Luke 24:44-53

Rev. Richard R. Wohlschlaeger

Swarthmore Presbyterian Church

May 16, 2010

I think I may have told you at another time how I rediscovered Ascension Day.  Perhaps in a way it wasn’t a rediscovery so much as a discovery in the sense that in our Protestant tradition in which I and so many of you are grounded Ascension Day hasn’t been what we might call a red-letter day on the calendar. 

The way I rediscovered Ascension Day is that I had gone one Thursday afternoon to the old farmer’s market behind what is now the “old” Target store on Baltimore Pike which, in turn, used to be Strawbridge’s (there seems to be much impermanence in the retail world!), and discovered that the poultry concession was closed.  Why, when the market is open only three days a week, would you be closed on one of them?  Surely that would put a dent in your profits.  It’s bad business.  And I felt disappointed, even annoyed.  But when your poultry concession is named Stoltzfus and you come from a culture of piety such as one can find in the heart of Lancaster County, then you close up shop and post a sign telling customers to come back to buy chicken after Ascension Day.

I have to admit feeling just a bit of shame as well when I looked at that hand-made sign about Ascension Day.  After all, I was a Christian pastor and the day had gone by me unnoticed.  And it probably wouldn’t have occurred to me that the day was a red-letter day on some Christians’ calendars.  But from that moment on I did become more aware of my own calendar and began to reflect on the meaning of Ascension Day for myself and within the whole flow of the story of our faith.

Ascension Day is always a Thursday because it occurs forty days after Easter, and, counting that way, forty days after Easter Sunday turns out to be a Thursday every time.  We’re observing it this morning because today is the closest time of worship for us to last Thursday, May 13 – Ascension Day this year.  Most of us probably went about our business not thinking of Ascension Day at all.  But, as I suggested, Ascension Day is observed more outwardly in some cultures than in others.  In Germany, for instance, from which most of the Lancaster County sects trace their heritage, Christi Himmelfahrt (“Christ’s journey into heaven”) is still an official school holiday, though few, I imagine, observe the day with any outward act of worship.  I suspect the kids enjoy a day off nonetheless.  In our culture, except for pockets of the religious devout, the day passes relatively unnoticed.

So what is a Protestant boy or girl in this country to do with the idea of Ascension Day?  Artists in our culture over the centuries have caught the images of Christ with outstretched arms rising into heaven, and though that image makes for good paintings, the whole scene doesn’t play well in our modern consciousness.  We’re a bit too sophisticated to accept the literalness of Christ’s floating up and away into a spatial heaven where today we have space stations orbiting the earth.  To my knowledge they’ve not run into heaven’s throne yet.

There are actually two accounts of the Ascension – the one we just heard from Luke and another in the first chapter of Acts.  Both are written by the same author, and yet they differ somewhat in detail.  Acts gives us just a bit more descriptive richness to feed the imagination of the great masters:

. . . as [the disciples] were watching [Jesus] was lifted up, and a cloud took

him out of their sight.  While he was going and they were gazing up toward

heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.  They said, “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.”

Let us say first that Luke saw three parts to the world: the earth on which he walked, the heavens above, and the world beneath.  When Jesus, risen from the dead, departs this world, he understandably goes upward toward the heavens above.  And yet Luke doesn’t necessarily intend that we take his story literally.  Marcus Borg suggests that Luke himself gives us hints that the story should be read symbolically or metaphorically.  First, the description of the Ascension in Acts says that it occurred forty days after Easter.  In the Bible the number 40 – as in the account of the flood that lasted forty days and forty nights – is a non-literal number.  The number 40 suggests a relatively long period of time, as the number 3 suggests a relatively short period of time.

A second clue to the story’s non-literal nature is that there is a crucial seeming contradiction in Luke’s two accounts of the Ascension.  In the one we read that concludes the Gospel of Luke, the Ascension appears to have occurred the night of Easter itself.  But in Acts the same writer specifically says that the Ascension occurred forty days after Easter, giving time for Jesus’ many post-resurrection appearances.  Is the author unaware of his own contradiction?  Or is he intending to say that the story need not be taken literally but that the meaning of it is important – very important – to our faith?

And that then begs the question: Why is Ascension Day so important to our faith as to have a special designation on our liturgical calendar?  The answer is this: for Christians in the past and now, Ascension Day meant and means that Jesus is now with God – at God’s right hand – “one with God.” 

And that proclamation has at least two important ramifications.  As Marcus Borg points out, there is a political and a religious dimension to the meaning of the Ascension.  Politically, to say that after the Ascension Jesus is “at God’s right hand,” a position of honor and authority, means that Jesus is “lord.”  In the first century, when kings and emperors claimed to be lords, this counter claim had strong political meaning.  To say “Jesus is Lord” meant, and means, that the Herods and Caesars of this world were not, and are not lords.  They were not then, and they are not now.

Second, because the risen and ascended Jesus is at the right hand of God – one with God – he, like God, can be experienced anywhere.  Jesus is no longer restricted or confined to time and space as he was during his historical lifetime.  Rather, like the God whom he knew intimately in his own experience, he continues to be known in the experience of his followers.  For Christians, the risen and ascended Christ is Immanuel – “God with us.”

You see, the farther Jesus ascends into heaven, the closer he is to us.  Loosed from the bonds of mortality, the eternal Christ abides within our hearts as never before.  An eleventh-century poem says it this way:

God is over all things,

under all things

outside all,

within, but not enclosed,

without, but not excluded,

above, but not raised up,

below, but not depressed,

wholly above, presiding,

wholly without, embracing,

wholly within, filling.

As he was about to be lifted up into heaven, Jesus turned to his disciples as he still turns to us, saying: “You are witnesses of these things.”  Indeed, celebrating the Ascension, I would proclaim in response to Christ’s reminder that, yes, I have been witness to these things, in my own life and in the life of others.  To the power of repentance and of God’s forgiveness.  To the glory of the divine Spirit in the flesh of our mortality, enabling us to forge through misfortune and pain to a new reality of ecstatic joy. 

Recognizing this in their own lives, the disciples of old responded to Jesus’ declarations and to his departure from them into heaven with joyful acts of worship.  This seems to have been not just a temporary high for Luke tells us that the disciples were “continually in the temple blessing God.”  Rather than being depressed that Jesus had withdrawn and left them with a heavy responsibility to carry on their own, they recognized that as Jesus assumes a position at the right hand of God he is in some miraculous way, beyond their understanding, even closer to them than he had been in life.  And they have courage to go on.

St. Augustine once said, “Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not.”  The ancient covenantal partnership remains.  In another way of saying it, in God all things are possible.  Ascension Day is an appropriate time to reflect on the divine-human relationship in which God abides in us, and we abide in God.  Amen.