Acts 16.16-34
Psalm 68.1-20
Revelation 22.12-14, 16-17, 20
Acts 1.1-11
 

When I was in graduate school, along with whatever I was supposed to be doing, I occasionally took some courses in theology. In one seminar there were, besides the graduate students in religion, some seminary students. One day one of them was struggling to articulate a question; finally, he came out with it: Is Jesus Christ alive now? Clearly this was the first time he had conceived this momentous question. Just as clearly, the professor wasn't thrilled at having this question posed and impatiently tried to evade it. But the student persisted and finally the irritated professor said "Yes, he is." The seminarian immediately followed up with "Why do you believe that?" The professor's response was "Damn it, I don't know! I just said that to shut you up." In my own department this sort of interaction between faculty and students would have been unremarkable: the last time I saw one of my professors from that department was at a conference; his first words to me were "Hello Wacome, you idiot. You're fat." And I was one of the students he liked. But there in the genteel Duke Religion Department it was shocking. Yet that question rightly arouses our fears and passions. Everything depends on how we answer it.

I have often found the ascension troubling. Consider how things look from the point of view of anyone with inclinations toward skepticism: "You say Jesus is risen, that he was put to death yet brought back to life, not just resuscitated eventually to die again, but resurrected into a whole new kind of life that will never die? Really? So, where is he?" "Well, you see, he went up this mountain and sailed off into space; he ascended to heaven in a cloud." The skeptic can be forgiven for suspecting this is an all too easy way out, a convenient ad hoc explanation for the very large fact that the resurrected Christ, supposedly alive today, is nowhere to be seen. It doesn't help that Luke, our gospel writer most concerned with historical accuracy, can't seem to get the chronology right: is it, as he says in his gospel right after the resurrection? But if so what becomes of the forty days of post-resurrection appearances? No wonder some scholars say outright that it's not an historical event, but "a purely mythological event...a symbol intended to express the significance of Christ" (John Macquarrie, Principles of Christian Theology, 2nd ed. 1977, p. 290.) I think there's no general objection to this sort of take on an event in the New Testament narrative. But there's a decisive objection to it here: if the ascension is purely mythological then so is the resurrection. If Jesus was resurrected he didn't then die and he still lives. But he's obviously not here with us. Take away a real ascension or something like it and, as St. Paul would say, we are to be pitied more than anyone, pinning our hopes on a resurrection that never happened. So far as faith goes, it really happened. But that raises another problem: where is he?

No matter how Luke might have intended his account of Jesus being taken up into heaven, in the ancient world it could have been taken literally. The Earth was at the bottom of the universe and heaven was above - in the heavens. While God as such was of course not located in space heaven was up there somewhere. That's where Jesus' body, that body still bearing the wounds of the crucifixion, could reasonably be located. As we all know the ancient cosmological picture that this presupposes isn't right; we have a very different conception of the cosmos, one that makes it exceeding difficult to believe there's a special place out there, half a billion light years past the Virgo Supercluster, say, where Jesus of Nazareth is walking around today. Thus modern theologians say things like it wasn't a change of location but a change of state. Okay, but that doesn't answer the question: he sure isn't at the old location, so where is he?

One theological handbook straigtfacedly asserts: "the body of Christ is now no longer present within the space and time framework but belongs to the Son of God in Eternity." This strikes me as flat out wrong. It's nonsensical. A body has to be someplace. A material object must have a location just as it has a shape, a size, a mass and so forth. It would be even worse to think we could avoid this problem by giving up on Jesus being an embodied, flesh and blood human being, to dispense with the body in favor of the disembodied soul of Jesus somehow being the thing that matters, the real person, and claim that this is who our resurrected Lord now is. Granted, there's all sort of pious talk -- even among Christians -- about people at death leaving their bodies and going to heaven, but this is something that in the last analysis has nothing to do with the Christian faith. It's a pagan import. The only life beyond the grave Christians know about is the life of resurrected bodies. If Jesus Christ was truly resurrected he must be bodily present somewhere.

For what it's worth, I think Jesus' ascension, portrayed by Luke, and perhaps as actually presented to the disciples who witnessed it, as an upward ascent into the heavens, is best understood as Jesus being taken ahead into the future, where he awaits us and the close of this age, the age of his being present with us only under the sign of his absence. But why? If Jesus was truly resurrected, why didn't he immediately and explicitly become king of the world? Why is the resurrected Jesus absent? Why, if in ascending to the Father he is vindicated and exalted, declared Lord of all, why hasn't every knee bowed, every tongue confessed? Why in so many ways do things go on as they did before, as though God had never been? To ask this is, of course, to ask about ourselves. Why this time of the Church, this life by faith rather than by sight? What are we for, we who live "between the times," in the age of the "already" and the "not yet?"

Part of an answer lies in who God is: he has infinite power, but he does not identify himself with it; instead he chooses a way of love that humbles itself and gives itself for the sake of the beloved. We're used to thinking of this under the idea of kenosis as applied to the incarnation: in becoming a particular human being God emptied himself of his divine power and glory, humbly taking on the role of a servant for the sake of needy humanity. We can apply this idea to God as creator too: God, though fully complete and sufficient in his triune self, freely chose to create. He who from eternity past was all things, did all things and knew all things chose to "make room" for others, for creatures like you and me, who would be other than God, who would do things he would not be able to control or even foreknow. As Jürgen Moltmann writes, when God created "this was the first act in the divine self-humiliation that reached its profoundest point in the cross of Christ." (God in Creation, p. 87).

We may take one more step, applying this to this time between Christ's ascension and his triumphant return as universally acknowledged king. Although Jesus is exalted he delays, he makes a space for us, calling us to do his work, inviting us to share in his glory. In the time of his absence we are given the charge of making him known to the whole world. St. Paul, addressing the church at Ephesus, wrote that Jesus Christ "ascended far above all the heavens that he might fill all things" (Eph. 4.10). In leaving this world Jesus in one sense made himself universally present, accessible by faith everywhere the Spirit moves his Church to witness to him.

This is a great truth, but taken glibly, without due heed to the fact that he is nonetheless absent from us, it is reduced to something banal or worse. A Sunday school teacher was asking her class of first graders "What's gray and has a long bushy tail and collects nuts in the fall? A small boy answers "I know the answer is probably Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me." Or, more seriously, there's Marly, a character in Jane Smiley's novel Moo. She's on the verge of eloping to San Francisco with a truck driver, fleeing her engagement to an affluent, influential and thoroughly annoying Christian. "Well, she had changed...she had changed because she had tired of Jesus, the way He came to you and sat with you, the way He had to be a man in order to be human. Everybody in her church was always talking about how happy it made them that Jesus was right there, at your elbow, helping you along and keeping you on the right path. What could be better than a personal savior? But Marly resented the way Jesus counted on you needing Him like that. He never stepped back. He always wanted something from you. You always had to do something to please him" (p. 362). Marly rejects a weird Christianity in which the absence of Jesus seems not to have registered, a faith oblivious to its need for consolation, to its uncomfortable task of humbly waiting for, and bearing witness to, a God who can be embarrassingly absent. Jesus told his disciples that he was leaving, but that he would send a comforter. I take it that we need the Holy Spirit among us not so much to comfort us in face of the vicissitudes of life but to sustain us when we would otherwise be bereft because Jesus is taken from us, because we do not see our lord and savior in the flesh. Our privilege is to share in the glory of Christ, but this is the Christ whose glory was at its height in the depth of humiliation and affliction for those he loved. Paul Zahl writes: "If you want to find the presence of the risen Christ, you can find him paradoxically in loss, despair, suffering and solitude. For God's glory dwells always in the cross, under the cross, in the form of rejection, termination and the loss of faith. The iron ration of Christian living consists in the absence of the tangible and the presence of that absence, as in...a continuing state of loss" (A Short Systematic Theology, p.36). The Church that forgets this is a Church that puts its confidence not in the God who was in Christ but in its own ability to purvey truth and righteousness to the world. It's a Church that acts as though Jesus belongs to it rather than it belonging to the unseen Jesus it awaits in hope.

Father Robert Capon begins his book The Foolishness of Preaching by jarring our sensibilities about the salvation we bear witness to in Jesus Christ. He asks us to imagine we're writing a scenario for a short film. The setting is a hot weekend summer day at a crowded beach. The surf is turning dangerous. The lifeguard is putting the 'No Swimming' sign on his tower and ordering people out of the water. Suddenly someone spots a teenage girl struggling in the waves a hundred yards offshore. What do we think should happen in our film? The answer, Capon says, is obvious: we want the lifeguard/Christ figure to come down from his perch, swim gallantly out to the girl, and tow her safely back to the beach. But this is the wrong answer. This version, with its crowd-pleasing scenario of salvation, has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus. In its place Capon offers a version that does:

EXTERIOR - OCEAN BEACH on a sunny afternoon. As the CREDITS ROLL, we hear rock music and we PAN SLOWLY across the large crowd on the beach. We ZOOM IN ON A LIFEGUARD sitting on his tower and talking with some GIRLS, and we HEAR snatches of the conversation.

GIRL #1 You really have to make everybody get out of the water?

LIFEGUARD Afraid so. The surf's getting stronger and there's a bad undertow.

GIRL #2 Bummer! This is my only weekend out here.

LIFEGUARD (hanging up the NO SWIMMING sign and getting down from the tower) Better luck next time. It's just not safe.
We FOLLOW THE LIFEGUARD down to the water's edge, and we HEAR HIM begin ordering people out of the surf.

LIFEGUARD C'mon! Everybody out! It's getting too dangerous.

SWIMMER #1 Do we have to? Why can't we just stay in the shallow part?

LIFEGUARD (becoming annoyed) Because I said you can't. Move it!

SWIMMER #2 (coming out and talking to his companion) How to ruin a nice day! I don't think it's all that bad.

LIFEGUARD (overhearing) Trust me, it is. Out!

SWIMMER #2 All right already! I thought this was a free country. LIFEGUARD Not on my beach!

We FOCUS ON THE LIFEGUARD after everybody seems to be out of the water. We FOLLOW HIM as he starts to walk back to his tower, and we PAN ACROSS THE CROWD as they begin to settle down to picnicking and sunbathing. CREDITS END and MUSIC FADES. THE CAMERA MOVES TO A TEN -YEAR- OLD BOY who is waving frantically and pointing out to sea.

BOY Hey, look look! There's still somebody out there!

We PAN OUT OVER THE SURF to a GIRL struggling in the swells about 100 yards out. We ZOOM IN ON THE GIRL, and we SEE HER alternately going under and coming up flailing her arms.

GIRL Help! Help!

We FOCUS ON THE LIFEGUARD as he jumps down from the TOWER, and we FOLLOW HIM as he runs to the WATER, dives in, and starts to swim out to THE GIRL CROSS-CUTTING BETWEEN THE LIFEGUARD and THE CROWD that begins to gather at the water's edge.

CROWD MEMBER #1 How in the world did he miss her?

CROWD MEMBER #2 You think he'll get to her in time?

CROWD MEMBER #3 I certainly hope so. We FOCUS ON THE LIFEGUARD as he reaches THE GIRL. There is NO DIALOGUE between them. We HOLD FOR SEVERAL SECONDS ON THEM and we see THE LIFEGUARD go under and not come up. WE HOLD ON THE SWELLS long enough to establish that they have both drowned; then FOCUS ON THE CROWD

CROWD MEMBER #1 What's happening?

CROWD MEMBER #2 I can't see them!

CROWD MEMBER #1 Why aren't they coming up?

CROWD MEMBER #3 You think they've both drowned?

CROWD MEMBER #4 It can't be!

CROWD MEMBER #2 I hate to say it, but I think it's true.

CROWD MEMBERS GENERALLY (voices overlapping)

Oh, no! It's horrible!

I don't believe this!

It's weird! Just this morning I had the strongest feeling something bad was going to happen.

How can God just stand by and let people die like that? How awful!

While THE CROWD is still talking we PAN TO THE LIFEGUARD TOWER. We ZOOM IN ON A CLIPBOARD left lying on the SEAT. CLOSE-UP ON THE CLIPBOARD; a NOTE reads:

"IT'S ALL OKAY; TRUST ME; SHE'S SAFE IN MY DEATH."

We REVERSE SLOWLY to a LONG SHOT OF THE OCEAN. We SEE no one, and we HOLD ON THE EMPTINESS. FADE TO BLACK.

Our work of witness in word, sacrament and service makes us contemporaneous with the resurrected Christ. In these ways we are reconnected with that Jesus who lived, died, defeated death but was then vanished from our sight. That future when he will at last be fully revealed and all things, and all manner of things, shall be well, lies for now hidden in the past, in that death we remember and in which we share. There is no way forward to it other than back through that life, that death, that resurrection.

Amen.