Lord over All
I don’t mean to start our meditation this morning on a morbid note, but here it is: the older we are, the more we read obituaries. Several of you have shared with me: “Pastor, I’ve read so many obituaries lately that it dawned on me: I am the last man (or woman) standing. I’ve outlived most of my friends!” Reading obituaries evokes complex emotions in us, especially as we age. But reading obituaries is also theologically instructive. That is, they reveal what people believe (and don’t believe) about God and about what happens to us after we die. Here is an example I read in one: “He is gone. But he isn’t really gone, because he will always live forever in our hearts.” Here is another one: “She is no longer here, but her love will always surround us.” These sentiments are natural to us. They are deeply ingrained in our psyches. And far be it from me to deprive anyone of the comfort they may provide. But the theologian in me asks: How do we mean them? To what extent do they square with our faith? Today marks the end of Eastertide. It is a special day—the day on which we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord. Our Gospel lesson recounts this event. Jesus is with his disciples. He reminds them that the Scriptures find their meaning in him. They will see this for themselves when he opens his mind to understand the Scriptures. They will see that the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms point to him. “Thus it is written: that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem” (Luke 24:46-47). After commissioning them with renewed authority to proclaim this message to all nations, he tells them to wait to be clothed with power from on high—the promised Holy Spirit. (About this more next Sunday.) He then withdraws from them and is carried up into heaven (Luke 24:51). He vanishes from the scene. The ascension is one of those events in the Bible that seems strange to us, to say the least. We don’t know exactly what to make of it. And because we don’t know what to make of it, we tend to think about Jesus and what happened to him after his death and resurrection appearances to his disciples along the lines prescribed by the contemporary obituary. Jesus is gone. But he is not really gone, because he will always live forever in our hearts. Jesus is no longer here, but his spirit lives on. Please don’t think this way. Honestly, if this is the sum and substance of the faith we share, then we should discard it. For it is worse than useless. But thankfully this is decidedly not the faith that is informed by the Scriptures. And so it is not the faith that the church proclaims, especially today, when we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord. Now granted, the ascension is about the departure of Jesus, which is clear from our Gospel lesson. He really does vanish from the scene. We are certainly not wrong in thinking this. But we are wrong in thinking only this, because the ascension at the same time is about his arrival. This is clear from our first lesson. If our Gospel lesson shows us what happens below the clouds, then our Epistle lesson shows us what happens above the clouds. In this connection, listen again to what the author of the Letter to the Ephesians says: “By his power God raised Jesus 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” (1:20-21). How can we even begin to comprehend the enormity of what the author is telling us here! And yet the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms point to this event too: Consider, for example, the vision of the Prophet Daniel. He sees the Ancient of Days with one like a Son of Man presented before him. Thousands upon thousands are attending him, ten thousands upon ten thousands are standing before him, as they await his ruling: “Behold, with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom is one that shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:13, 14). In this vision, Daniel is a witness here to the enthronement of Jesus as king. In the Gospels, Jesus himself endorses his identification with the Son of Man. Remember his trial, when he is questioned by the high priest on the eve of his awful descent into the abyss of suffering and death? The priest asked him: “Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One?” “I am”, said Jesus, “and you shall see the son of man seated at the right hand of the Power [on high] and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:61-62). In his state of humiliation, to borrow the language of the Presbyterian confessions, Jesus anticipates his state of exaltation. It is a scene where the power and glory of the exalted Messiah will be on full display, prompting the worship of all creatures in heaven and on earth and under the earth. We anticipated this worship when we cried out in our Call to Worship: “God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises!” (Psalm 47:5). This helps us understand better the response of the disciples to the ascension of Jesus. The lesson does not disclose to us their inmost thoughts, but it does record their gesture, which certainly makes sense in light of what we are saying here. The ascension of their Lord means his enthronement, to which the only appropriate response is their worship and exclamations of joy. Later one of the disciples, Peter, no doubt calling this scene to mind, will cite in his Pentecost sermon the most quoted Old Testament verse in all the New Testament. “The Lord said to my Lord. Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool” (Psalm 110:1; Acts 2:35). Does all this sound familiar? All that we have been saying so far is summarized in the Creed that we recite on each Lord’s Day: “The third day he rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” The right hand of God the Father almighty is the place of highest authority, as the author the Letter to the Hebrews affirms: After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven, and so became superior even to the angels (Heb. 1:3-4). Jesus is king. He is invested with royal power. That is what we proclaim on Ascension Day. But if he had assumed his throne in Jerusalem, as his followers had wanted, he would have been only one king among many kings. But when God exalted him to his own right hand, the place of highest authority, he became king of all nations—indeed of all creatures in heaven and on earth and under the earth. Chris Ganski, pastor of City Reformed Church in Milwaukee and a friend from grad school whom I always deeply admired, has written these profound words about the ascension: “Ascension points to the fact that the whole cosmos has been re-organized around Jesus of Nazareth…. Ascension means that Jesus encompasses all things, nothing falls outside his jurisdiction, someday everything broken will be put right, everything disordered healed, everything fragmented embraced by the wholeness he brings.” This is good news. But you may be saying at this point: “Pastor, all this is heady stuff. But I’m not sure how relatable it is to my everyday life here and now.” Allow me to respond. Acknowledging the exaltation of Jesus to God’s right hand makes all the difference. As Christians, it defines our approach to politics. Or rather, in the deepest sense it is our politics. We have an election season coming up, and many of us are very concerned. We have good reason to be! It may very well be one of the most turbulent times in the history of our nation. How will we respond to the turbulence? Will we allow ourselves to be swept along by the strong current of political passion? Or will we live out our own political commitments intelligently and responsibly? Acknowledging Jesus as Lord over all relativizes, qualifies and conditions those commitments. It helps us to see them in proper proportion. The peace and prosperity of our nation is a penultimate concern, not an ultimate concern, to borrow the language of the twentieth century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In other words, it is an important concern, but not the most important one. Indeed, to make it the most important is to put it in a place reserved for God alone, that is, it is to make it into an idol. From this fatal move, as history teaches us, comes violence and destruction. As Christians, we have dual citizenship. We are citizens of the earthly city. And as such, we are responsible to promote its welfare. But we are also and above all citizens of the heavenly city, from where we await a Savior, who by the power that enables him to subject all things to himself, will transform us and all creation (cf. Phil. 3:20-21). To him belongs our first allegiance. As citizens of the heavenly city, we are to do what the Apostle Paul tells us in Colossians: “Since then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (Col. 3:1-2). No doubt some will say that all this leads to quietism; it cuts the nerve of political involvement. Christianity defined in these terms simply endorses the status quo. These sort of Christians are so heavenly minded they are no earthly good. Historically, the leaders who controlled the levers of power wanted religion. It serves to pacify the masses. Just tell them that heaven is their true home, and that the misery they are enduring is only temporary, and they will let us do business as usual, and not rock the boat, so that we may continue to enrich ourselves at their expense. Karl Marx was perceptive enough to see this. That is why he called religion the opiate of the masses. But is this how it really should be? Politics is about power. It is about how we relate to power. We know that in this world that our own power is limited, that we exist among powers far greater than our own. That is why we are politically involved; we don’t want these greater powers to rob and exploit us. The greatest power is cosmic power, the power that governs the universe. Each human being wants to know its face. Does it have a good and wise and just face? Or does it rather have a dark and sinister face? Believe it or not, how we answer this question will determine how we live our lives, not least our political lives. If we believe this power to have a dark and sinister face, we will be fearful and resentful. We will be either risk-averse or reckless. In either case, we will show ourselves to be mistrustful, prone to conspiracy thinking or revolutionary violence in extreme cases. But if we believe this power to have a good and wise and just face, we will live differently. We will be confident and hopeful. We will be willing to take on calculated risk. We will be trusting, because we know that this power intends good, even if it does not always appear to be so now. But we carry on, because we know that in the end this good will triumph over evil, because good can only always intend good. This power, which some call higher power, is incomprehensible to us, to our finite minds. God is too big for us to understand. But God revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ, the man who, during the days of his life on this earth, showed himself to be good and wise and just. This Jesus was the same one exalted to the place of highest authority at God’s right hand, the place of absolute power, as we have been saying. That means the goodness, wisdom and justice of Jesus, the one who is head over all things for the sake of us, the church, is in the place of absolute power. How can this not motivate us to undertake bold action in the political square? Indeed, it should motivate us in all that we do in this life. But we struggle here, do we not? The author of the Letter to the Ephesians knows that this is a struggle for us. That is why he begins his letter with a prayer. He wants to assure his readers that he is praying for them. He prays first for our sight. We need a larger vision of the one in whose name we pray if we want to pray with confidence. We need the eyes of our hearts enlightened, so that we may see the hope to which God has called us. We need our vision enlarged if we are going to see with the eyes of faith the immeasurably great power that is at work for us who believe. In sum, the intent of the prayer is clear: that God’s people will receive revelation to know what we have in Jesus Christ. There is no greater power that we can evoke than this name. Our author wants us to know that this power is at work in us and for us. Let us rest firm in this conviction. To acknowledge that Jesus is Lord over all, to pray to God in his name, is to know a confidence and boldness that can come from nowhere else than Jesus. Let us then rejoice in his victorious power on this day and every day. Amen. |