The Significance of the Ascension

Sunday after the Ascension Sermon – 8:00 and 10:30am Church of the Ascension, Knoxville TN
RCL Year C 5/16/2010
Text: Acts 1:1-11, Psalm 47, Ephesians 1:15-23, Luke 24:44-53
The Rev. Robert P. Travis

Our music, readings, and even this message
all celebrate our patronal feast today.
Actually Ascension Day was Thursday,
but we figured more of you would celebrate with us
if we celebrated it on Sunday.
Many churches have a patron, like St. John,
or St. Luke and they celebrate their patron on the Saint's Day.
Our patron is an event in the life of Christ.
So it's kind of different.
And the question has always nagged me,
what is the big deal about the Ascension?

I thought, as I studied our Gospel passage,
“How awesome must that have been?”
I mean, to have the resurrected Jesus
open your mind to understand the scriptures!
How much harder then,
after that experience,
that all of a sudden he was taken away from you.
Like Good Friday, it takes a bit of thinking,
to figure out how the Ascension was a good thing.

The significance of the Ascension though,
is basically about God's trusting us to carry his message.
I mean, why not just have the Resurrected Christ,
go all over the world proclaiming his own message?

Well in one way, it has to do with a basic
understanding of human limitation,
and the amount an individual can do.
Jesus, even as the Only Son of God,
was indeed limited by his humanity,
limited to only reaching those people directly around him.
And as He tells us in the Gospel of John,
if he did not go away,
he could not send his Spirit, the Holy Spirit,
to dwell within us.
So on the one hand, it is simply more feasible,
to accomplish the mission, by empowering
many others to be his witnesses.

And there's this basic understanding,
that people will trust the experience of other fallible people more than they trust
the perfect Son of God.
It's really amazing, knowing all of our weaknesses,
that God trusted us enough, to go away,
and let us carry the light of Christ to the world around us.

In the book “What Difference do it make?”
a person who understood brokenness put it like this,
“what people needs is people.
And needy people
don't need no perfect people neither.
When Jesus sent his disciples out,
He sent Peter right along,
knowin' Peter had a bad temper and a potty mouth
and was gon' deny Him three times. . .
Even though Jesus knowed all a' their sin and weakness,
He sent 'em anyway. . .
If you is waitin to clean up your own life
before you get out and help somebody else,
you may as well take off your shoes and crawl back in the bed
'cause it ain't never gon' happen.
Jesus don't need no help from no perfect saints.
If He did, He wouldn't a' gone up yonder
and left us down here in charge.”1

The thing is though,
He didn't leave us in charge by himself,
nor did he ever intend to leave us alone.
That would have been folly.
And we have shown the weakness of that idea,
in all of the ways the church has messed up in the past.
We are left, in the hope of receiving the Holy Spirit,
being empowered by Jesus' Spirit,
to do the work He wants us to do.
Today He can still open our minds
to understand the scriptures,
and he does,
through the Holy Spirit dwelling in us.

C.S. Lewis puts the whole offer of Christianity into this.
In Mere Christianity He wrote,
“we can, if we let God have His way,
come to share in the life of Christ. . .
If we share in this kind of life,
we shall also be sons of God.
We shall love the Father as He does
and the Holy Ghost will arise in us.
He came to this world and became a man
in order to spread to other men
the kind of life He has – by what I call
“good infection.”
Every Christian is to become a little Christ.
The whole purpose of becoming a Christian
is simply nothing else.”2

So if the significance of the Ascension is
that God trusts us to carry His message,
the point of the Ascension
is that we can become Christ as He lives in us.
Ascension points to Pentecost,
as we anticipate the coming of the Holy Spirit,
and Christ living in us,
but also, by his ascending to the Father,
he took his human nature with him,
and therefore took our human nature with him,
allowing us the possibility of being
received into the presence of the most Holy God.
That fact allows us to receive the Spirit of God
in our human selves, because our humanity
was received by God in Jesus.

The goal the Ascension points to,
is our being clothed with power from on high,
as indeed Jesus promised his disciples
after he asked them to wait in Jerusalem.
That clothing in power,
in the power of the Holy Spirit,
enables us to be Christ's witnesses to the world around us,
and reach out to others,
not out of obligation,
or duty,
or guilt,
but out of his love poured into our hearts.

I was reading a blog post from Jen Seger,
Bettie Corey's daughter,
about the floods in Nashville,
and this example of the difference that love makes,
in evangelism,
was clarified for me.

She writes: “The kindness of strangers has been rampant.
At River Plantation,
I watched as food and drinks were offered
to workers at various homes.
At least half the people declined,
not because they weren't hungry or thirsty,
but rather, because someone else
had gotten to them first.
Isn't that the way evangelism should be?
Instead of assuming someone else will do it,
we should be scouring the people we encounter daily,
looking for ways to serve them in the name of Jesus.”3

When we decide not to share our love of Jesus
with those we encounter,
is it because we assume they have already heard the message,
or that they have already received the love of Christ,
or do we assume that if we don't
then someone else will tell them?

What if someone else does tell them?
Will they share the same things that we love,
how could they?
They are not us.

The Spirit living in us makes each believer's testimony
unique in value as well as substance.
Your sharing your message of hope
in love with those around you,
is of unique value in spreading the Kingdom.
The worst someone can do,
is decline the love offered by us,
and as I was reading Jen Seger's message,
I didn't get the impression that those declining
her aid in Nashville hurt her in any way.
On the contrary, they seemed to encourage her,
as she realized the part she was playing in a much
larger effort to help.

Being witnesses of Christ to the few people
we encounter in our lives is like that.
It's like we have a cup full of love that we carry around,
and when the opportunity arises,
we simply pour what we have been given
into someone else's cup.
It is a small act.
But it is part of a great outpouring of love,
that the Holy Spirit rains down on those Jesus loves.
And it is awesome to behold,
and to take part in.

So when you think about those in your life,
those few people you encounter,
think, why else would God place those people
in your path, unless it was so you
could be Christ's witnesses and share his love with them?

And if you do not yet have the Holy Spirit
empowering you to be Christ's witness,
pray for the Holy Spirit to fill your cup with love,
so that you can pour it out into those you know.
That way the Ascension will become
as significant here, today,
as it was for those disciples of the Lord
who first witnessed Jesus' Ascension.

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