Jesus left at the ascension, so that we could learn to look for Christ everywhere.
Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Ascension of Our Lord
Texts: Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53
God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
If you had stopped by here on Monday, April 8th at around 2pm, you would have seen something unusual: Jim Bargmann and I, standing out in the parking lot, staring up at the clouds.
No, we weren’t looking for Jesus. That, of course, was the day of the eclipse and though we knew we weren’t in the path of the totality, we were still hoping to see something. Anything. But, as many of you probably remember, we couldn’t see it here at all. In fact, the clouds were so thick and covered so much of the sky, we couldn’t even tell where the sun was! We watched and we waited for a break in the clouds, and we shared photos from our friends and family who were seeing this amazing thing. But in the end, all we saw was clouds. And after a while we headed back inside, feeling disappointed. And a little bit empty.
And I was thinking about that experience as I was imagining Jesus’s ascension.
Now, we don’t know what the weather was like that day. We aren’t given many details but we do know that there was at least one cloud. Because in the account in Acts, we are told that “as [the followers of Jesus] were watching, Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”
Now, we usually picture it as one of those huge, fluffy, white clouds that is just the perfect compliment to the gorgeous blue sky on a sunny afternoon. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was more like the day of the eclipse, overcast and threatening rain, with gloomy gray clouds covering the sky?
I know that’s statistically unlikely, given the arid climate of Jerusalem. But, imagining the Ascension happening under gray skies, helped me connect with the underlying melancholy of the event. Of course that wasn’t the only emotion, and seems not even to have been the primary one. After all Luke’s account in the gospel tells us that the followers returned to Jerusalem with great joy! And we’ll get to the joy. But I think we can safely imagine that the great joy was also at least tinged with a bit of sadness.
That there was glory, yes, but something gloomy too.
Jesus was leaving. The incarnation was over. And that’s so hard because even death itself couldn’t end the incarnation! That’s what we’ve been celebrating for forty days now – that death wasn’t the end of the incarnation. But this was. The Word made flesh, who dwelt among us, who died and rose again, was going away.
The clouds covered up the sun, and we are left in gloomy gray, staring up at the sky.
It’s a feeling we know well. When someone important to us, important to our community, leaves, it can feel just like straining to see the sun on a cloudy day. A feeling of missing something. A feeling of emptiness and longing.
It’s easy to imagine the followers of Jesus feeling that emptiness, that longing as they stood there looking up at the sky. As they realized that Easter really is over, and the long wait of Advent was beginning. No wonder those two white-robed figures had to prompt them to quit their staring and get back to living. They couldn’t tear their eyes away – they just wanted one more glimpse.
But, of course, the sun is still there even when you can’t see it.
Jesus may have left, but he wasn’t gone. And no clouds can cover up or take away Christ’s promise to abide with us, to be with us “always, to the end of the age.” No matter how empty we feel, Christ fills us. After all, Christ is fullness, as Paul reminds us in the letter to the Ephesians, the one “who fills all in all.” Who fills our broken and empty hearts with abundant and everlasting life – who fills us with the gifts of the Holy Spirit – with love and peace and great joy.
And this fullness isn’t only within ourselves, but Christ is the fullness that is so full that it fills the whole universe. Christ fills everything, is accessible everywhere!
I apologize in advance for this cringey comparison – but one way to imagine it is that Christ being lifted up in a cloud is a little bit like Christ being uploaded to the cloud. Okay, I know that’s a groaner, but go with it for a moment. I create a file on my device – and the only place I can access it is on that device, the place where it is saved. But once I upload it to the cloud, then it’s saved to the network that connects the world and that means I can get to it from anywhere. Christ is the network that connects us to everything – to God, to creation, to one another, even to ourselves.
And that’s part of what the Ascension, the end of the incarnation, the uploading to the cloud, helps us to understand.
Because there is one drawback to incarnation.
It’s singular. It’s particular. It draws our focus to one person and time and place, and that’s amazing because it helps us see the Triune God who is beyond person, time and place. But that focus on the one singular person of Jesus, can blur our peripheral vision, and blind us to the truth that Christ is everywhere, the fullness that fills all people and all things, present and accessible and living from one end of creation to the other. As long as Jesus was here, walking and talking and eating and healing and loving as one particular person, it was a little bit harder for us to see Christ anywhere else.
Jesus left so that we would learn to look for Christ.
So that we could learn to see Christ in everyone, in everything. So that we could experience the fullness of Christ.
And that doesn’t keep us from staring up at the clouds sometimes – desperate for a glimpse of the sun.
That doesn’t keep us from singing “Come, Lord Jesus” again and again until our throats are raw. It doesn’t keep us from feeling empty, even as we are being filled by fullness. In our longing, we are still clinging to the promise that Christ will return. As those two robed figures said to the disciples: “This Jesus, this Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go.” Christ Jesus will come again.
But what do we do in the meantime? We look for Christ, not just in the clouds, but in the dirt and in the mirror and in each other. We learn to see Christ – especially in those places we least expect, and in those people who are the hardest to love. We let ourselves be filled with the fullness of the one who fills all in all, so that we can be Christ’s eyes and hands and love in the world.
We do what we always do in Advent.
We watch and we wait for a break in the clouds.
In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
