Ascension Is for All Time
Ascension Is for All Time
Luke 24:44-53
Christian Community Presbyterian Church
Bowie, Maryland
May 24, 2020
This is the seventh Sunday of Easter. It is also Sunday after the Ascension. We don’t think much about Christ’s Ascension, except when we recite the Apostles’ Creed: “he ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God.” Tradition tells us that the Ascension was forty days after the resurrection, which would have been last Thursday.
What’s so special about the Ascension? After all, the resurrection wins as the most important event in Jesus’ life, Christmas places second, and Pentecost shows at a distant third. We forget that the Jesus event is a package deal. We don’t get to cherry pick Jesus’ life or teachings.
Luke thought that the Ascension was important. He told the story twice: at the end the Gospel and at the beginning of the Book of the Acts, emphasizing different aspects of the story in each telling. The Ascension concludes the narrative of Jesus’ earthly ministry. It is also sets the stage for Pentecost and the birth of the church. I invite you to look at the Acts 1:1-11 Ascension account after today’s worship, because in our time together today I want to focus our thoughts on the gospel narrative, which is a well-crafted piece of writing. In ten verses it covers three different time frames: past, present, and future. The Ascension is not a one-and-off event. That is why we should pay close attention to it.
Once I saw a documentary about the history of the telescope from Galileo to modern instruments. Optical problems were gradually overcome, refraction and reflection evolved, and changes in the size and construction of lenses and mirrors widened what could be seen with telescopes. The Hubble Space Telescope made it possible for us to stare at events which happened very close to the decaying echo of God’s “Let it be!” that we read about in Genesis 1.
That is one example is of what I call technology creep – using current technology and forgetting its history. We keep another example in our pocket, next to our ear, or under our texting thumbs: our smart phones. Cell phone services are now talking about 5G . The “G” stands for generation and “5" means fifth. The fifth generation of what? According to Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler in their current book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, 0G was in 1940 when the first telephone networks beyond local switchboards appeared. Forty years later we got to 1G, the first mobile phones, very pricy and the size of small suitcases. In the mid-1990s 2G phones were marketed, followed in the mid-2000s by 3G phones. Today’s 4G phones are camera-computer data terminal-game player-radio and television instruments which also happen to have telephonic capability. In the speaking of this sentence, a 5G phone can download a 2-hour movie.
We are accustomed to looking at things through the technology at our fingertips and our current social thinking. We give priority to contemporary values and ignore the roots from which those values have grown.
Jesus offers a counter-cultural view to using the present to forget the past. Yes, the resurrection changes everything, putting a new spin on everything that is old. But it is solidly grounded in the past, in “everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms.”
Jesus tells the apostles that the tradition is a feeding tube by which God’s work in all the long-gone days is delivered to our own time. So if Creation is 0G, we move through 1G (patriarchs), 2G (exodus), 3G (promised land and judges), 4G (kings and prophets), 5G (exile and resettlement). That makes the incarnation – birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus – 6G. George Santayana may have said that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, but Jesus is blunter, if his words were put into the modern idiom: Those who don’t know the past have no future.
Old is good. The Law of Moses tells how God intended for God’s people to live. The Prophets alerted the people to how they missed the mark (sometimes by a country mile). The Psalms share the feelings of God’s people through the whole realm of human emotions: praise, lament, confusion, doubt, fear, pleading, hope. What Jesus means is that God is not something new. Neither the apostles, nor you and I, are the first people to have encountered the living God. When we draw on tradition, we ask those who have gone on before us where the rocks and gullies are, where the fresh streams and lush berries are, where the fierce winds blow and the wild animals hide.
Jesus highlights the wonderful good that blossomed in the past. Indeed, he says that it “must be fulfilled.” In Luke’s mind Jesus clearly is the fulfillment. He is the eternal Word (even though Luke doesn’t use John’s language). Jesus is God’s prime presence (as Paul told the Colossians: “the firstborn of all creation,” 1:15). Jesus is the one beneath and beyond all we know. Quite simply, to deny the past is to deny who God is.
But we can’t stop in the past. We have to deal with the present, we have to use the lens which shows us the past in order to bring the present into focus. God is not just God of the past. God is God of the here and now. The disciples have seen with their own eyes and experienced with their own lives the things Jesus spoke about. It was real to them.
Jesus forces us to move from the past into the present and to discern and declare where God’s truth is real in 2020. Times change, conditions change. An oppressive regime locked down the people of Israel, for the safety of the empire rather than the people’s safety. The ravages of greed, militarism, and the brutal lust for power were pandemic. But Jesus said that the trajectory of the past proved that there is a God who does real things and God’s people are to stand up and be counted. In our own time of pandemic, believers are called on to say to the world that God’s grace is being experienced right now in the unstinting risk of medical professionals, cooks and couriers, farmers and grocers caring for the community as well as individuals. Jesus tells us that through the lens of the past we can see in the present where God’s forgiveness is being accepted, where healing breaks through brokenness, where technology subdues loneliness, where compassion overturns despair, where love defangs hatred, and where faith is being received and nurtured.
God provides the means of grace: prayer, worship (even via Facebook), scripture study, fasting, oral or typed holy conversation. God paves the avenues by which God’s transforming presence becomes accessible in our neighborhoods and in our social-distanced rooms. But if we don’t know the past, we won’t recognize the signs of God’s daily presence for what they are.
God is not locked into ram’s horns and sacrificial animals. God is not quarantined in stained glass, mausoleum-like sanctuaries. If Jesus were here today, he might drive a pickup or a Prius, blog or podcast on the web, tweet on Twitter, selfie on Instagram, or meet on Zoom, in addition to the foot-powered, face-to-face, parable-telling, hands-on healing and miracle working methods that he employed two thousand years ago. Which is to say, God calls us to use the ways and means which we have at our disposal to distribute God’s gracious gifts to those around us. Luke called it “open[ing] their minds to understand the scriptures.” We might call it “being available to where God is active today.”
If the gifts of God are still distributed in our time and place, then that means that the story did not end with Jesus’ departure from the disciples. Jesus tells the disciples, “stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” That sets the stage for Pentecost, which in the G schema I listed earlier, would be 7G.
God makes good on God’s promises. If God says that power will be given, power will be given! In this sense, the resurrection is an appetizer – a sample – of a future in which all in God’s family are given new life.
Some churches engage in the “PUSH” ministry. PUSH = Pray Until Something Happens. Luke promises that something is going to happen. It’s not Luke’s promise. It’s God’s promise. The Ascension calls on today’s disciples – you and me – to live with expectancy. Expectancy is all we have right now. But what are we expecting? The old normal or something new?
Cary Nieuwhof, a Canadian pastor and digital pastoral mentor, wonders whether churches will behave like malls in the age of Amazon, banking everything on people returning once things are normal again. While in-person gatherings and human connection are critical to human flourishing and the mission of the church, they’re not the only way we can be the church and may miss the bigger mission. We are not experiencing an interrupted life, but rather a disrupted life, just as exodus, exile, and resurrection were disruptions in the lives of God’s people. The Spirit is pointing us away from lamenting obstacles and towards embracing opportunities.
Church is all about relationship, and no one should be able to out-relationship the local church. That now includes digital relationships, out of necessity, which is the parent of innovation. Nieuwhof says that “to pretend that the only valuable relationships happen in person is to resist both everything that’s happened in the last decade and everything that’s going to happen in the future.”
In addition, God is calling us to reach out with the Good News the people who live much of their lives online – Gen-Xers and Millennials – the people who shop Amazon instead of malls and seek spirituality through blogs rather than buildings. That doesn’t mean we write off the unconnected, often older folks, many of whom have been churched. Most of them have phones, even if they are land-lines. Others can be physically visited as needs, time, and pandemic permit.
Despite what pessimists opine, we are not going to hell in hand baskets. We are on our way to God’s kingdom – the New Jerusalem. We are going in hybrid, autonomous, sweet chariots. Pentecost, which we will celebrate next week, was a radical change in how people perceived faith in God. Other radical changes included the rise of monasticism in the 6th century, the crusade mentality of the church in the 11th century, and the work of vernacular Bible translators John Wycliffe and Martin Luther and printer Johannes Gutenberg who helped propel the 16th century church into a new era of faithfulness. The Spirit is now kicking the church into a new Reformation, the 21st century generation church.
A Facebook post recently highlighted shifts which the church will need to make for the new normal. Let me expand several of those shifts.
• I’ve already mentioned the shift from an analog (physical) presence of the church to a digital one.
• There will be a shift from rote teaching of scriptural truths to equipping missioners to live them.
• Another shift will be from gathering as like-minded (and often homogeneous) groups of people to connecting with human beings across once-phobic divisions with shared visions of justice and mercy.
• There will be a shift from people being attendees watching professionals worship God to people being creating innovative worship of God in families, house churches, and faith communities.
• And there will be a shift from complexity – how hard and rigidly can we do this – to simplicity – how can we let the Spirit flow with holy abandon.
We are to anticipate the future like a child who sees a still-unopened package under the Christmas tree. What is the surprise that God will give? Will we recognize it? Will we welcome it? Will we know that it is from God?
The Ascension assures us that when we get to the tomorrows of our lives, God will be there already and that God’s grace will be more than sufficient. Like the disciples, let us actively wait, fully aware that God has been and continues to be at work among us. Let us remember the past, acknowledge the present, and claim the future.
Alleluia! Amen.
Luke 24:44-53
Christian Community Presbyterian Church
Bowie, Maryland
May 24, 2020
This is the seventh Sunday of Easter. It is also Sunday after the Ascension. We don’t think much about Christ’s Ascension, except when we recite the Apostles’ Creed: “he ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God.” Tradition tells us that the Ascension was forty days after the resurrection, which would have been last Thursday.
What’s so special about the Ascension? After all, the resurrection wins as the most important event in Jesus’ life, Christmas places second, and Pentecost shows at a distant third. We forget that the Jesus event is a package deal. We don’t get to cherry pick Jesus’ life or teachings.
Luke thought that the Ascension was important. He told the story twice: at the end the Gospel and at the beginning of the Book of the Acts, emphasizing different aspects of the story in each telling. The Ascension concludes the narrative of Jesus’ earthly ministry. It is also sets the stage for Pentecost and the birth of the church. I invite you to look at the Acts 1:1-11 Ascension account after today’s worship, because in our time together today I want to focus our thoughts on the gospel narrative, which is a well-crafted piece of writing. In ten verses it covers three different time frames: past, present, and future. The Ascension is not a one-and-off event. That is why we should pay close attention to it.
Once I saw a documentary about the history of the telescope from Galileo to modern instruments. Optical problems were gradually overcome, refraction and reflection evolved, and changes in the size and construction of lenses and mirrors widened what could be seen with telescopes. The Hubble Space Telescope made it possible for us to stare at events which happened very close to the decaying echo of God’s “Let it be!” that we read about in Genesis 1.
That is one example is of what I call technology creep – using current technology and forgetting its history. We keep another example in our pocket, next to our ear, or under our texting thumbs: our smart phones. Cell phone services are now talking about 5G . The “G” stands for generation and “5" means fifth. The fifth generation of what? According to Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler in their current book, The Future is Faster Than You Think, 0G was in 1940 when the first telephone networks beyond local switchboards appeared. Forty years later we got to 1G, the first mobile phones, very pricy and the size of small suitcases. In the mid-1990s 2G phones were marketed, followed in the mid-2000s by 3G phones. Today’s 4G phones are camera-computer data terminal-game player-radio and television instruments which also happen to have telephonic capability. In the speaking of this sentence, a 5G phone can download a 2-hour movie.
We are accustomed to looking at things through the technology at our fingertips and our current social thinking. We give priority to contemporary values and ignore the roots from which those values have grown.
Jesus offers a counter-cultural view to using the present to forget the past. Yes, the resurrection changes everything, putting a new spin on everything that is old. But it is solidly grounded in the past, in “everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms.”
Jesus tells the apostles that the tradition is a feeding tube by which God’s work in all the long-gone days is delivered to our own time. So if Creation is 0G, we move through 1G (patriarchs), 2G (exodus), 3G (promised land and judges), 4G (kings and prophets), 5G (exile and resettlement). That makes the incarnation – birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus – 6G. George Santayana may have said that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, but Jesus is blunter, if his words were put into the modern idiom: Those who don’t know the past have no future.
Old is good. The Law of Moses tells how God intended for God’s people to live. The Prophets alerted the people to how they missed the mark (sometimes by a country mile). The Psalms share the feelings of God’s people through the whole realm of human emotions: praise, lament, confusion, doubt, fear, pleading, hope. What Jesus means is that God is not something new. Neither the apostles, nor you and I, are the first people to have encountered the living God. When we draw on tradition, we ask those who have gone on before us where the rocks and gullies are, where the fresh streams and lush berries are, where the fierce winds blow and the wild animals hide.
Jesus highlights the wonderful good that blossomed in the past. Indeed, he says that it “must be fulfilled.” In Luke’s mind Jesus clearly is the fulfillment. He is the eternal Word (even though Luke doesn’t use John’s language). Jesus is God’s prime presence (as Paul told the Colossians: “the firstborn of all creation,” 1:15). Jesus is the one beneath and beyond all we know. Quite simply, to deny the past is to deny who God is.
But we can’t stop in the past. We have to deal with the present, we have to use the lens which shows us the past in order to bring the present into focus. God is not just God of the past. God is God of the here and now. The disciples have seen with their own eyes and experienced with their own lives the things Jesus spoke about. It was real to them.
Jesus forces us to move from the past into the present and to discern and declare where God’s truth is real in 2020. Times change, conditions change. An oppressive regime locked down the people of Israel, for the safety of the empire rather than the people’s safety. The ravages of greed, militarism, and the brutal lust for power were pandemic. But Jesus said that the trajectory of the past proved that there is a God who does real things and God’s people are to stand up and be counted. In our own time of pandemic, believers are called on to say to the world that God’s grace is being experienced right now in the unstinting risk of medical professionals, cooks and couriers, farmers and grocers caring for the community as well as individuals. Jesus tells us that through the lens of the past we can see in the present where God’s forgiveness is being accepted, where healing breaks through brokenness, where technology subdues loneliness, where compassion overturns despair, where love defangs hatred, and where faith is being received and nurtured.
God provides the means of grace: prayer, worship (even via Facebook), scripture study, fasting, oral or typed holy conversation. God paves the avenues by which God’s transforming presence becomes accessible in our neighborhoods and in our social-distanced rooms. But if we don’t know the past, we won’t recognize the signs of God’s daily presence for what they are.
God is not locked into ram’s horns and sacrificial animals. God is not quarantined in stained glass, mausoleum-like sanctuaries. If Jesus were here today, he might drive a pickup or a Prius, blog or podcast on the web, tweet on Twitter, selfie on Instagram, or meet on Zoom, in addition to the foot-powered, face-to-face, parable-telling, hands-on healing and miracle working methods that he employed two thousand years ago. Which is to say, God calls us to use the ways and means which we have at our disposal to distribute God’s gracious gifts to those around us. Luke called it “open[ing] their minds to understand the scriptures.” We might call it “being available to where God is active today.”
If the gifts of God are still distributed in our time and place, then that means that the story did not end with Jesus’ departure from the disciples. Jesus tells the disciples, “stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” That sets the stage for Pentecost, which in the G schema I listed earlier, would be 7G.
God makes good on God’s promises. If God says that power will be given, power will be given! In this sense, the resurrection is an appetizer – a sample – of a future in which all in God’s family are given new life.
Some churches engage in the “PUSH” ministry. PUSH = Pray Until Something Happens. Luke promises that something is going to happen. It’s not Luke’s promise. It’s God’s promise. The Ascension calls on today’s disciples – you and me – to live with expectancy. Expectancy is all we have right now. But what are we expecting? The old normal or something new?
Cary Nieuwhof, a Canadian pastor and digital pastoral mentor, wonders whether churches will behave like malls in the age of Amazon, banking everything on people returning once things are normal again. While in-person gatherings and human connection are critical to human flourishing and the mission of the church, they’re not the only way we can be the church and may miss the bigger mission. We are not experiencing an interrupted life, but rather a disrupted life, just as exodus, exile, and resurrection were disruptions in the lives of God’s people. The Spirit is pointing us away from lamenting obstacles and towards embracing opportunities.
Church is all about relationship, and no one should be able to out-relationship the local church. That now includes digital relationships, out of necessity, which is the parent of innovation. Nieuwhof says that “to pretend that the only valuable relationships happen in person is to resist both everything that’s happened in the last decade and everything that’s going to happen in the future.”
In addition, God is calling us to reach out with the Good News the people who live much of their lives online – Gen-Xers and Millennials – the people who shop Amazon instead of malls and seek spirituality through blogs rather than buildings. That doesn’t mean we write off the unconnected, often older folks, many of whom have been churched. Most of them have phones, even if they are land-lines. Others can be physically visited as needs, time, and pandemic permit.
Despite what pessimists opine, we are not going to hell in hand baskets. We are on our way to God’s kingdom – the New Jerusalem. We are going in hybrid, autonomous, sweet chariots. Pentecost, which we will celebrate next week, was a radical change in how people perceived faith in God. Other radical changes included the rise of monasticism in the 6th century, the crusade mentality of the church in the 11th century, and the work of vernacular Bible translators John Wycliffe and Martin Luther and printer Johannes Gutenberg who helped propel the 16th century church into a new era of faithfulness. The Spirit is now kicking the church into a new Reformation, the 21st century generation church.
A Facebook post recently highlighted shifts which the church will need to make for the new normal. Let me expand several of those shifts.
• I’ve already mentioned the shift from an analog (physical) presence of the church to a digital one.
• There will be a shift from rote teaching of scriptural truths to equipping missioners to live them.
• Another shift will be from gathering as like-minded (and often homogeneous) groups of people to connecting with human beings across once-phobic divisions with shared visions of justice and mercy.
• There will be a shift from people being attendees watching professionals worship God to people being creating innovative worship of God in families, house churches, and faith communities.
• And there will be a shift from complexity – how hard and rigidly can we do this – to simplicity – how can we let the Spirit flow with holy abandon.
We are to anticipate the future like a child who sees a still-unopened package under the Christmas tree. What is the surprise that God will give? Will we recognize it? Will we welcome it? Will we know that it is from God?
The Ascension assures us that when we get to the tomorrows of our lives, God will be there already and that God’s grace will be more than sufficient. Like the disciples, let us actively wait, fully aware that God has been and continues to be at work among us. Let us remember the past, acknowledge the present, and claim the future.
Alleluia! Amen.
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