May 4, 2008
Easter 7, Acts 1:6-14
“Suddenly two men in white robes stood by them and said, "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” I speak to you in the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
This past Thursday was Ascension Day, the day when the Church celebrates Jesus being bodily lifted up into heaven to be with God. Since the 4th century, Christian liturgy has commemorated Ascension Day on the 40th day after Easter Sunday. Often there is a service at St. Aidan’s on Ascension Day itself, but this past week there was too much sanding and staining going on in here. Luckily, the lectionary was forgiving and assigned the ascension reading from Acts for this morning.
This reading from Acts gives us a view of the last of Jesus’ bodily appearances to the disciples. Since Easter Sunday we’ve been hearing stories about Jesus’ encounters with his friends in the 40 days following his resurrection. He walked with them, he drank and broke bread with them, he explained scripture to them, he appeared to them in a locked room, he ate roasted fish with them on the beach. And this morning, we look on while Jesus is lifted up and taken out of the disciples’ sight by a cloud.
From this story and others like it comes the line in the Nicene Creed where we say that we believe Christ ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. It makes for a strange image, doesn’t it? Art created on this ascension theme tends to have Jesus floating in the air above the heads of his disciples or being carried up in a sort of bubble by angels, while the folks below look up astonished. I even ran across a screen saver on-line with a black starry background and this cut-out of Jesus kind of jerkily floating around. This idea of Jesus physically ascending into heaven doesn’t seem to mesh very well with our scientific, enlightened minds. We’ve been up there exploring – out past the clouds, to the moon and beyond – and it gets harder and harder to think of heaven as this physical place that is “up”. The image of Jesus physically ascending seems very strange and old-fashioned.
Probably because of this very story, when I was a little girl taking my first plane ride, I looked out at the clouds and expected to Jesus. Those puffy clouds looked so substantial from below that I contemplated whether there might be a way for me to jump out of the plane and sit on one. Maybe if I stayed up there for a while, I’d get to see a little bit of heaven, have an angel fly me around a bit. But then, of course, the plane flew through one of those clouds. And the thick puffy mass looked more like wimpy fog. All I was left with was a little condensation on the window. Not a single angel to be found. I remember feeling confused, and disappointed, and a little bit betrayed. I suspect it’s a sort of coming-of-age that many children face at some point.
Recently I was reading my daughter a night-time Bible story about Jesus talking with some of the disciples on the road to ‘EM-A-US’. And she said, “We can’t talk to him, like that, right?” Fumbling for an answer, I told her that we can still talk to Jesus anytime we want, that when we pray we can actually talk to Jesus. And she followed up, “But we can’t hear him, right?” And so I talked about how we don’t usually hear his voice out loud (although sometimes people do) but that somehow we can hear him in other ways -- when we pray, when we just stop what we are doing and listen, when we read the Bible, and also sometimes we hear him in other people. Not convinced, she asked, “But we don’t see him anymore, right?” I struggled on with my vague answers, talking about how Jesus is in our heart, and all around us, and in the people that we meet, and that we don’t physically see Jesus like his friends did back then, but we can see him in a different way. I wanted so badly to think of something that would reassure her and convince her (and me too) that Jesus is present in her life even when she can’t see or hear him in a way that she understands.
The disciples in this story from Acts are facing that same prospect. They have just seen Jesus lifted up and disappear from sight. Jesus is physically gone from them. Their time of being in real contact with him, of being able to watch him and hug him and hear him preach and teach and pray is over. From now on, their experiences with him will have to be something completely different. Understandably, they seem to be a little frozen, staring up in the sky. Confused, maybe even fearful, probably sad. And completely unsure what to do next.
And I guess I’m right there with them, staring up, wondering how it all works, questioning the details, having trouble getting past my skeptical self. Frozen in place. So thankfully, the angels in white robes appear and break us all out of our reverie. “Men of Galilee” (and I might add, “People of St. Aidan’s”), “why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
Jesus’ disciples, and probably most of us who hear this story, tend to have our focus all wrong. This story of Jesus being lifted up and disappearing into the clouds isn’t about physics or cosmology or the physical location of heaven. It’s about who God is. At Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation, God becoming human and living among us. And at the Ascension, this same human being became for all eternity a living, participating part of God. So with the ascension of Jesus Christ to join God, we have a much fuller picture of who God is. We can rest assured that all that Jesus taught and modeled, all that love and healing and openness and heartfelt forgiveness, all of that is part of what our God offers.
The ascension story is also about who we are. If Christ’s whole person – body and soul – is received with joy in heaven, that bodes well for all of humanity. Through him, we are renewed and redeemed, free to be in God’s presence, to worship God in all that we are and all that we do. As you’ll hear in the Eucharistic Prayer this morning, Jesus Christ has made us “worthy to stand before” God.
And maybe most important of all, the ascension is about our relationship with God. With the ascension of Jesus, we in our humanity can share in Jesus’ loving union with God. Jesus’ departure wasn’t so much the conclusion of a sequence of post-resurrection appearances as it was the first movement of a new way of being in relationship with us. The circle of God has broken open to include us within its embrace. And that’s not all -- Just before his ascension Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit upon his disciples, another comforter and friend who would abide with them – and us – forever; the spirit of truth that would dwell in them – and us. Stay tuned for more on that next week, as we celebrate Pentecost.
And so those early disciples who saw Jesus’ ascension didn’t stand there staring up into the sky for long. They stopped looking up at heaven and started living it – preaching the gospel, breaking bread together, praising God, teaching and learning about God, praying, doing wonders and signs, helping those in need. They stopped worrying about where Christ’s body had gone and started becoming the Body of Christ.
I’m still not sure exactly how to translate all that for a 4 year old. But maybe, somewhere in all that, is a better answer the next time Sophie starts asking questions. No, we can’t see Jesus in the same bodily way his friends could in the stories we read. And No, we can’t talk to him and hear his voice in the same, human way they did back then. But somehow – precisely because of his physical absence from us – he is actually closer to us, more available to us, more deeply ingrained in us, and more a part of our world.
And that is at least part of why we can say with such hope on this, the last Sunday of the Easter season, “Alleluia! Christ is Risen!”
Amen.
Elizabeth