in this beautiful world. This world is not the front porch to eternity, nor is it worthless in light of eternity. Rather, our life is in the here and now. Heaven is heaven and earth is earth, and both are beautiful! Our calling as Christians is to heal and transform the world – this world. It has been said that there are some people who are “so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good.” And, that was the temptation for the disciples – to gaze at the heavens, to wait for a Second Coming, and forget that their calling is to live faithfully in this life as God’s partners in healing the world . . . We do not need to look up to the heavens to find meaning and fulfillment. The heavens are right here in this wondrous moment. God is here in our lives and God has given us everlasting life right where we are.” (1)
Instead of the Ascension pointing us to heaven, perhaps it really points us to right here and right now, if we will just adjust our focus. Another topic of discussion at our weekly Bible study was in our desire to know what Jesus told the disciples during these 40 days. Luke says that Jesus explained the scriptures to them – and I wonder how Luke didn’t figure these explanations, these descriptions of “convincing proofs” important enough to record in the gospel or in Acts. Wouldn’t this information have helped us so much, I wonder? Wouldn’t we find our discipleship easier if we could have heard all that the disciples heard in this special gift time with Jesus? If we could have witnessed all that they saw? If we’d seen those things, maybe we could do better than the disciples, and heed the words of the men and white, and stop staring up to heaven, and get on with the work of being disciples and making disciples that Jesus desired.
But then I have to stop and think. It seemed right to God, didn’t it, that humanity could go forward even after Jesus departed? And it seemed right to Jesus, didn’t it, that he could leave and know that the disciples would carry on with his work? And it ultimately seemed ok even to the disciples, didn’t it, to be without Jesus’ daily presence, without his words of teaching and insight each day? So, as the men asked the disciples in our lesson from Acts, we must ask ourselves: Why are we standing still, gazing up toward heaven? What are we waiting for now? How could we insist that we need even more teaching and direction and guidance before we can move ahead?
The real trouble is that we barely follow the commands from Jesus that are crystal clear. Jesus gives us commands that aren’t hard to comprehend that deal with how we treat others, how we should look out for those who have the least in society, how dangerously attached we can become to our wealth and our possessions, how much is required of us to be disciples. Jesus never beat around the bush in his teachings. So I fear that it is not our lack of understanding that keeps us clamoring for just one more word from Jesus. It is not our lack of teaching and instruction from Jesus that keeps us paralyzed, looking into the heavens for another sign. It is our wish, instead, that Jesus has said something different while he was here, that he had taught different lessons, that keeps us waiting for one more story, one more parable. Perhaps we wish that Jesus would say it was really ok if we only loved those who were basically just like us. Perhaps we were hoping for a parable that made it ok to continue to rack up more possessions while others in our own communities went hungry. Perhaps we were hoping to hear that we really didn’t have to make sacrifices as long as we were basically good people.
Instead, God’s messengers encourage us to get a move on. We’ve heard the teachings of Jesus clearly enough. And we’ve been promised, as we’ll see more clearly next week, this Holy Spirit thing to help us. But our task has been explicitly laid out. The disciples finally get it – in the gospel of Luke we see them worshipping and joyful and blessing God. They’re joyful, despite the path that lays before them – joyful because of Christ’s presence in their lives, joyful because of the promise of the Spirit to come – joyful because they are heeding God’s call for discipleship. We are called to share in this joy, even as we are called to share in the task of discipleship. Don’t look up! Instead, look out, at the world around you, at the people who need you, and who need God’s grace so much.
Amen.
(1) Bruce Epperly, http://www.ctr4process.org/pandf//lectionary/May%208%202005.htm