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"GOD
DIDN'T ABSCOND"
TEXT: Acts 1: 6-14
"GOD DIDN'T ABSCOND" TEXT: Acts 1: 6-14 Introduction: Now, many of you remember in your early experience of church life those times of holding hands in a circle, at the conclusion of Sunday activities, especially evening youth meeting, and closing your eyes, and singing softly, "Come into my heart, come into my heart, Lord Jesus." That sentiment can be fine. But isn't there something a bit too sentimental and cozy about Jesus tucked safely, and innocuously, in our individual hearts? The story of Jesus' ascension is a story about the nature and authority of the church, the followers of Jesus, and it is also a large, cosmic claim about the authority of Jesus as the one who has ascended, who is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. I am sure that there is a part of us which would be quite content to treat the ascension in this way - as a rather humorous vestige from a pre-scientific world. We now live in a flattened, ranch style, one dimensional universe, not the three-storied creation of our ancestors. In our world, nothing goes up but the cost of living, unemployment statistics, the number of the hungry and /or homeless and the lives taken by war over land or nationalistic agendas. Jesus stays in place. Here, feet squarely planted in solidarity with us - next door, arm in arm with our values, our needs, our limits, our world view. God is now the worldly Marxist liberator, or the liberal noble example of highest humanity, or the amenable, leisure-suited panelist on the TV Christian talk show, not the ascended one. It's all been flattened out now, whittled to our scale, a worldview as uneventful as a Muleshoe, Texas, landscape. God no longer goes up or anywhere else. Little wonder that we have been willing to dispose of the ascension. It doesn't fit anymore; it's not mentioned that often in the New Testament anyway. It falls on a Thursday. Who needs it? But before we completely delete it from our consciousness, we ought at least to know what the church was trying to say in its early belief in the ascension. How odd for us to dismiss the ascension because it comes out of an alien cosmology. Who cares about the cosmology of a doctrine if cosmology is not the doctrine's chief concern? To dismiss this faith story on the basis of our scientific cosmology is as ignorant as dismissing (or affirming) Genesis 1 and 2 on the basis of scientific considerations. If Genesis 1 and 2 cared about science, it would be different. The church never worried about the ascension being scientifically true. The church's only claim was that the story is eternally true. What on earth is the church getting at when we say, "He ascended into heaven"? What are we to make of such a very strange story as the one that is our gospel for today? All
the church meant to say on Ascension Day was this: As Calvin said of the ascension, here is a story "not about a place but a function", i.e., the exercise of lordship. Cosmological, spatial considerations have little to do with it, except as our inadequate human attempt to depict a divine working that can't be grasped. All the church meant to say is that there is something cosmic at work here, something too grand to be limited to our earthbound categories. The same Jesus of Nazareth - carpenter's son, teacher, crucified and suffering one - the same Jesus has now gone up to sit down at the right hand of the Creator. This Jesus - the one who was rejected by the establishment, crucified by Caesar, dead and buried - to this suffering one-- God said, "Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool" (Ps 110:1). This Jesus now rules with the Creator: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," he says (Mt 28:18). He also says, "That as God has sent me so send I you." "Receive the Spirit." "Go in my power." "Lo, I am with you always!" It hit me that we do not say, " Jesus absconded." What we do shout is, "Jesus ascended!" God has begun in heaven what is yet to be accomplished on earth. Christ is gone, not to forsake us, but to continue to redeem us. He has gone to take charge, to rule, to put all things under his feet. The cosmology of the ascension bemuses the modern mind because the puny, self-centered "modern mind" no longer asks questions for which cosmic, universal answers are needed. We don't worry too much about the big picture. Just think for a moment about our political, socio-economic policies. Rather, we content ourselves with the cultivation of our own little plots of turf, hunker down, take care of our own little corner of the world. If we happen to be doing okay at the moment, we don't worry too much about the rest of creation. For people with such small concerns, no wonder we have difficulty understanding a large notion like the ascension of Christ. The doctrine of the ascension is not for sunny, calm, ordered days in May. Its force is not that of escapist nostalgia but of defiant, clinch-fisted apocalypticism. It's a faith for the last days, and the darkest days, days caught between the heel of Caesar and the chant of the mob. The one who came and stood beside us, who suffered because of us and for us, who felt the heel of Caesar, the fickleness of the mob, and the cowardice of disciples, this one has gone up. He is God, not just for the church, not just within my heart, but for the whole world. Nothing shall be beyond his lordship. This is not about escapism. It is time to stop gazing up into heaven (Acts 1:11) and start looking on earth for evidence of Christ's rule because no matter who is in the White House or what the newspapers say, Christ is "Ruler of Creation." He holds the whole cosmos in his expansive embrace. So, to a timid, lethargic, compromising church, let us declare, "Christ Ascended!" Because God has gone up, we have something to say to life in the valley. So go into your Jerusalem and say it! To the mother weeping for her starving child, to the person with terminal illness, the unemployed, the suffering we say God has gone up. Let us say to them what he has said to us, "I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God" (Jn 20:17). But no church can be easy with this great, cosmic, apocalyptic answer if that church no longer raises the great, cosmic, apocalyptic questions. The ascension is the great answer for the great questions about war, injustice, oppression, and faith. Because God has gone up, we're compelled toward cosmic, worldwide, multinational, universal concerns because even these must be subjected to his rule.
Even for our smaller questions, the ascension is the answer, even for
ordinary, commonplace Sundays in May like this one, it's important to
remember who rules. To those first disciples who feared that he was leaving,
he assured them that he was going, not away, but up (Jn 20:19). Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, shall find them; on that separate, but more free and honorable ground where the state places those who are not with her but against her - the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor." (Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience [Applewood Books, 2000].)
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