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May 4, 2008 7th Sunday of Easter Acts 1:1-14
Rev. Kyle Segars
Why are you looking up to heaven?
Before I begin this morning I want to give credit where it is due. For several years now I have been reading with much joy the writings of Rev. Paul John Nuechterlein, who I believe is now the Senior Pastor of the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Portage, Michigan. The core of the sermon comes from him.
What are we to do with ascension day? It passed by this past Thursday with hardly a ripple in our collective modern day radar screens. It falls 40 days after Easter and is always on the Thursday between the sixth and seventh Sundays of Easter, but how many of us stopped to consider it? How many still in this day and age really believe that it could have happened the way Luke and his community remembered it? That Jesus somehow lifted off from the ground and was physically swept away into the heavens? We had a discussion around this topic on Tuesday at our Lunch Bunch gathering and some there agreed with Marcus Borg that something definitely happened, but what was it? Jesus had died on the cross and then later the tomb was empty and he appeared to the disciples (walking through walls but also eating with them). Was he a Spirit, a body, a spiritual body as Paul says? And then he is received up into the clouds as he blesses them. I think the disciples’ language failed them, trying to explain what had happened to their lives as a result of being with Jesus. And as a good friend of mine from seminary likes to say about one of her favorite questions asked in the Bible (Why are you looking up to heaven?), where else would they be looking? The past month and a half of the disciples’ lives have been a whirlwind of joy, despair, uncertainty, fear, longing, disbelief. And now their beloved friend, their Lord, is vanishing from their sight behind the clouds. What does it mean? What are our ancestors in the faith trying to convey to us? Do we believe Jesus ascended into the heavens like we recite in our creeds? And if we do, what do we mean when we say that?
As Nuechterlein relates concerning a couple of visiting pastors at seminary saying they tried to avoid this day because of its worldview, it reminded me of a similar conversation with a couple of Dmin candidates I was helping with research at Columbia. They wanted to avoid this worldview held by our ancestors which many times is an intruder upon our modern understandings and sensibilities. The disciples and the community that read Acts really believed that Jesus physically ascended, with a transformed spiritual body, to a literal heaven up there someplace and would return again. Do we believe that? Do we need to? It is a challenge from the text, from the witness of our ancestors in the faith in how they articulated their experience of Jesus that day many years ago. And we weren’t there. And before we think our own worldview more advanced, perhaps we truly need to listen and realize we might have lost something, too. Maybe the spiritual dimension of our faith in Christ, what makes it real, what makes it come alive in our hearts and minds and our very lives day to day. And I know, there is a lot of talk about spirituality now in our culture, a lot of classes, many people reaching out for connection to God, but I am not talking about just any spirit, a spirit that would lead only to look inward. I am talking about the Spirit of God that infuses our lives by the very grace and mercy and love of God. God in Jesus Christ and now that same spirit living in and among us. Wow! We don’t have to go off and search for some spiritual connection somewhere, the spirituality given by God is with us at all times and in all places in order to help us fully live out our lives as disciples. That Spirit enables us to become more like servants of the Most High God and be involved in his service of others rather than just standing around looking up at the sky. Many times we think of the spiritual dimension of our existence as separate from the rest of our lives rather than as something integral to our lives in God. No wonder Ascension day passes by. Maybe we can relate to a baby born in a manger, a man executed on a cross, but ascending into heaven?
Listen again to how the early church tried to articulate this belief.
Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death
on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name
that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
The Ascension is not a story about a place, but the story of who is Lord. The same Jesus of Nazareth, the teacher, healer, exorcist, the one who challenged the injustices of his day, the one who was executed on a cross as a common criminal, this same Jesus now sits at the right hand of the Creator and Sustainer of everything. This Jesus, the suffering One, dead and buried – is the same One now that judges all peoples and nations. The power shown in his life, the cross and empty tomb is one and the same with God’s power. Hallelujah!!! I need to hear that and believe it and trust it!!! When I see what is going on around the world, when I read the news, I need to believe from the depths of my soul that the Ascension is true!!! Human power does not have the last word! Listen! Human power does not have the last word. Its definition of control is turned upside down by the radical love and forgiveness of a powerful God whose Son gives up all control, emptying himself to the form of a servant, a servant for you and for me!!! Wow! That is the power that counts, and the world needs to see and hear that. So, how is the world going to do so? Not by us standing around looking up to heaven, but by our living out the Kingdom come now through this Advocate that has been given to us. That is why the angels asked that of the disciples – instead of staring off into space, be about the commands of Jesus, watching, waiting for his call and commission to follow him out into the world for the world’s sake.
So, at Lunch Bunch it helped me clarify that I really do believe in the physical resurrection and ascension of Jesus even though I do not understand it. I believe that we experience that same Spirit of God in worship together because of his life, death, resurrection and ascension. I believe we experience in worship a foretaste of the feast to come because we understand how God’s future banquet has broken in upon us in the present. When we proclaim our faith in the ascended one, we are proclaiming that despite events that seem to contradict it, we can see and participate in the future Reign of God with Jesus in the here and now. We experience, not the absence of our Lord, but his real and life transforming presence. The marvel of this is that if Jesus goes to the future of the Kingdom ahead of us, then there is no place in our journey that we now go where Jesus is not there to greet us. And I know that in my life, I need this understanding. Because the future is safely in Jesus’ hands, I have more courage to face the challenges of today with hope and dignity. Even when it seems that there is only chaos, I remember this same Spirit of God hovered over the chaos and made something good. This same Spirit that lifted Jesus up bodily is the one who works with us and among us and despite us even now. So, I believe the ascension of Jesus has set us free to envision a future in which we are no longer slaves to our own selfishness and ignorance but slaves of Jesus. We are free to live in a new reality, where death and the threat of death no longer have dominion. We are free to live for others and not just ourselves. We can live courageously, even in a world where the fighting is still going on around us, perpetuated by those who have not yet heard that the battle has been decided. We are free to experience this Jesus, who still breaks into our present world giving himself to us anew day by day in the washing, the teaching, the eating and the praying. So, church, I ask you, why are you still standing here looking up into heaven?
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