Why do you stand there looking up to heaven? What a great line. The Ascension is a story about eternal presence - not eternal distance. I love the notion of the Ascension being a story of the unfailing availability of the Reign of God made known in the life of Jesus. He is going no place except right into the middle of every place. What a wonder-filled story we are handed especially because it appears as though the first gathering of the followers of Jesus did not take the story literally. They didn't keep looking up. They looked around. They ate with one another. They noticed the poor and the widows and the left out. They took on the character of Jesus when the character of those around them were just like that of the ones who were around Jesus as he was nailed and thrown away by the powers of the day. Those first followers expected to get nailed - yet they saw themselves alive alongside the Jesus who was in every scene of their lives.
Jesus was not rising up to a disembodied, cloud-like domain that was to serve as the holding ground for all the good folks through time. Jesus was becoming embodied in the life of the people who were being inspired to walk through the everyday stuff of life as a witness to how everyday life is the staging of God's Reign. Maybe for the final time the storytelling of Acts is pressing the point about the foolishness of a Heaven and a Hell and an Earth all being separate. For when we see them as such, they remain in place and they easily rule us and we forget about the unfolding of God's Reign even now. The story of the Ascension may be a simple invitation to stop wasting time on what has taken place or what might take place. For when those two dimensions of time rule us, we continue to forget about the opportunity to live as ones who are fed to live in peace - seek justice - love expansively - forgive like a door that opens up the day - make whole that which is broken.
And if we cannot accept the availability of God's Reign in Jesus - even when he is out of sight - our storytelling then presses the point by stirring up a pentecostal fire to show how real God's power for new life really comes together. Today, too many are still caught up in a Heaven and a Hell out there somewhere. It becomes the preoccupying conversation of churches. In other words, the church becomes lost in images it thinks it can control and therefore the church lives with the illusion that we are to be people living within a community of control that is ruled by rules that find ways to have exclusive rights to that which is God's domain.
From the wholesale availability of the Reign of God in Jesus at the Ascension to the explosive brushfire of Pentecost that leaves Heaven and Hell in ashes as the followers of Jesus take on life without boundaries or closed doors, there is an invitation to give our lives away. We give our lives aways as we share the gift of life that is already ours - eternally ours - and forever a gift we are free to hand off - even top the enemies around us. Wow. Jesus eternally available to our enemies - that could be a life changer.
TRRR
No comments:
Post a Comment