Context: The first Sunday in June was a preaching weekend for me at Christ Church Easton. We celebrated and talked about Jesus’s Ascension into heaven, marking the end of the Easter season, moving the church calendar to Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit. This is the text of the sermon I gave.
Why Ascend? And then what?
A couple years ago, I saw a comic strip about Jesus’s Ascension that sticks with me.
It’s Jesus and three disciples standing around. Jesus says, “Gotta go guys. Don’t forget what I taught you.” And then it shows Jesus’s feet as he ascends out off the page and the disciples say, “Bye, boss.”
They are standing around together and one asks, “So what have we learned?”
“Pretty much it’s love God and love your neighbor.”
“Well, that seems pretty simple, I don’t see how we can mess this…”
It shows a group is coming over the hill in their vestments and robes, with their hats and staffs, books, and scrolls. And the disciple says, “Uh-oh… Here come the theologians.”
And it sticks with me both because it strikes me as funny and that it’s on to something.
Jesus didn’t come to confuse us or complicate us. He came to set things right, so that we could get off the hamster wheel of sin and that instead we might have life in all its abundance.
We don’t have these stories and teachings in Scripture to vex us, but to help us.
In today’s reading, as he is about to leave the disciples, Jesus says:
“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you– that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled… Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”
Jesus has done what he came to do. The Word became flesh, lived among us, taught us, performed signs, died for us, conquered death, came back and showed us and told us all about it. As he is leaving, he is connecting all the dots and making sure the disciples get it.
He’s not giving them new information or teaching, he’s just recapping, reminding them. This is all part of the plan.
Jesus has to go so that he can send the Holy Spirit to do things that he couldn’t do in his bodily form. He could only be in one place at a time. There is more to do.
Jesus becoming incarnate: good news.
Jesus dying for us: tragic and horrible, but still part of the good news.
Jesus overcoming death: good news.
Jesus ascending and sending the Holy Spirit: all part of the same good news.
We talked a bit last week on Zoom and at the Healing Service about how things are going in the world with the Holy Spirit and the church and whether we might not prefer to have Jesus back in the flesh. Sometimes it might be nice to be able to ask Jesus something directly and have him settle the debate right then and there.
Two things come to mind with that: Jesus has already given us everything we need, to know what he would do, how he would answer questions, what we are supposed to do. Those answers aren’t going to change.
The fact that we, as people, aren’t loving God and loving our neighbor, the fact that we aren’t loving each other as Jesus loved us, isn’t because we don’t understand or we don’t know how.
It’s because we don’t want to.
It’s because it’s hard. It’s because it costs us—we have to sacrifice in order to do it. It’s because while we are living in the ways of the world, it’s not popular—people might think we’re weird or soft or whatever word you want to use.
There are stories that have been written that suppose that Jesus comes back just as he was before, preaching the same love, doing the same good works, and what ends up happening is that either the church or the government kills him because his message is a threat to their power.
Does that sound familiar? We just read that story a month or so ago.
Our world hasn’t changed so much since then. But it’s supposed to. And that’s up to us.
Jesus ascended into heaven because his work was done, and he was giving the ball back to his followers to move things forward.
I’ve shown you everything. Now it’s your turn.
If we look at the disciples during the two or three years Jesus was with them, Jesus did all the work. He was teaching them and showing them what to do, but they depended on him to do everything.
Here is what the SALT Project says about Jesus having to go away in their commentary:
“The fact that Jesus departs at all is worthy of reflection. Many founders of movements — or companies or political parties — stay around as long as they can (often staying too long!), and according to the Gospels, the risen Jesus is presumably impervious to death, and so could have remained indefinitely. From this angle, the fact that he leaves reveals what sort of movement he has in mind: a community not standing around admiring him (“Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?—as we heard in Acts), but rather active and present in the world, carrying on his work of kindness, justice, humility, and proclaiming the dawn of God’s joyous Jubilee. In the end, the Ascension itself is meant to invite and empower the church to be all the more down-to-earth. Into the world, for the love of the world!
For Jesus, it wasn’t about his ego, his pride, or any accolades. He leaves so that even more amazing things can happen with the Holy Spirit dwelling with and within us.
This is what spiritual maturity asks of us and looks like. Peter and the other apostles do not look and sound the same in the Book of Acts as they sound in the gospels. They carry on. They put in the work. They wait for the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus told them to. And after Pentecost, they are lit on fire with the Spirit and the early church is born.
The apostles accept that they are Jesus’s “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
There are no “thoughts and prayers” in the apostles action plan, their response to Jesus, as ours is in our Baptismal Covenant, was:
“We will, with God’s help.”
As we remember and celebrate Jesus’s Ascension; as we look to Pentecost next week and the coming of the Holy Spirit; and as we move into Ordinary Time, the Season After Pentecost—it’s the same Holy Spirit with and within us now as came to Peter and the apostles. It’s the same Holy Spirit that has inspired and guided the community of saints over the ages. It’s the same Holy Spirit that has used ordinary people and their ordinary lives to do extraordinary things for God’s kingdom.
The church has moved in fits and starts and stalls and sputters over the last couple thousand years. There have been miracles and signs and there have been tragedies and disgrace. When the church falls away from the Holy Spirit and from Jesus, it loses its way.
It’s during those times that we need to regroup, refocus, remember who we are and WHOSE we are and allow the Spirit to move through us to be the body of Christ, the church, Jesus’s hands and feet and love in the world.
This is our time. We can’t look around and expect someone else to do it. WE are why Jesus came. WE are why Jesus died. WE are why Jesus overcame death. And WE are why Jesus ascended and gave the world the gift of the Holy Spirit.
What will we do with it? What does it look like to have the Spirit in us?
Here is the SALT Project:
(changed to present tense)
“It looks like Jesus, and at the same time, it looks like us — that is, it looks like us being true to ourselves, the people God made us to be. In a word, it looks like love: incarnate, tangible, down-to-earth love. And from another angle, it looks like peace: not just any peace, but what Jesus calls “my peace,” the shalom of God, a buzzing, blooming, fruitful community, coming and going, alive with the Spirit, healthy and whole.”
We look to the characters in the Bible for our answers, as if their lives were more spiritually significant than ours. Here’s the thing:
When they were living out all these experiences, their stories hadn’t been written down. They were figuring it out, reading the stories they had, just like we are.
We have Scripture for our learning, so that we can continue these stories, live spiritually significant lives, be a part of God’s love story in its unfolding.
We have a chance to write the next chapters—to inspire, connect, and allow God to use us just as he used the first apostles. That’s what “apostolic” is all about—being sent out.
Jesus wants our stories and our time to matter just as much as the apostles in Acts. We have same Holy Spirit and we are proclaiming the same good news.
WE can be that community. That’s who we are called to be. It’s who we were made to be.
Will we? Our best answer:
We will, with God’s help.
