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The Blessing |
Luke 24: 44-53; Acts 1: 1-11
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© John Ewing Roberts |
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INTRODUCTION On Easter Sunday, six weeks ago, we celebrated a great festival of the church, observed the beautiful ordinance of baptism, and sang, Christ the Lord is Risen Today. That great hymn contains these words: "Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia! Foll'wing our exalted Head, Alleluia! Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia! Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!" (Charles Wesley, "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," No. 159, Wesley L. Forbis, editor, Baptist Hymnal [Nashville: Convention Press] 1991) Christ soars, then we soar where he has led. The ascension is both Christ's and ours (Fred B. Craddock et al, Preaching Through the Christian Year - C [Valley Forge: Trinity Press International] 1994, p. 264) Today is Ascension Sunday, the last Sunday in Easter; next Sunday is Pentecost, another great festival of the church. Again we will have baptism as the climax of the service. Kevin Gross and Rob Waddail are the candidates. I hope there will be others. Right now let us concentrate on the Ascension with the wonderful concept of soaring as Christ has. This is a difficult concept. Theologians can help us a little: What happened was that Christ passed, almost instantaneously, into another dimension. They could only describe it as a shimmer, perhaps an upward dazzle, a swift blurring of outline, and he was gone, as they had seen him go before (Luke 24: 31; John 20: 19- 26). (E. M. Blaiklock, Acts - The Birthday of the Church [Old Tappan, New Jersey: Fleming H. Revell Co.] 1980, pp. 12-13) That's hard to grasp, even for grown-ups, maybe especially for grown-ups, because all this talk about clouds and Jesus disappearing is very disorienting. FALLING UP The title poem of Shel Silverstein's book, Falling Up, is all about a child who soars and whose world is turned upside down with a disturbing result: I tripped on my shoelace And I fell up - Up to the roof tops, Up over the town, Up past the tree tops, Up over the mountains, Up where the colors Blend into the sounds. But it got me so dizzy When I looked around, I got sick to my stomach And I threw down. (Shel Silverstein, Falling Down [New York: HarperCollins] 1996, p. 7) Up versus down, disorientation and confusion, dizzying and disturbing, "up where the colors blend into sounds," an image that is beyond sense but makes sense, and leads to the predictable, unpleasant, and funny image of throwing down. I thought of Shel Silverstein's poem when I read a commentary on the Ascension of our Lord: The festival of the Ascension is endlessly problematic and admits of no simple or single "explanation." It is clear in these texts that the church struggled to voice a reality that ran beyond all its explanatory categories. We must take care that we do not engage in domestication that curbs the wonder and wildness of these texts. (p. 322) (Charles B., Cousar et al, Tests for Preaching - A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV - Year C [Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press] 1994, p. 322) When humans first began to launch space satellites, a lady who meant well, but who was relentlessly out to domesticate wonder and wildness out of the ascension, proposed that we figure out the exact day of the first Easter, add forty days to it to get to ascension day, then calculate the position of the earth on that day, then draw an imaginary line out from Jerusalem, with the confidence that this line would lead us to heaven. Her proposal would never work, because the ascension goes beyond our natural categories - it is wonderful and yes, wild. For example, were you thrown off course in the scripture lessons? Luke in the gospel that bears his name has Jesus say farewell and depart on the eve of Resurrection Day, what we call the first Easter Sunday. Luke in the book of Acts has Jesus ascend 40 days later. One departure is on the Mount of Olives, the other from near Bethany, a setting which may not be problematic since Bethany was on the eastern side of the Mount of Olives. But was it on Easter or 40 days later? St. Augustine said of the Ascension, "This is the festival which confirms the grace of all the festivals together, without which the profitableness of every festival would have perished. For unless the Savior has ascended into heaven, His Nativity would have come to nothing...and His Passion would have borne no fruit for us, and His most holy Resurrection would have been useless." (Cited in J. G. Davies, He Ascended Into Heaven [London: Lutterworth] 1958, p. 170) The cloud which took Jesus out of their sight had nothing to do with weather conditions on that day. This is a very special cloud, the cloud of the Presence of God in all its holiness. "It is the same cloud which led the Israelites in the wilderness, covered Mt. Sinai, and the Mount of the Transfiguration. Being taken up in the cloud therefore represents less chance of place (going up into the sky) and more a change of presence. Through the Ascension the Risen Christ merges again with the eternal, transcendent Godhead and the mystery of the Trinity is again completed. He who had `humbled himself and became obedient unto death' is now the exalted Lord of all." (Larry A. Tachte, "Welcome Home," Augsburg Sermons 2 [Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House] 1982, p. 143) When I was a teenager at Ridgecrest, a very good youth worker found a teachable moment about clouds when we were on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Thick clouds forced us to pull off the highway. We delighted in running through clouds and waving our hands through them. "You can see them, but you can't feel them; they are insubstantial, but they can change your behavior, making us stop, making you laugh and play; they are material, but immaterial. What a perfect medium for the movement from this world to another level of reality!" Acts 1: 9 says that Jesus "was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight." I don't know the physics and astronomy of it; but I understand that there is more to life than the categories of human understanding. I am sure that all who follow Jesus the Christ will follow "our exalted Head," soar one day where he has led. WHAT HAS THE ASCENSION TO DO WITH US? There were other issues than soaring, for the first believers. The problem for them was this: if Jesus embodied God "in the flesh," and if Jesus was no longer in sight, where would people find God embodied in the future? After Jesus was lifted up, and the cloud took him out of sight, what about the incarnation? There is always an implied second question, the question many of you are already asking yourselves, "What has this got to do with anything in my life or our world? I've come to church today worried about my health, my family, my job, my bills, my grief, my fears, and a bunch of other things. So who wants to talk theology? What have incarnation and ascension go to do with anything anyway?" THE EPHESIANS CONNECTION The author of Ephesians had an answer: "God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at the right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." (Ephesians 1: 20-22) (emphasis added) This is dense, powerful language. It means that the power God used to raise Jesus from the dead is still operative. And that sooner or later that power will win out, and Jesus the Christ is with God ("at the right hand") in this process on behalf of his community, the church. Meanwhile, the church is to serve as his body; we are to embody Jesus, fully, as his fullness fills us. If Jesus embodied God "in the flesh," if Jesus was no longer in sight, and if people want to see God embodied in the future, the place to look would be in the church. The progression goes like this: "If God who is invisible was embodied in Jesus, and if Jesus who has ascended is no longer visible, then the community of Jesus must visibly embody him." The church must be the body of Christ. If any one is going to see Jesus fleshed out, incarnate, embodied, it has to be in the church. That is why it is so wonderful when we "get it right," and so horrible when we "mess up. " We are the body of Christ. (I Corinthians 12: 27) An old fashioned poem, the kind that used to end sermons, puts it this way: Christ has no hands, but our hands To do His work today; He has no feet but our feet To lead (all) in His way; He has no tongue but our tongues To tell (all) how He died; He has no help but our help To bring them to His side. We are the only Bible The careless world will read; We are the sinner's Gospel, We are the scoffer's creed; We are the Lord's last message Written in deed and word - What if the line is crooked? What if the type is blurred? What if our hands our busy With other work than His? What if our feet are walking Where sin's allurement is? What if our tongues are speaking Of things His lips would spurn? How can we hope to help Him Unless from Him we learn? (Annie Johnson Flint, "Jesus Christ and We," Christ and the Fine Arts, edited by Cynthia Pearl Maus [New York: Harper and Brothers] 1938, p. 712) THE NEXT MOVE Let us go back to the disciples on the first Ascension Day as they stood outside Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives. Necks aching, eyes straining, backs arched, they kept looking up at that cloud. But a merciful messenger interrupted their stunned staring into space with these words: "You men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven." (Acts 1: 11) And as they trudged down the Mount of Olives, they were on the same road they had taken following Jesus on a donkey ride while children shouted and waved palms not so long ago. I suspect that when their eyes fell on a garden of olive trees at the foot of the Mount in a place called Gethsemane, they remembered that Jesus had been taken from them for the first time in that spot, taken by Romans with swords and led off to trial and crucifixion. But God in his power and mercy and love had raised him up and given him back to them for a time. Now he had been taken from them again, but this time, not by violence in the abuse of power, but by the powerful God whose Spirit of power was to be made available to them - being filled with the fullness of God would not be all that impossible if God were to do the filling! Hang on! Pentecost is coming! But at that moment it was hard for them not to concentrate on their sense of loss, of loss upon loss. The Romans took him and killed him - they had lost him. God raised him up. They seemed to have him back. Then God took him up - they had lost him again. Something else was going on besides loss; there always is more than loss in such times. "Power" is the key word here. Listen again to Ephesians. "God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at the right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all." (Ephesians 1: 20-22) This is the power you and I long for today, the power that answers the all important question I mentioned earlier: "What has this got to do with anything in my life or our world? I've come to church today worried about my health, my family, my job, my bills, my grief, my fears, and a bunch of other things. So who wants to talk theology? What have incarnation and ascension got to do with anything anyway?" We want to talk theology if it helps us get to the point where we are open to the power of God, the fullness of God, the possibilities of embodying God and being the continuation of the incarnation. POWER AT FOUR POINTS Here is how this power interacts with the church and with us at four important points. (1) Separation and Loss Even as we sense the withdrawal or absence of God in Christ, his power can still be at work. Frederick Buechner explains: Each of us...carries around inside...a certain emptiness - a sense that something is missing, a restlessness, the deep feeling that somehow all is not right inside...Psychologists sometimes call it anxiety, theologians sometimes call it estrangement, but whatever you call it, I doubt that there are many who do not recognize the experience itself, especially no one of our age, which has been variously termed the age of anxiety, the lost generation, the beat generation, the lonely crowd. Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. (Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, compiled by George Connor [New York: HarperCollins] 1992, p. 128) This is the power of God in the midst of separation and loss. (2) Worship God's presence and power shone in acts of worship, whether they were in the temple daily or in a home where the upper room helped them remember Jesus. (Acts 3: 1; 1: 13) (3) Witness Out of worship and waiting for the Spirit came the power to witness. "You shall be witnesses...." (Acts 1: 8) The power of God prepared and prepares the church for witness, and encounters us in each act of witness. (4) Blessing Luke 24: 50ff. tells how "lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up to heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God." Even as he goes, he blesses. Even as he goes, he entrusts us with mission. In just a minute we will sing of this remarkable gesture by Jesus: "See! he lifts his hands above... See! he shows the prints of love... Hark! his gracious lips bestow... blessings on his church below." (Charles Wesley, "Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise," A New Hymnal for Colleges and Schools, edited by Jeffrey Rowthorn and Russell Schulz-Widmar [New Haven: Yale University Press] 1992, No. 286] CONCLUSION I do not approve of lotteries. And if you think what I am about to say in any way condones them, you are dead wrong. But there was a brief moment this week when the big Powerball lottery story illustrated a feeling I have at this time in our church service. Let me explain. There was a time when the reporters told us that someone had won the Powerball lottery jackpot of $195 million, but that the person had not come forward to claim the prize. At first we only knew that the winning ticket had been bought in a Wisconsin fishing hamlet. Where was the winner? Had he or she lost the winning ticket? Was someone not paying attention? What was wrong with a person who could be a winner and not come forward? Then we found out that a certain Frank Capaci, from a working class Chicago suburb of Streamwood, had plunked down $5.00 at his neighborhood bar on the last day of the lottery ticket sales. The bartender took his money and that of other bar patrons and drove to Wisconsin, the closest state where tickets were sold. There was a winner, but he was just slow to respond. We have come now to the moment in our weekly service called "the invitation." You can see where I am going - the invitation is just what it says it is, an invitation to come forward and claim a greater prize than millions of dollars, a treasure greater than any annuity, a reward better than any cash payout, before or after taxes. The prize has many parts: - the prize is forgiveness of sins; - the prize is eternal life; - the prize is having Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior; - the prize is having the presence and power of the Spirit of God in your life. Why do people not come forward and claim the prize of all prizes, all that goes with having Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior? You don't have to be perfect to come forward; just the opposite, you simply need to admit that you aren't perfect but would like the help of God in your life. The aisle is not that long - children come down it each week to spend time with Greg Cochran. The pastor who will greet you is a friendly fellow. The people who will affirm you are warm and supportive. The hymn we sing now gives you the opportunity to receive the blessing, your moment to claim the prize. [This sermon is for circulation within the Woodbrook congregation and may not be reproduced without permission.] |