June 5, 2011 | 8:00 a.m.

Ascending

Kerri N. Allen
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 68:1–10, 32–35
Acts 1:6–14

The ascension and appearing of Jesus constitute a radical challenge to the entire thought structure of the Enlightenment. And since our present Western culture is very much the creation of the Enlightenment, we should think seriously about the ways in which, as thinking Christians, we can and should bring that challenge to bear.

N. T. Wright

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

“It is not for you to know the times or periods that God has set by God’s own authority.”

It was the early 1960s when a young man and woman met in Florida, fell in love. Maybe you know that feeling of being young and in love—or just in love. You know that feeling that I’m talking about? The anticipation, excitement, and hope for the future?

This couple was like any couple in that way. He was in his twenties and grew up in the Midwest and was educated on the East Coast before he went to Florida to work as a VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America). She had spent her life growing up in a small community on the East Coast of Florida, attending college in Atlanta, before returning to her little community to teach. They were an idealistic couple, observant of their surroundings, working together in a Head Start program, living in the midst of economic, social, and racial disparities, and fully committed to changing the world and the course of history.

This could be any couple in Florida, any man and woman in history, but it wasn’t. It was the 1960s, it was the South, and he was white and she was black. And in that day and in that social and geographic location, their story was not any story; their story was not an easy one.

Remaining in Florida would have been a risk. Not solely a risk of upsetting the comfortable, or struggling with prolonged stares or nasty glances, but real perils of life and death, real possibilities of kidnapping, fire bombing, or lynching.

They decided against that risk and packed their belongings in a VW bus, to travel through Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and further north. They were fully prepared to encounter unfriendly sheriffs along the way, so they concocted a tale that she was a housemaid.

In 2011, it is almost impossible for us to believe this scenario. It seems like a lifetime ago, and for some of us, parts of this story were not in our lifetime. But this particular story is one that I know well, one that I learned at a young age and continued to know throughout my life, because it is my parents’ personal narrative.

Unfortunately, the story of the Jim Crow South is only a blip on the radar in a long plot of systematic oppression and marginalization of African Americans in United States history. It would have been my mother’s ancestors, brought from parts unknown in Africa and into slavery in America by Europeans who likely resembled the blonde hair and blue eyes of my white father. We don’t need to recount a full history lesson here to know that this is a history of darkness and despair.

It is a story that we’d probably rather not talk much about, we’d rather avoid conversation and live into this present-day age where so much has changed and where in our social location we don’t have to worry about these things.

But sometimes you must look back in order to look forward. Looking back is not always just looking back, but sometimes looking back reminds us to look forward.

And I might imagine that for those like my parents or for those of my ancestors in their respective historical times, it might have been constant questioning: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Only to hear the metaphorical response: “It is not for you to know the times or periods that God has set by God’s own authority.”

Yes, we know that the story of this history takes many twists and turns, unfolds with highs and lows, heroes and heroines, martyrs and saints who remain in our midst. The church and the roles of Christians in this narrative are as complex and winding as the story itself.

After all, Christians are no less or more human than non-Christians with the desire for power, authority, and control as exercised in racist sociopolitical structures in United States. This history is a tale of broken humanity.

This history and those complexities were very present for me as I sat with this scripture text this week. I think that’s because of the interesting ways in which this text and any scriptural references to Jesus’ ascension have been interpreted.

Many interpretations of Jesus’ ascension have been offered, including, as of a few weeks ago, an idea that if you subscribe to a very particular and calculated set of beliefs, you will be raptured and ascend to heaven much like Jesus in this passage.

Or the ascension of Jesus is used as a hope-filled message for those who suffer in the here and now, offering an eschatological hope that is fulfilled when one dies, that their suffering ends as they are reunited with the Lord and loved ones in heaven.

This was the prevalent historical message to Christian African Americans during times of slavery and through Jim Crow, and it continues to be offered as a pastoral theology for those who suffer from continued systemic racial injustice.

It’s simple enough, it’s black and white, it explains the unexplainable, and it holds many truths. But it might also limit our own imaginations about what a fuller and more faithful response could be as present-day disciples of Jesus.

To understand what I am saying, let’s take a closer look at the biblical passage from today.

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus’ disciples were looking for the kingdom in which they could exercise power. They are still not quite sure what to make of this situation, what to make of this risen Christ, and it’s in that ambiguity that they continue to be impatient.

And we might even understand the impatience a little bit when we put the passage into a little more context. The story of the followers of Jesus is a continuation of the story of the people who covenanted with the God of Israel. As we place ourselves in this first-century time of the text, we look back at the history of these people of God in order to look forward.

The people are eager for Jesus to restore the sociopolitical power of Israel. I mean, come on now, Jesus, any day now, restore some balance to the powers and principalities of that day, and bring about some justice to systems out of control.

Looking back, I imagine this might have been how my parents felt as they journeyed from the South to the North, anxiously awaiting a hopeful new community, only to learn that living as an interracial couple with a multiracial family, the structures of racial imbalance existed in Minnesota, just on a different, but no less painful, scale.

Sitting in the present moment of the text, Jesus doesn’t really do much to assuage this impatience and desire when Jesus tells his disciples, “Timing is God’s business. You aren’t privy to the timing; what you get is the coming of the Holy Spirit.” Then Jesus tells them that they will receive the power of the Holy Spirit and be his witnesses (which in its Greek form assumes not just firsthand knowledge, but opposition, even martyrdom) to all the ends of the world and ascends into heaven. But this is not the end of the story.

It is tempting for some to assume that this means that Jesus has exited stage right, has gone up to heaven, and his ministry ceases until all things end and Jesus returns again. Much like those propagating the rapture, in this interpretation there is nothing that this world has to offer because this whole narrative is about some mystical, powerful, beautiful bodily ascension, lifting our very earthly bodies into heaven.

But that is a simplistic telling of the story that negates core elements of our faith, of the gospel, of the life and teachings of Jesus and how those are inextricably linked to Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension.

In the continuation of the story that these disciples would have understood, they would have known God as active and dynamic and present through human history, as the God who freed the people of Egypt, fed them in the wilderness, and returned them from exile.

Or as contemporary disciples, we might know this God as the God actively present in the end of slavery and Jim Crow or in any grace-filled moment in history where light overshadowed darkness and where perverted powers and principalities failed.

No, this passage articulates that the disciples who had been living with the risen Jesus for forty days, not quite knowing what to make of the resurrection, got it as Jesus ascended into heaven. That got it that Jesus’ ascension was not solely about some far-off place and time known as heaven, but it is about what happened to Jesus as he was elevated to a new status.

New Testament scholar Matt Skinner suggest this: “If our images of Jesus ascending contribute to a sense of Jesus’ removal from human society and our daily experiences, then we’ve missed the point of the ascension.”

By his ascension, Jesus receives power and authority and reigns over all. Jesus suffered and died at the hands of the authorities of his day—the secular and religious authorities—and his resurrection tells us that this is not the last word, that death was not the last chapter in God’s story, that the powers and principalities do not have ultimate reign.

And Jesus promises that the disciples will be written into the narrative, they will participate in God’s reign across all barriers. Even as Jesus moves into a new realm, God has important things in store for the disciples.

These disciples are written into the narrative to go to all ends of the earth to witness by their testimony about God’s love and forgiveness and through opposition of oppression and marginalization; the scripture sets the scene for the next phase of the narrative.

This next phase, this next chapter, sees God’s work unfolding. Throughout history, the story continues to see humans being humans—powers and principalities exercising authority that is not of God. This is the story of history that in no small measure my ancestors knew in slavery, that my immediate family knew as the Jim Crow narrative. This is the story of many other points in history that we’ve read about in books, heard in our confessions, or even received in text message updates as early as this morning’s news.

But this next chapter has also seen the reign of God—active and dynamic, upsetting those who wish to pervert God’s kingdom, ending slavery, ending legalized Jim Crow, in no small part because God wrote God’s disciples into the narrative to witness to the gospel message, to witness to the resurrection, to witness that the story does not end.

The disciples in the scripture waited for what Jesus promised. They waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit. And even in their wait, they went beyond sitting and around looking back at the past and dreaming about the future. Rather, they agreed that they were in this journey for good, completely in prayer together, waiting for God to reveal God’s timeline, waiting for God to initiate action and direct their witness, waiting to tell Jesus’ story to all places in the earth, waiting for the wild stuff yet to come.

So we too, the twenty-first-century disciples who have been written into the narrative, wait as well. We ask, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

And Jesus replies, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that God has set by God’s own authority.”

And we know through the history of the Bible, through this history of our own experience and the history of others, that Christ’s reign has come, that Christ rules today, but that one day, in one time and period yet unknown, the fullness of Christ’s reign will be revealed. The fullness of God’s kingdom will be restored. All thanks be to God. Amen.