Ascend

May 17, 2026

Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:1-11

As the Easter season comes to a close, we always end up here… with these two stories of the Ascension… stories only Luke tells us.  In a way, these stories wrap up the Easter narrative, but not in the way these disciples expect. If we’re going to be honest and true to the story, ever since they answered his call and followed after Jesus… nothing has gone according to these disciples’ expectations.  And that hasn’t changed over the last forty days. Everything they thought they knew about Jesus… the conclusions they may have come to while traveling with him… the expectations for the Messiah that they just can’t seem to let go… everything unraveled once they entered into Jerusalem.  Despite what we may think… or what our subsequent theology tries to assure us… the events of what we call Holy Week weren’t the way it was supposed to go… especially if we are looking at this story from the disciples’ perspective.  

And then… despite his trying to prepare them for what was to come… telling them multiple times what was going to happen after the arrest, sham trial, crucifixion and burial… Jesus is back among them… alive, embodied, eating, teaching, appearing to disciples far beyond the inner circle.  Without the comfort of their old expectations… these disciples have no way to process this new thing that is happening.  I’m sure with each passing day they are expecting Jesus to do something more.

So… you can feel all their old hopes rising again with each new encounter with the resurrected Jesus. Now the kingdom will come. Now Jesus will take David’s throne. Now Rome will fall. Now everything will finally go the way it was always imagined and expected.  But nothing of the sort happens. Not one thing.  There is no great show of power and might… as defined by our expectations.

Everywhere the story should have gone, it doesn’t. Jesus enters Jerusalem like a king… nothing comes of it. Jesus overturns the tables… nothing changes in the Temple. A sword flashes in Gethsemane… he stops the violence, heals the wound, and surrenders.  The resurrected Jesus steps out of the tomb.  Death is defied.  He appears to his disciples speaking peace.  But the resurrected Jesus never goes back in the story to correct it according to the disciples’ expectations… to do all the things that he was supposed to do.  Imagine what a resurrection appearance to Pilate would have been like and what might have come from it.  Or I like thinking about the resurrected Jesus appearing to Barabbas… convincing him to put down his sword and the ways of death and to take up a resurrected life by following the way of Christ.  Maybe one day, I’ll write my own gospel story with some extra scenes in it like that.  I wonder how that would go over?

But getting back to Luke and the story he is telling… where now, on this hill, these disciples must be thinking: Ok, now… now the kingdom will come. Now Jesus will take David’s throne. Now Rome will fall. Now everything will finally go the way it was always imagined with Jesus becoming the expected messiah promised.  But instead, Jesus ascends and leaves them all standing there looking up into the sky.

And that… for me… is why the church needs to hear this Ascension story every single year. Because Ascension is the moment the church stops waiting for Jesus to do the all the work on our behalf and starts living as the Body of Christ. It is the moment God says, “You have everything you need. Stop waiting on your old expectations of the messiah to come true. Start moving along the way of resurrection.”  It is the moment when our faith starts to become capable.

         Jesus doesn’t leave the disciples with nothing… before Jesus ascends, he “opens their minds to understand the scriptures.” That is a gift of the risen Christ… and a consistent challenge for the church today.  We live in a time when the Bible has never been more accessible, and yet biblical literacy has never been lower. And when people do feel confident about scripture, it’s often because they’ve grabbed hold of someone else’s interpretation… oftentimes troubling interpretation full of bad theology… and not because they’ve wrestled with the text themselves. It’s like reading the reviews of a movie and deciding you know everything about that movie based on someone else’s review without ever actually watching it yourself.

The new story begins when our minds open—when we read, question, explore, and allow scripture to surprise us… to undo our expectations of what it is supposed to say and do.  Too often we’re taught what to think about scripture, not how to think scripturally.  Jesus opens their minds… sends them on a journey of discovery… a scriptural journey where expectations are going to be defied and challenged… where the story isn’t going to go the way we think it needs to go… where our understanding gets challenged again and again… and like their time with Jesus… this journey with the scriptures is going to end back up on this same hill where the church stops waiting for the scriptures to do all the work on our behalf and instead starts living as the Body of Christ.  The church cannot live on borrowed interpretations. The church cannot grow on secondhand faith.   

On that hill, Jesus opens their minds. How open is your mind to resurrection today?

In the story… even with their minds opened, the disciples still cling to old hopes: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  It’s exactly the wrong question… revealing the wrong expectation still stubbornly at work. They still want Jesus to be the political Messiah they grew up hearing about. They still want power, victory, national restoration. They still want the story to go the way they’ve always been told it should go… where Jesus restores America to being a Christian Nation. 

No wait… that’s the same wrong expectations… but a different group of disciples. 

Resurrection has changed everything. The kingdom Jesus proclaims is not about thrones or empires. It is about justice, mercy, righteousness, and love. It is about a world shaped by God’s character, not by human power.

Is the church we have now the church Jesus imagined? Are our structures, habits, and expectations aligned with the kingdom of God?  Our Reformed motto… as we talked about in Bible study this week… our Reformed motto is, “Reformed and always reforming according to the Word of God.” Which may mean scripture… definitely needs to mean Christ… the incarnated Word of God.  Our motto is not reformed and always reforming according to nostalgia. Not according to comfort. Not according to what we’ve always done or even according to the current political values of either side of the political spectrum.  According to the Word of God… that we are hopefully engaging with our opened minds. 

Acts is the story of a church that keeps changing… because the Spirit keeps pushing it into places their expectations will never take them. Boundaries widen. Assumptions fall. The church becomes something new again and again… always surprised by where God’s grace is taking it… always amazed at the new life of resurrection that keeps appearing where before there was only death.  And that story must also continue through us.

Back on that hill… the disciples stand there, necks craned upward, staring at the empty sky. And two messengers ask what I think is the vital question of the day:  “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”  If we’re honest, much of the modern American church has become very skilled at staring at the sky.  We have built an entire religious culture around waiting… waiting for God to fix what we refuse to confront, waiting for Jesus to solve problems we helped to create and perpetuate, waiting for someone else to do the work of mercy, justice, reconciliation, and repair.  We have baptized passivity and called it faith. We have confused comfort with blessing. We have mistaken nostalgia for holiness. We have treated discipleship like a spectator sport—something we watch, not something we do.  Those disciples watched Jesus and waited so they could cheer him on from the sidelines.

Ascension shatters that illusion. Ascension is God saying: “You are not children waiting for a parent to come and clean up after you. You are my witnesses. You are my body. You are my hands and feet in the world.”  Ascension is the end of passive Christianity. Ascension is the beginning of Spirit‑driven agency.

Next Sunday, at Pentecost, the Spirit will descend and frightened disciples will become bold witnesses. They will speak languages they never learned. They will step into a world they never imagined. They will become the church Jesus knew they could be.

Ascension is the hinge.

Pentecost is the launch.

And we are still living into that story today.  Amen.