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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
Indeed, He is risen and ascended! Alleluia! Truly, we are blessed to have a service on Ascension Day, as other congregations observe the feast on the preceding Wednesday, the following Sunday, or not at all. Tonight’s Vespers are the third Ascension Day service Pilgrim has offered, over what is now going on the same number of years that I have been serving here. On the two preceding Ascension Days, I had the privilege and pleasure of preaching, respectively, on the First and Second Readings (Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23), and tonight we focus more on the Third Reading (Luke 24:44-53), especially its latter four verses that pertain more to The Ascension of Our Lord. For this sermon’s title, I simply took the phrasing of the Apostolic, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds: “Ascended into Heaven”.
Our Lord has “Ascended into Heaven”, but where exactly is heaven? Somewhere “up there”? Tonight’s Office Hymn, “Up through Endless Ranks of Angels”, was written by Jaroslav Vajda in 1973, at the request of Augsburg Publishing House, but, when it first published the hymn, the company changed the first line from “Up throughendless ranks of angels” to “There through endless ranks of angels”; making the change, reportedly, in order to avoid what is called the “three‑tiered” or “three-story” universe imagery: hell down below, earth here, and heaven above. Yet, one cannot ignore the Bible’s speaking spatially. For example, tonight’s Psalm says, “God has gone up with a shout” (Psalm 47:5), the First Reading says Jesus was “taken up” and “lifted up”, the Second Reading says God seated Christ “at His right hand in the heavenly places”, and the Third Reading says Jesus “was carried up into heaven”. We even call the event Jesus’s “ascension”, which English word comes from the Latin word essentially meaning “climb to”. No surprise the editors of Lutheran Book of Worship (#159) changed back Vajda’s hymn text as they paired it with a hymn tune that itself repeatedly moves up and so reflects well the spirit of the text; the editors of Lutheran Worship (#152) and Lutheran Service Book (491) followed suit.
So, is heaven somewhere “up there”? In some sense “yes”, but, heaven is not only “up there”. We might better say that heaven is everywhere. Of course, the answer to the question “where is heaven” depends on what you mean by “heaven”. The Old Testament’s Hebrew word and the New Testament’s Greek word both can refer both to the skies in contrast to the ground and to the place where God dwells. I have watched a little of the FOX television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, travelling about in the so‑called “Ship of the Imagination”. Produced and hosted by atheists, the show discussing the skies cannot imagine the place where God dwells, even though His dwelling is precisely beyond space and time. (With reference to a different science‑fiction show, namely Star Trek, one of my seminary professors helpfully likened heaven to a different dimension.) The Greek word St. Luke by divine‑inspiration uses in tonight’s Third Reading to refer to Jesus’s “parting” from His disciples is rarely used in the Bible, but, where the word is used in the Bible, the word is used precisely in reference to partings of space and time.
For forty days Jesus presented Himself alive to His apostles, appearing to them and speaking about the Kingdom of God; during that time He was both with them and not with them. Then, as they were looking on, He was lifted up, a cloud took Him out of their sight, and two men in white robes spoke both of Jesus’s having gone into heaven and of His coming in the same way as they saw Him go into heaven. The dramatic ascension events made clear to the apostles that Jesus would no longer be with them in the same visible way that He had been with them for the previous forty days. (To be sure, Jesus’s post‑resurrection appearances did not completely end—just ask Paul, Ananias, and John, the beloved disciple.) Between Jesus’s ascension and His coming again in the same way as they saw Him go into heaven, Jesus would continue both to be with them and to not be with them. And, the disciples worshipped Him and with great joy did as Jesus directed.
If you read my “Minister’s Moment” in last Saturday’s Kilgore News Herald, you know that Jesus likewise is both with us and not with us. Yet, we may not worship what seems to be an absent Jesus, or we may not with great joy do as He directs. You probably know the centuries old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind”. We may easily forget or dismiss as unimportant someone or something not in our direct view. We may forget that Jesus remains with us, or we may think His presence with us does not really help us in any way. We may think that He is gone, or that He has abandoned us in our affliction. We may wish that He was with us in another way, or , in some other way, we may under-appreciate Who He is, where He has gone, and why. In these and countless other ways, we sin, for we are sinful by nature, and that sinful nature clings to us in this lifetime, despite our repenting of our sin and trusting God to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake.
For us and for our salvation, the Only-begotten Son of God came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary and was made man. Also for us, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, suffered, and was buried. In the person of Jesus Christ, God and man, Divinity and humanity, are inseparably joined together. The man Jesus had all the powers and abilities of God, but, out of love for you and for me, the man Jesus chose not always or fully to use those powers and abilities, so that He could die for you and for me, to save us from our sins. After He died on the cross and so paid the price for our sins, the third day He rose again from the dead, ascended into heaven, and sits at the right hand of the Father. Wherever the divine nature of the Son of God is, there also is His human nature. Jesus Christ no longer humbly limits His use of His divinity, so even His humanity is exalted beyond all limits of space and time.
Tonight’s Opening Hymn, which goes back hundreds of years, refers to in a sense “new” hymns ringing throughout the world, because what Jesus did was “new” (LSB 493). The Hymn calls on us to worship the Ascended Lord, as the disciples did. The Book of Acts indeed tells us of that worship, how all the baptized believers in house churches devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship, namely, the breaking of bread and prayer in the Lord’s Supper. Day by day in the Temple courts, they reached out to those who did not yet know Jesus, and the Lord added to their number those who were being saved, day by day. (Acts 2:42-47) In short, that which Jesus in person began to do and teach before He was taken up, He afterwards continued to do through His Church. Likewise, by the power of His Holy Spirit, Jesus continues to work through His Church today: making believers through baptism and preaching, and then comforting and sustaining them through individual Holy Absolution and the Lord’s Supper. There especially He is present with the same body and blood that hung on the cross and ascended into heaven. True God, He is capable of being wherever He wants, and He is there in bread and wine with the same body and blood, now received by us for the forgiveness of our sins, and so for salvation and eternal life.
The God-man Jesus Christ has ascended to the place where God dwells to prepare for us to join Him there. Maybe some of these thoughts about The Ascension of Our Lord tonight have seemed to you like abstract teaching, but all of the teaching ultimately is for our comfort. Consider Josua Wegelin, who was born 410 years ago in the city of Augsburg in what we think of today as Germany and who on more than one occasion served a congregation in his hometown until the Thirty Years’ War forced him to leave that congregation for good. Wegelin’s sufferings and his hope in Christ that got him through those sufferings are evident in tonight’s Closing Hymn (LSB 492), which was included in a devotional booklet Wegelin wrote for his former congregation in Augsburg. The title of that booklet can be translated, “Pious Reconciliation with God, which helps in All Troubles”. Indeed, in the Hymn, Wegelin builds the hope of his own ascension on Christ’s ascension, and he says that that sure and certain hope of his own ascension stills all doubt and apprehension. Wegelin says his heart rests in Christ and that all his thoughts soar to Christ to still their deepest yearning. As Wegelin stilled doubt and apprehension and found rest and peace, so also do we. Tonight we close by praying the Hymn’s final stanza:
O grant, dear Lord, this grace to me, / Recalling Your ascension,
That I may serve You faithfully / In thanks for my redemption;
And then, when all my days will cease,
Let me depart in joy and peace / In answer to my pleading.
Amen.
Alleluia! Christ is risen! (He is risen indeed! Alleluia!)
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +