7th Sunday of Easter
Ascension of Our Lord (transferred)
June 2, 2019
44[Jesus said,] “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”45Then Jesus opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things. 49And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
50Then Jesus led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. 51While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. 52And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; 53and they were continually in the temple blessing God. – Luke 24:44-53
See also Acts 1:1-11 & Ephesians 1:15-23
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
My two-year-old and I were driving along, probably singing a repetitive rhyming song together, or maybe I had one hand on the steering wheel, the other hand reaching a hand puppet and into the backseat talking in a funny voice, when I heard one of those kid questions that snaps you to attention: “Where is God?” To be fair it wasn’t entirely out of nowhere – we had been talking about people who had died and where they were. But in a split second flashing before my eyes are years of theological training and pastoral experience, the little bit I know about child development, and the parental anxiety about handling big questions with grace and ease. Little of that was particularly helpful, because, how do you explain an unseeable, mysterious, immortal, invisible divine reality to someone whose brain works entirely in the concrete realm?
I took a deep breath and talked about how God is everywhere, how we meet God in church in bread and juice, in places where people help us, wherever we experience love and care. And in the way of 2 year olds, she absorbed what she was able to, left the rest, and asked for a donut. But it has had me thinking for weeks about how keep asking that question and how to keep answering it. Where isGod?
That’s one of the fundamental questions that the writers of the gospels were wrestling with. The people who had encountered God-made-flesh in Jesus were mostly gone, Jesus had not yet returned in the immediate way they had anticipated. The temple, the other physical manifestation of God’s presence on earth, had been destroyed. They were wrestling with how to maintain faith when they couldn’t see God. Each writer answers that question in their own way, but for the writer of the Gospel of Luke and its sequel the Book of Acts, it’s the story of Jesus’ ascension that helps answer that question. Oddly not once but twice the author tells us of the disciples gathered around Jesus as he gives them final instructions and then floats away into the clouds.
We supposedly sophisticated modern scientific people might scoff at first century folk who didn’t yet understand that the earth was round and revolved around the sun in what we now call “space.” We who fly on airplanes at 35,000 feet and who can google pictures of outer space know that Jesus didn’t go to live up above the clouds. But even though their scientific knowledge was primitive by modern standards, even they generally understood that you couldn’t just literally climb your way up into the clouds to find Jesus again.
And maybe we’re not quite as sophisticated as we like to think we are. We may be able to comprehend more than a still-developing 2-year-old brain, but how often to we operate as if God is “somewhere up there”?
Sometimes we operate as if we can climb our way up in to God’s good graces by going to church enough or doing enough good deeds or being a nicer, better, more productive person. We may not literally build a ladder up to heaven, but we fill our lives with things that we think will lift us up into better standing with others or with God or sometimes even with ourselves. It’s a way we think of God “up there” and ourselves as “down here.”
And we are not immune to looking up to the skies to plead for mercy in the face of tragedy we cannot fathom. Again this week, gun violence left 12 dead in Virginia Beach, while gun violence continues daily in ways that barely get a mention on local news. News of children traumatized, malnourished, and even dying in immigration detention camps at our own country’s borders make me long for God to be somehow more tangibly present, to somehow stop such horror from happening. Where is God in that?! People across the Midwest are devastated by violent storms and farther west people are dealing with now ever-present wildfires. Even for those of us whose theological convictions insist that the Crucified One is present wherever people are suffering or in pain, it is hard sometimes not to sit feeling helpless and wonder just where God is in all of this. Theological convictions aside, sometimes it feels like God is far away “up there” and we are struggling along “down here.”
And it can be just as hard to identify God when things are good. We may sing words of praise or quietly lift up a prayer of thanks for blessings small and large. We give thanks to God for our food and perhaps we give thanks as we wake in the morning and as we wind down at night. But it can sometimes be hard to find time and space for God in our busy daily lives. We are too often guilty of thinking of God primarily in places like church and mountaintop sunrises and moments of spiritual insight while failing to think of God in the ordinary tasks of washing dishes and sweeping the floor, on the ordinary streets where we live and work, in the thousand little daily struggles each of us finds in our lives. It’s another way we relegate God to “up there” and think of ourselves as stuck “down here.”
But even the ancients understood Jesus’ ascension in terms that went beyond Jesus going “up there.” The church as early as the 4thcentury talked about Jesus ascending into the whole cosmos. The God who took on real human flesh, walked in real human dirt, ate with real human people, and died a real human death, ascends not just up to the clouds but into every real human moment. Into our human bodies and the everyday ground we walk on. Jesus’ ascension is in it’s way an opportunity for Jesus to again be birthed into human life, to take flesh again and again in our joy and suffering, in our ordinary human moments. Jesus’ ascension is a way we understand God infusing again each corner of creation: the distant stars and the tiny bugs, the air we breathe and the ground that supports us.
And just as early in the life of the church they spoke about Jesus ascending into the Eucharist. The absence of Jesus’ body in the sense in which the people of 1stcentury Galilee and Judea knew it, opens for us the table where we meet Jesus’ body in a new way. Jesus goes not to dwell in the clouds but to dwell at our tables. To dwell not just with us but within us.
Maybe we know better than to understand that Jesus landed in a heaven located just above the clouds, and yet our understanding of just where Jesus has gone is sometimes still so limited. It would be easier to locate heaven and the presence of God in a geographic space, however inaccessible. It’s one thing to aspire to heaven, to find God in beauty and perfection, but it is sometimes a deeper challenge to discover God embodied around us in vulnerable people, and sometimes an even harder challenge to discover God embodied in us and in our imperfections and vulnerabilities. But that is the gift of Jesus’ ascension: that with our minds sometimes all too small to comprehend the mysteries of God, Jesus comes to reside with us and within us in every ordinary detail, in every imperfection, in every time of fear or sorrow or pain. Jesus’ ascension brings the heaven we long for, the dwelling place of God, right to us – at this table, in the world around us, in our daily stuggles, here and now and forever.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Christ is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
-Pastor Steven Wilco
Stewarding the Word 