Ephesians 1:15-23
Acts 1:1-11
I was out of the pulpit for the past three Sunday. First we had the choir’s wondrous musical offering; then our youth group led us in worship on Earth Sunday; and last week our friend Bruce Williams filled in while I went camping with the Scouts.
So it’s been about a month since I was in this pulpit—not a long period of time, but look at what has happened: food riots in other countries brought concern, even fear, about a world food crisis to our attention; our President told us that he knew about and approved of high-level conversations to use torture; violence in Iraq made April the deadliest month for Americans in seven months, with 47 more deaths—and untold Iraqi deaths as well; gas prices—well, I don’t have to tell you about gas prices.
It also seems that my sermon from a few weeks ago about Jeremiah Wright could use some revising—although I think my main point is still valid: we have much greater issues to deal with as a nation in this election year than the words of on minister.
So much has happened. Where do I pick up and begin to speak this morning after three weeks’ absence?
A good place to start is with the feeling of being overwhelmed. A quick reading of the news on any given day can lead to that sense.
I preached about torture early last month. More specifically, I preached about our need as Christians to continue to speak out against its use. After worship a few people said to me, “But I feel so powerless.”
The pain and the need of the world are so great and we are so small. We are quickly overwhelmed. The energy drains out. Did you see Thomas Friedman’s suggestion last week that we lack energy—especially the energy to be serious—the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way.
Write all the letters you want, make all the phone calls, stand in all the vigils. Does anyone have the power to end the war? Does anyone have the power to stop the food crisis? To lower gas prices? To bring an end to torture?
A quick reading of the news can lead to a sense of powerlessness.
We run out of energy. We get overwhelmed.
This may be why the 20th century theological giant Karl Barth famously urged ministers to prepare to preach with a newspaper in one hand and a Bible in the other. The news can overwhelm.
From scripture we get another vision. From scripture we get a different sense of what is and isn’t possible.
“You will receive power,” the risen Christ tells the disciples. Still bearing the marks of crucifixion, the risen Christ says to his followers: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”
Jesus responds to overwhelmed, questioning followers with the promise of power, with the assurance that they will be able to act in their world.
Resurrection changes everything. Christ is alive and that changes how we look at death. The final enemy is defeated, the destroyer has been destroyed. And because resurrection changes how we look at death, it changes how we look at life. Resurrection quietly tells us that what's dead is dead. But it also shouts loud enough that we might hear that something we never imagined is coming to life.
Living in the power of the resurrection, we set aside old hopes and old expectations so that something different can rise up. We stop fighting old battles, nursing old wounds, dreaming old dreams.
This was the resurrection lesson the followers of Jesus had to learn.
Listen again to the disciples. It is difficult for them to shake off their old concerns. Christ is risen—the first sign of God’s new creation. His followers respond by dragging out their old hopes like some moth-eaten coat. “Lord, is this the time?” they ask. “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” They long for lost political power. They want to be back on top.
Memories of faded glory still dance in their minds.
Maybe now. Maybe now they will experience the restoration of the old kingdom. Maybe now what their nation lost centuries ago will be given back to them. Maybe now the good old days will return.
Instead, something never imagined was coming into being. God’s new creation in all its wonder was starting to unfold.
This is the resurrection lesson we are still learning.
You know how this is. If you don't do it yourself, you know of people who just keep looking back. With no vision for the future, their only hope is recovering the past. Maybe now things will be like they used to be.
This is the hope of too many congregations these days. Maybe now things will be like they were in the sixties or seventies. Maybe now we can go back to the past. Maybe now.
We can’t predict the future, but one thing we do know with certainty. Next year will not be 1957 or 1980. Times have changed. Our world has changed. And the changes come hurling at us with increasing speed.
How does Jesus respond to hopes for the past?
“It's not for you to know. . .”
These are words for a church that is settling in for the long haul. All expectations that the world will soon come to an end are renounced. All hopes for the past are put aside. The new task is to find a vision for the future.
The response of the risen Christ might not be what we want to hear, but it is a response that is typical of Jesus. Not the old, but the new. The promise comes: “You will receive power.”
You will receive the ability to act.
In the midst of all that overwhelms us
We are given the power to change what needs changing.
And with that promise, Christ went from their presence. He was “lifted up” into heaven Acts says.
The ascension of Christ is usually misunderstood or ignored. In our time a bland literalism meets with a dull skepticism. We are asked to choose between a Jesus involved in some sort of vertical lift-off—going “up” into heaven—and the impossibility of the same event.
The ascension is, as NT Wright says, “a difficult and unpopular doctrine” because it asks us to think in new ways about the cosmos—about heaven and earth.
In his wonderful new book, Surprised by Hope, he gives us a glimpse of this new view.
The mystery of the ascension is of course just that, a mystery. It demands that we think what is, to many today, almost unthinkable: that when the Bible speaks of heaven and earth it is not talking about two localities related to each other within the same space-time continuum or about a nonphysical world contrasted with a physical one, but about two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter, and also quite possibly…two different kinds of what we call time…
What we are encouraged to grasp precisely through the ascension itself is that God’s space and ours—heaven and earth, in other words—are, though very different, not far away from one another. Nor is talk about heaven simply a metaphorical way of talking about our own spiritual lives. God’s space and ours interlock and intersect in a whole variety of ways even while they retain, for the moment at least, their separate and distinct identities and roles.
The point of the ascension is not that Jesus is going a long way away but that he is being elevated to be the true Lord of the world. Ascension doesn’t mean absence; it means sovereignty, exercised through the Spirit.
For the early Christians—and for us—this sovereignty is about power. It is about the power of God at work in raising Jesus from death. It is about the power of God making the crucified and risen Christ the ruler of this world. It is about the power of God working in us by the Spirit. This is what we have come to know: Christ no longer with us is—somehow—Christ powerfully present for us at all times
A little later in that letter to the Ephesians, the author writes: “God, by the power at work within us, is able to accomplish far more than all we can ask or imagine.” To me, that is one of the most amazing sentences in all scripture.
We are reminded in that there is a power at work within us.
Does anyone have the power?
Together we do. Together we are invited to see how we can act, to discover what we can do. And through our efforts God is able to accomplish far more than we can imagine.
The power of God is a creative ability that is dynamic, almost explosive in nature. It is indeed an ability to move the mountains that we face—or blow a path through them.
Power is the ability to act. And each one of us has that ability. Our strength, our power, allows us to act in the world.
This is how Martin Luther King put it: “Let us remember that there is a great benign Power in the universe whose name is God, and God is able to make a way out of no way, and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. This is our hope for becoming better men and women. This is our mandate for seeking to make a better world.”1
The power in the universe wants to do more. More than feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless. More than making wars to cease. This power wants justice to roll down like fountains and righteousness like streams.
That power wants to work through you. That power wants to work through this congregation.
Like all power, it is somewhat frightening. Because this is “holy power” it borders on the terrifying. But it also speaks to us of great possibilities.
The ability to act for the benefit of self and others is nothing less than the strength of God acting through us. Just think of what might be accomplished through you by that power.
How might your life make a difference in the world?
As Jesus is taken out of the sight of the disciples, two men robed in white ask them: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
Why? Because we are looking for God—and we’ll look in the strangest places—including the sky.
We want to know if God still cares for this world that God created and called good.
We want to know if God really does care about our incredibly difficult and surprisingly joyful lives.
We want to know if God really does care about these stress-filled lives that we live. Does God notice these lives of pain and pleasure all tumbled together in ways we could never have imagined?
The ascension tells us what we already know. God is no longer present with us in Jesus, and yet we live in the power of the Spirit that Christ sends.
This Jesus who is gone is the one who said, “I am with you always.”
The One who cried out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?” speaks to us of God’s unwavering care.
It may be that in our concern over God’s presence we are closer to the divine ground of our being than we would imagine. It may be that in our concern about God’s presence we can open ourselves to the new things that God is doing within us and among us and around us.
The resurrection keeps bringing us back to here and now. Our eyes are not on the heavens but on earth.
There is a charge for us here. If we take our theology seriously, it informs our actions. The power of the Spirit of God, the energy for life, is the ability to confront the principalities and powers of this world, to speak God’s “Yes” which sounds like a judging “No” to greed, to torture, to hoarding, to fear, but which is also a resounding affirmation of the goodness of life, the strength of love, and the possibility of justice and reconciliation.
This “Yes” is the message of Easter.
Christ is risen.
Christ is Lord of our lives.
Christ is Lord of all creation.
The risen Christ who reigns in power gives us the ability to act in the world as agents of
God’s new creation.
God’s “Yes” will be our strength and our power.
Christ is risen indeed.