May 8, 2016
Acts 1:1-11
Luke 24:44-53

As these 50 days of the Easter season approach their conclusion with next week’s Pentecost Sunday, the Sunday prior, according to the liturgical calendar, is always a celebration of the Ascension, this moment of Christ’s final, post-resurrection departing. We read the story twice this morning, presumably from the same author who tells us how Christ is lifted up in a cloud, vanishing from the sight of his disciples.

Despite its annual occurrence, it is probably the liturgical observation that most churches (or perhaps most Christians) are most apt to dismiss. We’re challenged enough to give historical credibility to some of the other more miraculous events of Christ’s life; this one just seems to go a bit beyond what’s necessary.  Sure, if Christ rose in bodily from from the dead, as the Church confesses, we need some kind of explanation for his eventual bodily absence, but we may be hard pressed to explain why Luke’s version ended up as doctrine.  Professor Ronald Cole-Turner says it fairly bluntly, “We do not, as a matter of fact, believe that Jesus ended his earthly ministry with the equivalent of a rocket launch, rising a few hundred miles above the earth.”[i]

The professor notes that scripture says that Jesus was “lifted up,” but this was written, of course, before we understood that the earth is constantly on the move and that the notion of “up,” meaning a fixed spatial location above our heads, is simply not a coherent idea.

Still, there’s a great deal of coherence to Luke’s gospel, and the meaning of the Ascension becomes much more relevant and important when we can accept that our gospel texts are less about history than they are about theological confession. To be sure, they are historical in style, and they are rooted in historical events, but their purpose always and primarily is to tell us something important and compelling about this amazing, mysterious, and eternally loving God who appeared in the flesh, suffered our rejections, died at our hands, and yet loved us too much to let us end the story that way.

Cole-Turner continues, “The significance of Easter and ascension are tied together as two parts of a single whole. Together they constitute one sweeping movement that brings the obedient Christ not just from the grave to the skies but from hell and godlessness to the place of highest honor at the right hand of God the Father.  [You recall the words of our creed that say, he ascends into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God, the Father, from whence he shall come to judge the living and the dead.]  The distance bridged in this movement of resurrection and exaltation is not measured in the number of miles from earth to heaven but in the amount of evil and destruction that separates us from God.  It is not the force of gravity that must be overcome, but the forces of sin, death, hell, and annihilation.”[ii]

The Ascension represents the closing of the circle, the culmination of the mission of Christ who became one of us so that he might lift us all with him into the fellowship of God. The Ascension is the gathering of Christ back into his place in the Triune God; it is “the End,” which also prefigures our great “End,” when divine love gathers up all of creation into eternal communion with its creator.

And so, there’s a victorious tone to Ascension Sunday, which then gets amplified on Pentecost when the Spirit that is Christ’s gets poured out on us. Bodily presence is replaced with a spiritual presence that assures us of Christ’s victory by allowing us to know something of it, experience something of it, even now as we live toward its end.  That’s why the Ascension matters.  It reminds us of, and ties us to, the victory of God over godlessness, the victory of God’s will for salvation over everything that might get in the way.

Victory has been a part of Christian faith from the very beginning, but understanding that victory, interpreting it in the midst of life’s messiness, integrating it into lives that are realistic, but also hopeful, compassionate, and peaceful is trickier than we think. Some of us make sense of that victory by turning Christian faith into a ticket to heaven.  The messy present is reduced to being a means to that victorious end that we are assured of.  But, to me (and to many others) that’s just not a compelling enough vision.  The now has to mean more than that.  There’s opportunity NOW, there’s life to be had NOW, there’s victory to know NOW, otherwise, why bother living it?

“Everything happens for a reason.” You’ve no doubt heard people say those words.  That phrase is one of those theological tenants that is rooted in a particular way of understanding God’s victory for the now.  I think that when it is said it is a way of confessing that even if we don’t understand what is happening, or even if what is happening is painful or difficult, we believe that God has a purpose for us, that God is working for good, that in the end this particular circumstance is wrapped up in God’s greater plan for salvation.

Someone once asked me if I believed the phrase. She had found me working on a sermon and sipping coffee on the patio of a Starbucks.  She wasn’t a church member.  I didn’t know her very well.  But her ailing mother was a neighbor of mine, and she had moved back home to be with her.  She was grieving her mother’s decline when she saw me and sat down.  She told me about her mother’s difficulties and about her own sadness, and she finished with “but I know that everything happens for a reason.”  I replied that I was very sorry for all the she and her mother were suffering.  I had no need to address the theology of her conclusion, but then she asked me point blank.  “You do believe that everything happens for a reason, don’t you?”

What would you have said? You see, when I hear those words I see visions of a God who sits in heavenly comfort doling out pain and suffering for some higher cause, as if it were God’s will for her mom to take ill and suffer a long, slow decline and death.  As if God wanted it that way so that she or somebody else could learn a life lesson of some sort.  But, I just don’t see God toying with us that way.  I don’t think God desires brokenness.  So, I said, “No, I don’t think everything happens for a reason.  I think sometimes things happen that make God sad.  Things happen that God doesn’t want to happen.”  She looked at me with great disappointment and said, “It surprises me that you – a person of God – would say that.”

I didn’t mean to rob her of her comfort. And, I think that today, if this were to happen, I would have responded a bit differently.  But, the truth of the matter is that I see God’s victory working a bit differently than she did.

In the book that our Monday night group has been reading, Adam Hamilton talks about this very question. He says that most of the time when we say that, “everything happens for a reason,” we aren’t really talking about cause and effect.  “We usually mean that God must have a plan we cannot yet see.  Some [he says] find this comforting.  Often is has just the opposite effect.  A woman once told me how, after the death of her six year old son, her church friends sought to comfort her by telling her that ‘everything happens for a reason.’  That was the last time she went to church.  She asked herself, ‘If everything happens for a reason, then God must have wanted my son to die.  What kind of God decides that, in order to accomplish his purposes, he will take the life of a six year old boy?”[iii]

I think that’s a very good question.

Hamilton offers an alternative view of the way God works victoriously in the face of suffering. It comes from a 1950’s newspaper clipping that a friend shared with him, and it fits more closely to my own understanding.  “Suffering is not God’s desire for us, but it occurs in the process of life.  Suffering is not given to teach us something, but through it we may learn.  Suffering is not given to teach others something, but through it they may learn.  Suffering is not given to punish us, but sometimes it is the consequence of our sin or poor judgment.  Suffering does not occur because our faith is weak, but through it our faith may be strengthened. God does not depend on human suffering to achieve his purposes, but sometimes through suffering his purposes are achieved.  Suffering can either destroy us, or it can add meaning to our life.”[iv]

My own experience is that some of my greatest times of suffering have birthed my greatest times of growth and spiritual discovery. In fact, it was in the midst of my greatest grieving that Christ appeared to me most profoundly.  But, I do not believe that God caused my loss or willed my pain.  Rather, I think that God used my loss and pain to bring about healing and a newness of life.  And in so doing, God revealed something of God’s victory to me.

The early Christians didn’t sign on to following Christ and to being guided by his Spirit because it would make life easier, full of victory that is devoid of pain. They signed on because it made their lives sacred.  They embraced the Spirit because it tied their lives to a force that was eternally and unchangeably beautiful.  It brought them victory right NOW even in the midst of their struggle.

Professor Cole-Turner’s concluding remarks feel like a good place to end. He writes, “This doctrine [of the Ascension] is the presupposition for the profoundly important belief that right now Jesus Christ is interceding for us, praying for [and making real] our salvation.  Jesus our high priest, who knows exactly the temptations and the trials of our human condition, bears up our prayers with is own, assuring that our feeble prayers reach far beyond the limits of our power to project them.  For while we await our own ascension, our prayers ascend even now with the exalted Christ to the very heart of God.”[v]

[i] Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 2, page 498.

[ii] Page 500.

[iii] Making Sense of the Bible, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2014.  Page 227-228.

[iv] Page 226.

[v] Page 502.