Acts 1:6-14, Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36, 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11, John 17:1-11
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
For the nineteen years I’ve been with you I’ve been firm on having us repeat the Creed every week. Usually the Apostles Creed and during the Easter Season the Nicene Creed. You could say I’ve been rigid.
Many Protestant churches don’t repeat the Creed. Or they make up their own, or borrow one, which usually is easier for modern people to believe. But the real Creed is full of things that are hard to believe. And that’s the point. If something’s not hard to believe, it’s not worth having in a Creed. A Creed is a challenge as much as a comfort. And it reminds us that truth is a gift to us, and not our own. Designer religion is one reason I’ve been rigid about the Creed. But soon that all will be up to you.
The Ascension of Jesus is in both Creeds, and that tells us that it’s one of the essentials, and that we are expected to believe it, and that it’s hard to believe. The disciples who watched it were totally surprised. The Epistles claim it but never explain it. It’s not in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and St. Luke is the only one who depicts it. At the end of his Gospel he does so briefly, and he does it more fully at the beginning of The Acts. My sister-in-law suggested to me that St. Luke wants to make sure that we know that the Lord Jesus ascended not just as a spirit but in his body, and that even in heaven he remains in his body, his resurrected body, still with skin and bones and muscles.
His Ascension does not undo his Incarnation, although in a way it is the opposite. For thirty-three years he walked with us as the infinite God contained within a human being. And now, with this, he is a human being with the infinity of God. A human being now unconstrained by time and space. Still about five foot six or so, still ten fingers and ten toes, and how can this be true? Why should I invite you to believe such a thing? Why not a purely spiritual God, philosophically more sensible, no conflict with science or physics or biology, much easier to believe?
Touch your forehead. Feel your body. Skin and bone. There’s a body like yours in heaven. Touch your head where you were baptized. There’s a baptized person on the throne of God. Your body will die someday. There is a person who died at the center of the future of all things. Is this only metaphor? How literally do you want to take it? Well, how valuable is the physical reality of the world? How important should it be to God, with our plague and pandemic and suffering? Our world of skin and bone and muscle and blood?
How far shall we push the story by St. Luke? Did Jesus float up like Mary Poppins, minus the umbrella and a hat? How high up did he go? Up to the clouds, or did a cloud come down? How far away is heaven? Does heaven come down, or is it all around us, but closed to us, unless it opens up? This is a specialty of St. Luke. He says that on the night of Jesus’ birth, an angel stood among the shepherds and their flocks, and the glory of God shone around them. He says that at Our Lord’s baptism “the heaven opened.” He says that at the Transfiguration Jesus lit up with glory and a cloud enveloped them, in which God spoke. So did heaven come down or was it just opened, or both?
You see it already in the Exodus, at Mount Sinai, when God spoke to the people from the cloud on the mountain. And God led the people in the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire right up there in front of them. It’s technically called the Glory-cloud, capital G-Glory, with the Glory that belongs to God alone. The cloud both hides God and reveals God’s presence. But isn’t God everywhere? Well, yes, but the God who can be everywhere can also focus and concentrate particularly here or there—like in Jesus. Just so, heaven is immense and high and all around us, and when God wants it to, it opens up.
When Jesus is lifted up and enters the cloud, that is the sign of his enthronement. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.” He is seated at the right hand of God the Father. But hadn’t he always been there with his Father before all worlds? Well, yes, but this is new, now he’s also a skin-and-bones human being, one of us, and seated at the right hand of God of the Father.
The Bible doesn’t explain this theoretically, because probably it can’t, as it’s such a mystery and wonder, but it’s offered to us as being very good for human beings.
It means that someone with first-hand knowledge of being human is there with God to intercede for us.
And it means that he governs all things in the world for our good, which he knows first hand about.
And it means that he limits God’s unlimited power in order to do only the sort of things a self-sacrificial human being would do, so no more plagues, for example, as punishment, or to teach a lesson.
And it means that a human as God is always with us, as one of our Deacons passionately reminded us on Monday night. Not just the general presence of a spiritual God, but the spiritual presence of an embodied God, the son of Mary, who is always with us.
Now, what about the two men in the story, robed in white? St. Luke calls them “men,” not angels, like the two men who just forty days earlier had met the women at the empty tomb and told them Christ had risen. I take these two as humans like us, but from the other side of death, and sent back from our future as messengers, as emissaries of the Life of the World to Come, when Jesus will come again, in glory.
This glory is ahead for us to share with Christ, as St. Peter says in his Epistle, which is to encourage us during the fiery trials that we suffer today. Apart from that I have only a vague idea about what it means for us to share that glory.
You know, in nineteen years I’ve never preached about Glory, even though it’s a big deal in the Bible. It’s hard to relate to in our lives, unless we’re watching the Olympics. But in church our language is full of it. By the end of our service today you’ll have used the word “glory” twenty times. We hardly notice it when we’re saying it. It’s abstract and disconnected. We might have things in our lives that are somewhat glorious, but the actual, singular, capital-G Glory of God is not in our experience, not like for people in the Bible. So we relegate it to a distant mystery, like a wonder to believe in but a wonder that’s far off from us.
So St. John makes this move in his Gospel. He reports the Lord Jesus saying that he will be glorified when he is lifted up—on the cross! For St. John, the cross was already Our Lord’s ascension. The Lord Jesus made his crucifixion his enthronement. From his shame he made his majesty, his curse his holiness, and his humiliation his glory. In the injustice against him he justified the world, the hatred against him he turned to love, and the malice around him he filled with grace.
So I think it’s grace that is your sign of glory. Glory is the wonder, and grace is the sign—the capital-G Grace that you live by, the grace that you practice, the grace that you extend. As Jonathan Edwards said, “Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.” The wonder and the sign.
Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected. That’s how the Lord Jesus, upon his throne, is now signifying glory—by grace. That’s the only glory the church has the right to, that we are held by grace. That’s the glory of your community of Jesus, that you are so gracious to each other and to the world. In God’s eyes you are robed in grace. Look it you. Did you know that you are like those two men, that just by your graciousness you are ambassadors of the Life of the World to Come!
Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.
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