Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning.
Today's reading for Ascension Sunday is Acts 1:1 11.
You can find that in your pew Bible if you wish on page 884.
All right. Acts 1.
In the first book, Theophilus I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven.
After giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen after his suffering, he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.
This, he said, is what you have heard from me.
For John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.
So when they had come together, they asked him, lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?
He replied, it is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, and in all of Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
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 toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?
This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as as you saw him go into heaven.
This is the word of the Lord.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Well, friends, we are in the middle of graduation season, getting right to the end of it, in fact. And just last week, I had the privilege of flying up to the Bay Area to attend not one, but two graduation season ceremonies.
On Wednesday evening, I was able to attend the graduation of my cousin Ryan from the University of San Francisco. He graduated from their master's program with an emphasis in psychology, and his field is nursing. Ryan served for years in the army and did tours of duty in Iraq. And during his time in Iraq, he was shot at.
After that experience, he's really had a strong sense of call to care for veterans and those who've been impacted by the mental health challenges, including PTSD of war. And so in just a short bit a couple months, he'll be taking a nursing position at a mental health department of a veterans hospital up in Long Beach.
The evening ceremony Wednesday night was held in the Louis M. Davies Symphony hall in San Francisco. I was seated with six other members of my extended family high up on the balcony. But Ryan could see us as he processed in with hundreds of other classmates, all graduating with either a master's or a doctoral degree. And he could see us as we stood and cheered. Well, then the ceremony began, and I fell fast asleep, and my mom and my dad did, too. And I was going to show a photo and then decided better not show it, but there is a photo out there somewhere of my mom, my dad, and I all fast asleep during this ceremony. But I will say this, I was roused in time to stand and cheer when Ryan went forward to receive his diploma. And, you know, I was there in the flesh, may have been sleeping, but I was there.
And then I was there on Saturday when out on a lawn for nearly two hours, I got to celebrate my niece Anna's graduation from Marin County Catholic School. From Marin Catholic. And that also was a very long experience. It was incredibly hot, sweated through all our clothing. We. But we could say we were there. My brother, my sister, my mom, my dad. Family members gathered. And I did remember, too, how much it impacted me during these special moments like graduation to know that there are people who care about me, people walking with me in these journeys of the ups and downs of life. There is something powerful to presence, isn't there? I think we've been made acutely aware of it. After the pandemic, I sat with my nephew Peter, who had a compromised graduation and his high school graduation. That'd be the best way to say it. It was outdoor, in a field only a few people could attend. Others have known zoom graduations. He realized, wow, this is an amazing thing to actually be in person together, hundreds of people and experience that and have our presence bless those who are graduating. Don't you feel too post pandemic? Especially the power of presence in our hives when we want to celebrate something. I recently traveled to Seattle to do Jonathan Yee's wedding. And it was great to be there, you know, but it's also great to have the power of presence with us when we're going through something terrible like the loss of a family member or the loss of our house and belongings to a fire or when we face some new health challenge.
It's powerful to have others with us. Now. People can be with us in spirit, even if not in presence. Right? My cousin Ryan's mom, Lynette, passed away just two years ago, and so she couldn't be there during that celebration, during that commencement. But there was still a way in which she was present in spirit.
Still, something powerful to looking back as Ryan did, and actually seeing family members there cheering him on.
Well, as Christians, we make this bold and rather wild proclamation, really. We say that Christ is present with us here and now today in the church. The very last words the risen Jesus spoke to his disciples. His final words to those graduates, you might say during his commencement speech to them, was, lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age, after he had sent them out to baptize and make disciples of all nations.
And when we come forward to receive not a diploma but bread and a cup, as we will today, we believe Christ is present, present with us in that moment. The same Jesus who was in the boat with the disciples on the Sea of Galilee when a storm raged and Jesus brought calm to the waters by saying, peace, be still. Somehow we want to say that Jesus, that Christ is with us in a powerful, meaningful way. But how can we say that? How can we say Christ is here? How can we speak of Christ's presence when the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth was never even on this continent, let alone the region of California called Tova Gar by the Tongva people, or that many of us today would call 225 South Hill Avenue in Pasadena? Jesus lived 2,000 years ago in another part of the world.
And even if we confess, as many of us do, that this Jesus rose from the dead, he did so back then and there, not here and now.
And some 40 days after his resurrection, we read in the Bible, Jesus left the earth in his ascension. And so you could say from what Scripture clearly states, Jesus is decidedly not present here and now.
How do we confess the opposite? That Jesus is profoundly, richly, life alteringly here today.
Do we say he's present in memory?
Sure.
We do say that when we celebrate communion today, we'll recall the words that Jesus said to his disciples at the Last Supper. How he said, do this in. In memory of me, as he presented the bread and broke it.
As we read together the stories of Jesus, like the one that Angela read today, as we gather to recall Jesus teaching his life example, his healing, his justice seeking words, his words of good news, his life poured out for us, his resurrection, there's a kind of presence he takes on, a presence in our memory and the Church's memory.
But still, we Jesus followers have long argued there is more to Christ's presence than simply our memory of Him.
My Aunt Lynette was present at Ryan's commencement in memory. But a world of difference. It would have made if she was somehow present in person the way my mom, my dad, my brother and sister were, Isn't there some presence greater than memory alone that Christ provides for us?
Well, as a church, we proclaim that there is. And we profess that Christ's presence with us is wondrously linked to the very event that we are celebrating today. Today's Ascension Sunday. Ascension day is exactly 40 days after Easter. But Ascension Sunday is ordinarily celebrated the first Sunday after that day and the last Sunday before Pentecost, 50 days after the Resurrection, when we remember the Holy Spirit to the church. Today is a Sunday. Christians around the world remember those stories from Scripture of our Lord's ascension. And believers like you and me have long seen in that ascension our Savior's departure as a new kind of arrival.
We see in precisely that moment our Savior left his disciples as he was taken up into the sky, a new way he would be present in to them.
We read in today's passage of how the disciples watched as Jesus was lifted up and then a cloud takes him out of their sight. The disciples then gaze up to heaven. Two angelic figures robed in white, ask them, why do you look up to heaven?
This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way you saw him go into heaven.
Well, from what we know of first century cosmology, the kind evidenced in a passage like Acts chapter one, heaven or sky or air, those are all ways to translate the Greek word that's translated as heaven in today's text.
All of those things, heaven, sky or air, that's the word for where Jesus went. And it's not, was not seen in first century cosmology as a kind of endless expanse. That's how I picture it, you know, the heavens, the sky, the air. People imagined a layer of sky above the earth that was bounded by a firmament.
And at the far reaches of that firmament were the stars and planets. And beyond that firmament, well, that was the realm of God, the realm of heaven. When Jesus is imagined as taken up into the sky, he's portrayed as not simply rising up into the endless expanse of space to be apart from us. It was like he was breaking through a boundary separating the earthly realm from the heavenly realm, creation from the very power that first gave life to all things that we see.
The theologian Karl Barth described the ascension like this. He wrote, christ went to the absolutely inaccessible place, to the cosmic reality by which humans are always surrounded, but a place humans cannot attain or enter.
And yet Christ did enter that reality.
The book of Hebrews puts it like this. Christ passed through the heavens, where he now resides with God, our great High priest. And because that realm or reality of God always surrounds us and exists side by side with this earthly realm, when Jesus enters it, it doesn't mean he's flying off to some place or location far from us. Rather, he's entering a realm that's alongside us, over us, surrounding us, the very reality that gave life to us and all that exists. And yet it is radically different from this reality, as different as Creator is from creation.
We would say Christ broke through that boundary at the Incarnation, as the stuff of God was brought to Earth.
At the Ascension, he breaks through that boundary again, this time bringing the stuff of earth, a flesh and bone body, to the realm of God.
And by entering God's realm with his body, Christ himself is no longer bound to just one place and time. Like Jerusalem in the early first century of the Common Era, he can be in this place and time. He can be present during a commencement ceremony, or at a veteran's hospital bedside, or out on the protest line, or as you and I come forward to receive bread and a cup.
And okay, if you're struggling to get your mind and heart around this notion that two realities, Earth and heaven, creation and Creator, can exist side by side in one single place and time, consider, if you will, a fascinating theoretical construct our Caltech folks might well pass on to us from quantum Quantum Mechanics.
Back in 1961, Eugene Wigner, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, introduced a thought experiment that became known as Wigner's Friend.
It begins with a photon particle of light.
When an observer in an isolated laboratory measures the photon, they find that the particle's polarization, that is the axis on which it spins, is either vertical or or horizontal.
However, before the photon is measured, the photon actually displays both polarizations, vertical and horizontal at once, as dictated by the laws of quantum mechanics. The photon exists in what's called a superposition of two possible states.
Because of that, two people like Wigner and Wigner's friend, could each observe a different reality and both be right.
Physicists at Harriet Watt University have recently used real photons and advanced measuring equipment to test Wigner's thought experiment. And you know what they found?
Their results confirmed that contradictory realities proposed by Wigner were indeed plausible.
Two realities, quantum mechanics tells us, can exist side by side.
Well, with that as an example, Scripture invites us to imagine what physicists might call a superposition of two worlds or realms or realities. Or kingdoms, to put it in classical theological terms. We're invited to consider this construct of two kingdoms at work in one place. Basileia is the great Greek word that's often translated as kingdom, as it is in the passage Angela read from the New Revised Standard Version. But basileia can also mean rule or reign or reality.
And a central theme of Christ's ministry is this basileia, or realm or reality of God. And as he taught about it and demonstrated it, we saw what it was. It was a realm where goods were shared and not hoarded. It was a realm or reality where in fact, power wasn't concentrated in one person's hands, it was distributed. It's a reality where the sick were healed, the poor heard good news proclaimed, those who mourned were comforted, the prisoner was freed, the blind saw, the deaf heard the tyrant, and those who lord it over others were brought low and the humble were lifted up.
The reality or realm or basileia of God. It was like a huge feast where with only five fish or five loaves and two fishes distributed by some disciples, thousands were fed and there was a great deal left over.
We saw that realm of God, that reality of God in Jesus ministry and his disciples, they got to be a part of it. They saw it in the flesh. But then we read, Jesus departed from them. So did that kingdom they saw so close at work among them, did that depart too?
No.
Our scriptures proclaim exactly the opposite. That by ascending to heaven, by entering God's realm in his body, Christ and the kingdom we saw at work in him has now spread to every place.
And the disciples are called to witness to it in all places. That realm, that reality of God as they saw it in Christ.
Christ may have left the disciples that day we read about In Jerusalem, some 40 days after he appeared to them risen from the dead. But he left to rule all places, to show all places the gracious, loving, justice, working, sick, healing, enemy, forgiving, peacemaking reality we saw under Christ's ministry and rule. That realm or reality is now spread everywhere by Christ's ascension to God's realm, that realm that surrounds us all.
As the book of Ephesians famously puts it, God raised Christ from the dead and seated him at the right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named God's rule.
That kingdom we saw in Christ now rules all places. For it exists in God's reality that surrounds all places. If we have eyes to see it, ears to hear it.
The great reformer John Calvin put it like this. Carried up into heaven, Christ withdrew his bodily presence from our sight, not to cease to be present with believers still on their earthly pilgrimage, but to rule heaven and earth with a more immediate power.
By his ascension, he fulfilled what he promised, that he would be with us even to the end of the world.
When Christ ascended, He was no longer there with his disciples in the flesh, for he had ascended to rule with the right hand of the Father. But he is present now by his rule. The ascended Christ is with us, present by his rule.
So as I attended my cousin and my niece's graduations last week, I thought of the forces that rule us today, the forces that would rule those graduates as they went out into the world.
I thought of all the forces vying for their attention, vying for our attention today. And my mind was drifted back to another graduation speech, a commencement speech given at the University of San Francisco 24 years before that ceremony. I got to be a part of that ceremony. I slept through a good deal of.
But back in 2004, in May, the president of the University of San Francisco at the time, the Reverend Stephen A. Privet, a Jesuit, told this to his graduates.
Live your lives free from the tyranny of popular culture, which would have you believe that wealth, pleasure, power, status and youthful looks will bring you happiness and satisfaction.
This is simply not true.
That's a powerful commencement address.
Wealth, pleasure, power, status, youthful looks. Would these be forces that rule the lives of graduates in 2004, those I saw graduating in 2025?
Or would other forces rule them? At my nephew's graduation, one of the speeches emphasized the power of compassion, another, the value of service.
A nun spoke at my niece's graduation of the quest for truth and goodness and looking to Christ in that search.
So many forces can direct and guide us. And so as we come forward this morning to receive communion and argue as we do, that Christ is present in this moment, at this place and time, and as we go out to witness to Christ in the world, may we indeed be open to that ruling presence.
On one hand, Christ's rule is a great comfort, isn't it, to know that with all the wrong in the world, the wrong in us, the wrong out there, all the issues and concerns, that there is another power at work where all is right.
And one day that world, that reality, that realm will win the day, and it's breaking in in our time.
But let's also receive that rule of Christ in another way, too. Let's receive the guidance, the leadership, the direction that he affords us. The ascendant Christ is present with us by his rule. So let's go where he leads us, attentive to what he calls us to. And as we do, maybe love of God and love of neighbor might rule our lives. And people will see it.
They'll see another reality existing in superposition to this reality. They'll see it in witnesses who, in word and deed show that there is another power at work, another Savior at work, another rule or reign or reality at work. And maybe they too will catch a glimpse of the ascended Christ present not just in Jerusalem, but in Judea and Samaria and to the very ends of the earth.
Maybe even in this place.
In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Amen.
