Skip to main content

Above, Beyond, and Beside

(A sermon based on Luke 24:44-53 & Ephesians 1:15-23 for Ascension Day 2013)

Following his resurrection, Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples and then, on that fortieth day, he ascended to take his place at the right hand of his Father. From there he rules over all that is and from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

This, then, is an awe-inspiring day. It is a day to celebrate the power of God and the lordship of Christ.

It is a day to celebrate the fact that Jesus is beyond us. After his resurrection he came back to his disciples but then forty days later he left them. Jesus Christ is the Son of God who left his place with the Father to come here as a human being who lived, died, and rose again. Then he ascended—he went back to be with his Father and in so doing he went somewhere that they could not go, at least not yet. So this is a good day to remember and to celebrate that Jesus Christ is beyond us. He is God and he is to be worshiped.

When Jesus left his followers he left them for good—not in the sense that he would never come back because he will but in the sense that it was for their (and our) good. He said so himself when he said that it was good for his followers if he went away because then the Father would send the Holy Spirit who would be with them.

It is an ironic truth: Jesus Christ is beyond us and because he is beyond us he is always with us. That is because in God’s gracious plan the ascension of Jesus led to the Father’s sending of the Holy Spirit which is the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ; that Spirit will never leave us.

It is a day to celebrate the fact that Jesus is above all things. When he ascended, Jesus took his place as Lord of everything that is in the universe. Through his resurrection and subsequent ascension, Jesus became greater than every other power or influence in the universe. Absolutely everything is under his feet. There is nothing that is not under him and that will not finally bow down before him and submit to him. Jesus is Lord!

It is an amazing truth: the same power of God that caused Jesus to be raised from the dead and seated at the right hand of the Father in heavenly places is available to us right here and right now! That great power of God is working in and through us.

It is a day to celebrate the fact that Jesus is beside the Father. To say that Jesus is at the right hand of the Father is to say that he is in the position of honor and power. From his place of honor and power Jesus rules all of creation. From that position he is our Lord and so he rules our lives and the life of the Church.

It is an awe-inspiring truth: the life of the resurrected and ascended Christ fills the Church. We are filled with the life of Jesus Christ our Lord!

As you can see, Ascension Day is a day to celebrate God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Now, can we get a glimpse of the difference the Ascension makes for us?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Was a Refugee

(A sermon based on Matthew 2:13-23 for the First Sunday after Christmas) I have never been a refugee and you probably haven’t either. There have been times for many of us when we “had” to leave home but we did so because we chose to get an education or to take a job or because our parents told us it was time. Oh, there is a sense in which many of us feel a restlessness and rootlessness and feel like we are on a constant quest for home. But the facts remain that we have never been driven from our home or from our hometown or from our homeland because of warfare or famine. We have never been driven away because of our ethnicity or our politics or our religion; we have never been forced out or forced underground because we are a threat to those in power. Millions of people are refugees, though. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, there were at the end of 2012 15.4 million refugees—people who have fled their country for another because of war or persecution—in the world....
Post a Comment
Read more

People Get Ready

(A sermon based on 2 Peter 3:8-15a for the 2nd Sunday of Advent 2014) Given the myriad problems faced by those of us living here on Earth, it is only natural that we who are looking for the return of Jesus Christ wonder why God is taking so long to send him back. After all, it’s been 2000 years now since he was here the first time. Would it make you feel any better to know that people were already wondering about that just a few decades after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus? Well, they were. Why? I can think of at least three reasons. First, the memory of the Church was that Jesus had seemed to imply that he would come back soon, maybe even within a generation. Second, people are by nature impatient. Third, people have a misconception of what time is and especially of how God relates to time. The truth about time, according to the science of physics, is that it’s relative. Einstein theorized and all physicists now agree that time is relative to how fast ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Elijah: Forty Days of Pilgrimage

(A sermon based on 1 Kings 19:1-9 & John 6:47-58 for Sunday, March 23, 2014) [Third in a Lenten series entitled "Making Good Use of Forty Days"] Elijah the prophet had just won a great victory for the Lord over the prophets of Baal and Asherah; in the contest on Mt. Carmel, God had, in response to Elijah’s simple request, rained down fire from heaven while the Canaanite God Baal, in response to the fervent entreaties of his prophets, had done nothing. In a contest of God and Elijah against 850 false prophets, it had been no contest: the 850 didn’t stand a chance against those two. But when Jezebel, the Baal-worshiping queen of Israel, sent word to Elijah that she would have him killed by high noon the next day, he high-tailed it out of town as quickly as he could. He fled to Beer-sheba, which would be like one of us fleeing to Key West—it was about as far as he could go and still be in the country. And then he went a little farther. Exhausted and depressed, El...
Post a Comment
Read more