5-24-17 - The End - and the Beginning

Tomorrow is Ascension Day, a major church feast day - and ignored by most churches, unless they are named Ascension. Maybe this holiday gets less airplay because the event it commemorates is so odd. What shall we make of this dramatic departure of the already quite dramatically risen Christ? It's hard to imagine such a bizarre event, which only Luke records in any detail, in both his gospel and in Acts.

Yet this is the final scene in the incarnate life of the Son of God, and tells us how he gets back to the place from where our story says he started: the heavenly precincts, where from now on he will be seated in glory at the right hand of the Father. (...a somewhat sedentary eternity for one who moved around so much, and prompting the vexing question a child once asked me, "Who is on the left side of God?")

Jesus hung out for forty days after his resurrection, the Gospels tell us, instructing and inspiring his followers to believe the impossible, and to live as though they believed it. It’s hard to convince the world all things are possible with God while holed up in fear in a room in Jerusalem. So Jesus kept showing up and going through the lessons again. Even so, they didn't quite get it. Gathered with him just before he takes his final bow, they still ask, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Have they heard nothing he’s said about God being among them to heal the sick, raise the dead, proclaim restoration to the poor? Do they still not understand his mission, or theirs, to make visible the power of God to restore all creation to wholeness? Once again, Jesus tries to explain it:

He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’

Why do we so often need to be reminded of where we’re supposed to be headed? Why do we so often let our focus narrow to the small matters of our own lives, forgetting where we stand in the big picture of God’s Life? How might we be regularly redirected to God’s mission through us?

By remembering that it is all about the Holy Spirit’s power working through us. Whenever we feel confused or discouraged or in doubt, we return to this central promise: You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.

And then we need to be open to receiving that power, that presence of God with us; open to exercising that power in Jesus’ name – not our own power, but God’s power empowering our proclamation, our works of restoration and healing, our witnessing.

Jesus’ disciples were told they would be his witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The book of Acts shows us how closely the spreading of the Good News followed that trajectory. Our chapter in that book will tell even more amazing stories as we let the Spirit work through us.

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