Sermon For Ascension Day

He Ascended That He Might Fill All Things

There is a peculiar silence that falls over the Ascension. The disciples stand on the hillside, their eyes fixed upward, and the text tells us they keep gazing into heaven even after the cloud has taken Jesus from their sight. Two figures in white have to interrupt them, asking, almost gently, why they are standing there looking up. It is one of the stranger moments in the New Testament, and I suspect it is strange because it touches something we recognize in ourselves. We know what it is to watch something irreplaceable disappear and to stand there, unable to move, uncertain what comes next.

The Church gathers today to observe the Feast of the Ascension, one of the great hinge-points of the Christian year. We have kept Easter, we have sung the resurrection, and now we arrive at this moment forty days later when the risen Christ is taken up and a cloud receives him out of the sight of his disciples. The lectionary appoints Acts 1 and Ephesians 1 for this day, and together these two passages form something like a diptych. Acts gives us the scene on the ground, the disciples watching and waiting. Ephesians gives us the view from above, what the ascension actually accomplished and what it means for the church. Held together, they answer a question that is worth sitting with this morning: what does it mean that Christ has ascended, and why should that matter to us gathered here today?

Let us begin where Luke begins, in the opening verses of Acts.

What The Departure Actually Was

Luke tells Theophilus that his first account, the Gospel, dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach. That word begun is doing a great deal of work. The implication is that Acts is the continuation, the next chapter of what Jesus is still doing and teaching, now through his Spirit and his church. The ascension is not a conclusion. It is a transition.

Before he is taken up, Jesus gives the apostles instructions through the Holy Spirit. He speaks to them about the kingdom of God. And when they ask him whether he is now going to restore the kingdom to Israel, he does not rebuke the question, but he redirects it. He tells them it is not for them to know the times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. What they are to receive instead is the Holy Spirit coming upon them, and what they are to do is be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Then he is lifted up, and the cloud takes him.

Now, it would be easy to read this scene as a kind of abandonment. The one who had walked with them, eaten with them, shown them his wounds, is gone. The disciples stand there staring. But notice what the two figures in white actually say. They do not say, he is gone, go home and remember him well. They say, this Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you have seen him go. The ascension is framed from the very beginning not as a permanent departure but as a promised return. The disciples are not meant to stand gazing upward indefinitely. They are meant to go back to Jerusalem and wait for the promise of the Father, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and then to move outward as witnesses.

The departure, in other words, is purposeful. It is not loss. It is the precondition for something greater.

What The Ascension Actually Accomplished

This is where the letter to the Ephesians becomes indispensable. Paul's prayer in Ephesians 1 is one of the most theologically dense passages in the New Testament, and it is worth slowing down inside it.

Paul prays that the believers at Ephesus would receive a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of God, that the eyes of their hearts would be enlightened. He wants them to know three things: the hope of his calling, the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and the immeasurable greatness of his power toward those who believe. And then Paul describes that power by pointing to what God did in Christ. He raised him from the dead, 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 in the one to come. He put everything under his feet and gave him as head over everything to the church, which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.

That last phrase deserves a moment of attention. The church is described as the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way. The ascended Christ does not withdraw from the world. He fills it. He is not absent from creation; he is exalted over it and present throughout it in a way that his earthly, localized ministry could not accomplish. When Jesus tells the disciples in John's Gospel that it is to their advantage that he goes away, because if he does not go the Helper will not come, he is saying something similar to what Paul says here. The ascension is not a retreat. It is an expansion. The risen and ascended Christ, through his Spirit, is no longer limited to one place, one conversation, one hillside in Galilee. He is present wherever his people are, wherever his word is proclaimed, wherever his Spirit moves.

This is the central claim of this feast, and it is worth stating plainly. The ascension means that Jesus Christ is not a figure of the past to be remembered. He is the reigning Lord of the present to be trusted and obeyed. He sits at the right hand of the Father, not as a passive observer, but as the one to whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been given, as the one who intercedes for his people, as the head of the body which is the church.

What This Means For The Church's Witness

Now we can return to the hillside and the disciples standing there, and we can ask what the ascension means for them, and for us.

The two figures in white do not simply announce the return of Christ and leave it there. Their question, why do you stand looking up toward heaven, implies that there is something to be done. The disciples are not called to passive waiting. They are called to return to Jerusalem, to receive the Spirit, and then to be witnesses. The structure of Acts 1:8 is worth noticing. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth. This is not a sequence of options. It is a commission that moves outward from the center, from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the foreign. The ascension of Christ does not leave the church without direction. It gives the church its direction.

And the power for that witness is not the disciples' own courage or eloquence or organizational capacity. It is the Holy Spirit coming upon them. The ascension and the gift of the Spirit belong together. Christ ascends, the Spirit is poured out, and the church goes. That is the pattern of Acts, and it is the pattern that the church has lived by in every generation since.

There is an honest question worth raising here, and it is one that people in this congregation may be carrying. If Christ is truly reigning, if all things are under his feet, why does the world look the way it does? Why does suffering continue? Why does injustice persist? Why does the church so often seem weak and scattered rather than triumphant?

Paul's prayer in Ephesians 1 is addressed to people who need their eyes enlightened. He is not writing to people who can already see everything clearly. He is praying that they would come to know what they do not yet fully perceive. The reign of Christ is real, but it is not yet fully visible. We live in the interval between the ascension and the return, between the promise and the consummation. The disciples were told that Jesus will come in the same way as they saw him go. The reign is established, but the kingdom has not yet come in its fullness. This is the honest shape of Christian hope. It is not denial of present suffering. It is confidence in the one who holds the future.

The collect for Ascension Day in the Book of Common Prayer captures this tension beautifully. It asks that we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell. We are not yet where he is. But we are not without him. And the Spirit given to the church is the down payment, the guarantee, of the inheritance that is coming.

What We Do With This

So we come to the Table this morning, and we do so as people who live in that interval. The Eucharist is itself an ascension-shaped act. We lift up our hearts, as the ancient liturgy says. We join our worship to the worship of heaven. We receive the body and blood of the one who is both present with us and reigning above us. The Table is not a memorial to someone absent. It is a communion with the living Lord who fills all things.

And we leave this place as witnesses. Not because we have everything figured out, not because we are certain of all the answers, but because we have been given the Spirit and we have been given the commission. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the ends of the earth. For most of us, that begins with the street outside this door, the neighbor, the colleague, the person we will sit across from at dinner tonight.

The disciples stood gazing upward, and they were gently redirected. Not because the ascension was unimportant, but because it was not the end of the story. It was the beginning of their mission. The same is true for us. We have been told where he has gone. We have been told he will return. We have been given his Spirit. We have been given his word. And we have been given to one another as his body, the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way.

Go and be witnesses.

Sources Consulted

The Holy Bible, Christian Standard Bible. Nashville: Holman Bible Publishers, 2017. Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23.

The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Publishing, 1979. Collect for Ascension Day and the Eucharistic liturgy.

F. F. Bruce. The Book of the Acts. The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988.

Andrew T. Lincoln. Ephesians. Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 42. Dallas: Word Books, 1990.

N. T. Wright. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.