Sermon - Rev. Judith Perry
Some of today’s reflection came from a sermon by Garry Deverell in 2002.
The story of the Ascension, where the risen Jesus takes leave of his disciples and is taken up into heaven by God, can be found only in Luke, the Gospel, and in The Acts of the Apostles.
You will not find the story in Matthew or John, and the reference to an ascension in Mark 16 comes from a very late manuscript which almost certainly relies on Luke’s account.
So, the Ascension belongs to Luke. It is his story. But why does he tell us the story at all, where the other gospel writers do not?
And why does he think it so important that he tells it not once, but twice—once at the end of his Gospel and once here in Acts?
It’s sort of natural to think of heaven being up, with a God riding on clouds or in a heavenly regal court on a throne with Jesus on his right hand as his Chancellor.
We retain those old images and figures of speech even though we know that they are all bosh.
There are some marvellous old paintings of the ascension with the just the legs or feet of Jesus at the top of the depiction, and the men underneath looking astonished up his skirts.
But whatever, they and we have not been abandoned. What about this ascension story?
First, we have a resurrected Jesus who greets and meets his followers and then we don’t. He’s gone. For many folk, Christ has indeed left the stage, and they have left whatever faith they had behind.
I am just back from Quebec, and seeing all the abandoned churches, Protestant and Catholic. La Sacred Coeur de Marie has been reconfigured into Pickle Ball Courts.
The Sunday before last I went to Wesley United Church, a huge church with about 20 people in all. We celebrated Star Wars Sunday.
We were given light sabres. These are weapons. The prayers and the sermon were Star War themed, and we waved these around when we sang a hymn.
You might have some thoughts about this, and you can tell me later.
This church is in the middle of Montreal, Nore Dame de Grace, NDG, a traditional anglophone area with large immigrant populations.
When I grew up there the common language was English and the second language was Yiddish.
Now this is the only United Church the borough, and no Anglican Churches.
Growing up in Quebec, the Catholic Church called the shots, and we Protestants held our flags high. All gone now
For so many Jesus is gone, and God is of no consequence.
Here is a way of reading the Ascension story, and, as a consequence, another way of understanding the experience of abandonment.
Let’s summarise what Luke has to say like this.
Christ is no longer present as a particular human being who occupies a particular place and time, he is nevertheless, also by virtue of the Ascension, more abundantly present and active than he has ever been before.
This not as some kind of ghostly presence who hangs in the air but never takes form.
No, says Luke, Christ is now present as the material body of Christian believers, brought into being and inspired by the very Spirit that made Jesus who and what he was.
Sometimes this is a church, a congregation, sometimes an intentional community, sometimes a group of close friends who join together in the faith: just the two or three, These are all forms of church.
The Spirit now makes the Church what Jesus of Nazareth was, so infusing and shaping its life and work that the mission of Jesus continues in the Church as a real and tangible Christ-presence for the world.
We mistake Christ’s presence for physical buildings, churches, like this one here, or the one I saw in Chambly with the large banner which read: “Et la huitieme jour, Dieu crea le pickleball.”
On the eighth day, God created pickleball. The sanctuary had become pickleball courts.
Church buildings are just that, buildings.
If Luke were here today (and perhaps he is, in the Spirit), I think he would say that the modernist use of his story seriously neglects certain crucial details.
In the ascension story there is certainly a withdrawal of the divine presence . Christ is taken from the community into heaven.
But it would be premature and reductionist to then assume that the gap, the emptiness left by God’s withdrawal, may be filled only by the activity and imagination of human beings.
Now, listen carefully, because this next bit is a little tricky.
Presence is not simply about being able to see and touch things in such a way that we can get our heads around them.
We’ll never get our heads around the Divine Essence.
Following Luke, presence is more properly what is given us in the resurrection and ascension of Christ.
It is the irreducible power and authority of the Other, a presence which so exceeds and overwhelms our powers of comprehension, that when God visits us, we know it has happened, but we are left powerless to explain how or why. Even to ourselves.
Why? Because the Other is a strong and passionate love that takes hold of us completely, body and soul, covering and surrounding us like water.
In a repetition of the death and resurrection of Christ, our human powers are put to death, our powers to know things, to objectify and use other people, to control who and how God would be. All gone.
We suddenly find ourselves dispossessed of even our power to picture what God is like.
This Other arrives in our bodies as the power of a new life, life lived on a plane hitherto unimagined, life lived in communion with the God who is love.
In that power, we are commissioned and sent to bear witness, not to the power of this presence in our lives, but to the power of our lives in this presence,
We are destined to be mystics. In the wake of the Ascension, Christ remains present to us, but this presence is of a different order.
It is a ‘saturating presence,’ a presence which so pervades and infuses the world with God’s glory that it confuses and dazzles our limited imaginations.
We cannot to pin Christ down to a particular bodily form and draw borders around him which define where he is and where he isn’t, nevertheless, he is present in material reality which we encounter everyday:
But, what good is a superabundant presence if it dazzles our eyes so much that we cannot see that Christ is with us?
In John’s Gospel, Anne read a prayer of Jesus for the Church, which comes as the end of a long conversation which John places at the Last Supper before Jesus is crucified.
This conversation about how the disciples will cope when Jesus has gone. As with Luke, John does not portray Jesus’ imminent disappearance as a withdrawal of presence.
In a profoundly paradoxical statement in chapter 14.28, Jesus says to his friends “I am going away; but I am coming to you”. It is by going away that I will come to you.
For John, the going away is ineeded in order to have a more profound communion with Jesus than was ever before possible, a communion which echoes and redoubles the love which Jesus already shares with his Father.
For Jesus will now come in the Spirit to gather people into the divine presence which signifies here a participation with Jesus in that sacrificial giving and receiving of divine love which we call, in shorthand, the Trinity.
We’ll talk more about the Trinity in a couple of week’s time.
This participation in Jesus goes way beyond knowing and seeing or even imagining.
The Ascension is for Christians both a fact and a promise.
The fact is this: that Christ is everywhere present as the authority and power of God, a power which before and behind us, a power which forever seeks our surrender to God’s love.
And here is the promise: if we will first discipline ourselves, through prayer, to discern Christ’s presence in the midst; and if we will then surrender ourselves to his love, body and soul;
For Christ has not left us as orphans. He comes to us tangibly and bodily every day, to love and care for us as only God knows how. If only we will recognise and surrender.