A friend of mine, who is a psychologist and an agnostic, once looked through one of my Prayer Books and noted the observance of such days as the Transfiguration and the Ascension and asked me, “You don’t really believe all that stuff, do you?” It’s a fair question for all of us this morning. Perhaps, more than we want to admit, we have problems with some of the traditional beliefs and teachings of the Church.

Every Sunday when you and I gather here to worship we stand and say the Creed. When we do that we state what we as the Church, the Community of Faith, believe about God. The Creed is basically a condensed version, a shorthand version, of the Bible. We recite the central events of the life of Jesus: his birth, death, resurrection, and his ascension. We celebrate his birth at Christmas. We commemorate his death on Good Friday. We rejoice at his resurrection throughout the fifty days of Easter. But his ascension into heaven hardly gets mentioned.

Our Lord was raised from the dead and for forty days he appeared at various times and in various ways to his disciples. Then he ascended into heaven. For ten more days his followers met together and prayed as they had been instructed by him. And then, fifty days after the Day of the Resurrection, the gift of the Holy Spirit is given to the Church and then the great evangelical expansion, the mission to go into all the world with the Good News, begins. We will celebrate that event next Sunday on the Feast of Pentecost. But the ascension of Jesus, coming as it does forty days after Easter Day, always occurs on a Thursday and it just sort of gets lost. We celebrated it here at St. John’s with a Eucharist last Thursday, but since a few of you missed that service I want us to focus on it today.

After this sermon you’re going to stand up and say, “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” What does that mean? Don’t we sometimes simply say the words and accept them, but don’t really think about them, maybe don’t really “buy into” them?

“As the apostles were watching, Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” These words from the Acts of the Apostles describe Jesus ascending into heaven. What sort of picture do you form in your mind when you hear this? Over the centuries various artists have tried to paint it. I always end up with something resembling a lift-off at Cape Canaveral!

Aside from saying that Jesus is no longer physically in the world, what is the truth being expressed here? St. Luke paints a picture with words; like an impressionist he is working with imagery which points beyond the concrete to the unseen. He paints a picture with words that describe Jesus as going “up”, as if heaven were a geographical location high in the sky. It reflects a first century construct of the cosmos. However, most of us don’t believe that heaven is “up” there. Yet we traditionally and normally say “up in heaven.” At the same time most of us would agree that heaven is not physical place, but a state of being. To be in heaven is to be with God, to be in union with the divine. But it is natural to picture heaven in terms of “up-ness”. We speak of many things that way. When things get better or things go well, they go “up”. “His grades went up”, we say. Or, “She has really gone up in her profession.” We know when we say this that success is not a place that is literally up; it is a state of being.

When you say the Creed I hope you’ll remember these three things:

1. The Ascension means that Jesus is no longer limited to time and space;

2. He ascended as a human being;

3. His Ascension represents the triumph of good over evil.

The scandal of Christianity has always been the Incarnation: the belief that

the God of the universe would limit himself, would enflesh himself in a person. The Ascension is the reverse of the Incarnation. Through the Ascension the particularity of Jesus becomes the universality of Christ. The God of “somewhere” becomes the God of “everywhere”. The localized Jesus becomes the ubiquitous Christ.

A few years ago bumper sticker theology was popular. One bumper sticker read, “My boss is a Jewish carpenter.” It was cute and it got your attention. But it was terrible theology because it ignored the Ascension. He is no longer the carpenter from Nazareth; he is the cosmic Christ. He is no longer limited to time and space, as he was in first century Galilee, but is living today, enthroned in the hearts of believers everywhere. Jesus is no dead hero whom we remember from the past, but is alive and present in the universe now as the Christ.

Secondly, it is important that we understand that Jesus ascended as a human being. He doesn’t leave his humanity behind at the ascension. His humanity was not an illusion as the Gnostics would have us believe. He doesn’t cast his humanity off as an unwelcomed burden with which he is finished. He takes his humanity with him. Our humanity is not limited to physicality. Jesus the Christ has shown us what we can be and who we can be. The Ascension tells us that the life for which we are ultimately made is not found in this world, but in heaven. What that means to me is that no human being is insignificant. That no life is unimportant because every person, in Christ, has a divine destiny, that every one of God’s children is destined to ascend.

With that perspective all of our relationships take on new importance. For when we deal with one another, when we share each other’s problems, when we seek to alleviate suffering, when we work for peace, when we seek to make society responsive to human need, as you and I try to serve and minister in our various vocations, we are in touch with a child of God who has a divine destiny, who, through the Ascension of Christ, will reign with Christ.

And the third significance of the Ascension I want you to consider this morning is the belief that Christ is the Lord of history. St. Luke wrote, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” So, we are not to fear. And this, my friends, indeed calls for faith. A faith that I find most difficult.

In the midst of the mess of this world, a world beset by terrorists, world in which barbarism is becoming the norm, where religions are excuses for the inhuman treatment of God’s children, a world which refuses to eschew the futility of violence and war, in this chaotic existence of ours, the Ascension tells us that Jesus will return. And this history of which we are a part has purpose and an end. As Christ’s Body, the Church, you and I play a part in this salvation history of the world. We participate in the struggle of good versus evil. We are not called to stand idly and silently by, but are called to proclaim the values of love over hate, of peace over war, and respect the dignity of every human being. In our world where justice and love seem nothing but wishful thinking, nothing takes greater faith than this. And these acts of faith are based on the Christian hope that at the end of history is the triumph of justice and good which is symbolized by Christ’s coming again to rule the earth.

As my skeptical friend would say, “Do you believe all that stuff?” It’s a good question. Do you? As Christians, only by the grace of God, can we say, “Yes, I believe.”

For the grace and the gift of faith, for the gift of believing, let us rejoice and give thanks to the risen and ascended Lord Christ. Amen.