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.