Before the readings:
We’re celebrating the Feast of the Ascension today. Ascension is technically a Thursday – and we’ve sometimes done a special Ascension service – but this year we’re observing it on Sunday, as many churches do.
Ascension is a fancy word for “going up.” What we remember and honor today is the time when the risen Christ, who has been spending time with his friends and followers, gives them their final instructions – tells them to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit – and leaves to return to God the Father.
We know that God doesn’t actually live above the sky, but there’s a very deep-seated and ancient impulse to think of God that way, so Jesus appears to ascend – go up – into the sky, out of sight. My favorite images of the Ascension are the ones with Jesus’ feet dangling down from the top of the frame.
The lectionary does something odd but understandable for Ascension. It gives us the very end of the Gospel of Luke… and the very beginning of the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Those passages overlap: they both tell the Ascension story.
The Gospel of Luke and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles have the same author. That’s widely accepted by Biblical scholars. But Luke didn’t just cut and paste. There are differences.
Luke has done a lot research and gathered all the information he can, to put together his accounts of the life of Jesus and the early church. So we might think of him as a historian. But he’s not a historian in the modern sense. It doesn’t bother Luke that he has Jesus saying slightly different things, in these two scenes.
Maybe the best analogy is to modern authors like Hilary Mantel who do a lot of research so they can write about real people and real events, but then do their historical writing as a novel, a story, to catch readers’ attention and bring them along.
Let’s receive those texts now…
What do you notice?…
I feel like the Luke version feels a little like an episode of a TV show at the end of a season when the writers don’t know yet if it’s going to be renewed. Trying to wrap things up so that it feels complete, but also leaving some threads they can pick up if they DO get another season.
And they DID – so the Acts version is more forward-looking. It leans into what happens next – in the next 28 chapters and fifteen years or so.
Maybe the biggest difference is the two men in the Acts version. We’re meant to understand that these are angels – their sudden appearance, their white garments. In Luke’s Easter Gospel, there are also two men in white clothes who appear suddenly – to tell the women who have come to the tomb that Jesus is not here, but has risen.
Why leave those angelic messengers out of the Luke version? It might make you wonder if that particular detail really happened. It might make you think: what does this do, in the story?
What it does in the story is get the disciples to stop staring up… and start looking around, and out… at THEIR work in the world, the work Jesus has charged them with: being his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Being witnesses. The word used there in Greek means both of the things it means for us in English. Somebody who sees a thing happen, and can tell other people about it. Or: Somebody who is a witness in a legal sense – who testifies at a trial to what they have seen and know to be true.
It means a third thing too, because the Greek word here is martus. It’s the root of the English word martyr, someone who proves the strength of their convictions by being willing to die for them.
We have that word because so many in the early generations of Christians, in times of persecution, were called to face death for their faith in Jesus.
So being a witness, in this particular Christian sense, isn’t just about knowing and telling. It’s also about being willing to put yourself on the line – to take a costly stand – for what you know to be right and true and good.
Jesus’ friends, watching him disappear into the clouds, might not know – yet – that that kind of courage and commitment will be asked of them. But Luke certainly does. By the time he’s telling this story, Peter, Paul, and many other Christians have become witnesses to Christ Jesus at cost of their lives.
This call to be witnesses is interestingly different from what Jesus tells the disciples in the gospel of Matthew – the text sometimes called the Great Commission. At the very end of Matthew, Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”
Matthew’s Jesus tells the disciples: Go make more Christians. Convert people. In Luke and Acts, Jesus tells the disciples: Bear witness. Tell and show people what you have learned from me. Luke’s Jesus leaves the outcome of that witnessing in God’s hands.
Last week I read a piece by two young Christians, Hannah Bowman and Luke Melonakos-Harrison, about being witnesses to Christ in a time when a conservative Christian cultural and political agenda is threatening trans lives, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom, and teaching the truth about race and racism.
Their article never uses the word witness but I think that what it means to be witnesses to Jesus, in these times, is exactly what they’re talking about.
“Solidarity requires that we translate our general values—our desire to love, protect, and support the LGBTQ community [or other communities under threat]—into specific actions sufficient to the threats we face now…. Churches should consider how they can—as a congregation or community—develop real relationships of mutual aid with affected individuals and families…. The church must be a community of real bodies, acting together as a material expression of the body of Christ in our society. …The question for the church must not be “how do we form willing, individual Christians into allies of the LGBTQ community [or other communities under threat]?” but instead “how do we become the broken body of Christ given up in acts of solidarity?””
How do we, together, become ready to put ourselves on the line – to become witnesses – for what we know to be right and true and good? For what we have come to believe, and to hope for, in Christ? It’s a big question. But the book of Acts has one answer – an important answer. It’s in what happens in the very next verses.
After these two men in white tell them to stop staring at the sky, the disciples go back to Jerusalem. They regather in the upstairs room where they’ve gathered before. The core group gets back together – the men and women who have been Jesus’ closest companions along the way. And they spend a lot of time praying together.
A few verses, and about ten days later, they’re still gathering for togetherness and shared prayer. Our Pentecost lesson for next week begins, “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.”
Our former Bishop Steven Miller preached on this text once and it stuck with me. He pointed out that this sentence, that first sentence of the Pentecost story, Acts chapter 2, really stresses the group’s togetherness. All. Together. In one place. Three separate words in the original Greek. Luke really wanted to hammer this home. ALL. TOGETHER. In the same place.
So what do the disciples do in response to Jesus’ call to be witnesses? They regroup. Literally. They regather in a familiar place.
I’ll bet they did some checking in on those they hadn’t seen yet. Has anyone seen Thaddeus? How about Joseph Barsabbas? Does anyone know where Mary and Cleopas are staying? …
More people would show up, day by day, and be welcomed. Everyone would share what’s been happening to them. How it’s all been feeling. Maybe how frightened they’ve been, and how sad. They’d wonder together: what next? Jesus seems to think there’s more for us to do… but right now, this is what we need: just to be together, all together, in one place. To regroup. To find each other and ourselves again.
I’m listening to the wisdom of this text. I know there are people in this congregation for whom the question they bring with them to church is: How does faith matter, facing the things we’re facing? What is the good news here – for me, for my struggling neighbors?For the grieving and the outraged and the hopeless? And how can I, can we, offer or embody that good news? – Especially when the name of Jesus Christ is plastered all over movements that seem so far from his teaching and witness?
And I know there are people in this congregation for whom the question they bring with them to church is: Does this place, these people, this God, have anything to offer to help me hold myself together, or hold my loved ones together? To help me survive, and maybe begin to heal?
There are probably other big questions that people are carrying inside them too. And many may carry some of each.
It’s been said that every preacher really only has one sermon. I suspect, with humility, that my one sermon is: God calls and empowers us to join God in striving for justice, mercy, peace, and human wholeness, individually and together, in ways small and large. That we are not here for solace only, but for strength; not for pardon only, but for renewal.
But sometimes – Lord, sometimes just we need solace. Sometimes we just need to regroup. The past two years have been so hard. The past two WEEKS have been so hard. People keep gently suggesting that maybe this summer we should just… meet up around the firepit. Have a tea party on the patio. Go for walks together. Connect and reconnect. Rest and play, listen and share, and pray for and with one another.
Whether we gather virtually or in person, we need to regroup. To find each other and ourselves again, all together in one place. To experience ourselves as the Body of Christ gathered. So that when the Holy Spirit shows up to send us forth as witnesses – we’re ready.