99% of the time, by the end of worship service #3, I am utterly sick of my own words. Today is no exception. So, here it is, and it is what it is. Thanks to Songbird for sharing her wonderful sermon, and ChicagoRev for sharing his wonderful sermon (via e-mail). It was a fun week with you all!


He Ascended into Heaven

read Acts 1:1-14 here

The story of Jesus’ ascension is recorded in two places in the New Testament, but by only one author. The ascension is present at the end of Luke’s gospel, and here at the beginning of Acts (also apparently written by Luke). It seems a little redundant for Luke to include the incident in both places, especially since here in Acts he specifically refers to the gospel account. “In the gospel I wrote about Jesus’ life and ministry until he was taken up to heaven…” he says, and the listener must be thinking, “Ah yes! I remember it well.” And yet Luke feels compelled to tell the story again!

Now, I’m not sure we give the ascension much thought today, aside from reciting the Apostle’s Creed, “He ascended into heaven”… (And maybe not even then! Sometimes we let familiar words wash right over us, don’t we?). But apparently for Luke, the ascension is worth repeating at the end of one chapter of the story and the beginning of another. Not even the resurrection receives that kind of treatment. Luke is clearly up to something, but what?

Well, clearly the ascension fits in both places as a matter of chronology. The last thing that Jesus does on this earth is to make his rather bizarre exit. And the first thing the disciples do in his absence is to watch him go, jaws dropped, necks craning toward heaven. The ascension fits both places chronologically.

But I think something is going on here spiritually and theologically too. If the life of Christ and the life of the church are two sides of a seesaw, then the ascension is the fulcrum between them, the point at which Christ’s ministry tips over into the church’s ministry—into our ministry. I think the ascension sets us up for our ministry in some powerful ways.

The substance of that ministry is clear. Jesus tells us that we are to be his witnesses, empowered by the Holy Spirit. You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit, Jesus assures them, and you will be my witnesses in all the world.

Whenever I think about our role as witnesses to Christ, I think about the painting by Matthias Grunewald of the crucifixion, called the Isenheimer Altarpiece. The cross is in the center, and John the Baptist stands to the side. He has a Bible in one hand, and with the other he is pointing, just pointing, to Christ on the cross. That is our role as witnesses, to discern God’s activity in the world and point to it. It’s not about us, it’s not about the words we say, it’s about calling attention to what God is doing, to who Christ is for us.

And so who is this Christ to whom we bear witness? In some ways, we may feel like witnesses several generations removed! Those early disciples had it a little easier perhaps--they had traveled with the man, they’d heard the stories from his own lips, they had seen him resurrected, put their hands in his side … Luke calls these events Jesus’ “many convincing proofs.”

Many convincing proofs.

Oh my goodness, I am so in love with that phrase. It’s the only time the Greek word appears in the entire New Testament, and I can just see Luke jabbing his finger in the air for emphasis, or pounding his fist on the table. Remember what you saw: Many! Convincing! Proofs! Oh, it’s so endearing! Luke’s faith is unwavering.

“Don’t forget, this man was real; you saw him with your own eyes,” Luke seems to be saying. Luke is careful to remind the reader of Jesus’ tangible deeds: his life, what he taught, his instructions, his resurrection appearances, his teaching about the kingdom of God. Concrete, specific, convincing proofs.

Is the ascension meant to be another one of those convincing proofs? On one level, yes—the disciples actually see it happen. (Contrast this with the resurrection, which they see only in hindsight. They don’t see Jesus resurrecting, they see him resurrected, walking around, cooking on the beach, and so forth.) So in some ways, this is as convincing a proof as anything they’ve seen that Christ is indeed who he says he is.

At the same time, I’m not so sure. I think the ascension by its very nature blurs the line between what’s concrete and convincing and what may be more abstract. Yes, the disciples saw it with their own eyes, but what exactly is it? It defies description or explanation.

The NRSV seems clear enough: Jesus was taken into heaven in a cloud. When I try to picture exactly how this went down, I admit things get a little cinematic. The Disney chorus sings a breathy “Ahhhhhhhh…” in the background, and Jesus is lifted up (without the use of wires, it’s gotta be CGI all the way!). Jesus is taken up into heaven, as if on some invisible cosmic escalator—cloud as mode of transportation. I much prefer the King James Version, which is a bit more abstract, and would perhaps be harder to film. It says that a cloud “received him out of their sight.”

The cloud received him.

Yes. Jesus is absorbed into the mystery of God, and the disciples see him no more.

In that sense, the ascension seems to be an antidote to all those “convincing proofs.” Jesus has been running around with the disciples for forty days, and for a long time before that, spelling things out for them, but when it comes down to the end, he gives them some words of promise, and then there are no more convincing proofs; he just… fades… away.

It seems to be an important moment, a corrective of sorts, a preparation for how things are going to be from now on …because once the incarnate God leaves the earth, things are not going to be spelled out so much; we will have to discern our way forward.

In other words, the ascension seems to say, this is the way things are now. God is wrapped in hazy inscrutability, and you may not be able to get your arms around God anymore. Maybe you never could.

The convincing proofs maybe won’t always seem so convincing. For sure, they won’t always be very concrete.


How do you know God is real? What are your “convincing proofs”? Surely if such proofs exist for us, they are quite different than the ones the disciples witnessed.

I was listening to a story on All Things Considered last Thursday about child soldiers, children who are forced to fight in various civil wars and conflicts around the world. There are an estimated 300,000 child soldiers in the world today, and child advocates are understandably worried about how these children turn out. The NPR story centered around children who fought in Mozambique in the 1980s and who are grown now.

Now, there is no reason to hope that they would turn out OK. Absolutely no reason. And yet… A study looked at a small group of these young adults and found that they are doing remarkably well. They are productive members of their communities; they are raising families; the cycle of violence that everyone had feared would continue has not. Many of them realize that they missed out on going to school, and rather than turn inward in bitterness and despair, they are utterly committed to making sure their children get an education and have a better life than they did. One of the researchers expressed amazement at this and said, “What we’re seeing are not cycles of violence per se, but that pain can be turned to altruism.”

I heard that on Thursday, driving around in my car, and I found myself actually saying aloud, “My God.” Again I say, “My God!”

God-in-the-flesh is not walking around among us anymore, but truly I tell you, the Holy Spirit is alive in this world and there are glimmers of hope like this all around us, and that is as convincing a proof as we get. I felt it in my bones.

But make no mistake. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like much. Many do not see this as a convincing proof, at all. “A group of 41 child soldiers are living productive lives and you rejoice? What kind of God would have allowed them to be forced into combat in the first place? How is this not just wishful thinking on your part?”

They are good questions. And I don’t have an answer. All I have is what I believe to be the inner testimony of the Spirit which led me to confess in the middle of my commute: "My God!" I know full well that this seven-minute story on NPR seems utterly ridiculous as a convincing proof of God’s love and faithfulness, and yet it is compelling to me. It’s compelling because we worship an ascended Christ, a Christ who was “received into a cloud until they couldn’t see him anymore” and who still wears that mystery. I wish God would spell it all out for us, but God doesn’t. Instead, God travels in a blurry mist of grace and hope.

The challenge and call for us is to recognize that grace and hope so that we can point to it, so that we can witness to it. So how do we recognize it? How do we sift through all the blurriness of our age and speak with clarity about who God is and what God is up to?

I think the answer lies in how we orient ourselves from the very beginning.

We are told that the disciples traveled “a Sabbath day’s journey” from Jerusalem, where they were staying, to Mount Olivet, where the ascension took place. I think of a day’s journey as the distance one can travel in a day, so I wondered what the Sabbath had to do with anything. Isn’t the Sabbath as long as any other day? Wouldn’t it be the same distance?

Well the term turns out to have nothing to do with how far and fast one could travel in a day. It seems that in Jewish law, the people were instructed to remain a certain distance from the temple, from the holy of holies—from the center of worship*. They could travel wherever they wanted during the Sabbath day, as long as they did not stray too far from that source, that center of their being.

I want to suggest that when we are trying to recognize God in the midst of the cloud, when God seems too far away and too blurry, that it’s time to find our center and let that ground all of our travels.

Where do you experience God in your daily living?

Where do you, like the disciples on that mountain, find your mouth gaping open in wonder and awe?

What activities bring you closer to God?

Where do you experience joy?

That’s your center. If each of us starts from that center, and returns to it again and again, then the Spirit will empower us to be Christ’s witnesses, just as those first disciples were empowered.

This doesn’t mean that we stay closed and comfortable, that we stick close to home. Yes, we have a center, but the circle is wide! We are still called to be Christ’s witnesses to the end of the earth. But we cannot, we will not, be effective, without that center.

That center may be tough to articulate, like the image of the ascended Christ wrapped up in cloudy mist. But the point is not to explain, but to worship, like those early disciples did, their eyes cast toward heaven for just one more view of God—and then to point others toward that view—that sometimes blurry, but always blessed, view.



*from the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible