Ascension Day 2007 | Luke 24:44-53
Every evangelical kid has some variation on this story to tell: you
come home, expecting to find your mom and siblings there, but
there’s nobody home. And suddenly, fear grips your heart in an
icy vise. The rapture. Jesus came back while you were walking home from
the bus stop and you didn’t notice. Not only that, but everyone
in your family was taken up into heaven—except you. In the midst
of the panic, as you race around the house looking for the little piles
of clothes people leave when they’re raptured, you are
overwhelmed with grief. Why were YOU rejected by Jesus? Why did he take
your brother—whom you know first-hand to be evil—and not
you? [You’re sure it has something to do with masterbation and
Jesus’ words echo in your mind, blocking out all other
thoughts—if your right hand offend thee, cut it off!]
Okay, if you weren’t raised evangelical, this has got to sound
absurd, but for those of us raised in that tradition, it was a very
real fear, and this experience happened to most if not all of us at
least once during our childhoods. Over half of the population of the
earth believes in the rapture, you know—the belief that at the
sound of the heavenly trumpet, all the true believers in Jesus will
just rise up into the sky. One thing I’ve never been clear on,
even when I WAS an evangelical, is what people expect to do, exactly,
when they get to outer space. Orbit like satellites? Regardless,
they’re certainly in a hurry to get there.
But rapture is just a generalization of a tradition that goes back a
long way in Western religion. Lots of people have had their own
personalized raptures, or “ascensions” as theologians call
such boutique raptures. Enoch is the first in Jewish history—the
Book of Genesis says he was taken up because he ‘walked with
God’—kind of a scary consequence for getting a little too
chummy with the almighty, perhaps. The jury is out on whether Moses was
buried or ascended—there are stories both way. But there’s
no ambiguity about Elijah, who was carried away by a fiery chariot into
the clouds. Muhammad had his night journey—a kind of temporary
ascension. Even Mary got her own launching pad in 1871 when the first
Vatican Council declared the Assumption of Mary an official dogma of
the Catholic Church, and a belief necessary for salvation.
Ascensions occur in religious traditions when people are deemed so holy
that contemplating their death and decomposition just seems
unthinkable. Of course, the biggest ascension in our tradition is
Jesus. Christians have long believed that he was taken straight up into
heaven. But in our current view of the universe, knowing what we do of
the vastness of outer space, this is a more difficult teaching to take
literally than it was in the past. After all, where did Jesus go after
his ascension? Depending on his rate of acceleration, he could only now
be clearing the orbit of Neptune.
When confronted with the more mythic elements of our faith, we must ask
what does this mean? Not is this true, but is this TRUE? What is this
story saying to us symbolically?
When Martin Luther was constructing his theology of the Eucharist, he
struggled with the conundrum of how Christ could be seated at the right
hand of the Father, and simultaneously present on every altar in the
Christian world. The answer that occurred to him became the Lutheran
doctrine of ubiquity, one of the most blatantly mystical doctrines in
the history of Protestantism. The doctrine of ubiquity states that
Jesus can be simultaneously seated at the right hand of the Father and
be present in the bread and wine on every altar not because Jesus has
the ability to bilocate—although that’s a nifty trick,
too—but because he is present EVERYWHERE. Now this is standard
teaching in the Eastern Orthodox churches, and certainly the Roman
church has had its mystics that claim the same, but it has rarely been
stated so baldly, so definitively in the West. As one famous prayer
puts it, Jesus “ascended into heaven to fill all things.”
Christianity could not have caught on if Jesus had just hung around.
Its survival depended upon the apostles growing up, showing up, coming
into their own through their own adventures and struggles. In other
words, if Jesus had stayed, the apostles never would have blossomed.
Jesus told them, “You will do greater things than I,” and
he needed to leave so that they could. Of course, he didn’t need
to leave in such a dramatic way, but if you’re going to make an
exit, it might as well be a grand one.
It’s no different for us now than it was for those first century
apostles, either. The Spirit of Jesus is everywhere present,
companioning us, encouraging us, inspiring us, but we still have to
step up and grow into our own spiritual maturity. We still have to find
the courage to go against the status quo, we still have to fearlessly
search ourselves morally, we still have to overcome the inertia of
apathy to enter into compassionate action on behalf of others, even
people we don’t even know. Especially them. As Paul says in our
reading today, we, the church, are his body, which is “the
fullness of him that filleth all in all.” This is what we are
here, for. There is a lot more suffering in the world today than in
Jesus’—not per capita, thanks be to God for modern
medicine—but just in terms of sheer volume. Our job is far from
finished.
In our parish we have just begun to have serious conversations about
moving out of survival mode and into mission mode—considering how
we can minister to those beyond our immediate community, how we can
“do greater things” than even Jesus himself did. It is a
conversation that encourages me and excites me. Jesus may have been
taken up, but we are “left behind”—not as some kind
of punishment, but because we are carrying on the work of Jesus in the
world—healing the sick, fostering compassion, befriending the
outcast…and indeed, raising the dead.
At this time I would like to invite any of you to share briefly what these readings brought up in you…
Let us pray:
Jesus, we have heard the scripture, and we have shared from the
scripture of our lives. Help us to be the visible presence of your
compassion in the world. Help us to grow into the kind of people you
have called us to be. Amen.