Lifted
Acts 1:6-14
June 5, 2011
It seems as if it is built into the system that we’ll never get the Ascension right. It’s never on a Sunday, for this enigmatic Ascension of Jesus takes place ten days before Pentecost, so always on a Thursday when we are usually not here. Some churches do celebrate it on the day, but the strangeness of Ascension has never really caught on in the Protestant camp, so today we can only puzzle that something happened and what it is is not exactly clear.
Since the disciples didn’t comprehend it either we are in good company. The Ascension is depicted by only one author, the fellow we call Luke who wrote the two-part Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles saga, and as happens frequently in the Biblical narrative when something happens that is real but beyond our figuring out, readers resort to a description that doesn’t make full sense either as a method of communicating this utter paradox.
Jesus was busy after the resurrection, but if we take the account in Acts literally, he wasn’t doing much except visiting with his disciples, making them know for sure that he was alive again, teaching them about the Kingdom of God and showing them how to read the Bible. All of this intense socialization took the proverbial 40 days, a lengthy slice of time for conversation, but never long enough.
On the 40th day, the apostles all gather today in Jerusalem for a major conversation with Jesus, and first of all, one of them asks the major question, the question they have been dying to ask ever since Easter morning. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Clarence Jordan translated it: “Will that be the occasion on which you will take over the government?”
That may sound religious, even political, but it proves that the apostles never got it. The question is an eternal one, being reworded for every generation. In the 1950’s: “Lord, when are you going to get rid of communism and reestablish democracy?” In the 2000’s: “Lord, when are you going to throw out the Saskatchewan Party and give the NDP a majority?” In the church today: “Lord, when are you going to fill up this sanctuary again so that our coffers are overflowing and the activity of this church is bursting at the seams?”
Jesus must have winced several times and responded, “You are not to get all worked up about timetables and events which the Father has under his own control.” In time you are going to get the Spirit and that time is short, by the way, and then you will be given the right stuff to be able to figure out what to do with the Communists and all those other political parties and whether those pews are going to be filled on the way to the kingdom of God. Those were his last words – don’t think you can figure out on what day the end of the world is going to happen – and right before their eyes he was lifted up before a cloud got in their way of watching him go.
This is an easy one today for movie directors with their range of special effects and many a Sunday School student can readily see Jesus go up, up and away like the most mundane of superhero. But then childhood fades away and the sense of “heaven above” evaporates with the images coming back from the space stations and satellites. If heaven is not on the moon, how far does Jesus have to go up to get there? I doubt that there are any of you in the pews who do not recognize that this is a futile, if not ludicrous way of thinking that breaks down pretty quickly.
The paintings of the Ascension typically don’t show the two guys in white robes – Clarence Jordan has them in blue jeans – standing beside them, gawking into the heavens. There were two men in dazzling white robes in Luke’s Gospel who came immediately to stand beside the women who were staring at the empty tomb. They are just called “men,” but the religiously knowledgeable know they are angels. An angel, however, simply means “messenger” and sometimes these Biblical messengers are not there to spread saccharine sweetness and light, but to give us a swift kick back into reality – an ironic twist since most people think of angels, if they think of them at all, as bearers of unreal pleasures.
Remember six weeks ago the two guys were speaking to the women with an edge, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he is risen.” Hold that thought.
The apostles looking up didn’t see the same two guys, “Fellas, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” You got your heads in the clouds, you’re looking for life among stuff that’s dead and gone, what’s up with you? Your job is to live fully in this living world.”
There’s still this striking image of Jesus going up into heaven, but when you get down to earth about it, Jesus has been showing the kingdom of heaven to them all the time. The fact that he is gone in a physical sense does not mean it’s all over; now it’s really beginning because the kingdom of heaven is within you. That’s what the two guys in blue jeans were conveying, “You’ve been given it to use in this world, now use it!”
It’s never been easy and our minds have great difficulty grasping what it means to live in the Spirit right now and minister to this hurting world. The simple thing to do is simplify, fashion all sorts of myths and wise sayings to guide us along, and basically go back to living the way we are accustomed to doing in the rest of this incomprehensible world. Business as usual is good business.
Yet, the Church has a habit of thinking differently. We in particular are meant to be non-conformists, so that we are not intended to be the generals of a religious coup d’état, although that has been tried a number of times and while some have been successful, real faith disappears in the military victory.
Near the end of World War II, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin were observing together a parade of tanks and infantry units. Churchill mentioned that he hoped that perhaps the Pope would be able to help put Europe together again after the war. Stalin replied, “Oh yes, and how many divisions does the Pope have?” The sobering reality is that you don’t have to be a Stalin not to get it.
What are we doing staring up in the clouds looking for a saviour? What are we doing wanting always to go back to a dead past? What kind of life is there? The kingdom of heaven is among us right now and what we need is imagination. Imagination is not thinking up something that’s pretend or not real, but shaping this living world in a non-conformist and different way to begin to mold how things are really meant to be on this earth. You may think that you have been defeated by the economic, political, and social worlds, but they can never take away from us our imaginations. Let’s turn our imaginations upon this world and this church and illuminate its life.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan