Sermons
May 10, 2026 (6th Sunday of Easter)
Wait
Acts 1:1-11
Recently we did something we hadn’t done in this country since I was a very small child. We went back to the moon. The Artemis crew didn’t land on it, as Apollo 11 first did when I was a year old, but they did fly around it, and took a lot of really good pictures.
Before Apollo 11, a previous mission got a beautiful picture of the earth rising above the moon’s surface—a photo that reminded us that the borders and divisions and conflicts we insist on are ours, not necessarily the absolutely necessary natural order of things. The Artemis 2 folks had several very good digital cameras with them, and they got a companion photo to that “Earthrise” picture, this time of the earth setting behind the lunar surface. We’ve been promised that we will soon walk on the surface of the moon again—people even imagine that we’ll build bases there and people will one day live on the moon. I’m not too sure about that.
But the pictures of the earth from space, of the backside of the moon that we don’t see from here, of people long ago walking on the heavenly body that lights our night, would be thoroughly mind-boggling to the ancient people. These images have implications for our theology—most particularly for how the way the Bible’s cosmology relates to the understanding that science and space exploration have given us.
We’ve all heard the stories of how science began to understand that the earth is not the center of the universe, and that the sun, moon, and stars do not revolve around the earth on a dome that holds back the waters above and separates us from heaven. When Copernicus discovered that, many centuries ago, and began to tell others about his discovery, the powers-that-be of the church threw a fit. Copernicus was followed by Galileo, who was excommunicated for his beliefs, and was only pardoned by the church in the last century.
When people finally went into space, and saw and photographed the earth from that perspective, we knew for certain Copernicus and Galileo were right. There’s no firmament, no dome that separates the waters below from the waters above. The mountains don’t hold up the sky. The moon, sun, and stars don’t move across the firmament; and there are no little windows in the dome that God can open to let the rain out.
And the people who traveled to outer space did not find heaven out there somewhere.
We still don’t know exactly where heaven might be, where God lives. But what we’re pretty sure about is that you can’t start on the earth’s surface, defy gravity and rise up into the air, and be in heaven right after you disappear into the clouds.
The trouble with this, of course, is that there are several places in the Bible where people are depicted as doing just that—Elijah ascended to heaven on a fiery chariot as Elisha watched,[1] for instance—and there are also legends that say the same thing happened to Moses, even though that’s not in the Bible. And forty days after Easter, Christians celebrate the Ascension, and read this text from Acts that says Jesus also ascended from earth into heaven.
So what do we do with this story?
I don’t know about you, but I have not heard a whole lot of sermons on the Ascension, nor have I preached on it more than a couple times. Having lived all but the first year of my life in the days after people walked on the moon, I have never heard a preacher deal with this story.
What can we do with a story of an event science tells us can’t possibly have happened? If we deal with it as factual truth, we open up a great can of worms: where is this heaven we’re saying Jesus ascended to? how did it happen, given that gravity, as the bumper sticker says, is not just a good idea; it’s the law, a law even Jesus would have been bound by as long as he lived on earth? what do we do with all of the things science tells us about the universe, about where the moon is, where the stars are, what it’s like out there? Do we have to throw out all the knowledge science has given us—to believe as some odd folks here and there still do that the moon landing was faked, a giant and well-preserved hoax?
But on the other hand, if we deal with it as “just a story,” something that could not possibly have happened, because of course we know better now that we have science and the technology to study outer space, we have other questions. If we don’t believe a story in the Bible really happened as it’s written down, then is there anything in the Bible that we can believe, or is it all a pack of lies? And if a story like this one didn’t really happen, then it can’t possibly have anything to say to us today about our own lives of faith, can it? Where can we find truth in a story that modern science says is impossible? If I actually choose to preach a text like this as the Word of God, am I not asking the folks who hear it to check their brains at the church-house door?
I have a feeling these questions are why I’ve never heard and rarely preached a sermon about the Ascension. And I have no idea how it happened that the risen Jesus, whom Paul and the Gospels tell us was seen by many eyewitnesses in the days following the first Easter, went away and was seen no more.
My suspicion is that the story of the ascension is a metaphor—like the fantastic descriptions of the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation, this story is an attempt to put something into words that’s far too big, far too incredible, for mere words. They said, “I can’t describe it,” but then if they wanted to get their point across to anyone else, they had to try to describe it. So they said, “We were there with him, and we asked him a question, and he answered it, and almost before he quit talking it was like he just…disappeared.”
I don’t pretend to have any idea what really happened—except that Jesus, who had been raised from the dead and whom they had seen after that, wasn’t with them anymore, had gone back to the Father. But I don’t personally think we have to believe this story happened exactly as it’s written down in order to find truth in it. I don’t think a story that is in the Bible has to have happened exactly as it’s written down in order for it to be the Word of God.
So there has to be truth here, there has to be something God is trying to say to us. Let’s look at the story, and see if we can find it.
These first few verses of the book of Acts tell us Jesus was meeting with the eleven disciples, and he told them to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, which had been promised by the Father. And they asked him, “Now are you going to restore the kingdom?”
They still don’t seem to get it. Jesus is not going to raise an army and overthrow the Romans and re-establish the throne of David in Jerusalem.
He quickly dismisses the question: “You don’t get to know when that’s going to happen.” But, he says, “When the Holy Spirit comes to you, you will have the power to be part of the restoration of the kingdom: you will be my witnesses, starting here in Jerusalem, and expanding out into all the world.”
And that’s when he left them. No goodbyes, just gone.
The disciples stood there slack-jawed and staring in the direction they thought Jesus had gone, until a couple men in white robes showed up. These two men are probably to be understood as the same ones who appeared to the women at the empty tomb to ask, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?”[2] This time they ask, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”
Literally translated, the Greek verb in this sentence means something like, “Why do you stand there with your eyes in the sky?”
They tell the disciples, Look, he’ll be back—someday he’ll come back exactly like he just left. There’s no response by the disciples, and the men don’t tell them to do anything. But in the next verse, which will be part of our reading for next week, the disciples go back to Jerusalem, back to the upper room. They go back and they do what Jesus had told them to do: wait for the Holy Spirit to come. They stop doing the things they’re not supposed to do: speculating about when the end-times will come, and stand staring at the sky, mouths hanging open, completely stuck in the moment and unable to move forward.
As they stood there catching flies, they forgot that there was something important they were supposed to be doing—something Jesus had explicitly told them to do. When the two men asked their question, “Why are you standing there like a bunch of idiots staring at the sky?” they remembered. So they went back to Jerusalem to wait, just like Jesus had said for them to do.
It was, at least according to tradition, about ten days later that the Holy Spirit finally did come to them—on the Jewish holiday of Pentecost, or in Hebrew Shavuot, which is two weeks from today. In the meantime, the eleven disciples waited, along with, as next week’s text will tell us, a number of women, including Jesus’ mother, and his brothers.
And here, I think, is where we might find some truth for us today.
We live in a time when things are changing so fast that we can’t always keep up. And we don’t know that we really want to keep up. Some of the changes that are happening are quite uncomfortable. It’s happening in the world around us, and it’s happening in churches.
Things we used to do that worked very well don’t really work anymore—including the ways churches have attracted new folks and made new disciples. In a lot of cases, nothing we’ve tried to get us back on track has worked. We don’t really have a very good picture of what the future will hold for us, for our churches, for our community, or for our country. We find ourselves a lot of the time stuck in a moment, just like the disciples were at the ascension—we just look, and look, at what used to be.
But God wants to do something new with us, just like those disciples had been promised: send the Holy Spirit and make these clueless guys into witnesses to Christ’s life, death, and resurrection, not just among their own ones but all over the world. Perhaps, then, we would be best served if we would follow the example of these eleven after the two men in white robes snapped them out of that moment they were stuck in: gather ourselves together as disciples of Christ, and devote ourselves to prayer as we wait for God to act.
Interestingly, this is the approach advocated by Disciples author Gay Reese, in her congregational workbook titled Unbinding the Gospel.[3] She went in as a consultant to a church wanting to start an evangelism committee. She began by asking if they would trust her and do what she suggested, even if it seemed odd. They agreed, so she said, “Will you commit to doing nothing for the next three months, except gathering to pray?”
Well, that wasn’t at all what they expected to hear. And they objected: “We have to report to the board at the next meeting, and they will expect us to have done something.” But she convinced them, and they did it. They came together every week to pray. They prayed on their own, and gathered in groups of two or three between their regular meetings.
It seems sort of ridiculous in a culture whose motto often seems to be, “Do something—even if it’s wrong.”
No, stop, and wait, and pray. Just like Jesus told the disciples to do as he ascended into heaven.
And it turned out that for that church, it worked. Before the three months were out, things were happening in that church. People started stepping up to take on important work relating to evangelism and hospitality. Ideas started bubbling up to the surface in that committee.
By the end of the three months, the congregation was beginning to grow—and it kept growing—all because a group within the church made the commitment to wait and pray, as the disciples did in the days between Ascension and Pentecost.
Like those disciples, perhaps we might spend some time waiting and praying, not staring at the sky or the rear-view mirror…and perhaps just like into that gathering of waiting and praying disciples, the Holy Spirit’s life-giving power will come to us.
[1] 2 Kings 2:1-14
[2] Luke 24:5
[3] Martha Grace Reese, Unbinding the Gospel: Real Life Evangelism (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2008).