A Sermon on Acts 1:1-11

Preached Ascension Sunday, May 12, 2002

By Donald M. Tuttle

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

Not long after September 11, an email began to make the rounds. You may have seen it. It asked the question: "Where was God on 9/11?"

It was a good question to ask then and a good question to continue to ask. Where was God when those planes crashed into the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field? Where was God when thousands were dying and thousands more were left devastated by the loss of a parent or child, a husband or wife?

Where was God on 9/11?

Of course, it doesn’t take a terrorist attack for people to ask such a question. It happens every day.

Where is God? It is one of the hardest questions people ask. It is one of the hardest you are I are called to answer. What do we say?

Some say that God has gone away.

Many years ago the Deist developed such an answer. They suggested that God created the universe, gave humanity rational minds to understand it, and then went away, refusing to engage or being involved in the world God created.

Today few would openly hold to such a doctrine, but many have testified to the absence of God. In fact, the ancient Christian writers had a term for the experience. it was "Deus Abscondit"—that is, the God that is hidden. According to Richard Foster, many of the great saints experienced it. In his book Prayer, Foster says that it was this sense that John of the Cross felt when he spoke of the "dark night of the soul" and that Jean-Pierre de Caussade had in mind when he wrote of the "dark night of faith." And Quaker George Fox seemed to allude to it when he said there were times "when it was day I wished for night and when it was night I wished for day." Even the great George Buttrick seems to know such times. He said there were times in which "we were beating on Heaven’s door with bruised knuckles in the dark."

Yet despite all these, I can’t think of anyone who expressed the sense of God having gone away better than a young man who wrote a letter to his pastor. In the letter he described his feelings of abandonment, his feeling that God has gone away and left him. He signed the letter: "Yours truly. God’s only forgotten son."

Where was God? As far as he was concerned, far, far away. For many of us there are times in which God seems to have gone away.

But the Good News is that God has not gone away but that Christ has gone up—up to reign as Lord of all.

The story of the Ascension is a strange one for modern ear’s to hear. Scholars don’t want to study it. Preachers don’t want to preach it. Listeners don’t want to hear it. That’s because it sounds so bizarre. People of Jesus’ day might have imagined a three-tier universe in which heaven was just above the clouds, but we don’t think that way. We have been to the moon. We have seen that big blue marble earth spinning in the vast void of space. We have been above the clouds and didn’t find heaven there. So for us the ascension sounds like a bad scene from an alien invasion movie.

But the point of the ascension is not geography but theology. It is not about where Jesus went but what he did. It is a reminder that Jesus has not "gone away" but has gone up, gone up to take his place next to God from which we rules over all that God has created.

The Apostle Paul understood this truth. Consider two passages from his works. The first comes from his letter to the church at Philippi. He wrote:

Therefore God also highly exalted him

and gave him the name above every name,

so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend,

in heaven and on earth and under the earth,

and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord

to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:9-11)

The second is from the letter to the Ephesians. There he wrote:

God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Paul understood the ascension. He knew that Jesus’ going up meant that he was taking his rightful place next to God from which he could and would reign over every power and principalities with which humanity struggles. He knew that while evil and death might seem strong, Christ has already defeated them. He knew that nothing existed outside of the Lordship of Jesus Christ. In short, Christ rules—and always will.

William Willimon understands this as well. He points out that the doctrine of the ascension is not for the sunny, calm, ordered days of May. It is a truth for the last days, the darkest days, the days when the entire world seems bound for hell. It is for the days in which mother’s are weeping for their children, people are dying of terminal illnesses, and faithful employees are getting pink slips. It is for the days when we appear to have no future and no hope. It is for the days where God seems to have gone away.

It is on those days that the ascension is Good News for it means that Jesus—

reigns over everything that might befall us. It means that there is hope because our future rests in the hands of the one seated at the right hand of God.

So let’s not just sit here, gazing up to heaven, thankful for what we have received. Let’s go tell the world. Let’s go tell them that God has not gone away but that Christ has gone up, that Christ rules--and always will.