He Ascended Into Heaven
Sermon
The Lord Is Risen! He Is Risen Indeed! He Really Is!
Gospel Sermons For Lent/Easter
I want to take the text seriously this morning. It would be easy not to, because Luke's story of the ascension of Jesus is not easy no matter how you take it. For you and me, twenty centuries later, this story may be very hard to take very seriously.
Our take on the ascension of Jesus might be on the order of liturgy as lift-off: Jesus being lifted up to the Air Force song: "Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sky!"
Or we might take this as a story that defines worship as wondering where Jesus went and our lives as wondering where he is when we need him!
Maybe we take it to mean our faith is fairly far-fetched. Not only did he get up from the grave, he levitated out of life, at least as we live it, grounded as we are in the realities of life. Realities that do more to weight us down with worry, than to send us soaring up through the skies.
On this Ascension Sunday when we're recognizing all those who have worked so hard this past year to make programs happen here at church, and we're giving each of them a balloon, I couldn't help but think, if you could just get enough of those together, if you and I could just get it together, could we be lifted, like Mary Poppins, above our distress into the peace and the presence of God? Could our lives lift off with all the peace and tranquility of a hot air balloon that lifts into the summer sky with barely a whisper?
I'm going to be at the General Assembly of our denomination in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this summer. Balloonists call it "hot air heaven." They tell me that in addition to the hot air at the General Assembly, there will be plenty of opportunities for hot air balloon rides. I hope to try it. I'd like to see how that feels. Just for once, to just stand there and "be lifted up."
Somewhere in my files there is an article from The Wall Street Journal that describes a church in California where the pastor lifts off regularly -- all jokes about "hot air" aside. From time to time, in a moment of great drama, as only in California, his pulpit is enveloped in smoke and flames and high tech pyrotechnics, and it rises, with him aboard, through the ceiling of the sanctuary, where, I presume, he gets out in the attic, climbs over light fixtures and ceiling supports, and comes back down to earth with the rest of us.
Life is like that. Even when something gives us a lift, it doesn't last -- for long. It doesn't last long enough. And we're left wondering, like the disciples who watched Jesus go, "What happened!?"
What happened to my hopes and dreams? What happened to my great expectations? What happened to my marriage, my career, my kids, my country, my community, what I've counted on all my life? What happened to me?
Those are the kinds of questions that don't always make you feel high and lifted up. Those are the kinds of questions that can leave you feeling hopeless and left behind. Like the disciples of Jesus who, having seen him die, and then saw him alive again after the resurrection, now saw him leave as he was "lifted up ... into heaven" (Acts 1:9, 11).
I think the "lift-off" was the least of it. What the disciples saw going up in smoke, like a cloud, were their hopes and dreams, and everything to which they had committed their lives. It says they just stood there gazing into nothingness -- no doubt with their mouths open. And I have to wonder, if CNN had been there, what they'd have had to say.
The Scottish theologian William Barclay had this to say about this event: "The ascension is far and away the most difficult incident in the life of Jesus either to visualize or to understand ... No one has ever succeeded in painting a picture of the ascension which was anything other than grotesque and ridiculous. In films of the life of Christ, if the ascension is portrayed, the whole matter descends into sheer bathos."1
I looked up "bathos" in the dictionary. It means "ludicrous, trite, or mawkishly sentimental." But I think the ascension is more serious than that, and we need to take it seriously.
It's serious enough that we regularly say we believe it. The Apostles' Creed says that among all the other things I say I believe, I say I believe "he ascended into heaven." And the writer of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, same writer, thought it was serious enough to say it twice.
He said it first as the conclusion to his Gospel, that we call Luke; and then at the beginning of his sequel, that we call Acts. Whatever happened that day, for Luke it sums up the gospel, and it sets the stage for things to come.
In a sense, first, Ascension sums up the gospel. You might say it makes the resurrection mean something. That the good news we call the "gospel" truth is not just that Jesus was raised from the dead, but that he is risen to new life. If Jesus had only been raised from the dead he could have died again.
He could have just ridden off into the sunset after a long run that ran out. He could have simply turned up missing, or snuck off when no one was looking.
The power of the resurrection comes in saying that he "ascended into heaven," and that as the men in white said to disbelieving disciples, believe it, "... he will come back ..." (Acts 1:11 CEV); believe it, "... he will come to judge the living and the dead" (The Apostles' Creed, Ecumenical).
Believe it; he is alive forever, and as he said, "Because I live, you also will live" (John 14:19 NRSV).
Resurrection is not just resuscitation; it is being raised to life forever, lifted up into life as God means it to be for you and me.
As Harold Daniels, of our denomination's office of worship down the road in Louisville, has put it, "Ascension day marks the assumption of glory and power by the crucified and risen Lord ... Ascension day embodies the meaning of the Easter season ... (Ascension day means) Jesus Christ is Lord!"
Reaching for a way to say what that means, the church has reached back to the Psalms:
Clap your hands, all you peoples;
shout to God with loud songs of joy.
For the LORD, the Most High, is awesome,
a great king over all the earth.
God has gone up with a shout,
the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.
-- Psalm 47:1-2, 5-7
Ascension says that Jesus Christ is Lord.
But that just sets the stage for what's to come, because, as Beverly Gaventa writes, that's the least of it! She says: "While the liturgical tradition of the church has tended to make the ascension of Jesus into a festival to his glory and power, the emphasis in the biblical tradition is elsewhere ... The interest in Acts 1 appears to be less in what is happening to Jesus than in what is about to happen in the lives of the earliest Christians."2
As spectacular as whatever happened may have been, however "California" it may sound, the emphasis that Luke is putting on it is not as much on what happened to Jesus as on what was beginning to happen to the disciples. Not so much on Jesus "going," as on God "coming," as the Holy Spirit, into the lives of that very dispirited group of folks we know as the first Christ followers -- "first Christians."
Twice Luke has Jesus promising that though he would be absent from them, God the Holy Spirit would be present with them. And don't get all hyper about the "Holy Spirit." (Presbyterians do!) It's just a way of saying the presence of God. Simply put, Jesus' going would not mean that God was gone.
It's no accident, I think, that Luke immediately lists those whose lives had been affected. As though to say to them, and to you and me, that "God the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth," Jesus Christ, our risen and ascended Lord, is still the Lord of people like "... Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James ... (and of) certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers" (Acts 1:13-14 NRSV).
They'd ridden an emotional and spiritual roller coaster with Jesus. Those are the people who loved Jesus in life, mourned him in death, believed in his resurrection, and lost sight of him at "ascension." Cedar Point Amusement Park aside, that had to be the most harrowing roller coaster ride in history.
On a modern psychological stress test those folks were off the charts, if not by this point off the wall, as many would claim. They were right where you and I are sometimes. Right where we least want to be. And right there is where they discovered the presence of God. No pie-in-the-
sky, no piece-of-cake, just the peace that comes when we can say with Paul, as we Presbyterians do:
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord
-- Romans 8:38-39 NRSV
The same Jesus "(who) rose again from the dead, ... ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; (who) from thence ... shall come ..." to you and me.
____________
1. William Barclay, The Apostles' Creed for Everyman (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967).
2. B. Gaventa, et al, Texts for Preaching, A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV -- Year A (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), p. 311.
Our take on the ascension of Jesus might be on the order of liturgy as lift-off: Jesus being lifted up to the Air Force song: "Off we go into the wild blue yonder, climbing high into the sky!"
Or we might take this as a story that defines worship as wondering where Jesus went and our lives as wondering where he is when we need him!
Maybe we take it to mean our faith is fairly far-fetched. Not only did he get up from the grave, he levitated out of life, at least as we live it, grounded as we are in the realities of life. Realities that do more to weight us down with worry, than to send us soaring up through the skies.
On this Ascension Sunday when we're recognizing all those who have worked so hard this past year to make programs happen here at church, and we're giving each of them a balloon, I couldn't help but think, if you could just get enough of those together, if you and I could just get it together, could we be lifted, like Mary Poppins, above our distress into the peace and the presence of God? Could our lives lift off with all the peace and tranquility of a hot air balloon that lifts into the summer sky with barely a whisper?
I'm going to be at the General Assembly of our denomination in Albuquerque, New Mexico, this summer. Balloonists call it "hot air heaven." They tell me that in addition to the hot air at the General Assembly, there will be plenty of opportunities for hot air balloon rides. I hope to try it. I'd like to see how that feels. Just for once, to just stand there and "be lifted up."
Somewhere in my files there is an article from The Wall Street Journal that describes a church in California where the pastor lifts off regularly -- all jokes about "hot air" aside. From time to time, in a moment of great drama, as only in California, his pulpit is enveloped in smoke and flames and high tech pyrotechnics, and it rises, with him aboard, through the ceiling of the sanctuary, where, I presume, he gets out in the attic, climbs over light fixtures and ceiling supports, and comes back down to earth with the rest of us.
Life is like that. Even when something gives us a lift, it doesn't last -- for long. It doesn't last long enough. And we're left wondering, like the disciples who watched Jesus go, "What happened!?"
What happened to my hopes and dreams? What happened to my great expectations? What happened to my marriage, my career, my kids, my country, my community, what I've counted on all my life? What happened to me?
Those are the kinds of questions that don't always make you feel high and lifted up. Those are the kinds of questions that can leave you feeling hopeless and left behind. Like the disciples of Jesus who, having seen him die, and then saw him alive again after the resurrection, now saw him leave as he was "lifted up ... into heaven" (Acts 1:9, 11).
I think the "lift-off" was the least of it. What the disciples saw going up in smoke, like a cloud, were their hopes and dreams, and everything to which they had committed their lives. It says they just stood there gazing into nothingness -- no doubt with their mouths open. And I have to wonder, if CNN had been there, what they'd have had to say.
The Scottish theologian William Barclay had this to say about this event: "The ascension is far and away the most difficult incident in the life of Jesus either to visualize or to understand ... No one has ever succeeded in painting a picture of the ascension which was anything other than grotesque and ridiculous. In films of the life of Christ, if the ascension is portrayed, the whole matter descends into sheer bathos."1
I looked up "bathos" in the dictionary. It means "ludicrous, trite, or mawkishly sentimental." But I think the ascension is more serious than that, and we need to take it seriously.
It's serious enough that we regularly say we believe it. The Apostles' Creed says that among all the other things I say I believe, I say I believe "he ascended into heaven." And the writer of the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, same writer, thought it was serious enough to say it twice.
He said it first as the conclusion to his Gospel, that we call Luke; and then at the beginning of his sequel, that we call Acts. Whatever happened that day, for Luke it sums up the gospel, and it sets the stage for things to come.
In a sense, first, Ascension sums up the gospel. You might say it makes the resurrection mean something. That the good news we call the "gospel" truth is not just that Jesus was raised from the dead, but that he is risen to new life. If Jesus had only been raised from the dead he could have died again.
He could have just ridden off into the sunset after a long run that ran out. He could have simply turned up missing, or snuck off when no one was looking.
The power of the resurrection comes in saying that he "ascended into heaven," and that as the men in white said to disbelieving disciples, believe it, "... he will come back ..." (Acts 1:11 CEV); believe it, "... he will come to judge the living and the dead" (The Apostles' Creed, Ecumenical).
Believe it; he is alive forever, and as he said, "Because I live, you also will live" (John 14:19 NRSV).
Resurrection is not just resuscitation; it is being raised to life forever, lifted up into life as God means it to be for you and me.
As Harold Daniels, of our denomination's office of worship down the road in Louisville, has put it, "Ascension day marks the assumption of glory and power by the crucified and risen Lord ... Ascension day embodies the meaning of the Easter season ... (Ascension day means) Jesus Christ is Lord!"
Reaching for a way to say what that means, the church has reached back to the Psalms:
Clap your hands, all you peoples;
shout to God with loud songs of joy.
For the LORD, the Most High, is awesome,
a great king over all the earth.
God has gone up with a shout,
the LORD with the sound of a trumpet.
-- Psalm 47:1-2, 5-7
Ascension says that Jesus Christ is Lord.
But that just sets the stage for what's to come, because, as Beverly Gaventa writes, that's the least of it! She says: "While the liturgical tradition of the church has tended to make the ascension of Jesus into a festival to his glory and power, the emphasis in the biblical tradition is elsewhere ... The interest in Acts 1 appears to be less in what is happening to Jesus than in what is about to happen in the lives of the earliest Christians."2
As spectacular as whatever happened may have been, however "California" it may sound, the emphasis that Luke is putting on it is not as much on what happened to Jesus as on what was beginning to happen to the disciples. Not so much on Jesus "going," as on God "coming," as the Holy Spirit, into the lives of that very dispirited group of folks we know as the first Christ followers -- "first Christians."
Twice Luke has Jesus promising that though he would be absent from them, God the Holy Spirit would be present with them. And don't get all hyper about the "Holy Spirit." (Presbyterians do!) It's just a way of saying the presence of God. Simply put, Jesus' going would not mean that God was gone.
It's no accident, I think, that Luke immediately lists those whose lives had been affected. As though to say to them, and to you and me, that "God the father almighty, creator of heaven and earth," Jesus Christ, our risen and ascended Lord, is still the Lord of people like "... Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James ... (and of) certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers" (Acts 1:13-14 NRSV).
They'd ridden an emotional and spiritual roller coaster with Jesus. Those are the people who loved Jesus in life, mourned him in death, believed in his resurrection, and lost sight of him at "ascension." Cedar Point Amusement Park aside, that had to be the most harrowing roller coaster ride in history.
On a modern psychological stress test those folks were off the charts, if not by this point off the wall, as many would claim. They were right where you and I are sometimes. Right where we least want to be. And right there is where they discovered the presence of God. No pie-in-the-
sky, no piece-of-cake, just the peace that comes when we can say with Paul, as we Presbyterians do:
I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord
-- Romans 8:38-39 NRSV
The same Jesus "(who) rose again from the dead, ... ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; (who) from thence ... shall come ..." to you and me.
____________
1. William Barclay, The Apostles' Creed for Everyman (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967).
2. B. Gaventa, et al, Texts for Preaching, A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV -- Year A (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1995), p. 311.
