What are we doing? Preaching ascension in a time of horror

‘Why do you stand staring up into heaven?’ (Acts 1.11)

That is the challenge of the angels to the Jesus’s disciples after the ascension. That is the challenge to us today.

Because if they are staring into heaven, they are not focusing on their sisters and brothers; on healing, on breaking bread, on sharing possessions in common.

The ascension of Jesus does not mean the action is now all in heaven. It’s not just a way of getting him off the stage. He’s not preparing an escape route for us to get out of this world.

No: the ascension is not a postscript. It is the flowering, the fulfilment, of the incarnation of God in Christ, his crucifixion, his rising from the dead.

It tells us that this one – this human being who walked our earth and healed and challenged and loved – is the divine Word. That this one, who was cursed and crucified and shamed in weakness, is our Lord and God. That this one who rose from the dead, takes his humanity and ours into God’s heart. His humanity – and his wounds. Jesus does not leave his body behind, and he does not hide his scars.

At the ascension, that human body, that glorious and wounded flesh, is taken up into God’s infinite life. And all power and dominion go with him: the cursed, the victimised, the weak, the risen, the vindicated. And all creatures go with him; for in his body, all things are held together. He, and no power of earthly violence, is Lord of all.

Jesus is lord means no one and nothing else is lord: the love embodied in Jesus defines what is most true, most real. And it calls to us: to transform our lives, our community, our earth through the power of that love.

Why do you stand staring up into heaven?

Yesterday, there was another school massacre of children in the US, in Udvale Texas. 19 kids and 2 teachers shot dead. Chris Murphy, the senator for Connecticut – where the Sandy Hook school massacre happened 10 years ago - got up in the Senate and asked his colleagues repeatedly ‘What are we doing? Why are we here?’ He challenged them: if we cannot use the power we have to oppose violence and protect children, why are we here?

I don’t think I am being partisan if I say those words are prophetic. And they speak to each one of us.

What are we doing? What are we doing to bind broken hearts? What are we doing to end cultures of violence and hate?

It may feel there is little we can do. But remember the ascension. Jesus is Lord. Not Caesar, not Herod, not Pilate, not child killers, not gun lobbies, not white supremacists. Might is not right. War is not God. Violence does not have the last word – in Udvale, in Ukraine, in Yemen. In Liverpool.

God’s call comes to each one of us: what can you do? But we never answer this alone. We answer it in the grace of God, with the gift of the coming Spirit, and in the company of all our fellow travellers, the communion of saints in earth and heaven.

But answer it we must, if we are to be true to Christ. 

What are we doing? Why are we here?

Why do we stand staring up into heaven?