Whenever I think about Ascension Day, which we observe this morning, I remember my home parish, the Church of the Ascension in Tujunga. That parish closed in the 1980s—it couldn’t adapt to the realities of a changing neighborhood— but it was the place I first encountered the Episcopal Church and was baptized there at age 19 when I was home from college for the summer.
I came into that parish through their theater group which rehearsed and performed in the adjacent parish hall. I still remember my shock on first entering the church building itself and seeing the enormous mural of the Ascension painted on the wall behind the altar. The painting depicted a larger-than-life-sized Jesus rising in the air, with amazed disciples at the corners looking on. The rector at the time noticed my astonishment and remarked, “Try not to think of the altar as a trampoline.”
The rector’s jibe underscores a problem I had for many years with Ascension Day. We no longer picture heaven up above us, hell below us, and a flat earth in the middle, so for a 21st century Bible reader to understand the Ascension without picturing Jesus being beamed up to the stratosphere like Captain Kirk to the Enterprise means to think about this event in mystical, non-physical terms. Ascension Day asserts that Jesus goes from this world to another one and his journey is a return to the source of his being, the Father. The earliest Christians talked about the Ascension in almost magical language, but in our terms he is simply going home. He has been with us for a while, and now he is going back. In the process, he has transformed us and our world.
I think my earlier resistance to Ascension Day derived from the difficulty I used to have with mysticism in general. I was—I don’t know quite how to put this—in my younger days a kind of flat-footed Christian. It was Jesus’s teachings, parables, and resistance to oppression that initially drew me to him. I could take or leave the healing stories, the walking on water, questions of bodily resurrection and virgin birth. Jesus was for me a moral champion, and I didn’t much trouble myself with questions that exceeded my imaginative capacity.
I no longer have the Ascension Day qualms that used to trouble me. What changed? What changed, of course, was decades of life on planet earth. Years of living wear away the smug assurances of youth. The longer I lived the more I experienced life in all of its joy, sorrow, and mystery. I got married, became a father, and worked in the church, sitting with people who experienced all the wonder and tragedy that life can offer. It wasn’t so much that my faith changed as it was that I became increasingly aware of my own particularity. Who was I to discount someone else’s experience of the divine? Ascension Day is our tradition’s way of realizing that the earthly Jesus is no longer present. He may be physically gone, but he is with us in a new, and yes mystical, way.
In the timeline of Luke’s Gospel, the Ascension takes place 40 days after Easter. Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit, occurs 10 days after that. The theologian Karl Barth called this period between Ascension and Pentecost the “significant pause” in the action. For me it has always seemed emblematic of the Christian life. We have known Jesus’s earthly presence. We await his return. What are we supposed to do in the meantime?
I want to share with you a quote from one of my favorite passages in scripture, the 11th chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews. The author lists all the great Hebrew patriarchs who have gone before us—a group he will subsequently call a “cloud of witnesses”.
13These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. . . .16But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. [Hebrews 11:13-16]
“They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” Just as the Israelites were never at home in Egypt or in Babylon, just as the early Christians were not at home in the Roman Empire, so all of us who love God and follow Jesus are never quite at home in the world we inhabit. That’s one of the reasons the church has always found itself uncomfortable with cultures and governments all through time and history. Most nation states cannot help but act like Egypt, Babylon, and Rome. The earliest Christians were persecuted because they refused to worship Caesar as a god. They acknowledged allegiance to someone else, the God they knew in Jesus. And that was a crime.
Whether you believe in the literal passage of Jesus into the clouds or not, Ascension Day offers you some deeply mystical good news. How many times in your life have you felt yourself a “stranger and exile”? It is a struggle for any sensitive, thoughtful, compassionate person to get through childhood, let alone the rest of life. The Ascension of Jesus is really shorthand for a process we can only talk about in figures and images. God has been taken up into the divine life of God. And he has taken us there with him. You are in God and God is in you in a new way we could not even imagine before. You may never feel you quite fit here, but there is a place you belong. The world’s bullies will continue to oppress, but you are no longer under their power. You are a citizen of that better country, the heavenly one the author of Hebrews describes.
When Jesus returns to his Father in the feast of the Ascension, he is gone, and we are changed. Jesus has been glorified, but so have we. The world, which is always confused about ultimate values, does not understand the kind of glory that Jesus shares with his followers. The world thinks that glory is all about power, success, affluence. The glory that Jesus shares with us is a glory founded on acceptance of our true identity in Jesus. We live in two worlds but belong to one. And it is our heavenly citizenship that enables us to live abundantly in the earthly country where we will always know ourselves to be strangers.
I wish back in the 1960s I had looked at that larger-than-life mural of Jesus ascending a little less sarcastically and a lot more receptively than I did. What I should have seen there was an artist’s mystical attempt to capture the meaning of a new life in which God calls me to accept both myself and you as blessed creatures showing forth the image of God. The truth today is that Jesus’s glory is now your glory, and you accept and live it out most fully when we all gather at this table and give thanks that all we are all called simply and finally to be ourselves. Amen.
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