The Ascension

                              Luke 24: 50-52    Acts 1: 6-11

          In 1983, the magician David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear. In front of twenty guests seated before him on Liberty Island, and on national television, the great statue disappeared.  That was an illusion. Throughout history, magicians the world over have performed escape and disappearing acts to our amazement. But they are illusions. They do not really happen, although they certainly appear to be real.

          In 30AD or thereabouts, our Lord Jesus Christ performed his own disappearing act, but it was no illusion. It was real. All Christianity has since relied on the truth of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven. The Apostles and Nicene Creeds recite it. “He ascended into heaven.”  To say otherwise is to ignore scripture. To think otherwise is to humanize Jesus and lose the impact of salvation.

          What does scripture say about the Ascension? Although you can find other verses referring to it, the only passages that appear as eyewitness testimony are found in the books of Luke and Acts, both written by the same author, Luke. There is a passage about it in Mark 16, but modern scholarship almost unanimously accepts this passage as a later appendage and not part of the original manuscript.

          So when it comes to testimony, we are left with the books Luke wrote as an editor, interviewer, and non-eyewitness. Luke was not one of the original disciples, though he knew many if not all of them. His book of Luke is accepted as “gospel,” for he was faithful to his task of interviewing the eyewitnesses and reporting what he was told.

          The gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus led the disciples out to Bethany, just a mile or so outside Jerusalem. He blessed them and during that blessing, Luke says that “he parted from them and was carried up into heaven.”  They worshipped him, went back to town joyfully, and hung around the temple praising God.

          Over in the book of Acts, also written by Luke, Jesus presents himself to the “apostles whom he had chosen,” says Luke. It’s not disclosed exactly where they are. Jesus promises them power, tells them to be his witnesses just like he told them in the gospel of Matthew. Then, Luke says that while the apostles were looking on, Jesus “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

          That’s it. From a witness standpoint, these are the Biblical stories of the Ascension. In the gospel of Luke Jesus is carried up into heaven. In the book of Acts, he is lifted up into a cloud which takes him away. Witnesses see him leave, but they don’t see where he goes. He disappears, except this is no illusion. This is real. Those disciples spent the rest of their lives telling that story, even giving their lives to back up their belief that the resurrected Jesus ascended into heaven.

          I find myself asking questions. Where did Jesus go? Where is heaven? Is heaven somewhere up there? Is it, like Dorothy said in Oz, somewhere over the rainbow, way up high? Seriously, where is heaven? The Bible says that’s where Jesus went. I’m not trying to be cute here. Is it up? Is it over there? We have this tendency to think that at death,  the body separates from the spirit or soul, and so then the soul can just sort of float up or out into heaven. But Jesus didn’t lose his body. There are plenty of Biblical references to his body, his flesh, after the Resurrection. So when Jesus was lifted up or carried up, he was carried bodily. Remember, we believe in the resurrection of the body. We have our role model in Jesus himself, whose resurrected body ascended into heaven.

          So maybe the better question is: Where is heaven? If it’s up, how far up? We have sent people to the moon. We have sent cameras in satellites to Jupiter and further. Is that still “up?” Or is it “out?” Whatever it is, we haven’t run into heaven yet, though we have gone millions of miles in all directions, far beyond the confines of earth. Where is heaven? Where did Jesus go?

          If we look back just a paragraph before the Ascension in both the Lukan and Acts passages, we see something enlightening. In Luke, he tells us that Jesus opened the minds of the disciples to understand the Scriptures. He tells them that he is sending the promise of God the Father upon them. He tells them to stay in town “until they are clothed with power from on high.”  In Acts, it is much the same. They are told to wait for the promise of the Father. And he tells them that they “will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” So the disciples find themselves back in Jerusalem, waiting for power and a baptism, both from the Holy Spirit, this thing with which they have no familiarity.

          Is this just more information about the event of the Ascension? Yes and no. In a very real way, it is a partial explanation of what happened in the Ascension. For in Scripture, it doesn’t take that long to begin to see the connection, the very real connection, between heaven and earth. Jesus is the bridge to connect the two.

          What does he say in the Disciples Prayer, also known as the Lord’s Prayer? “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven…”  What does the book of Revelation say in chapter 21? “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth…and I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God…And I heard a loud voice saying  ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man…’ ”  Reading these and other passages, doesn’t it seem as though heaven and earth are not just spiritually, but even physically, connected?

          Where do they come together, heaven and earth? The book of revelation says that the new Jerusalem is “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” The Pauline letters repeatedly refer to the Church as the bride of Christ. Heaven and earth are being brought together by the Church, and it is guided in that coming together by the Holy Spirit, that same Holy Spirit to which Jesus alluded right before he ascended into heaven.

          The Bible is a collection of stories, but that within that great collection is that long binding thread which holds the fabric of those stories together. The thread is love. The Bible is a love story. Yes, it is a creation story, and a covenant story, and a kingdom story, and many more. But at the end of the day, the bible is a love story, the story of God’s overwhelming love for his children and his creation.  He has proven by the sending of his Son that there is no end to his love and no boundary which would stop him from offering us salvation; that is, reconciliation.  We see that foreshadowing in the Ascension, for indeed what follows close on its heels is Pentecost, the day of the great awakening, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the hearts of mankind. Through Pentecost, we are awakened, empowered, emboldened by a power inside us that comes from God himself. The Ascension and Pentecost are inextricably linked, for in the Ascension we can see a piece of earth in the bodily form of Jesus moving into a heavenly sphere. In the same way, Pentecost discloses a God who will send part of the Trinity itself into the hearts of believers right here on earth. It is a Spiritual binding, this exchange of heaven and earth and earth and heaven.

          We have not answered where heaven is. Perhaps we have established that it at least in part resides in the spiritual realm, a place as real as any address on planet earth, but as mysterious as any magician’s illusion we have ever seen. Heaven is real. Heaven is a destination. Heaven may someday be right here, but it will take the return of Jesus for that connection to be complete.

         When we celebrate the sacraments, we invoke a joinder of heavenly voices with our own and we sing praises to God the Father and God the Son. We acknowledge the real presence of Christ’s body and blood, albeit a spiritual presence, in the elements of bread and wine. We are, for a moment in time, united with our Savior in both his death and resurrection. We are raised through the Holy Spirit in Christ’ presence. We are in one of those “thin places,” as the Scots like to describe it, where heaven and earth seem to be separated by the thinnest of veils. We are for that brief moment, experiencing heaven. That’s right. We can experience heaven here on earth through the power of the Holy Spirit.

          So where is heaven? It is, I think, not “up” or “out”, but in. If the Ascension of Jesus was a literal journey into somewhere in the stratosphere, wouldn’t he be somewhere in the world as we define it? I think Jesus ascended, but not so much to another place as to another dimension. I don’t mean anything alien. Quite the contrary. Jesus is a resident of heaven and it is real. I just don’t think we humans will ever be able to assign heaven an address any closer than the place in our hearts where Jesus resides, at least not until he comes again as promised.

          Maybe that’s why the Ascension passage in Acts ends this way.  As Jesus ascended, suddenly two men in white clothing are standing beside the disciples. They ask the disciples a question. “Why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who had been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven.”  The angels announce an interval, an interval in which we still live, between the first and second coming of Christ. But the connection has been drawn by Jesus himself. He must go in part so that we may be filled, that we may be connected, by the coming of the Holy Spirit. And in that interval, the Holy Spirit will keep God’s people in living union, in connection, with the risen and glorified Lord.

          In the announcement of those angels, I think this is where we begin to understand where heaven is. It lives in us through the power of the Holy Spirit. The more we have, the more we live in that dimension. The day will come when all is once again reconciled. If we can take the book of Revelation literally, that reconciliation will come right where we stand. Wherever it is, it will be real. And it will be heaven.

          Why do we stand looking into heaven? He is coming again as surely as he came before. We are connected. Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit. We too can have our hearts opened to understand the Scripture. We too can feel the presence and the power of our Lord through the Holy Spirit. Open the door. Let him in. Don’t stand there looking. We have work to do to get his house in order.