Acts 1:6-14
For those of you who have managed to stay away
from the social networking site Facebook,
let me take a moment to explain one of Facebook’s many idiosyncracies:
the “Like” button.
People on Facebook can post something called a status update,
which lets their friends know what they are doing
or thinking
or reading
or taking pictures of
at any given moment.
And when their friends read this status update
or browse through the pictures
or take a look at the recommended website,
they can click on the word “like.”
Then everyone who sees the update will see how many people “liked” it.
Once one person “likes” an update,
there’s even a cute little thumbs-up sign under the it
that tracks the number of people who have “liked” it.
As cool as this may sound
there is at least one person who thinks
all this “liking” is not a good thing.
Writer Johnathan Franzen is concerned about the way Facebook has
transformed “the verb ‘to like’ from a state of mind
to an action that you perform with your computer mouse.”
His bigger concern is that this reveals a tendency in our culture
to substitute an easy kind of liking for the more difficult task of loving.
To like something, on Facebook or otherwise,
is to keep a certain distance from it.
Liking is, by and large, a positive feeling.
Love, on the other hand, costs us. It is messy and complicated.
To love someone is to become vulnerable, to risk getting dirty.
Love, writes Franzen,
“is about bottomless empathy,
born out of the heart’s revelation
that another person is every bit as real as you are.” (1)
Without a doubt,
the words and actions of Jesus reveal that he was a man
who loved deeply and suffered all the painful consequences of love.
Seeking out the lonely and the lost,
calling his followers to leave family and secure jobs,
preaching a message of uncompromising demands:
Love your enemies
Turn the other cheek
Bless those who persecute you...
Jesus may not have known much about the superficial, Facebook style of “liking”
but he knew all there is to know about
what author Alice Sebold describes as
“getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” (2)
And Jesus wasn’t afraid to tell his followers that
they were called to do the very same thing.
After all, Jesus was no superhero of love.
He wasn’t even superhuman.
Jesus was the fullest expression of what a human being could be
and how a human being can love.
This particular story from Acts, though, of Jesus ascending into heaven,
certainly reinforces the superhero image.
If you go to the Holy Land, you can visit the
Chapel of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives.
You can go right up to the place where there is a foot-like depression in a rock,
said to be the exact spot from which Christ left the disciples
and disappeared into the sky on a cloud.
That footprint reinforces this image of Jesus the Superhero,
springing away from the earth with such force that
the very rock under his foot would forever bear the scars! (3)
With this image in mind, can any of us blame the disciples for standing there,
heads craned up
necks tilted back
mouths hanging open
watching their Lord disappear into the sky?
With this image in mind, can anyone blame us
for the persistent myth in our faith and in our culture
that heaven is somewhere up there...
somewhere in the direction of the sky where
the disciples last saw our beloved Savior?
That is where we tend to think of heaven, right?
Somewhere up there.
Of course, in our scientific age, we all know that heaven isn’t really “up there”
any more than hell is somewhere “down below.”
We have accepted that the earth is round, after all,
so that way of thinking just doesn’t work any more.
But still, polls show that nine out of ten Americans believe in heaven
and 85 percent think that they will go there when they die.
As Tom Long puts it,
“In sober moments of reflection,
our culture may find talk of heaven implausible,
but in moments of need, it finds
the hope of heaven irresistible.” (4)
So what if this passage really isn’t about the geographical location of heaven,
but something else entirely?
When the disciples are caught staring dumbly up in the sky,
the men in white tell them,
“This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven,
will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
What is that supposed to mean, anyway?
Theologian Christopher Morse has carefully considered
all the biblical evidence for heaven,
and he comes to the conclusion that
heaven is “not about blue skies or life only after death,”
but that heaven is coming toward us even now from God,
heaven is God coming to us,
“God’s unbounded love breaking in to every situation,
stronger than any loss, even death.
We don’t go to heaven; heaven comes to us.” (5)
It is so tempting for us to read this story in Acts
and conclude that the ascension is a one of a kind moment
that has nothing to do with our every day lives.
Like the disciples, we might stand in awe for a few moments
and then we walk away, shaking our heads,
feeling more than a little confused about
what in the world all of this means.
Confirmation and baptism represent the same temptation.
It’s a festive day, for sure.
It feels like a one of a kind moment set apart from the rest of our lives.
We are here to celebrate with these eight young people
who have worked hard all year
spent time in prayer
labored over faith statements
and ultimately decided to join our church
by professing their faith and being baptized
or renewing their baptismal vows.
It’s a festive day, but one that is all too tempting to leave behind
-- kind of like the ascension --
because, let’s face it,
it just doesn’t seem to have much to do with
life beyond these four walls.
If confirmation was a Facebook status update,
sure, we’d all “like” it...
but “liking” confirmation,
would be about the equivalent of “friending” Jesus,
which is in the end about keeping him at arm’s length,
letting him see just the parts of our day to day lives that we choose to share.
At the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, British Columbia
there is a baptismal font which is a statue of
“a standing male figure,
looking rather stern and
dressed in a long, bluish-grey robe,
[holding] up a black bowl of water.”
An inscription nearby reads:
“[This statue was once] used as a baptismal font in a church
but was removed when children were frightened by it.” (6)
Whoever carved that statue surely knew
that baptism is by no means just a festive occasion;
it is a symbol of death.
Confirmation is not so different.
Today is not just a day to celebrate, it is the beginning of new life for
Megan and Ryan, Jacob and Dallas, Matthew and Tyler, Alex and Cory.
And new life can only begin after death.
Beginning today,
we are calling these young people in our church to
live every moment and every day differently than before.
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,”
says Jesus, “and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”
That is what the ascension is about,
that is what confirmation and baptism are about:
this promise that when Jesus goes away from us
that’s when the Holy Spirit is going to come
and give us the same kind of power Jesus had.
The power to love.
The power to bring God’s love into every situation.
The power to make heaven real, here and now.
Kate Braestrup’s kids were playing in the backyard
when her cousin George used gasoline to try and ignite a pile of brush.
The gasoline exploded into a fireball that badly burned
all three of them.
In a panic, Braestrup got them into the car
and started driving to the hospital while calling 911 on her cell phone.
Braestrup writes that
“George was cursing and crying because his burns hurt
and because he knew that the fire
that had injured these children was his mistake, his fault.
He was the adult who had decided to use gasoline to start the fire,
and his was the hand that struck the match.
“Are they breathing?” the dispatcher said,
and I held up the cell phone.
George, beside me in the passenger seat, said,
“Oh my God. Oh hell. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”
Zach was sitting behind him in the backseat.
In the middle of his own loud litany of “Oh God” and “Oh hell,”
Zach leaned forward.
He reached out with his burned arm,
an arm blistering and shredding before my eyes,
and put his burned hand on George’s shoulder.
“It’s all right, George,” he said. “We love you.”
If you are living in love,” writes Braestrup,
“you are in heaven no matter where you are.” (7)
Heaven is here now,
not in some far-off place where Jesus flew off to
above the gaze of the astonished disciples,
not in some far-off future
that doesn’t have anything to do with today.
Likewise, these young people are not the future of the church,
and we do them and ourselves a disservice
if we think of them just this way.
They are the church...here, now, today,
and they are not the church by themselves
but with the rest of us, all here together.
Together, as Christ’s church, we are here to make love real,
to push past the superficial “liking” and “friending”
that we can do with a click of a computer mouse
and get down into the pit where real love happens,
a pit that looks a lot like everyday life.
And when we live together in that kind of love,
when we let that kind of love loose in a hurting and needy world,
no matter how messy and painful it may be,
no matter how much it might cost us,
we might just get the clearest glimpse of heaven
we will ever see.
Amen.
Endnotes:
1. Jonathan Franzen, “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts.” The New York Times, May 28, 2011. Online here.
2. Ibid.
3. Wesley Hill, “Ascension Theology, by Douglass Farrow” (book review), The Christian Century, May 13, 2011.
4. Tom Long, “Heaven Comes to Us,” The Christian Century, April 25, 2011.
5. Ibid.
6. Paul Galbreath, Leading through the Water. The Alban Institute, 2011.
7. Kate Braestrup, Here If You Need Me. Back Bay Books, 2008.
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