Ascension Day: The Reign of Jesus in the Realm of Life

TranscriptioN

Thanks for making time to come and gather on a Thursday night.

This is one of those days where it's often it comes up on us and we're not used to thinking about it, but it is such an important day in the church's calendar. Part of the gospel here is Jesus crucified, risen from the dead, ascended on high, who will come back again. All of this is the gospel, the saving work of God.

And this is actually our first time as a church celebrating it on its actual day. And thank you to Caroline for trying out the incense with us tonight. I was thinking about how joyous it is to talk about Jesus going up in the clouds and then having the clouds of incense just permeating our olfactory imagination.

So thank you. It smells like prayer in here. I'm grateful to you for your help.

And so as I said, this is one of the central days in the church's calendar, in the history of the church. And this feast commemorates not Jesus being absent, but his exaltation as King. That's what the Ascension is all about.

This feast declares that heaven and earth will one day be ultimately one, and that Jesus is Lord over both of these dimensions, heaven and earth, both parts of God's creation. And both of those realms find their overlap in Jesus himself, who is the promise that heaven and earth will ultimately be reunited, restored in this cosmic story of salvation and new creation. And as we look at this book of Acts chapter one, let me pray for us.

In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. 

Amen. The disciples gather around Jesus, and they ask him in chapter one, the beginning of this chapter, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? This is the question on their minds. The expectation is that the Messiah is going to come, that the Messiah is going to conquer the nations that were warring against God and his anointed one.

This is sort of the theme of the Psalms, and that God would establish a throne that would last forever through his servant of the line of David. And that's why the cross had been so surprising, but now Jesus has risen from the dead, and you can imagine, now he's risen from the dead, perhaps their hopes are sparked again, that this might be the time now. Now that we've seen him, now that we've walked with him in his resurrection, maybe now is the time.

When are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel? Is this the time it's going to happen? And Jesus tells them not to worry about the day or the hour. That shouldn't be on the forefront of your thinking and your anxiety, but he instead gives them a call in the meantime. He tells them that the Holy Spirit will come upon them.

They're to wait until that happens, and then they're now going to be Jesus' witnesses in Jerusalem, and then in Judea, which is broader than the area in which is Jerusalem, and then Samaria, just north, and then to the ends of the earth. Everyone else, the Gentiles, but they are waiting. They're in this season of waiting for the Holy Spirit to come on them.

And it reminds me that we're not supposed to waste our time on worrying about when this is finally going to come. When is Jesus going to come back? Reading the newspapers for signs of the times is not a helpful discipline. Instead, we're called in this time of waiting while Jesus is reigning, and we're waiting for him to come again.

The word for that that they use in the Bible and in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is the parousia, when he comes again to restore all things in their fullness. While we're in this waiting period, we receive this call to bring the message and continue the works of Jesus, who was crucified, resurrected, now he reigns on high. And now one of the things that we're called to do is look for the ways that he reigns right now, because his kingdom isn't just out there, but what the Ascension declares is that his kingdom is come, and will come more fully.

And so we're looking for the ways that his kingdom comes. And it's easy to get hung up on misconceptions about heaven being something out there, something disconnected from our everyday experience, or geographically above us. I can't remember who I was talking with, but there was a Russian atheist, and when he went up into space, he said, you know, I went up into the heavens and God was not there.

And so the reality is that heaven is not geographically located, somewhere out there disconnected. Heaven is another realm or dimension that overlaps with the dimension that we find ourselves in, and Jesus reigns over both realms and dimensions as king over all creation. It's easy to think of it as this repository of souls that's off in the sky, but the way that the Bible describes heaven is that heaven and earth, and we think of that phrase, heaven and earth, as this complete totality of the creation.

And sometimes God's realm breaks into ours. You can think of the Theophanies, the Old Testament, like Mount Sinai, the crossing of the Red Sea, or even something as simple as going into the temple, this thin place where heaven meets earth. And Jesus came in the book of Acts, part of the argument is that he is the temple, he is the place where heaven meets earth.

So if you want to encounter the place, you encounter Jesus, because that's the one who brings these things together. And so when we see Jesus being the temple, we see him stirring people's hearts, healing them physically, some other brokenness restored. These are all the miraculous spaces where we see heaven breaking into our world.

And so I was remembering a time where I felt something like this, where the two realms, there was two realms. And so I used to work when I lived in Chicago as a caterer for a catering company, and I was about 18 or 19, I was in under, no, I was 20, I was an undergraduate, and I was working for this catering company, which brought me into really cool places in Chicago. And one of the interesting places that I got to go was inside the stage of Millennium Park.

And the reason I was there was because there was a girl who was having her 16th birthday party. So this is a realm I'm not used to, where one 16th birthday party is celebrated with private catering inside the stage of Millennium Park. And here I am in this fancy tuxedo, going to this place, serving hors d'oeuvres.

And one of the kids had struck up a conversation with me as I was serving them food, because they don't have some of the same barriers. And the mom comes over and says, please don't talk to the help. I've never felt so out of the realm of where I was at.

I'm wearing a tuxedo, which is not me, and I'm serving food in Millennium Park, which is not me, and here I am, the help, and it's just a weird reality where there is a realm that I was in, which I was not accustomed. That realm was not mine. So it's possible to imagine that God's realm is kind of over here, and it has nothing to do with our realm.

But when we pray the Lord's Prayer multiple times a day, we say, may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. And so there is something of the kingdom of God breaking into our realm that we get to experience when Christ reigns. So when Jesus becomes king, he rules over both heaven and earth, and when we see heaven break in, it's a promise that earth and heaven will ultimately be one.

Like when you read Paul's passages about all in all, Christ is all in all, these things will ultimately be one, and we taste now what will ultimately be true in the future. And it's not that like God has, Jesus has disappeared in the ascension, and we're left to just fend for ourselves down here, but Jesus again is Lord, and he is active, and our job isn't to just fixate on when he's going to restore all things, but to discover how he's doing it right now through the Spirit that he has given to us. He had to ascend in order to send us the Spirit, who is his presence that empowers us to carry on his works to the ends of the earth, which involves our neighborhoods, those closest to us, wherever we go and work.

So Jesus is taken up in a cloud in their sight, and the Son of Man ascending on a cloud is a reference to Daniel 7 13. Again, at this time there's no New Testament written. Their Bible, the Bible that they were familiar with, was what we would call the Old Testament.

So when Jesus ascends on a cloud, this is the image that's coming to mind, is Daniel 7 13. It's kingship language, that the Messiah has become King. It proclaims that Jesus is exalted, not that he's absent, and that's really important, because sometimes it can feel like he is, but being King is really the opposite of abandoning his project until the end when he's going to come back again, and that's why these messengers, heavenly messengers, say to the disciples, why are you standing here looking at the sky? The disciples had been focused on when Jesus is going to bring a physical kingdom, rather than being enamored with discovering where it is now

They were missing, well I should say it this way, they were called to mission, not to date setting, not to wonder when, but to discover where Jesus's rule and reign is breaking into their lives at this time. And so now they need to get their eyes off the sky to look at what's in front of them. Have you ever been on a road trip with a child, or have you been the child on the road trip? You know, the sense of time is just not the same when you're little, and so when you're on a four-hour car ride, and you're in the first five minutes, and you hear from the back, are we there yet? Are we there yet? Well, no, no, it's been five minutes.

Are we there? It's been two minutes since you asked. No, we're not there. Internally you have this dread about how long this four-hour car ride is going to be, and the way that a child is going to stop asking that question is either if they're sleeping, or if they become enamored with what the things are that they can look at out the window. 

And as they're looking out the window, there's things to look at, they're just enamored with wonder at what they're seeing as they see new landscapes and places. And that helps me personally to understand something of the kingdom mission that the disciples and us are called to. Rather than focusing on the are we there yet? Can you please come back now? Instead, it's a call to notice the kingdom that God is bringing in them, through them, and around them.

The end is secure. Jesus is ascended. He is going to come back again, and he's going to restore all things.

And he reigns now, and in the meantime, before he comes back again, their call is to proclaim the message, and more importantly, to notice where the kingdom is coming in their lives, and in the world, and in the lives of others. And noticing that is actually part of the proclamation. When you can notice it and name it, this is part of the work of the kingdom mission.

So Jesus ascends to reign, and the story of Acts is all about what Jesus continues to do and teach. And this is the story that's continuing and written into the life of the church through the centuries. I was actually thinking about this.

This is the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. This is how, you know, if we look back at the last 1700 years, we are seeing the work of the Holy Spirit writing out this story of the Acts of Jesus in the church. And as you consider your own story, what work has God done in your story to redeem what's broken? And so looking at those things that are broken, and seeing how God has redeemed them, those are miraculous breaking in of the kingdom of God.

Those are the places where heaven and earth get joined together, where you start to see Jesus's rule, and his reign, and his lordship. The point of being saved, when we hear that language, it's often loaded. It's not to go somewhere someday.

That's not usually how the Bible talks about being saved. Again, because heaven's not a geographic place out in the sky. It's to be joined to the new creation work that Christ is doing as he is Lord of all things.

It's seen in the freedom that we have from sin, or that we're experiencing from sin, even for the first time. It's experienced in the changed ways of thinking that we have, the behaviors that change, the breaking of generational trauma, of generational sin, the restoring of broken relationships, broken selves, patterns of speech. All of these things are where heaven breaks in, and we see Jesus's rule and reign as king.

So I want to encourage us to make time for contemplation and stillness, to reimagine how the world has sown in corruption, but how God is going to reap in corruption from that, as the Bible says. There's a passage that I really love from C.S. Lewis in a book called Letters to Malcolm, and he describes memory and reality in this passage, in the new heavens and the new earth. What's the relationship between memory and reality? What happens now in our lives should be framed by the reality of what will be later, and so as he's talking to his imaginary friends in these letters, he says, this is a quote, I can now communicate to you the vanished fields of my boyhood.

They are building estates today, only imperfectly by words. Perhaps the day is coming when I can take you for a walk through them. In other words, the reality of what will be restored is different than his memory, and the memory of what will be restored should reframe what's now broken and what's in need of redemption.

And so again, today we celebrate Jesus as Ascendant. He rules and he reigns as King over all and Lord, and our call is to carry on with the disciples these words in the works of Jesus until he comes again to restore all things ultimately. So we don't need to waste time or effort concerning ourselves with when he comes, but resting in the certainty that he will indeed restore all things, and then we're to engage with him in this work of restoring creation and discovering heaven in the daily earthly experiences that we have.

And that requires us taking time to wonder and notice what God's doing as we serve one another like Christ, and we cultivate incorruptible things from what's been sown in corruption. So make space, like a child in a car ride, to be mesmerized by God's work in your hearts, and in the hearts of others, those who you live with, those who are around you, be mesmerized at the kingdom work that Jesus is doing, because Jesus is Ascended not to abandon the world, but to rule and to reign and to make all things new. Let me pray for us.

O God of peace who has taught us that in returning and rest we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength. By the might of your Spirit lift us, we pray, to your presence, where we may be still and know that you are God, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.