Sermon for CATM – May 2, 2010 – The Ascension of Jesus Christ
Show “God’s Ipod” short film (Will be on Youtube by June
Jesus is alive!!! Amen. He is here by His Holy Spirit. He is present to us. God has not abandoned us. Lives that touch Jesus are transformed. New purpose and self-respect is discovered to enable us to move away that the things that bind us.
New strength is discovered to begin life afresh, to rebuild shattered lives. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is here, today, in this place…at work to transform us into the likeness of Jesus.
Romans 8: 11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.
For a man who died 40 days ago, Jesus was surprisingly well. It would have been quite a rough ride for those who had been convinced that Jesus was a fraud.
After His crucifixion, after His resurrection, Jesus appeared again and again and again to all kinds of people, to the disciples and to others…alive!
Those who had seen Him die, those who had made up stuff to get Him killed, those in spiritual leadership who had, they thought, done their best to rid the people of a man they just didn’t understand but who they thought wasn’t a good guy…
All these folks, people who we don’t think about a lot, would have been pretty messed up…when they saw Jesus walking around and talking and eating and hanging out with His disciples…AGAIN.
And Peter, the loud, over-confident, foot-in-mouth disciple who had denied Jesus three times, Jesus restored by giving Peter three opportunities to confess his love for Jesus and receive the profound commission to be one who would feed the sheep of God.
To Thomas the disciple who just wouldn’t take the word of his friends for the resurrection of Jesus, Jesus appeared and offered His wounds as hard evidence of His resurrection. Likewise, the rest of His appearances were enough to confound those who refused to believe.
PPT:
Matthew 28:9 Jesus appears to Mary and Mary Magdalene
Mark 16:14 Jesus appears to the eleven apostles
Luke 24:15-31 Jesus appears to two disciples
Luke 24:36-53 Jesus appears to the eleven apostles
John 20-21 Jesus appears to the Apostles
Acts 1:1-11 Jesus appears to the Apostles
Acts 9, 22, 26 Jesus appears to Paul.
1 Corinthians 15:6 Jesus appears to over 500
In order to get a complete idea of the events surrounding the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, we need to look at the complete account by Luke, which he begins at the end of his gospel and continues into the book of Acts. Let’s read together this account, part A and part B.
Read: Luke 24:44-53 and Acts 1:1-11
Luke 24:44 He said to them, "This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms." 45 Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.
In case you have not been tracking with us for the past little while, we’ve been walking through the experience of the disciples in the post-resurrection period leading up to the ascension of Jesus, which is today’s topic.
The disciples, of course, were all Jewish men who had left pretty much everything to follow Jesus. So here, Jesus emphasizes something that is really very important, but that can get lost on contemporary ears. Jesus here, after the resurrection, reminds the disciples of what He had told them before the crucifixion: there were countless prophesies about Jesus in the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Bible that were true and that had to be fulfilled. Just to mention a very few:
Isaiah 7:14 “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel”. And Isaiah 9: 6 “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”.
These prophesies are obviously about Jesus, but Jesus doesn’t rely on the fact that the prophesies were there in plain text in the Bible. It’s never enough to have the text on the page.
Spiritual things need to be spiritually discerned and understood. Some people look at these verses and see no correspondence to Jesus. Why?
1 Corinthians 2: 14 says this: “The man (or woman) without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned”.
It’s not enough to have it there in plain English. We need the revelation of God, we need our eyes opened by God in order to understand what God means by what He says. So v 45 says: “Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures”.
Jesus reminds them that the OT prophesies are fulfilled in Him. This helps the disciples connect the dots, helps them to put together everything that had happened, that must have seemed like a puzzle, so they could understand that God is at work completing the work He had begun.
46 He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things. 49 I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high."
Now, after connecting the dots for the disciples to help them understand everything that had happened, Jesus commissions them, here indirectly. He says that ‘repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem’.
Jerusalem was a city of mostly Jews, and it was to be the birthplace of the proclamation of Jesus. But here Jesus makes it clear that by no means is the gospel of Jesus to say confined to the Jews.
This is specifically why you and I here today, as Gentiles, have access to this hope that is in Jesus. Far from a nationalistic faith, far from a narrow ethnic faith, the Way of Jesus is open to all nations, and indeed the gospel has gone to all nations.
Every tribe, every tongue on planet earth has the opportunity to hear the gospel and come to know Jesus Christ. In fact, such is the shift here in North America that missionaries now come from Africa and from China to spread the gospel in this land.
Wherever the gospel is not, God is at work to bring the knowledge of His grace in Christ Jesus. So the disciples are, here in this passage, commissioned by Jesus, as witnesses of all that happened…all that Jesus taught, His suffering and death and resurrection AND His ascension to heaven, to the right hand of God the Father.
And here He hints that, again, this is not something that’s going to happen in the natural. The Apostles are not just being sent out to relay the facts of all that had happened.
They are going to receive power, they are going to have to wait to be sent what God has promised, the Holy Spirit. They are going to have to wait until (I love this phrase) they have been “clothed with power from on high”.
50 When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. 51 While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. 52 Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. 53 And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.
So much of what Jesus did was done in normal and natural circumstances. He taught as people teach others. He ate and slept and walked and talked like any other man.
Unlike pagan accounts of gods and demi-gods, which some suggest were foreshadowings of Jesus, Jesus just was. Christian theology talks about Jesus being fully human and fully God. That’s because…why? He was just like it says, human. But He was also divine, He was also fully God.
And here, in this account, while Jesus has lifted up his hands to bless them, He is taken up into heaven. In one pretty impressive instance, Jesus’ story and all that has happened to Him is verified by His ascension.
Now we jump to the B section of Luke’s narrative in Acts chapter 1.
Acts 1: 9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. 10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 "Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."
Luke ends his account of the Ascension with what appear to be two angels giving what strikes me as a pretty funny, slightly back-handed challenge: “"Why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven."
Why is that funny? Or why might it strike someone quirky like me as funny?
There are three basic postures or approaches to life that Christian take:
Look up
Look down
Look up and down
The first is to look up. Why do we look up? We look up to see Jesus. We fix our eyes on the author and finisher of our faith. We focus our eyes and our hearts heaven-ward. We spend our time in worship. We spend our time making sure we are living in such a way as to have assurance that we will one day live forever with Jesus in heaven.
For much of the history most a lot of Christians have lived and thought this way. What might be the downside of always only looking up? [We grow out of touch with what’s around us; we don’t see what’s coming and can get bowled over; we focus on what is to come and not what we are called to do]. We’re out of balance and off-kilter.
It was Christians, I believe, who first came up with the quote: “Too heavenly minded to be any earthly good”. Only looking up, anticipating what is to come, is one way Christians have chosen to live.
The second way is “Only looking down”. I’ve watched more than one person drift from what appeared to be a vital faith in Christ to a flattened, lifeless faith, or to walk altogether away from Christ. These tend to be folks who are consumed by issues they see around them.
They see people coming from all nations to Canada and they start to believe that it is disrespectful to share the love of God in Christ with them. They see that Canada is a rich, pluralistic country and they start to suspect those of us who take very seriously the call to make disciples of all nations. We start to look pretty fishy, or conservative, or out-of-touch (take your pick whichever disparaging label you like).
Or, by looking down, by focusing only on what they see around them, people can start to wonder where God is. There is suffering in the world (something we’ve looked at in depth in recent months – you can check out my sermon archive online if you’re interested in that topic).
There are problems and there is suffering in the world, and it can seem, when we’re out of balance, that God is distant, removed, uninvolved and uncaring. Either way, looking down, not looking up and being aware only of things on this vertical plain causes us to be out of balance.
The third way is what I will call the Jesus Way. Jesus calls us indeed to look to Him, to love and worship God with everything we are. We need to, at regular intervals, on our own AND as we come together like we are today…we need to look up together in order to have a clearer vision of Jesus.
But the Jesus Way beckons us both to look up in order to see Him and (and the cross actually perfectly illustrates this) this way (stretch out hand). In Matthew 25 Jesus says that we encounter Him also as we feed the hungry, clothe the naked and visit the prisoner.
Our experience of Jesus must include a profound commitment to worshipping God with abandon and joy, and at the same time being deeply engaged with people through whom Jesus shows Himself to us.
In fact Jesus suggests that the sincerity of our communion and our worship has a test. That test is: Did we feed Him when He was hungry, clothe Him, visit Him?
The Apostle Matthew has his own account of Jesus’ last words to the disciples. I’m so glad we have the accounts of the four gospel writers to enable us to get a complete picture of all that happened, of all that Jesus said and did.
What is Jesus purpose statement for the church? There is only one, one that matters to God and one that will keep us going the direction we’re supposed to go. It is summed up here:
Matthew 28:16 Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17 When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.18 Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."
Friends, we know, if we’ve spent any time at all in the Word of God, how rich and challenging and life-changing is the Way of Jesus.
CATM Academy, our school for discipleship, spiritual formation and ministry preparation exists to gather us together as friends so that we can learn the Way of Jesus together and then, as co-labourers in the gospel, do exactly what Jesus instructs us to do in this passage.
Our purpose is to love the world, to bring the world, to woo the world to Jesus. There is no better way of life than the way of abundant life in Jesus.
There is no greater purpose in life than to do the will of God, which is to love justice, do mercy and walk humbly with God, AND to bring people to relationship with Jesus. As this sent community, we are never without Jesus.
Jesus is alive!!! Amen. He is here by His Holy Spirit. He is present to us. God has not abandoned us. Lives touched Jesus are transformed. Things that bind us lose their hold on as. New strength is discovered to begin life afresh, to rebuild shattered lives. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is here, today, in this place…at work to transform us into the likeness of Jesus.
Let’s pray.
