The biblical universe and the 21st century universe are not constructed the same. There are few days in the Christian year that show this more vividly than this one. Ascension Sunday- the day when we read about how Jesus got swept up into heaven. Now isn’t that a very odd idea from a bygone view of life and the universe!
Challenging enough concept to the modern mind) and then, some time later, was “taken up into heaven” while the disciples stood in astonishment, looking up. Until two strangers dressed in white appeared among them and said, “Why are you standing around looking up? It is time to get back into life, but expect it to be different, and expect life to be enlivened by a Spirit like you’ve never felt before.” That’s actually not an exact quote. It’s more what I imagine from the scant biblical record.
The ascension constructs the world above us as the heavenly realm where God and the heavenly beings reside, and the world around us as the earthly realm where we struggle along until we have done our part. But that is not how the physical universe is constructed today. After all, when we look up and see the stars and the moon, we don’t think “heavenly beings.” We think, planets and black holes and the vast frontier of space.
But if you have ever lost someone around whom your world revolves, you may be able to make a different kind of sense of the ascension. If you have ever found yourself “staring into space” wondering what is next, you might be able to relate to the disciples. What do we do now? How am I to move forward? No matter how humans have viewed the shape of the physical universe over time, the disorienting shape of the big changes in life, and the way life gets handed from one generation to the next is an age-old unbroken lineage marked by a familiar uncertainty, disorientation, and excitement.
Birth, Baptism, graduation, retirement, marriage, death- they all disrupt us but they also move us from one way of living to the next. We “ascend” from one life stage to another, ready or not. And at each stage life we are challenged to grab on to life in a different way. We are called to take hold of life with courage, trust, and sometimes even daring.
Maybe it’s not Jesus who ascended. Maybe it was the disciples, ascending to a new way of living the gospel.