Sermon: Ascension Deficit Disorder

First Presbyterian Church

May 21, 2023, Easter 7A

Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53  

 

Ascension Deficit Disorder

 

 

Before we go any farther: the title comes from a comic strip, one that circulates frequently among preacher types about this time each year.

In the strip the disciples are seen (backs to us viewers) looking up at the sky, some pointing, as Jesus ascends into heaven. One disciple, however, is crying out “Where? Where? I can’t see him!” And of course, that one disciple is labeled “Ascension Deficit Disorder.”

Such deficit of attention has been typical of the occasion for quite a while now, even in some of the church’s most liturgical quarters. Part of the issue is that, technically, the feast day doesn’t fall on a Sunday – Ascension Day was actually this past Thursday. As well, the event doesn’t really feature prominently in much of the church’s liturgy and practice – its “public theology,” if you will. Let’s face it, the most attention any of us ever pay to the Ascension is when it appears in the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, in a terse four-word phrase. For example in the Nicene Creed we read: 

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

 

And, really, that’s about it for the Ascension.

To be fair, it’s not as if scripture makes that big a deal of the Ascension either. Only one New Testament author takes the trouble to mention the event, but interestingly that author feels compelled to describe it twice. Luke includes a brief account of the event at the end of his gospel, but then returns to the event at the beginning of the book of Acts. And if we look closely, the two accounts…well, they’re not exactly the same.

The Ascension is described, not surprisingly, at the very end of Luke’s gospel. It shares the twenty-fourth and last chapter of that gospel with the visit of Mary Magdalene and other women to Jesus’s tomb, now found empty; Luke’s lengthy account of Jesus’s appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus; and Jesus’s subsequent appearance with the larger body of disciples back in Jerusalem afterwards. The account we read from Luke earlier picks up directly after that event, after Jesus has asked for something to eat and been given a piece of fish, which he ate in front of them in a way a ghost would not be able to do. 

Luke doesn’t give us any indication of time lapse in chapter 24; so far as we know all of the events in this chapter take place on the same day – including Jesus’s opening of scripture to the disciples and their trip to Bethany, where he was lifted up to the heavens in front of them. 

At the beginning of Acts, however, Luke offers some different details. For example, in verse 3 Luke adds the noteworthy detail that after his resurrection, Jesus appeared to the disciples over the course of forty days – quite different from the seeming all-in-one-day approach at the end of the gospel. The words Luke records from Jesus are slightly different as well, and Acts also adds the two men in white robes who chide the disciples for standing around looking at the sky. 

While there are churches in this country, and probably in this town, who would accuse me of some sort of heresy for pointing out what looks like inconsistency from one biblical book to another, the explanation here is pretty simple. At the very beginning of his gospel Luke declares to his intended reader, the otherwise-unknown Theophilus, that after noting how many others were seeking to write down accounts of the gospel story as they had been handed down by eyewitnesses, that “I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you” (Luke 1:3-4). In short, Luke tells us from the very beginning that these two substantial volumes are the products of careful and thorough research. To put it in scholarly terms, Luke has taken up the task of gathering material from primary and secondary sources (eyewitnesses and those who had received the stories from them). When, by the time of writing down Acts, he had gathered information that he didn’t necessarily have at the time he wrote his gospel, Luke duly and diligently updated the record, so that “most excellent Theophilus” would be more completely informed about all these things that had taken place. 

Would that we would be so diligent in our handling of scripture. 

So, what of it? Why is this obscure lectionary event worth bothering with? 

We get some hint of that in that third reading, the one from the letter to the Ephesians. When, in verse 20, the author describes how God "raised him (Jesus) from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places," we also see that this places Jesus "far above all rule and authority and power and dominion" of the earthly variety, and head over all the church as well. In addition, the earlier verses of this reading suggest what it looks like when the church is truly living and serving together under that ultimate authority of Christ; faith in Jesus, love for all the saints, wisdom, hope. To understand the Ascension, and to what Christ has ascended, is to begin to understand our place in God's order, and perhaps to avoid getting a little too stuck on ourselves and our own importance. We live under the authority of the risen and ascended Christ; nothing we do escapes that authority. 

As to today’s story itself, maybe two points need to be reinforced. In both accounts Luke records Jesus reassuring the disciples that even as he is leaving them, he is not leaving them alone. Actually, though, the fulfillment of this promise is pretty much next week’s scripture, so let’s leave that until then, shall we?

The other striking point that we might easily overlook is almost buried in Luke 24:49, and reiterated in Acts 1:4. Even as Jesus is telling the disciples that “repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem,” (or to be Jesus's witnesses in “Jerusalem, and all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” as Acts describes), Jesus’s first instruction to the body is to … go back to Jersualem. Go home. Wait. 

Wait “until you have been clothed with power from on high” in Luke. Jesus “ordered them not to leave Jersualem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father” in Acts. 

Even as we have a worldwide call, we also have a mandate to wait upon the Lord. We are to go into all the world, but not without being made ready by the moving and shaking of the Holy Spirit. We are, in short, to hurry up, and wait, to be open and receiving and ready for the leading of the Spirit to prepare us to witness to the world.

Does the church, universal or particular, really do a good job of that? In a way that's exactly the kind of thing a church, especially a church in an interim or transitional period, needs to do most of all; wait, listen to Jesus's authority, listen for what the Spirit is saying and where the Spirit is leading.  These days it doesn't seem like many churches are all that good at this, and maybe that’s the Ascension Deficit Disorder we need to be worried about.

For even the highly neglected days on the church calendar, Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated); #267, Come, Christians, Join to Sing; #---, When Jesus knew his time had come; #---, See our Jesus now ascending

If anyone knows where this comic came from or who created it I'd love to give them credit.