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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!)
I am glad to be back home in Kilgore and here at Pilgrim, though I enjoyed my time away and appreciate the congregation’s granting me the vacation. For me, one of the highlights of my trip to Austin was celebrating my older niece’s graduation from The University of Texas, although for her the graduation was bittersweet, as she had to say goodbye to friends and classmates to whom she had been particularly close over the last four years. Sorrow is what we might expect when people part not only from friends and classmates but also from a dear teacher. So, we might well be surprised that neither in the brief portion of tonight’s Gospel Reading that tells of the Ascension of Our Lord nor in the somewhat-more‑detailed account in the First Reading (Acts 1:1-11) do we hear of the disciples’ sorrow but of their worshipping the Lord, returning to Jerusalem with great joy, and being continually in the temple blessing (or, maybe better, “praising”) God. Considering that brief portion of the Gospel Reading, tonight we realize that, as with the disciples, so also with us, “Jesus’s Ascension leads to our worship and praise”.
At least Jesus’s Ascension should lead to our worship and praise. Tonight’s small attendance in part speaks to how Jesus’s Ascension fails to lead some to worship and praise. Yet, also we may not always or even ever fully appreciate the theological significance of the Ascension of Our Lord, that He is ruling all for the sake of His Church and has exalted to heaven our common human nature. Or, we may focus on what we misperceive as His absence from His Church on earth, as if He has left us to attract new converts and fend off His enemies by ourselves. Or, we may get so caught up in such things as difficulties with work and school, politics, our families or individual lives that we think that the Lord has abandoned us, as if He is not even aware of what we are going through, much less helping us through it all. So, worship and praise as a result of Jesus’s Ascension may be the furthest thing from our minds and hearts.
Such situations surely can be considered at least part of why Jesus told His disciples and tells us that the Scriptures record the Divine necessity of preaching in His Name repentance for the forgiveness of sins. All people, including each one of us, is sinful by nature, and so we commit those and countless other sins of thought, word, and deed. Apart from such repentance, we deserve nothing but temporal and eternal punishment. So, the Lord Himself and those He called and calls to do likewise preached and preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins: having sorrow not over His parting and being carried up into heaven but over our sin, trusting God to forgive our sin, and at least wanting to stop sinning in the same old ways that we have been sinning and in any other new ways, too. The promised Holy Spirit comes from on high and enables such repentance, and when we repent, then God forgives our sin. God forgives our sin of not appreciating the significance of Jesus’s Ascension, of thinking that He is absent from His Church, and of thinking that He has abandoned us. God forgives all our sin, whatever our sin might be, for the sake of His Son Jesus the Christ’s death on the cross for us.
As Jesus told His disciples and tells us, the Scriptures record the Divine necessity also of the Christ’s suffering and on the third day rising from the dead. That suffering and rising were Divinely necessary for you and for me, for our salvation. Out of His great love for us, Jesus took to the cross the burden of our sin, and there, in our place, He died the death that we otherwise would have deserved. His resurrection showed His victory over sin and death for us, and His Ascension also was for you and for me. Jesus certainly did not ascend for Himself, because His divine nature already had, among other things, all divine honor and glory, and, through the personal union of His divine and human nature in the man Jesus, the divine nature communicated to His human nature, among other things, all divine honor and glory. So, Jesus ascended for you and for me: as the Epistle Reading put it, to be seated at God’s right hand and be head over all things for the Church (Ephesians 1:15-23, especially NIV) and to exalt our shared human nature to where we who repent and believe in Him will someday also be similarly honored and glorified.
Note well that the disciples’ worshipping and praising followed Jesus’s lifting up His hands and blessing them. Jesus’s blessing us with the forgiveness of our sins also precedes our worshipping and praising Him. To be sure, Jesus is not present with us in the same way as He was with His disciples, but He left behind the pastoral office of preaching the Gospel and administering the Sacraments that perfects the saints, does the work of ministry, and builds up the body of Christ (Ephesians 4:8-12, especially KJV). Our eyes do not see Jesus in the same way that the disciples’ eyes saw Him, but nevertheless by faith we see Him present in the water of Holy Baptism, in the touch of individual Holy Absolution, and in the bread and wine of Holy Communion, which are His true Body and Blood. In these ways He Himself continues to do and teach through those He has chosen, working with them and confirming their message through the accompanying signs (Mark 16:20).
In tonight’s Gospel Reading, the Divinely‑inspired St. Luke says that the disciples returned to Jerusalem with great joy. Although St. Luke does not give the reasons for that great joy, we can identify some good likely reasons, such as the Lord’s blessing, His return to the Father, the promised coming of the Holy Spirit, and so on (Plummer, ad loc Luke 24:53, p.566). We likewise can have joy always (Philippians 4:4), even in the midst of such things as difficulties with work and school, politics, our families or individual lives. Not only is the end of all such difficulties with eternal life the light at the end of the tunnel, but God is with us each and every step of the way through the tunnel, sympathizing with our weakness and providing His all‑sufficient grace (Hebrews 4:15-16; 2 Corinthians 9:8; 12:9), and working all things together for His good purpose (Romans 8:28). Jesus has not and will not abandon us, no matter how bleak the future may look at any given moment! At various times things even looked bleak for the disciples and other Christians, who were continually in the temple not only before Pentecost but also after Pentecost (Acts 2:46; 3:1; 5:42), until tensions with the Jewish leaders scattered many of them out of the city of Jerusalem to the surrounding regions (Acts 8:1), but even that scattering was for the good of the Church and the joy of the people (Acts 8:4-8).
Tonight in considering the brief portion of the Gospel Reading that tells of the Ascension of Our Lord, we have realized that, as with the disciples, so also with us, “Jesus’s Ascension leads to our worship and praise”. We might expect sorrow at His parting and being carried up into heaven, but we find something else. Jesus died and rose for us, and He ascended for us. We, who repent and so are forgiven, worship and praise Him now, as we will for all eternity.
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 + + +