Acts 1:1-11
My favorite preacher and writer, Barbara Brown Taylor, says that going to church “is one of the most peculiar things twentieth-century human beings can do—to come together week after week with no intention of being useful or productive, but only … to declare things they cannot prove about a God they cannot see.”[1] When you put it that way, it’s a wonder any of us are here! Why would we want to do something so peculiar?
She goes on to say, “Our word for it is worship, and it is hard to justify in this day and age; but those of us who do it over and over again begin to count on it. This is how we learn where we fit. This is how we locate ourselves between the past and the future, between our hopes and our fears, between the earth and the stars. This is how we learn who we are and what we are supposed to be doing: by coming together to sing and to pray, to be silent and to be still, by peering into the darkness together and telling each other what we see when we do. We may baffle our unbelieving friends and neighbors, but it cannot be helped. Half the time we baffle ourselves, proclaiming good news when the news is so bad, trusting the light when the sky is so dark, continuing to wait on the Savior in our midst when all the evidence suggests that he packed up and left a long, long time ago. To be theologically correct, we have been waiting on the Savior ever since the first Ascension Day, when Jesus led his disciples to a mount called Olivet just outside of Jerusalem, spoke to them for the last time, and disappeared inside a cloud”[2]
How many of you remember celebrating Ascension Day when you were growing up? Not many, I’m guessing. For one thing, it’s not a Sunday. Traditionally, the Feast of the Ascension is celebrated forty days after Easter. Since Easter is always on a Sunday, and there are always seven days per week, Ascension Day is never on a Sunday. Some churches choose to celebrate the ascension the following Sunday; others prefer to ignore it. For those of you who were raised Catholic, you might have gone to mass on a Thursday to commemorate this event. It’s not such a big deal in the Protestant church. But I found myself intrigued by this story again this year, and I think it’s because of what Barbara Brown Taylor said: “All the evidence suggests that [Jesus] packed up and left a long, long time ago.”
If we celebrate the Ascension, we are celebrating Jesus leaving us. And who wants to celebrate that? Who wants to celebrate being left alone? Who wants to celebrate that Jesus commanded the disciples to be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth”—and then promptly left them to do it on their own? It’s no wonder we don’t like to celebrate Ascension Sunday. Don’t we have enough experience of being left to our own devices? Don’t we already know the pain of loss? Why would we want to celebrate Christ leaving us, too?
We may not believe in the factuality of Jesus ascending into heaven but we certainly understand the emotional reality. We have watched as our future went up in smoke. We have watched as our dreams vanished in thin air. We have watched our loved ones slip away, out of reach. We sometimes feel as if Jesus did, indeed, pack up and leave us long ago.
And to make matters worse, the angels who appear after Jesus ascends into heaven seem to berate his followers: “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” they ask. Well of course they’re watching the place he just left. They’re not ready for him to leave.
Many churches with stained glass windows have an ascension window. Invariably it will show Christ hovering in the air, his hands stretched out in blessing, with the disciples watching him happily. “But he is there with them—he is in the window—and if they went away joyful, [as the scripture says] then I cannot help thinking that it was because they thought he would be back in a day or two, next week at the latest. Two thousand years later, we tend to see the whole thing a little differently. We need a new window to describe our own situation: a window with just us in it—no angels, no Jesus, no heavenly light—just us, still waiting, still watching the sky, our faces turned up like empty cups that only one presence can fill.”[3]
Many years ago I was sitting in church one Sunday—this was back when I sat in the pews—when I heard two young girls arguing behind me. I couldn’t hear their words—I heard just enough to know they were fussing. Then one of them said, quite audibly, “Wait! I’m looking for Jesus!” It turns out they were trying to share the same children’s bulletin, which included a word search puzzle . . . and one of the words they were supposed to find was Jesus.
It caught my attention—and has stayed in my memory—because of how many times I’ve felt that way. Wait! I’m looking for Jesus! When I hear of another family torn apart by addiction, I think, Wait! I’m looking for Jesus! When I read of another child who became a victim—or a perpetrator—because of a parent’s gun left within reach, I think, Wait! I’m looking for Jesus! When I hear the hateful rhetoric in our society, when I see the ridiculous laws intended to isolate, when I see the rise of hate crimes, I think, Wait! I’m looking for Jesus! Even when I read some of the more difficult passages of my own Bible, I think, Wait! I’m looking for Jesus!
Surely that’s how the disciples felt. They had already lost him once, tragically, to death. Miraculously, he came back to them, only to leave again. Of course they were still “gazing up toward heaven.” They were not ready to let him go. The angels said “Go and preach the gospel!” and the disciples must have been thinking, Wait! We’re looking for Jesus!
We all do it. When the right road takes a wrong turn, we look for Jesus. When the perfect job becomes a complete nightmare, we look for Jesus. When our children get sick or our teenagers rebel or our parents start forgetting, we look for Jesus in the situation. And this is good, that we look for Jesus in the midst of our troubles and problems. This is the way it should be. It’s just that we don’t always see him. We feel like he left us long ago, and we’re not sure what to do next. Do we just stand around, looking up to heaven, looking to where we last saw Jesus, where we last encountered God?
I sometimes think that is why we come to church: we’re looking for Jesus where we saw him last. We’re looking for God where we last encountered the Divine. Mystics will refer to “thin places”—those places where the veil between us and God is thin and easily permeable. I do believe there are such places, but primarily because we are aware of them—the way I naturally open up to a prayerful mood when I’m out on the lake alone because I have prayed there so many times before. But maybe every place is a thin place, and we’re just too thick to recognize it!
Anyway, we look to the water or we look to the cross, eager—anxious—to see, to find God. Like the disciples, we look to the Jesus heavens. Many people believe that Christ ascended into heaven, a place where God and the angels and those who have gone before us reside. Of course, with our modern knowledge of space, we realize that even if space is “the final frontier,” our searching of it most likely will not lead us to a place with pearly gates and streets of gold. So we think of heaven more as a state of being, rather than a place.
But what if heaven is more than a place or a state of being? What if Christ ascended not to a place or to a state of being, but to a time—to all time, where the past and the present and the future are all wrapped up together? If so, then we have nothing to fear. Wherever our journey might take us, Christ is already there. Whatever may happen, we will never be alone. That scary road that holds so many unknowns—God is already there, in every step, at every mile marker. “When I confess that Jesus ascended into heaven, I am confessing that Jesus awaits me in very ordinary places and ordinary ways with extraordinary grace and love.”[4]
We know, of course, that Jesus is no longer alive on earth, and we know that if Christ hadn’t left the earth, he would still be bound by the laws of the earth, including those pesky things like gravity and the inability to be in two places at one time. But when Christ ascended, the Divine became available to us in ways we couldn’t have dreamed. “It was almost as if he had not ascended but exploded, so that all the holiness that was once concentrated in him alone flew everywhere, flew far and wide, so that the seeds of heaven were sown in all the fields of the earth.”[5]
When you find yourself doubting it, look back to the beginning of this passage, before Christ said goodbye. “Jesus presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.”
Wait there, where you are, for the promise.
Wait for the promise … of the Holy Spirit.
Wait for the promise … of God’s presence with you.
Wait for the promise … of strength for the journey.
Wait for the promise … of hope in hand.
Wait for the promise … the promise given and the promise fulfilled.
Just wait.
Watch and wait.
Work and wait.
But when in doubt … wait.
[1] Taylor, Barbara Brown. “The Day We Were Left Behind.” Christianity Today, May 18, 1998.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Bouman, Rev. Dr. Luke. “The Ascension of Our Lord,” May 5, 2005, www.predigten.unti-goettingen.de
[5] Taylor, Barbara Brown.