Acts 1:1-11: The Feast of the Ascension
Did Jesus take us all to heaven or bring heaven to us...
The way I see it, there are two possibilities to engage this Ascension story. The first is that Jesus is miraculous and magical and the text is begging, if not demanding, us to have faith in him. His story. His ministry. His ongoing work --with and through us. If Jesus can go to heaven, covered by a cloud, while also telling us to focus on what it is in front of us here on earth, he’s worth believing in. The sermoning in this case is short.
God is love.
Jesus is love.
Go and love. What more do you need?
The other way to engage this Ascension story is much more relational, human, and empathic. It is an invitation to really get to know Jesus, intimately by listening closely to his story and context and then practicing with our story and context.
Jesus had died a horrible and shocking death. He had a sense that the end was near and it was not going to be good news (we know this from the last supper), but he was not prepared for a public execution. His family and friends were not prepared for that either. Who could ever be prepared for a traumatic event like that? The Romans used a death sentence as a form of crowd control so it had to be torturous. Holy week moved quickly, Jesus was arrested and from there it was downhill. Until his resurrection. As it turns out, Jesus was not done. There was some unfinished business. Unfinished business is a natural occurrence when someone dies unexpectedly.
A few weeks ago we heard about Jesus appearing to his disciples in the upper room three days after his death in Jerusalem. The disciples were not done with Jesus and Jesus was not done with them.
“Wait, he died?”
“What!?”
“There was so much more for me to learn!”
These perplexed questions of grief and astonishment are often the questions asked after a loved one dies, especially when we are not ready for them to pass from this life to the next.
Judith Herman, a trauma and recovery expert, says “Traumatic events call into question basic human relationships. They breach the attachments of family, friendship, love, and community. They shatter the construction of the self that is formed and sustained in relation to others. They undermine the belief systems that give meaning to human experience.”
This was no different in Bible times. Following Jesus’ death, relationships and community were called into question and it was unsettling.
There are also studies in our modern world that show that people preparing to leave this world for the next often engage in a three-part intervention model that includes asking questions about their life story, forgiveness, heritage and legacy.
In our story this morning, Jesus comes back for forty days to create space for grieving and closure. He invited space for questions about the story, rituals for forgiveness and made way for his legacy - their shared legacy. This story gives us a model of how to deal well with this unfinished business. In other words, a model to tell our stories and establish our legacy. Jesus’ return shows us what we might need to do NOW to put our affairs in order. This story, which comes right before the story of Pentecost, shifts the focus from one person (Jesus) to all of us who follow him. It was a big deal.
A few years ago, our denomination, the United Church of Christ, launched a marketing campaign centered around this quote by actress Gracie Allen: “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” In the UCC, we claim that “God is still speaking,” and we know that the story is not over. There is still work to do. Jesus just needed those last forty days to iron out some details with his disciples and then he would ascend into heaven. More than anything the Jesus story was not over. It would continue. The Jesus story would go like this: I died and was resurrected, (COMMA) God is still speaking. How will you finish the story? What is after your comma?
All of us come and leave in the middle of a story. We can begin to engage in our unfinished business even now so that there will always be commas.