• Acts of the Apostles 1:1-11

The story told in Luke’s Gospel and continuing through his Acts of the Apostles begins in the Temple in Jerusalem and ends in Rome.  It starts with concerns uniquely important to God’s people, the Jews, and culminates with a mission to the entire world.  Throughout this sweeping story, the Holy Spirit intervenes at crucial points– from intimacy with one person, Mary at her miraculous conception, to empowering all the followers of Jesus to continue his mission to the entire world.  At the last possible moment in Jesus’ earthly ministry, just before his miraculous ascension into heaven, Jesus asserts: now, “you will receive the Holy Spirit and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”

• Psalm 47

God is given all the attributes of a mighty king, who reigns over all nations.

• OR Psalm 93

The psalmist, as does any good poet, takes a familiar experience– the sea crashing against the shore– and uses it to intensify and make vivid another experience, in this case our experience of God, who gave the Law as a sign of God’s consistency and loyalty for all time.

• Ephesians 1:15-23

The writer of Ephesians offers empowerment to all believers by linking God’s great power in Jesus to them, as members of the church.

• Luke 24:44-53

The last act of the Risen Christ in Luke’s account is a hermeneutical task and a promise.  Jesus explains himself using the texts of the Torah, the prophets and the psalms; then he promises, “You are my witnesses of these things.”  He now tells them to wait briefly when they will receive what the Father had promised them, that is, until “you have been clothed with power from on high.”  He lifts his hands in a farewell gesture of benediction and “withdrew from them and was carried into heaven.”  No earthquake, no wind, no fire– (all that and more will come in ten days!).

L.P. Hemming, in his contribution to Blackwell’s Postmodern Theology, (p.452), observes that God became “transcendent” in the Western imagination when space became infinite, under the influence of Greek philosophy.  The God of the Bible, to the contrary, acts in human history, in the lives of specific individuals and communities.  Perhaps it was inevitable that Western Enlightenment/Modernity would push God to the periphery or merely to the sentimental or the personal.

The biblical texts of the Second Testament, which follow the movement of where God acts in the world from one person, Jesus, shifts now to where God acts through all who follow him, and then from the immediate eye-witnesses to all future believers!  Now, the claim goes: the divine is imminent, even mundane; not out there somewhere (“transcendent”), but right here, between one another; not esoteric, but in daily life.  Is one claim more astounding than the others:  God at work in Jesus or God at work in us?  Are both claims a kind of ‘incarnation’?  The ‘miraculous’ is now quotidian; it is not out there somewhere, but it can be happen between people. 

The departure of Jesus is dealt with almost perfunctorily by Luke; the greater drama of this story comes ten days later on the Feast of Pentecost when God publicly and spectacularly transfers God’s mission to ordinary people and into basic human relationships and interactions in public.

In a sense, Ascension Day is the calm before the storm; the (pregnant) pause before all (re-)creation breaks loose.  After the understatement about Jesus’ departure–he simply “withdrew”- -the breathtaking implication of his final promise– his followers will be “clothed with power from on high” –will begin to unfold, starting at that first Pentecost and still reverberating.