Staring at Feet

Six weeks ago, we celebrated Easter, and the Gospels proclaim the stories of Jesus appearing to his apostles over the span of 40 days after his resurrection.

Luke’s Gospel sees Jesus joining two men traveling a dusty road to Emmaus, and together with them at table, Jesus makes himself known in the breaking of bread. Elsewhere in the Gospels, in the hours after fleeing the futile confines of the tomb, Jesus appears to the fearful apostles, cowering behind locked doors, to bring them a message of peace and forgiveness.

A week later, Jesus appears again and lets the resurrection-doubting Thomas touch the Lord’s wounded hands and pierced side. Not long after, the apostles abandon the shelter of the Upper Room and decide to go fishing. Jesus meets them on the shore of Galilee and invites the group to join him for a nourishing beachfront breakfast of fresh fish.

Those days are now over, and it’s time for Jesus to return from whence he came.

This morning’s lesson from the opening verses of the Acts of the Apostles tells the story of the Lord’s ascension into heaven.

His jaw-dropping departure completes the circle of his earthly living. A life of service and sacrifice that began with his arrival in a Bethlehem stable is now made complete in the Son’s return to the Father. It is an event of which Scripture only makes brief mention, but the Ascension nevertheless is a moment of epic proportion for all those who follow the risen Christ and claim him as Savior.

Listen now for the Word of the Lord as Luke begins the second volume of his holy witness to the fulfillment of God’s promises in Christ. 

In my first book I told you, Theophilus, about everything Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken up to heaven after giving his chosen apostles further instructions through the Holy Spirit.

During the forty days after his resurrection, he appeared to the apostles from time to time, and he proved to them in many convincing ways that he was actually alive. And he talked to them about the Kingdom of God.

Once when he was eating with them, he commanded them, “Do not leave Jerusalem until the Father sends you the gift he promised, as I told you before. John baptized with water, but in just a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

So when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, “Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?” He replied, “The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere – in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

After saying this, he was taken up into a cloud while they were watching, and they could no longer see him. As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white-robed men suddenly stood among them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why are you standing here staring into heaven? Jesus has been taken from you into heaven, but someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go!”

Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, a distance of half a mile. When they arrived, they went to the upstairs room of the house where they were staying. Present were Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James (son of Alphaeus), Simon (the Zealot), and Judas (son of James). They all met together and were constantly united in prayer, along with Mary the mother of Jesus, several other women, and the brothers of Jesus. (Acts 1:1-14, New Living Translation)

In 1888 the Kimberly Clark Paper Co. purchased a vast tract of undeveloped land along the Fox River at a place in northeast Wisconsin known to locals as “The Cedars.”

It was there at The Cedars where Kimberly Clark built a sprawling paper plant, around which sprang a mill town aptly named “Kimberly.” The mill employed several generations of men, including my father, grandfather, and a handful of great-uncles. Back in the day, most of the women-folk were stay-at-home moms, but a few clocked-in daily to lend their hands to the making of coated paper for worldwide markets.

The mill was the economic engine that fueled the community. Its weekly payrolls established comfortable, middle-class lifestyles for hundreds of families, including mine. The mill further infused the village with a sense of identity and purpose. Thus the intimidating mascot of my high school was a paper wasp, and Kimberly’s athletes were known as the “Papermakers.”

Then, in 2008, the mill shut down – an innocent victim of corporate scheming. The closure left the community fighting for its very survival, and by 2014, the mill was gone – literally! The merciless swings of a wrecking ball reduced the once-teeming paper mill to rubble and ruin.

Visiting the site not long after, I stood behind a security fence slack-jawed and dumbfounded, staring out at the shocking emptiness that forlornly lay before me. To say “I couldn’t believe my eyes” is an understatement.

So my heart and soul are in league with the apostles of this morning’s lesson, who find themselves standing around flat-footed and staring off into space, not entirely sure what to make of what their eyes just beheld. Jesus has somehow or other been gathered up in the clouds and returned home to heaven, and his closest followers can’t seem to move on or walk away from the launch pad.

They’re frozen in place, staring up in the sky with squinty eyes, straining to catch their final glimpses of the soles of the Lord’s feet, as they get smaller and smaller while rising higher and higher, until there’s simply nothing left to see. Like me before the rubble of the Kimberly mill, they are stunned, puzzled; maybe even a little worried; surely in grief.

Among them are at least some of the same disciples who watched from a distance as Jesus suffered and died.

They also are among those to whom Jesus appeared after he rose from the dead and offered “convincing proof” in his many appearances that he was indeed alive. And now, just as his disciples start wrapping their heads around the reality of resurrection and getting used to having Jesus around again, Jesus disappears in the blink of an eye.

So, now what? What’s next? Apparently little else but stand around and wait.

Maybe that’s just our natural, instinctive reaction when we experience a major life change.

You and I stand around – looking up into the sky or gazing at our navels, waiting for some perfectly clear message from on-high about what to do now or what comes next.

Here in the story of his ascension, Jesus tells his followers to stay put in Jerusalem and wait for a baptism in his Holy Spirit, who in short order will empower them to go out to the ends of the earth and tell the story of Jesus and who he was and is for those placing their trust in him.

Jesus has answered the question of “what’s next” – at least for the moment, and within a few short days, it will be the Holy Spirit who will provide the disciples with the necessary get-up-and-go and point them in the direction that the Lord wants them to head. We’ll hear more about that next Sunday when we celebrate Pentecost.

But for now, though, Jesus calls his disciples to wait.

Presumably the Holy Spirit could have arrived right after Jesus had departed. But the Lord waits to send the Spirit in much the same way God waited for centuries to come to us in Jesus. And so, God’s people are left waiting – again.

Waiting is hard, and no one likes to wait – particularly those of us living in a world of immediate gratifications, quick answers, and fast responses. Yet, more often than not, it is in our waiting that we begin to learn. We learn to be still, and to wait with patient confidence and abundant hope, and to listen with attentive ears for God’s call and the Spirit’s leading to be a responsive community – a community that waits upon the Lord to initiate action in and through us, action that reveals to the world his risen glory and amazing grace through you and me.

Oddly enough, waiting has an active quality to it that goes far beyond just sitting around and contemplating what was in the past and what could be in the future. The apostles wait in the seclusion of an upstairs room, where once they cowered in fear but now devote themselves to prayer, along with other women and men who follow Jesus. The group remains sequestered, yet expectant.

In their waiting, they do what Jesus tells them to do in the here and now, but even more, they are readying themselves for what is yet to come. The waiting period conditions them to be attentive to God, so that they might respond when the time is right. They wait in a place of enormous if not-yet-fully-explained expectation. They live in uneasy anticipation of the new realities that Jesus has sown into the fabric of Creation.

Living like that requires just as much courage as if Jesus had told them to go out immediately and change the world using their own brains and brawn. They wait, not because they see it as their only option, but because they expect big things to come from God – big things and wild stuff in which they will be privileged to play important roles. They wait until God’s Holy Spirit in Christ tells them it’s time to move.

Jesus has promised to come back, somehow in much the same way that he left in the first place.  In the meantime, however, God has given God’s people work to do. The biblical scholar John Stott lyrically summarizes the implied message from the angels to the disciples then – and to us now:

“You have seen Jesus go. You will see him come again.  But between that going and coming there must be another.  The Spirit must come, and you must go – into the world for Christ.”

The Spirit will point you in the right direction when the waiting is over and the work is to begin.

What that work looks like will be as varied as are the people gathered together in Christ.

What that work looks like will be as varied as are the gifts and skills, talents and abilities, given to you and me by God, and enabled through the Holy Spirit, and patterned in the person and work of Christ.

Back in northeast Wisconsin, the good people of Kimberly, staring across the rubble of their esteemed paper mill, caught a glimpse of what might be, and the work that lay before them became clear. From the rubble would rise something new: a development of single-family homes, condos, townhouses, and apartments. Theirs was the work of resurrection – creating life where once was only death.

Perhaps an encouraging lesson in economic and community development isn’t exactly what Luke intended in recording the story of Jesus’s ascension. Then again, the Lord does promise to make all things new. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world – all the world – through him might be saved and raised up from the rubble of sin and brokenness into new places to call home. “In my Father’s house,” Jesus says, “are many rooms.”

Without question, the only constant in life is change. And amid such disruption, we take heart knowing that the Holy Spirit of God in Christ is at work doing new things, even as we wait in patient hope for the coming return of our Savior.

The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message on Ascension Sunday, May 12, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Scott Hoezee, John Stott, and Jason R. Weber inform the message.