The Ascension of our Lord, 06/02/2011

Sermon on Luke 24:44-53, by Frank C. Senn

"He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father." This is an article of faith among us. It is the one article that is verbally the same in the both the Nicene and the Apostles' Creeds. But it is little understood-perhaps because, liturgically, the Feast of the Ascension is hardly observed anymore.

Since the Ascension in the church year calendar follows St. Luke's chronology, it comes 40 days after Easter Day, so it is always on a Thursday. It many European countries it remains a holiday-the legacy of Christendom. I doubt that Europeans go to church on Ascension Day in any greater numbers than Americans for whom Ascension Thursday is not a civic holiday. Some churches observe it on the Sunday after the Ascension. Even the Roman Catholic Church in the United States has abandoned Ascension Thursday in favor of the Sunday after the Ascension. If that's all we can do, maybe we should do it. I think the Ascension of our Lord needs to be observed. It is too important theologically to ignore.

Some commentators have seen Jesus' resurrection and ascension as two sides of the same event. The liturgical tradition has not treated them that way. That's why we have a proper eucharistic preface for Ascensiontide. Even the Gospel of John sees them as two separate events, although in John they occur on the same day. Jesus says to Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, "Don't touch me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father." Without the resurrection, Jesus cannot return to the Father in any real sense. But without the ascension, we don't have access to Jesus. The ascension makes Jesus available at all times and in all places, not just in first century Palestine.

I think we have trouble picturing the risen Jesus being bodily in heaven because we imagine heaven as a spiritual place. It's part of our whole problem with the bodily resurrection. But Jesus rose from the dead bodily, and it is in his risen body that he is in heaven.

The idea of Jesus, fully human, now being in heaven in his thoroughly embodied risen state comes as a shock to many people. I suspect this is because many people think that Jesus actually stopped being divine when he became human and then went back to being divine when he went to heaven. The ascension, following the resurrection, invites us to reconsider all this. Jesus is always fully human and fully divine. As a human being he has a body, just like you and me. That body was raised from the dead, and now the risen Jesus is in heaven "at the right hand of the Father."

"Right hand," of course, is symbolic language. It means a position of power and authority. This means more than that Jesus has clout; it means that he is in charge. He is in charge not only in heaven but also on earth.

Many will object that it doesn't look like he's in charge. Or, if he is, he's making a mess of things because the world hasn't improved in any observable way since Jesus' resurrection and ascension. But that misses the point. The early Christians knew that the world was still a mess. But they went off like messengers of a company announcing that a new CEO had taken charge. They discovered through their own various callings how his new way of running things was working out. It wasn't a matter of Christians taking over the world in a kind of theocracy. That has been tried, and it always ends in a disaster. But neither is it a matter of backing off and letting the world go to hell in a hand basket while we privately gather behind closed doors to worship Jesus.

No, Jesus' kingdom advances through the life and mission of the Church. That's why Jesus tells his disciples to "stay in Jerusalem until you are clothed with power from on high." The kingdom comes through the Church, energized by the Holy Spirit, which goes out into the world vulnerable, suffering, praising, praying, misjudged and sometimes misjudging, but always celebrating, like Paul bearing in his body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be displayed. If Jesus did not ascend to the Father, the Spirit is not sent from the Father and the Son, and the Kingdom of God is not advanced in this world by means of the life and mission of the Church.

Sometimes the little flock needs to know just what a great mission it has been given. It's a big world out there and we sometimes feel that we're kind of understaffed. But we have a powerful resource propelling us. Numbers have never counted where God is concerned (although you wouldn't get that idea from the Book of Acts). We are empowered by the Spirit of the risen and ascended Lord, but we can't let all this power go to our heads. The danger here is triumphalism. If the Church identifies its structures, its leadership, its liturgy, its buildings, or anything else with its Lord, as if they are one and same, what you get is either what Shakespeare called "the insolence of office" or the despair of people who think that it just doesn't work.

The ascension is helpful here too. The One who is indeed present with us by the Spirit is also the Lord who is strangely absent. Christ is Immanuel, "God with us," but he is also over against us. He is the One who tells Mary Magdalene not to cling to him. Christ is not here; he is in heaven. Yet he is not inaccessible to us. Our access to him is through means-through sacraments and prayer. We believe in the real presence of Christ in Holy Communion, but we know that this Communion is only "a foretaste of the feast to come." It is not yet the full heavenly banquet. We also have the assurance that Christ is our high priest who intercedes for us in heaven. We need no other mediator or advocate than Jesus Christ. This is precisely why we don't pray to the saints or to Mary, even though they surely pray for us in heaven just as they did on earth.

Jesus has gone ahead of us into heaven, into God's time and place, into God's new world. But from there he is ruling the rebellious present world as its rightful Lord and also interceding for us at the Father's right hand. When we grasp and celebrate what the ascension tells us about Jesus' continuing work for the life of the world, we're rescued from a wrong view of human history and equipped for the task of doing the work of the kingdom in the present time. Human history is not a matter of inevitable progress; but neither are our deeds in the world irrelevant to the outcome.

Now, of course, it is one thing to show how all this fits together. It's quite another to be able to envisage or imagine it, to know what it is we're really talking about when we speak of Jesus being still human, still in fact an embodied human, but absent from this present world. We need, in fact, a new and better world view, a new and better way of thinking about the world than the one our post-Enlightenment culture has bequeathed us.

The early Christians, and their fellow first-century Jews, were not, as modern professors tirelessly say, locked into a three-storey universe with heaven up in the sky and hell down beneath their feet. When they spoke of up and down they were using metaphors so obvious that they didn't need to be spelled out. When we say that pupils will be "moving up a grade" at the end of the term, we don't necessarily mean going up to the second floor. Sometimes we're literal when we ought to be metaphorical and metaphorical when we ought to be literal.

The mystery of the ascension is just that-a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many people today, almost unthinkable; that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same time-space continuum or about a spiritual world contrasted with a physical one. We speaking about two different kinds of space, two different kinds of time.

We have difficulty with this because we post-Enlightenment Westerners are so flat-footed when it comes to imagining other realities than our own empirical one. Although writers are quite capable of taking us into other parallel worlds, parallel times and spaces, we retreat into our rationalistic closed-system universe. C. S. Lewis did a great job of imagining a parallel world to our own when the children passed through the wardrobe, in the Narnia stories. But the generation that grew up knowing its way around Narnia doesn't seem to know how to make the transition from a children's story to the real world of grown-up Christian devotion and theology.

Eastern Orthodox Churches help the imagination of the faithful by showing the interrelationship between earth and heaven in their church buildings. Heaven is the space around the altar-the sanctuary; the earth is the nave and narthex. The two are separated by an icon screen, upon which are portrayed the saints, whose presence in heaven is not far from worshipers on earth. Gathering both heaven and earth into a single realm is the dome, on which is painted (I means "written") Christ the Pantocrator, the ruler over all things, holding together things in heaven and things on earth.

One day this Jesus will return in glory to judge the living and the dead. He will be (in Wesley's words) still wearing "those dear tokens of his passion" on his "dazzling body." That's what the angels said to the apostles who stood about gaping as Jesus disappeared into a cloud. "This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." It's not a matter of us following him where we cannot go. It's a matter of remaining faithful in the meantime as we await his return to make his rule complete, doing those things that prepare his second and glorious advent in the colonies he has left behind; and also, in the meantime, staying in touch with our risen and ascended Lord through prayer and sacrament. Amen.

Pastor Frank C. Senn
Evanston, IL
E-Mail: fcsenn@sbcglobal.net

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