Ascension Day Sermon

To those of you prone to disliking the word "sermon", firstly, I absolutely understand and secondly, feel free to not read any further. However, if you'd nonetheless like to read what the Riga trip got me thinking about this is some of it. I've added some points now afterwards - I guess there's always something that I feel should have been there in the sermon and just didn't surface in time. Oh, one more thing, I just read rlp's blog about exclusivity and inclusivity and thought it was a really good one. The title is A New Abraham and a New Earth. Inclusivity, as it happens, was the theme of the Riga synod.

Today’s readings give us two accounts of the Ascension, of Jesus returning back to heaven. First there’s the Acts:
“When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

And then there is St. Mark who true to his style only states that:
“Then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.”

Incidentally, the Gospel of Luke is even more brief in its description. It says:
“Jesus led the eleven to Bethany, not far from Jerusalem. While in the act of blessing them, Jesus was carried up to Heaven.”

Now, the general understanding of the Christian doctrine of Ascension holds that Jesus bodily ascended to heaven in the presence of his apostles, following his resurrection. The term heaven refers to a physical reunion with God the Father.

This is the challenge of theology, though: the language. Especially theologians (me included, although I feel shy to use the word theologian about myself) use these magnificent words like: doctrine, resurrection, ascension, physical reunion… and on the other hand, there are simple enough words like love, sin, forgiveness, holy or even grace that are profoundly important to faith and not nearly as easy to explain as you’d like.

One thing is of course that theologians spend several years learning the meaning of these words and still often feel that they don’t quite know how to write or talk about faith or for that matter theology. It isn’t difficult as such: there’s God’s Son who dies for the world and its sins and through Him we are forgiven. And yet the more you read your Bible - or anything else, really - the more questions there seem to be.

Last weekend in Riga someone commented on the Apostolic creed, which is the affirmation of faith that we use in our services, that it isn’t that much of a statement of faith but more a compilation of faith questions. I kind of liked that.

Some things we usually know off hand as we, as good Christians, should. We know that the story is unfinished in that Jesus is still going to come back. We know that sitting at the right hand of the Father means that Jesus is very important to God. We know that Jesus is with God and where they are is called heaven. In Finnish incidentally the word for heaven and sky is the same so when you say the word two parts of your brain activate: the one that is interested in nature and weather and the one that is religious.

But then there are the questions such as what or how is heaven like? And the questions like what happened at ascension? How did people react or feel when, as they were watching, Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight? These are the fascinating ones and yet also the ones that we cannot really get an answer for. Not that it has ever stopped us from trying, though.

Somebody last weekend at the synod said another thing that got me thinking. He said that people don’t like grown up theology, theology that demands one’s own judgement and thinking and questions. I don’t quite agree. It is true, yes, that we all at times prefer easy answers to more questions, but most of us have also a big part of the inquisitive and eager to learn child left in us. The problem isn’t that we aren’t interested, it is that we are afraid that we’ll be labeled heretics.

The thing with that is of course that all kinds of people have gotten that label for seeing things exactly as they are. There will always be those who do find it as their task to protect God from inappropriate questions, which is understandable enough. Only, I'm pretty sure that God is big enough to deal with any questions I might come up with. At the end of the day what theology, like all science, is about is wanting to understand things and the world around us better. And there is nothing wrong about that. In fact, there is huge value to it.

So, my point is that questions belong to faith and to our relationship to God as much as they belong to our life otherwise. God is beyond science and theology but at the very same time the questions of science and theology are questions that intrigue and fascinate us because they do teach us something about God’s creation and God, too.

As we try to understand what heaven may be or try to find words to describe God’s love that becomes visible in Christ or when we allow for the fact that there can be things we are yet to find or understand we’re doing something God has created us to do.

God created us to be his image. Since human kind on the whole seems to be curious about everything around it the question is weather God isn’t quite the same. That’s a thought isn’t it? Could it be that God in addition to His other qualities is a curious, inquisitive God? God who wants to understand us so much that He sent His Son to become one of us and then called Him back in order to send the Holy Spirit to the world and into the lives of all human kind to support, guide and help us as we look for answers and ultimately for God.