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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!)
Although the opposite party’s candidates dispute the need for such a restoration, one of the two presumptive nominees for president of the United States has as his slogan, “Make America great again”. The idea of restoring the country’s previous greatness is not unique to him, as other presidential candidates and conservative leaders have previously published books about such restoration (Beinart). Yet, people apparently do not agree on just when America was great, and so they do not agree on which America needs to be restored (McGill). As if to illustrate that point, a Chicano activist is producing satirical baseball caps that say, “Make America Mexico again” (Latimer). (The activist says he does not actually want to make America Mexico again, but some would say that, in a sense, that is happening anyway.) We see in our culture today different ideas about both restoration and what the country should be like, and so we should easily relate to the apostles, who, today’s First Reading tells us, had their own ideas about Jesus’s restoring the Kingdom to Israel. Tonight, we consider that First Reading under the theme, “Restoring the Kingdom”.
The First Reading appointed for the Ascension of Our Lord is the beginning of the Divinely‑inspired St. Luke’s second book written for a man named Theophilus. The second book begins similarly to how the first, his Gospel account, ends, as we heard in tonight’s Gospel Reading (Luke 24:44-53). They both narrate the Ascension of our Lord. In Acts, St. Paul’s beloved physician, St. Luke (Colossians 4:14), characteristically uses a number of medical terms as he tells of Jesus’s forty days between His Resurrection and Ascension, teaching about the Kingdom of God. Despite Jesus’s promise of a time when the disciples would not question Him about anything, which promise we heard in the Gospel Reading this past Sunday, and despite the disciples’ immediately thinking that that time had arrived already (John 16:22-33), the Eleven (Acts 1:12-13) even moments before Jesus’s Ascension were repeatedly questioning Him whether at that time He would restore the Kingdom to Israel. We know from earlier in St. Luke’s Gospel account both that those listening to Jesus already thought then that the Kingdom was to appear immediately (Luke 19:11) and that they previously asked when the coming days would be (Luke 21:5-36). In the case of tonight’s First Reading, Jesus told them that they were not to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority but that they would receive power to be a part of bringing about a Kingdom much larger than Israel had ever been, a Kingdom promised already in the Old Testament (for example, Isaiah 49:6), a Kingdom to some extent already achieved by the end of the book of Acts (Acts 28:31).
At times, you and I are not much better than the disciples, even though we have the benefit of the Holy Spirit’s power that came upon them ten days later. You and I can worry sinfully about this country and other countries in the world—what is happening now and what will happen in the future, regardless of which presumptive presidential nominee we might get. Especially as we are surrounded by people who do not understand that Jesus’s Kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36), you and I likewise can fail to distinguish between the country and the Church. So, you and I also can lose sight of the real Kingdom of God—what it consists of and how God brings it about. At times you and I are not much better than the disciples, because by nature you and I are just like the disciples, sinful human beings, who, on account of the original sin we inherit and all the actual sin we commit, deserve present and eternal punishment. And, we will receive such eternal punishment, when Jesus Christ comes to judge in the same way the apostles witnessed Him go (confer Scaer, CLD VI:103), unless we turn in sorrow from our sin, trust God to forgive our sin, and want to do better than to keep on sinning. When we so repent, then God forgives our sin.
God does not forgive our sin because we repent, but God forgives our sin for the sake of His Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ died on the cross for the sins of the whole world, including your sins and my sins. Yet, Jesus did not stay dead! As we heard in the First Reading, after His suffering and death, Jesus presented Himself alive by many proofs, appearing to the apostles during forty days, speaking about the Kingdom of God. The same Son of God, in the same flesh in which He was born of the Virgin Mary, was crucified, resurrected, and eventually ascended—taken up, lifted up, taken out of sight. And, arguably equally important for us and for our salvation, in “the mystery of godliness”, He was proclaimed among the nations and believed on by us (1 Timothy 3:16).
As St. Luke in his first book wrote for Theophilus, Jesus began to do and teach things, and then, in his second book, the Holy Spirit finishes teaching and doing those things. By the empowering of the Holy Spirit, the apostles preached repentance and forgiveness—law and Gospel—as we heard Jesus in tonight’s Gospel Reading say the Scriptures prophesied. Those who received that special empowering likely had already been baptized, and so, like us who are baptized, they had received the Holy Spirit and so faith that in turn receives Holy Baptism’s gifts: the forgiveness of sins, rescue from death and the devil, and eternal salvation. And, those who had received that special empowering not only “stayed” with Jesus but perhaps a better translation is that they “ate” with Him; like us who are individually Absolved and admitted to this Rail and here receive the Sacrament of the Altar, they had table fellowship with Him, eating His Body and drinking His Blood, for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. Jesus’s Ascension did not change the apostles’ fellowship with Him; it just changed the main way that they experienced it, and, as they came to experience Him more, so we experience Him now.
You and I can be concerned appropriately about things going on in our country and the world. You and I can exercise our civic duties, including voting for whichever candidate we might think best (or maybe even, if our consciences compel us, not voting at all). When we sin again, as we will, in regards to our country or God’s Kingdom or in other ways, we, with repentance and faith, live each day in the forgiveness of sins by grace through faith in Jesus. The disciples saw Jesus taken or lifted up until a cloud took Him out of their sight, but, by the power of the Holy Spirit, they knew and we know that He eventually sat down and even now sits at the right hand of the Father, ruling all, as St. Paul describes in tonight’s Epistle Reading (Ephesians 1:15-23), for the benefit of His Church—not the kingdom restored to Israel, but the Kingdom of God, which far surpasses the Kingdom of Israel, whether past, present, or future.
The same is true of America: the Church as the Kingdom of God surpasses it, no matter how great it might have ever been in the past, no matter how great it might be now in the present, or no matter how great it might ever be in the future. The Church as the Kingdom of God gives the forgiveness of sins through Word and Sacrament and so restores people to right relationships, both with God and with one another. Jesus is coming with the clouds (Revelation 1:7), in the same way the apostles saw Him go, but until then He rules all for things for the benefit of His Church, His “restored kingdom”. We remember well both the confession and the exhortation to worship in today’s Psalm (47): God reigns over the nations; God sits on His holy throne; God is King of all the earth; sing praises with a psalm. Sing praises to God, sing praises! Sing praises to our King, sing praises!
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 + + +