May 20th, 2020
/Wednesday Words Eve of Ascension Day 5 – 20 – 20
Psalm 68: 1 – 20 2 Kings 2: 1 – 15 Rev 5: 1 – 14 BCP pages 963 bottom
Ascension Day passages: Mark 16: 19 Luke 24: 50 – 53 Acts 1: 1 - 2
The Ascension of Christ Jesus
Today, Wednesday, May 19, we the Church celebrate the Eve of Ascension Day. The Feast of the Ascension is always celebrated on the 40th Day of Easter – at least in the Western Church, this is the date.
During the previous 40 days, the Risen Christ has appeared to His followers at different times and places. Tomorrow morning Jesus will assemble the Disciples in Bethany on the way to the Mount of Olives. There Jesus will instruct them to go into all parts of the world, beginning in Jerusalem, telling everyone they meet about the Kingdom of God and about Jesus’s death and resurrection. In the meantime, they were to wait together in Jerusalem for the Spirit of God to come to them. Then they would know what to do and would have the power to do what God asks of them.
There is evidence as early as 30 years after the Resurrection that new Christian Church celebrated Ascension Day as a set-aside Feast. This was the first event in the life and ministry that the church celebrated together. When you think about human nature, that makes perfect sense. Jesus’s followers were quite likely to get together on the anniversary of that last day to share their memories of Jesus’s departure from them. Over the centuries, Ascension Day became a time to remember the instructions that Jesus gave about preaching, teaching and baptizing as we celebrate the mission work done the previous year.
The only description that Scripture gives us is that while Jesus was blessing the Disciples, He disappeared into heaven as they watched. Artists through the centuries have painted this scene in such different ways. Some show the disciples looking up at Jesus as angels carry Him away. Some show Jesus’s feet disappearing into a cloud. Some depict Jesus rising in fire and light. I do look forward to the replay tape in heaven’s library when I get there!
Our faith is an Easter faith. It hangs on the reality of Jesus as fully man and fully God, as One who died and overcame death to live again. We acknowledge in the Nicene Creed each Sunday that Jesus “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father”. We talk about going to live with Christ Jesus in heaven after we die here on earth. We cannot explain it, but we affirm that Jesus’s life with God is important to us and for us. That life in heaven with Jesus is the fulfillment of the promises God has made to us of salvation and eternal life.
We are blessed to have all the knowledge that science can provide for us. Like you, I follow the news of the trials and errors in the search for a vaccine against Covid-19. I am happy that we understand germs, that we do not attribute illnesses to demons. Science gives us photos of the surface of Mars and can show us exactly what a single Covid-19 virus looks like. When we cannot prove something in a test tube or a telescope, we often push it aside and label it as superstition. Much of our faith lies outside science, and we allow that to make us uncomfortable in sophisticated circles.
The strength of our faith, however, rests in a God who is above and beyond and more than science. Our faith never denies science, but our faith is not limited by science. God’s grace and love is not limited by science. The universe was not created as a cosmic accident, nor were we created without purpose. The more we know of God, the more we understand that God is not limited by our boundaries, physical or scientific.
God created us, seeks our good, sustains us in all things and delights in our company. Whatever we can understand God is beyond, above, exceeds and overcomes. St. Paul reminds that we live and move and have our being in God. The thing that is hard to comprehend is that the entire universe exists and moves and has its being in God. Our faith in the Risen Christ is secured by the God of the universe.
Blessed be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, world without end. Amen and alleluia!
