A Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension
As preached (with minimal edits) at the 9am BCP service at St George's Anglican Church, Place du Canada on Sunday June 1st, 2025
Acts 1:1-11, Psalm 93, Ephesians 1:15-23, Luke 24:44-53
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Can you guess the author of this famous quote?
The author begins by quoting the oft-uttered phrase: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.'"
The author then goes on to explain that:
"That is the one thing we must not say. [because] A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher ... You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else [He was] a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool ... or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."1
Any guesses?
I'll let you off the hook. It was C.S. Lewis in his book, Mere Christianity.
I bring this quote up today because today we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension. A feast commemorating an event where Jesus does something that shows who He is. That makes it clear that He is not in fact, just some guy with good moral ideas but is in fact, God godself.
Rightly, this feast was on Thursday but we have chosen as a community to observe it today.
The feast of the Ascension is when we celebrate Christ being taken up bodily into heaven. It's a spectacle - an otherworldly, bizarre, deeply weird incident.
It's only recounted in the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts. The other Gospels allude to it and talk around it, but they don't go into detail.
Can you blame them? Most folks, most Christians at least, are able to get behind Jesus as a good man. An exemplary man, “a pattern and a guide,”2 a human who lived and died and even rose again. And yet, as C.S. Lewis points out, to do so is to ignore significant parts of the gospel, to disregard Christ's own words.
Most of us can stretch our hearts and our minds far enough that we can affirm Christ's divinity in a palatable, digestible sort of way: Jesus, being God - being divine - is able to control the weather - the storms on the sea and the material laws governing how many fish and how many loaves of bread it takes to feed 5000 or so people, he is able to cure and to heal. But, even some of the most devout Christians today begin to shift in their seats when we start talking about a resurrected Lord being carried up - bodily in a cloud into heaven… it's… a bit much. It's uncomfortable, it’s weird.
Protestant theologian Tim Keller has a sermon on the Ascension that's almost as famous as the C.S. Lewis's quote from earlier, where he bemoans the lack of Ascension cards in Christian bookstores. "It's easy," he says, "to find cards regarding Christ's birth, his death, his resurrection, but when it comes to his Ascension - radio silence from Hallmark."3 And that is a curious thing. Because everybody who has ever lived was born, and everyone who has ever lived has died or will die, and even in Jesus' time - there were a few people who came back after they'd died - look at Jairus's daughter or Lazarus of Bethany. But, as for those who were taken up into heaven in a cloud? We've got Jesus in the New Testament and Enoch and Elijah in the Old Testament. That's it. And the difference here, what makes Jesus’ Ascension so impressive, is that Jesus went up on his own authority, and the other two were 'assumed.' In fact the other two were assumed on Christ's authority - on God's authority. The authority of the Word that in the beginning was with God and was God.
Crazy stuff. Wild stuff. Otherworldly stuff.
The Ascension, in its very self, points to a world that is bigger than we can ask or imagine. It compels us to go out into that world and live lives that ring with the fullness of God's love for this planet - for God's people - all of them - all of us. This unknowably different picture of an unknowable and different world - the new heaven and the new earth, calls us to bear witness to the palpable presence of God among us.
God who is wholly different than we are - but who loves us all the same.
Christ being at the right hand of the Father does not mean that God has abandoned us and gone off to a better place where we cannot follow. Rather, Christ's Ascension shows us who God is.
Once again, God has stretched out his arms of love just as He did on the cross - to embrace the whole world. To expand out beyond human form without denigrating or belittling the human form.
In the Ascension, God doesn't burst out of the confines of the fragile human body. Instead, God takes that fragile human body into Godself.
Because God who wrote himself into creation- God who loved us so much that He gave his only Son that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have eternal life - that same God - brought humanity into himself - he changed the game. He made things cosmic - magnified - bigger than we can ask or imagine. Not by denying humanity or transcending it but rather by glorifying it. By affirming it. By going to sit at the right hand of God - wherever that is and whatever that is - God has changed the rules of the cosmos. God has made it so that we all have access to Godself simply by being us.
It's why we gather together every Sunday: Rain or shine, earthquake, tornado, or flash flood - no matter the political landscape or the economic situation -- No matter what's happening on the news or in the world, in our lives, or even whether or not we - as individuals - can make it. No matter what, there will be a gathering of our community here every Sunday morning.
Together - on behalf of the whole community - those gathered will remember, give thanks, and hear once again (or for the first time) the promises of scripture - the comfortable words - that culminate in the life, death, resurrection, Ascension, and coming again of Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the Christ, the one who is at once the Son of God and God himself. It's staggering to think about.
God, who created everything, loves us that much.
This morning we have come together to worship God and to meet Him in Word and Sacrament, and this morning - in the Eucharist - we will participate in something as old as the Church - we will remember Christ's life, death, resurrection, and Ascension and in doing so - in remembering and more than remembering in participating in this story - we will be given eyes to see the profound in the ordinary - eyes to see that new cosmic order that the Ascension points to - eyes to see The Son of God in bread and wine, so my friends - as you go out into the world - into the greatest part of the liturgy - I pray that you would take some of this Eucharistic reality with you. That you would see the world a little differently - that you would see it through the ascended Christ. I pray that you'll see more clearly and That the reality of our loving God will be all the more tangible. Amen.
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. New York: Macmillan, 1952. 55–56.
I swear these are lyrics to a hymn my grandmother used to sing. But, the closest hymns I can find online are a smattering of 18th century hymns that aren’t quite the one like, Jesus my Pattern and my Guide by Samuel Medley which has a totally different tune than the one in my head and I’ve Found a Friend, O such a Friend by James Grindlay Small which isn’t quite right either. The other option is Joseph, Be our Guide and Pattern by Muriel E. Newton-White which is a Canadian hymn that was popular in the 1970s and was sung to two different tunes. This one is my best guess but only works if Grandma switched out Joseph for Jesus. But, as she died in 2019, so I have no way to fact check.
Keller, Timothy. The Ascension. Sermon, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York, NY, May 18, 1997. Gospel in Life. https://gospelinlife.com/sermon/the-ascension/.