Ascension Is Expansion

One of the things I love about the Church year is that it teaches us something even when we might not fully notice it.

Since December, we as a church have been walking through a story together.

We began in Advent, waiting in darkness and hope.

Then Christmas: God drawing near in the vulnerability of a child.

Epiphany: flashes of glory, moments where people begin to see who Jesus really is.

Lent: the long road toward Jerusalem.

Holy Week: betrayal, suffering, death.

Easter: resurrection, astonishment, new creation breaking open in the midst of the old.

And now today: Ascension.

This strange, beautiful, slightly bewildering feast where Jesus blesses his disciples… and disappears into a cloud.

It is one of the oddest scenes in the New Testament.

In fact, there is a whole tradition of Christian art

that seems to recognize just how strange it is.

Some medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Ascension

show the disciples gathered below staring upward while,

at the very top of the painting,

all you can still see of Jesus is a pair of feet disappearing into the clouds.

Which is honestly both funny and deeply human.

Because that is exactly what we would do too.

We would stare upward trying to catch one last glimpse.

Trying to hold onto the visible Jesus just a little longer.

And the disciples in Acts do precisely that.

Jesus is lifted from their sight,

and they simply stand there gazing upward into heaven.

Of course they do.

What else would you do?

The teacher they have followed.

The friend they have loved.

The one they believed would change the world.

Gone from sight.

And then these mysterious figures in white robes appear and ask:

“Why do you stand looking upward toward heaven?”

Not really a rebuke. More like a redirection.

Because Ascension is not actually the ending of the story of Jesus.

It is the hinge.

The turning point between the life of Jesus and the life of the Church.

Or maybe better: the moment where those two stories become one story.

Up until now, the disciples have mostly watched Jesus.

They watched him teach.

Watched him heal.

Watched him forgive.

Watched him feed crowds and calm storms and welcome strangers

and break bread and rise from the dead.

But now something changes.

The age of watching is ending.

The age of living begins.

The disciples still do not fully understand this.

In Acts they are still asking Jesus:

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom?”

They are looking for a timetable. A political resolution.

A moment when Jesus will finally fix everything from above.

But Jesus redirects them away from speculation and toward vocation.

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you;

and you will be my witnesses…”

In other words: the story is moving outward now.

And that, actually, is what the next half of the Church year is about.

For the last six months, the first half of the liturgical year,

we have been telling the story of Jesus’ life.

But after Pentecost, next Sunday, something changes.

The question is no longer simply:

“What did Jesus do?”

The question becomes:

“What does life look like now that Christ is risen

and the Spirit has been given?”

That long green season after Pentecost is sometimes called “ordinary time.” Which sounds terribly boring. But “ordinary” here does not mean dull.

It means ordered. Daily. A regular rhythm.

It is the season where we learn how resurrection is lived.

Week by week, the readings turn toward forgiveness, generosity, prayer, courage, reconciliation, hospitality, justice, endurance, shared life.

Ordinary human existence becomes the place

where the life of Christ continues.

And that is what Ascension prepares us for.

Because many of us unconsciously imagine spirituality as mostly about “looking upward.”

Trying to escape the world.

Trying to get somewhere else called heaven.

Trying to leave ordinary life behind.

But Ascension does not tell a story about Jesus abandoning the world.

It is the moment the life of Christ begins to move outward into the world through ordinary human beings.

Ascension is not really about absence. It’s about expansion.

The presence of Christ is no longer confined to

one place, one body, one moment in history.

Now the life of Christ begins taking root in ordinary people.

People like Peter, who still barely understands what is happening.

People like Mary and the women who remain praying faithfully together.

People who are anxious and uncertain and not fully prepared.

Which means: people like us.

And maybe that is why I find the ending of today’s reading so moving.

After all the mystery and clouds and glory, what do the disciples actually do?

They return to Jerusalem together.

And they pray together.

That is the beginning of the Church.

Not triumphal certainty.

Not mastery.

Not having all the answers.

Just people gathered together in hope,

waiting for the Spirit of God to breathe through them.

And maybe that is where many of us are too.

Trying to figure out how to live faithfully in a complicated world.

Trying to become more fully human.

Trying to learn what Christianity actually looks like

beyond slogans or inherited assumptions.

And Ascension offers this quiet but profound answer:

The Christian life is not mainly about admiring Jesus from a distance.

It is about becoming a people

through whom the life of Christ becomes visible in the world.

A people who forgive.

A people who feed others.

A people who pray.

A people who tell the truth.

A people who care for the lonely and the poor.

A people who learn, however imperfectly, to love as Christ loved.

The disciples begin the day staring upward at disappearing feet.

But eventually they must turn back toward Jerusalem.

Toward one another.

Toward the life waiting to be lived.

And so must we.

Because from now on, when the world asks, “Where is Christ?”

the answer is meant to be found not only in heaven,

but in ordinary lives slowly being shaped into Christ’s likeness here on earth.

Lives like ours.

Amen.