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Many of you may have memories of years past when on Ascension Sunday children would come from their Sunday School class, of which there were myriads, with a white Styrofoam cup turned upside down with cotton balls glued all over it. There would be a paper cut-out of Jesus dangling from a string out the bottom of it. When you pulled up on the string, Jesus would disappear into the cup as if to ascend into heaven amidst clouds of glory. So cool. The whole scenario just begs that be a spaceship involved.
Ascension Sunday. Ascension is such a big word. I wonder what it would be like to be a child and ponder this thing of Jesus ascending into heaven. I think they would have a lot less trouble dealing with it than adults do. We adults, we want scientific proof and stuff like that and tend to dismiss as preposterous a bodily resurrected from the dead human being ascending bodily to somewhere else. But hey, try this on for size. We like to imagine ourselves as living in a four-dimensional reality. We can measure length, height, depth, and time, but that’s not it. Since the discovery of the subatomic world, it’s pretty much an established fact that there are at least 11 dimensions to our universe or our four dimensions don’t add up. There are seven more dimensions of reality that we can’t conceive of, but they are there. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here. Here's another one about things we can't see. The electrons in the atoms we each are made of are at this very moment jumping in and out of existence. “Where do they come from and do they go, nobody knows but Cotton-eyed Joe”. If our electrons are popping in and out of our reality and presumably into another, how are we able even to physically exist.
When I consider reality at the sub-atomic level, well, Jesus bodily resurrected from the dead and bodily ascended to someplace called heaven does not seem all that impossible. Rather, it is as possible and probable as the mathematical singularity we call the Black Hole which we now have pictures of to prove their existence. Over a hundred years ago, black holes were only theoretical possibilities swirling around in Albert Einstein's nearly god-like brain and now we have pictures of them...and...it's theoretically possible that there are wee-teenie black holes just about everywhere blipping in and out of existence...like the one that just happened in my brain!
But anyway, I think children have simpler thoughts and questions about Jesus' Ascension that we would feel more comfortable pondering. I can think of at least three obvious questions that deserve some time: Where did he go? Does he still have a body? And, what’s he doing there wherever it was he went? I put on our child-like minds for a bit and ponder these.
To answer the first question Ephesians tells us that God has “seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places (Eph. 1:20).” He has ascended into heaven and enjoys the position of being God the Father’s right hand man, so to speak, the one who does the Father’s wishes. To a child’s mind, that’s an informative enough answer and they would be ready to move on to question number two. But some older children may want to ask where is and what is heaven or the heavenly places as Paul calls them.
Well, briefly, I don't like to think of heaven as being up and far away. Rather, I think of it as overlapping our reality and as being at the center of everything and hidden behind everything. If you could somehow open a hole in reality right in front of you and stick your head in and look around, you would be looking into heaven. And like the Apostle John in the Book of Revelation, you would see God’s throne and on the throne would be a super fantabulous display of lights of every colour because we can’t see what God the Father looks like. “Tis only the splendour of light hideth Thee”. Seated to the right of God would be the best friend and brother you will ever have, Jesus. You would see angels and choirs of angels and lots and lots of people from all times and all places and some of them you would know and they would all be singing, worshipping and praying, and you would have a feeling of being so loved and so special wash over you - that’s the Holy Spirit - and you would want to just step right on through except it’s not your time. When its your time, then you’ll go.
Question number two: If Jesus is in the heavenly place, then what’s his body like? Is he a ghost? is another way of putting it. The answer is that he still has a fully human body, resurrected all be it, and he has some scars. Now try this on for size; Jesus’s ascension back into heaven is every bit as important as Christmas.
At Christmas, we celebrate that God the Son became a human being just like us in every way. We call that the Incarnation or the infleshment of God. God the Son came from the heavenly places here to earth and became a human person with a real body just like ours. He thinks and feels just like we do. With the Ascension, the reverse happens. Jesus, the Son of God and the son of Mary took humanity, human flesh, back through into heaven. As a result, God the Father from sends the Holy Spirit to come and live in us to glue us to Jesus. It’s like life-glue. There’s Elmer’s glue and Gorilla glue. So also, there’s life-glue, the Holy Spirit, who glues us to Jesus so that we share in Jesus' new, resurrected life, and slowly we become more like him until when our time comes, because of that life-glue we go straight on to be with Jesus and we get resurrected. But also and until then, while we are on this side of things we are God’s beloved children just like Jesus is because we are life-glued to Jesus with the Holy Spirit. And as I said, this life-glue makes us to become more living, more loving like Jesus and helps us to do here on earth what Jesus is doing there in heaven.
And that takes us to our third question: if we participate in Jesus’s life because we are life-glued to him and doing what he is doing, then what is he doing? For part of the answer to this question we have to go to the Book of Hebrews where we find that Jesus is our great High Priest who while in continual worship of the Father prays like all get out for each of us. He says, “these are my brothers and sisters whom you’ve given me, my life lives in them (Heb. 2:11-18) protect them, provide for them, let them know you love them just as much as you love me.” He constantly prays for us and our needs before the Father who in his love for his Son and his children is more than willing to listen (Heb. 4:14-5:10). This also is why it’s important for us to think of heaven as being behind everything rather than way far away, up there somewhere. If God is right here behind everything, he is with us and hears our prayers real good.
In and with Jesus we pray all the time for the needs of the world as Jesus does. As Jesus is always praying for us so also we should to strive to pray without ceasing. I like to try to pray The Lord's Prayer as often as I can think to. We pray in and with Jesus because we are life-glued to him, but sometimes we don't know what to pray and sometimes we are hurting so bad we can't pray. Guess what? When we don’t know what to pray, Romans 8:26 tells us that the Holy Spirit is still praying in us always for what we need. It should give us great comfort to know that in the inner life of God even God is praying for us. Sit on that one for a while.
The other part of Jesus’ work as High Priest is to bless us with the blessing of the Father, which is that he blesses us with the Holy Spirit. We’ve talked about this already. This life-glue is the power of the Father’s love for his Son by which he raised Jesus from the dead and seated him in the heavenly places by his side and that the same power is at work in us by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit not only life-glues us to Jesus so that we share in the love that Jesus and the God the Father have for each other but the Holy Spirit also life-glues us to each other so that we can love each other and other people and even those we might call enemies like God loves us, like family.
As I said a moment ago, what Jesus does in heaven before the Father is what we do here on earth empowered by the Spirit. Jesus is always praying for us so we should be always praying. Another thing Jesus is doing is worshipping. In Jesus, life-glued to him and to each other we find our true worship, which is rooted in God the Son’s love of God the Father coupled with thankfulness and praise of the Father for what he has done for us through giving us his Son, and drawing us into God’s very being through the Holy Spirit. We don’t just attend worship because that’s what good Christians do to learn how to be better Christians. We attend worship to worship the Father through Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit. In and with Jesus, we worship, we praise, thank, and love the Father who has made us his own and pours his love on us.
So, we worship and we pray. One other thing, as the Father sent the Son into the world with a mission of reconciliation so the Son sends us into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit with that same mission. He in us and we in him, we are to carry out the mission of the suffering Servant who came to restore us to fellowship with God in such a way as to make us to participate in the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the life-glue of the Holy Spirit living in us. This means we are to let ourselves be moulded by that love into a fellowship that proclaims and invites all people. Because Jesus has ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit into us we are life-glued to God in him, we worship in him, we pray in him, and in him we reach out proclaiming and inviting all people into the loving communion of the Triune God of grace. That’s what Jesus is doing and so that’s what we do and so there you have it. Amen.
