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Sermon length
A friend mentioned that there was recently (is currently?) a vigorous conversation on Twitter about the ideal, or proper, or fitting, sermon length. Since I’m off Twitter I barely have access to people’s most recent two or three tweets; I definitely can’t go perusing anyone’s account for extended back-and-forth replies and RTs. But the mention piqued my interest.
A friend mentioned that there was recently (is currently?) a vigorous conversation on Twitter about the ideal, or proper, or fitting, sermon length. Since I’m off Twitter I barely have access to people’s most recent two or three tweets; I definitely can’t go perusing anyone’s account for extended back-and-forth replies and RTs. But the mention piqued my interest.
I could have sworn I’d written about this—and I have, briefly, in this long essay on preaching—but it turns out what I was thinking of was the webinar I did back in April for pastors and preachers. Starting around the 28-minute mark I share a personal anecdote and then some remarks on the question of how long a sermon should be.
But since it’s not in print, let me say something here. To start, consider what I wrote in that 2019 essay:
Method [as in, homiletical method] is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don’t be a slave to method; don’t be a disciple of methodologists.
This remains right. Sermon length is entirely a prudential question. And the factors involved have everything to do with the preacher in question, the congregation, the occasion, and the larger social, cultural, and ecclesial context. It’s true that a sermon is not a “lesson” (as I also say in the essay). Worship is a setting not for doctrina but for kerygma. But who says kerygma should be brief? That expectation, in my experience, is rooted in presuppositions about brief attention spans, poor listening skills, and logistical convenience. The implication is not that a sermon shouldn’t be on the shorter side. A “longer” (but it’s hard to use comparative language here, since we have no “average” sermon length by which to measure) sermon has to justify its length by the very same criteria. The point is that there is no platonic ideal. The length of a sermon is not one of the substantive features by which we may judge it. A 10-minute sermon could be faithful; a 2-hour sermon could be equally faithful. And both could be unfaithful. I’ve been in rural African contexts where sermons and “words from the Lord” lasted, in themselves and in sequence, hours on end. American frontier revival preaching was similar. Were/are they too long? It depends! We’d have to hear the sermons in question.
For these reasons I’m skeptical of generic advice on this front, that is, generic at the national or even denominational level. There are certainly principles that should inform a sermon’s length: clarity, substance, exegesis, saturation in the rhetoric of the scriptures, a commitment to announce the gospel (and not some personal advice or cultural commentary), a prayerful intention to be an instrument of the living Christ to his people, etc.
But here’s one anecdote that makes me wary of any broad push to keep sermons “shorter” (not just “standard” 18-22 minutes but even less than that). There’s a church here in town that draws many college students to it whose sermons are 45-60 minutes each week. Some peers wonder how that can be possible. I outline a theory in the webinar linked above. The theory is this.
Twentysomethings who make the decision to come to church today, even in west Texas, are doing something they simply do not have to do. No one’s making them. They’re coming because they believe it’s important or, at least, because they imagine it might be important. They’re already committed or open to becoming committed. At the same time, as I’ve written elsewhere, they’re illiterate—biblically and literally. They don’t read, and they certainly don’t read the Bible. How then are they supposed to be inducted, invited, drawn into the life and story and protagonists and plots and subplots and diction and style and majesty of the holy scriptures? This local congregation’s answer, one I’m inclined to endorse, is: through preaching. Note that the preaching is still proclamation; it hasn’t yet become teaching. But it’s doing what itinerant and revival preaching did centuries ago in a similarly illiterate age: namely, providing a means of access to and a rhetorical formation in both the letter and the spirit of the Bible. Precisely in the middle of the liturgy, as it should be.
Yes, don’t use long sermons as an excuse for poor preaching. Yes, don’t make sermons load-bearing for all the church’s pastoral work. Yes, don’t so hog the liturgical attention that the Eucharist—the climax of worship!—is sidelined, minimized, or forgotten. Yes, avoid the TED Talk–ification of preaching. Yes, yes, yes and amen to all this and more.
The upshot, though, is not that sermons ought to be shorter. The upshot is that the question of sermon length is downstream of the genuinely important questions. The length will follow from answering these. Once they’re answered, and answered well, the length will take care of itself.
Theses on preaching
1. The principal subject matter for preaching, always and everywhere, is the triune God of Israel attested and revealed in the good news about Jesus, the Lord and Messiah of Israel. If a sermon could not plausibly be said to have been about that, it was not a sermon.
1.1. This is primarily a substantive point, that is, regarding what a sermon is "about," which doesn't mean that counting the number of times the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Spirit," "Trinity," etc., are mentioned in a sermon is going to do the job. Throwing around those words isn't good enough; indeed, imagine an expertly crafted sermon on the book of Esther that somehow avoided such terms, just like the text in question, while nevertheless rendering God's providential, saving hand throughout.
1.2. Having said that, the point is secondarily grammatical. That is, months and months of sermons unpopulated by liberal use of the sentence structure, "God [verb]," would be deeply suspect. In most sermons God ought to be the grammatical subject as much as he is the subject matter. God is not passive—in Scripture, in the world, in the church, or in the sermon—and he shouldn't be implied to be by the rhetoric of preachers.
2. A sermon is the proclamation of the gospel by an authorized member of the church out of a specific text from Holy Scripture in the setting of public worship among, to, and for the sake of the gathered local assembly of the baptized.
2.1. Proclamation means announcement, attestation, verbal testimony, public witness, a herald's message from the royal throne. A sermon, therefore, is not a lesson. It is not (primarily) teaching, or didactic in tone or content. It is not a pep talk, an inspirational message, or personal sharing. It is not a comedy routine. It is not a TED Talk. It is solemn, joyful, awesome declaration of the gospel of the incarnate Lord.
2.2. The gospel is the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God become human, crucified, risen, and ascended. Jesus is Immanuel, God with us; the autobasileia, the kingdom himself in person; the God-man who takes away the sins of the world. He is the promised one of Israel, the grace of God enfleshed, the King and Ruler of the cosmos. His name means love, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption. A sermon is not a sermon that does not point, like the outstretched finger of John the Baptist, to this Christ, and to life in him, the life he makes possible.
2.2.1. That the sermon announces the gospel, and the gospel is the good news of friendship with God through the grace of Christ, does not mean that every sermon must be about or mention the name of Jesus. Most should, no doubt, and no sermon should fear mentioning Christ lest he be "imported" into or "imposed" on, say, a text that does not mention him by name. A Christian sermon should not fear to be a Christian sermon. But it is certainly possible to preach a faithful Christian sermon out of an Old Testament text without mentioning Jesus. Why? Because the good news about Jesus is the gospel of Israel's God, whose covenant with Abraham is the very covenant renewed in Christ and extended to the gentiles. God's grace, in other words, and God's identity and attributes, are one and the same across the covenants. To preach the one God just is to preach the gospel.
2.2.2. Having said that, reticence about preaching Jesus from Israel's scriptures is an inherited prejudice worth unlearning in most cases. Moses and David and Isaiah foretold Jesus, as Jesus himself taught. We should take him at his word, and God's people deserve to hear of it.
2.3. A sermon is and ought to be rooted in and an explication of some particular passage of the Christian Bible. This should go without saying. A sermon, however thematic, is not on a topic or theme first of all. The topic or theme arises from the text. A sermon series that does not follow the lectionary and is organized thematically should be very careful so as to commit itself to concrete texts each week.
2.3.1. Expository preaching may be done faithfully, but not all preaching need be expository. The danger of so-called non-expository preaching is that it become unmoored from the text. The alternative danger, however, is mistaking the sermon for a class lesson. But a sermon is not a lecture; the pulpit is not a lectern. A lecture's aim is understanding. A sermon's aim is faith. One can proclaim the gospel out of a text without parsing its every verb and explaining its every historical nuance. But one can do the latter without accomplishing the former. That's the error to avoid.
2.3.2. A sermon is not a book tour. It is not a personal testimony. It isn't time for church business (or, God forbid, budget talk). A sermon isn't practical advice, or suggestions for living your best life now, or ideas about how to parent. It is not electioneering and it is not political advocacy. If you hear attempted preachments that, for example, do not have a biblical text as their source or the living God as their subject or the gospel as the matter of their announcement: then you have not heard a sermon.
2.3.3. Texts preached on should be diverse in every way: narrative, epistle, Torah, psalms, wisdom, paraenesis, apocalypse, etc. For both lectionary and non-lectionary traditions, the harder texts should not be avoided (purity laws, money, war, nonviolence, gender, miracles, politics, justice—whatever challenges you or your audience's preconceptions or sacred cows).
2.4. Preaching is an item of Christian worship. It is an element of the liturgy, the word proclaimed in speech and sacrament. Preaching is not secular. It is not a species of human speech in general. It is the word of God communicated through human words. The preacher is an instrument of divine speech, a sanctified mediator of Christ's saving gospel. The Holy Spirit sanctifies the words of the sermon to be, in all their unworthiness, the medium of the eternal Word that slays and makes alive again.
2.4.1. Preachers and Christian hearers ought to approach the word proclaimed mindful of what is happening. Which is not to make the occasion a somber or rarefied event: a sermon's environment is and ought to be the lively reality of human community, which means nursing babies and fussing kids and coughs and tears and inarticulate moans (offered by, for example, profoundly intellectually disabled persons, who are welcomed by Christ himself to hear him speak). The sermon, in short, is not cordoned off from real life; the assembly need not resemble the silence of a monastery before God can begin to work. But precisely in the midst of and through all such common features of human life together, the Spirit of Christ is making his presence known in the speaking of his holy word.
2.4.2. The long-standing catholic practice of the church is for the proclaimed word to precede the celebration of the Eucharist, which is the climax of the liturgy. Churches descended from the Reformation tend to reverse the order, so that the service culminates in the sermon (sometimes tending, regrettably, to eliminate the meal altogether). The catholic sequence seems right to me, but in either case, there are dangers to be avoided.
2.4.3. Protestants must resist the temptation to make worship talky, so word-centered that it really does become like one long classroom experience, peppered with prayers and a bit of music. The word, moreover, must not swamp the sacrament. Far too many sermon-centered churches, even if they celebrate communion, downgrade its importance through a minimum of ritual, time, and emphasis. The sermon becomes the reason the people are gathered; and if the sermon, then the preacher; and if the preacher, then a mere minister has displaced Christ as the locus of the church's assembly. The gravest theological danger is that the sacramental principle of ex opere operato ceases to apply, practically, to the sermon, because its centrality highlights the need for technical quality, and preachers are no longer trusted to successfully proclaim God's gospel apart from their own worthiness or talents, for those very things become exactly the measure of their faithfulness, and thus their appeal.
2.4.4. Catholics (East and West) must resist the temptation to make the sermon, or homily, a mere prelude, preferably brief, to the Main Event. The gospel is proclaimed in word and sacrament; that need not imply equality in every respect, but it certainly requires a kind of parity, a recognition that each has its proper work to do, under God, for God's people. Ritual is good and liturgy is good, but proclamation of the gospel has the converting power of Christ himself through the Spirit (a sword in the hand of the servant of God, to mortify the flesh and vivify the soul), power to convict of sin, awaken faith, to work signs and miracles, to raise the dead. The centrality of the Eucharist does not logically entail, and must not become an excuse to enact, the liturgical devaluation of the proclaimed word.
2.5. A sermon is an ecclesial event; it exists by, in, and for the church of Christ. Preaching is a practice proper to the baptized. The proper context and principal audience for the word of God is the people of God. In this the sermon is no different than the Eucharist, whose natural home is the gathered community of faith.
2.5.1. The twofold telos of the sermon is the awakening of faith and the edification of the faithful. The sermon, then, is preached primarily to and for baptized believers, not to nonbelievers, visitors, seekers, or pagans. The sermon is not first of all evangelistic or apologetic. Doubtless there have been and are contexts in which sermons ought to be oriented to nonbelievers, but that is not ordinarily, not normatively, what the sermon is or is for. The word proclaimed is for the upbuilding of the saints in via, the (audible) manna alongside the (visible) manna that the Lord provides for the journey through the wilderness to the promised land.
2.5.2. Simplifying sermons so as to be intelligible, week in and week out, to people who know nothing about the Christian gospel or Holy Scripture is unwise and, though it may provide short-term results, in the long-term it is impracticable, ineffective, and damaging. The Lord's people require feeding. Refusing, on principle, never to move beyond milk for infants will leave the people famished and arrested in their spiritual maturity.
3. Preaching in a digital age presents challenges the church hasn't had to face in nearly its entire life. It's a genuinely new world, and the changes are still fresh, historically speaking. Microphones, video, images, projected text, recording, podcasts, broadcasting to multiple sites at once—I don't envy pastors who have to make decisions about such things in real time. But there are principles worth keeping in mind while navigating the new landscape.
3.1. Technology should serve the sermon and the sermon's ends, not the other way around. It should serve, in fact, every one of the theses above. If it does not—if it distracts, if it draws attention to itself, if it becomes an end in itself, if it is superficial, if it is flashy, if it is ugly, if it abets rather than subverts the hyper-technologizing tendencies already gnawing and corrupting the minds and souls of the faithful—then it should be resisted and rejected out of hand.
3.2. Preaching is an oral event. Considered as a natural occurrence, it is essentially a verbal communication spoken by one human being to the hearkening ears of a gathering of other human beings. Technology can aid this occurrence: by amplifying sound, for example, for the large size of an assembly; or, say, for the hard of hearing. It can even transmit the sermon to those unable, for medical or travel or other reasons, to attend the convocation of God's people in person. These are clear ways in which technology serves the orality of gospel proclamation.
3.2.1. Technology can also mitigate the spoken nature of the sermon. Such technology includes videos, extensive use of screen text, involved graphics and images and slide shows, and so on. The question is not whether these are absolutely forbidden in any and all cases. The question is whether they are subjected to rigorous theological inquiry as to their suitability to the essential form of churchly proclamation, rather than their merely instrumental capacities with respect to desired secondary ends (e.g., lack of boredom, capturing youths' attention, entertainment, laughs, viral videos). The medium is not neutral, not an instance of adiaphora; the medium is, literally, the message: the word of God for the people of God. If it isn't a word, if it isn't God's word, then it isn't the preaching of the gospel. And that's the whole ballgame.
3.3. Churches and preachers should be wary rather than eager to use new technologies. Technology takes on a life of its own. It masters its domain. Nor is it neutral: a social media app cannot reinforce good habits of sustained attention, for example, because by its very nature a social media app is meant to colonize your attention and destroy your ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time without interruption. Nor is technology master-less; it serves gods, rabid and hungry and insatiable. Those gods are the market and Silicon Valley. Technology doesn't descend ready-made from heaven. It comes from somewhere, and is made by human beings. Those human beings make what they sell and sell what they make for one reason: money. Letting what they make and sell into the church is a dangerous game to play, even if well-considered and well-intentioned. A pastor ought always to be suspicious rather than sanguine about the power of technology in the life of the church—and such suspicion should bear on its use in preaching.
4. Technique is, hands down, the least important thing about preaching. If a pastor has spent the week dwelling in the biblical text for that Sunday's sermon and, from the pulpit, strives, while petitioning for help from God's grace, to preach from Scripture the good news of God's grace in Jesus on behalf of and for the sake of the upbuilding of Christ's body—then the job is done. In a real sense that is the only criterion for any sermon: was that thing accomplished (even, was its accomplishment sought)? If so, then questions of delivery, eloquence, clarity, form, etc., are all secondary, and of little import. If not, if a truly Christian sermon was not even attempted, then all the good humor, articulateness, pathos, personal anecdotes, intelligence, powers of rhetoric, and the rest don't mean a damn thing.
4.1. Method is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don't be a slave to method; don't be a disciple of methodologists.
4.2. Preaching should wear its study lightly while depending on it as the sermon's lifeblood. You can spot a preacher who doesn't study from a mile away. A preacher who doesn't read except for what is strictly necessary. A preacher who doesn't read widely, who doesn't read for pleasure, who doesn't read anything but commentaries (though, please, read the commentaries!). A preacher whose primary—or, God forbid, exclusive—allusions and references are to pop culture. A good preacher doesn't flaunt sources and drop names. But the research that informs a sermon should be discernible in the rich substance of it; should be there to be offered to anyone with further questions following the sermon. "Oh, you had a question about that line? Here are half a dozen books I'd recommend on the topic if you want to go deeper on it..."
4.2.1. Speaking of pop culture: steer clear of it. Nine times out of ten an explicit and/or drawn-out reference to pop culture is a distraction and undermines the aim of the reference. Lovers of pop culture vastly overestimate the universality of their pop culture darlings. Harry Potter may have millions of fans, but here's the truth: half of your church hasn't read the books or seen the films. Moreover, pop culture almost always skews young, and playing for the youth is a capitulation to market pressures. A sermon is catholic: it is meant for the one holy church of God—not some upwardly mobile demographic slice of it. Finally, pop culture references usually denigrate rather than elevate the material. What hath Hollywood to do with Jerusalem? Children's movies and science fiction are silly and insubstantial compared with the holy ever-living Trinity and the sacrifice of Jesus upon a Roman gallows. "When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die—oh and that reminds me of this funny little anecdote from Finding Nemo..." The juxtaposition is absurd, and though congregants might chuckle or wink, in their hearts they know something great and weighty is being set alongside something weak and shallow. Don't do it.
4.2.2. The pop culture rule is a species of the greater genus of illustrations. (Another species is anecdotes.) Illustrations are certainly useful and have their place. But at least two dangers are worth addressing. One is the tendency for illustrations to swamp the text. Instead of the preacher's experience at the DMV illuminating the real matter at hand, which is the text from Scripture, the opposite happens: God's word becomes a bit player in the larger drama of the preacher's life. The other danger is related: illustrations, consistently used, can come to shape the people's minds in the following way. Instead of Scripture being the relevant, formative, immediate influence on their souls—their hearts, minds, morals, imaginations—Scripture is instead pictured as distant, alien, strange, ancient, foreign, irrelevant. And what illustrations do is bridge that gap, translate that language, assimilate that culture into ours, our time and context and culture and language being the dominant factors. Illustrations and stories and anecdotes and allusions need, rather, to serve the relevance and power and relatability and authority of the scriptural text, not reverse the terms and increase the alienation people (perhaps already) feel about the Bible.
5. All that the preacher does, all that the many facets of the sermon strive to achieve, must be in service of the one thing necessary: to speak human words, rooted in God's written word, that may, by the Spirit's grace, become a conduit for the living and eternal Word, Christ risen and reigning from heaven, to speak himself in person, in his saving presence, to his beloved people, that he might justify and sanctify, equip and encourage them in faith, hope, and love; and that they might, when the words are finished, give glory to God—and say Amen.
1.1. This is primarily a substantive point, that is, regarding what a sermon is "about," which doesn't mean that counting the number of times the words "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Spirit," "Trinity," etc., are mentioned in a sermon is going to do the job. Throwing around those words isn't good enough; indeed, imagine an expertly crafted sermon on the book of Esther that somehow avoided such terms, just like the text in question, while nevertheless rendering God's providential, saving hand throughout.
1.2. Having said that, the point is secondarily grammatical. That is, months and months of sermons unpopulated by liberal use of the sentence structure, "God [verb]," would be deeply suspect. In most sermons God ought to be the grammatical subject as much as he is the subject matter. God is not passive—in Scripture, in the world, in the church, or in the sermon—and he shouldn't be implied to be by the rhetoric of preachers.
2. A sermon is the proclamation of the gospel by an authorized member of the church out of a specific text from Holy Scripture in the setting of public worship among, to, and for the sake of the gathered local assembly of the baptized.
2.1. Proclamation means announcement, attestation, verbal testimony, public witness, a herald's message from the royal throne. A sermon, therefore, is not a lesson. It is not (primarily) teaching, or didactic in tone or content. It is not a pep talk, an inspirational message, or personal sharing. It is not a comedy routine. It is not a TED Talk. It is solemn, joyful, awesome declaration of the gospel of the incarnate Lord.
2.2. The gospel is the good news about Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God become human, crucified, risen, and ascended. Jesus is Immanuel, God with us; the autobasileia, the kingdom himself in person; the God-man who takes away the sins of the world. He is the promised one of Israel, the grace of God enfleshed, the King and Ruler of the cosmos. His name means love, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption. A sermon is not a sermon that does not point, like the outstretched finger of John the Baptist, to this Christ, and to life in him, the life he makes possible.
2.2.1. That the sermon announces the gospel, and the gospel is the good news of friendship with God through the grace of Christ, does not mean that every sermon must be about or mention the name of Jesus. Most should, no doubt, and no sermon should fear mentioning Christ lest he be "imported" into or "imposed" on, say, a text that does not mention him by name. A Christian sermon should not fear to be a Christian sermon. But it is certainly possible to preach a faithful Christian sermon out of an Old Testament text without mentioning Jesus. Why? Because the good news about Jesus is the gospel of Israel's God, whose covenant with Abraham is the very covenant renewed in Christ and extended to the gentiles. God's grace, in other words, and God's identity and attributes, are one and the same across the covenants. To preach the one God just is to preach the gospel.
2.2.2. Having said that, reticence about preaching Jesus from Israel's scriptures is an inherited prejudice worth unlearning in most cases. Moses and David and Isaiah foretold Jesus, as Jesus himself taught. We should take him at his word, and God's people deserve to hear of it.
2.3. A sermon is and ought to be rooted in and an explication of some particular passage of the Christian Bible. This should go without saying. A sermon, however thematic, is not on a topic or theme first of all. The topic or theme arises from the text. A sermon series that does not follow the lectionary and is organized thematically should be very careful so as to commit itself to concrete texts each week.
2.3.1. Expository preaching may be done faithfully, but not all preaching need be expository. The danger of so-called non-expository preaching is that it become unmoored from the text. The alternative danger, however, is mistaking the sermon for a class lesson. But a sermon is not a lecture; the pulpit is not a lectern. A lecture's aim is understanding. A sermon's aim is faith. One can proclaim the gospel out of a text without parsing its every verb and explaining its every historical nuance. But one can do the latter without accomplishing the former. That's the error to avoid.
2.3.2. A sermon is not a book tour. It is not a personal testimony. It isn't time for church business (or, God forbid, budget talk). A sermon isn't practical advice, or suggestions for living your best life now, or ideas about how to parent. It is not electioneering and it is not political advocacy. If you hear attempted preachments that, for example, do not have a biblical text as their source or the living God as their subject or the gospel as the matter of their announcement: then you have not heard a sermon.
2.3.3. Texts preached on should be diverse in every way: narrative, epistle, Torah, psalms, wisdom, paraenesis, apocalypse, etc. For both lectionary and non-lectionary traditions, the harder texts should not be avoided (purity laws, money, war, nonviolence, gender, miracles, politics, justice—whatever challenges you or your audience's preconceptions or sacred cows).
2.4. Preaching is an item of Christian worship. It is an element of the liturgy, the word proclaimed in speech and sacrament. Preaching is not secular. It is not a species of human speech in general. It is the word of God communicated through human words. The preacher is an instrument of divine speech, a sanctified mediator of Christ's saving gospel. The Holy Spirit sanctifies the words of the sermon to be, in all their unworthiness, the medium of the eternal Word that slays and makes alive again.
2.4.1. Preachers and Christian hearers ought to approach the word proclaimed mindful of what is happening. Which is not to make the occasion a somber or rarefied event: a sermon's environment is and ought to be the lively reality of human community, which means nursing babies and fussing kids and coughs and tears and inarticulate moans (offered by, for example, profoundly intellectually disabled persons, who are welcomed by Christ himself to hear him speak). The sermon, in short, is not cordoned off from real life; the assembly need not resemble the silence of a monastery before God can begin to work. But precisely in the midst of and through all such common features of human life together, the Spirit of Christ is making his presence known in the speaking of his holy word.
2.4.2. The long-standing catholic practice of the church is for the proclaimed word to precede the celebration of the Eucharist, which is the climax of the liturgy. Churches descended from the Reformation tend to reverse the order, so that the service culminates in the sermon (sometimes tending, regrettably, to eliminate the meal altogether). The catholic sequence seems right to me, but in either case, there are dangers to be avoided.
2.4.3. Protestants must resist the temptation to make worship talky, so word-centered that it really does become like one long classroom experience, peppered with prayers and a bit of music. The word, moreover, must not swamp the sacrament. Far too many sermon-centered churches, even if they celebrate communion, downgrade its importance through a minimum of ritual, time, and emphasis. The sermon becomes the reason the people are gathered; and if the sermon, then the preacher; and if the preacher, then a mere minister has displaced Christ as the locus of the church's assembly. The gravest theological danger is that the sacramental principle of ex opere operato ceases to apply, practically, to the sermon, because its centrality highlights the need for technical quality, and preachers are no longer trusted to successfully proclaim God's gospel apart from their own worthiness or talents, for those very things become exactly the measure of their faithfulness, and thus their appeal.
2.4.4. Catholics (East and West) must resist the temptation to make the sermon, or homily, a mere prelude, preferably brief, to the Main Event. The gospel is proclaimed in word and sacrament; that need not imply equality in every respect, but it certainly requires a kind of parity, a recognition that each has its proper work to do, under God, for God's people. Ritual is good and liturgy is good, but proclamation of the gospel has the converting power of Christ himself through the Spirit (a sword in the hand of the servant of God, to mortify the flesh and vivify the soul), power to convict of sin, awaken faith, to work signs and miracles, to raise the dead. The centrality of the Eucharist does not logically entail, and must not become an excuse to enact, the liturgical devaluation of the proclaimed word.
2.5. A sermon is an ecclesial event; it exists by, in, and for the church of Christ. Preaching is a practice proper to the baptized. The proper context and principal audience for the word of God is the people of God. In this the sermon is no different than the Eucharist, whose natural home is the gathered community of faith.
2.5.1. The twofold telos of the sermon is the awakening of faith and the edification of the faithful. The sermon, then, is preached primarily to and for baptized believers, not to nonbelievers, visitors, seekers, or pagans. The sermon is not first of all evangelistic or apologetic. Doubtless there have been and are contexts in which sermons ought to be oriented to nonbelievers, but that is not ordinarily, not normatively, what the sermon is or is for. The word proclaimed is for the upbuilding of the saints in via, the (audible) manna alongside the (visible) manna that the Lord provides for the journey through the wilderness to the promised land.
2.5.2. Simplifying sermons so as to be intelligible, week in and week out, to people who know nothing about the Christian gospel or Holy Scripture is unwise and, though it may provide short-term results, in the long-term it is impracticable, ineffective, and damaging. The Lord's people require feeding. Refusing, on principle, never to move beyond milk for infants will leave the people famished and arrested in their spiritual maturity.
3. Preaching in a digital age presents challenges the church hasn't had to face in nearly its entire life. It's a genuinely new world, and the changes are still fresh, historically speaking. Microphones, video, images, projected text, recording, podcasts, broadcasting to multiple sites at once—I don't envy pastors who have to make decisions about such things in real time. But there are principles worth keeping in mind while navigating the new landscape.
3.1. Technology should serve the sermon and the sermon's ends, not the other way around. It should serve, in fact, every one of the theses above. If it does not—if it distracts, if it draws attention to itself, if it becomes an end in itself, if it is superficial, if it is flashy, if it is ugly, if it abets rather than subverts the hyper-technologizing tendencies already gnawing and corrupting the minds and souls of the faithful—then it should be resisted and rejected out of hand.
3.2. Preaching is an oral event. Considered as a natural occurrence, it is essentially a verbal communication spoken by one human being to the hearkening ears of a gathering of other human beings. Technology can aid this occurrence: by amplifying sound, for example, for the large size of an assembly; or, say, for the hard of hearing. It can even transmit the sermon to those unable, for medical or travel or other reasons, to attend the convocation of God's people in person. These are clear ways in which technology serves the orality of gospel proclamation.
3.2.1. Technology can also mitigate the spoken nature of the sermon. Such technology includes videos, extensive use of screen text, involved graphics and images and slide shows, and so on. The question is not whether these are absolutely forbidden in any and all cases. The question is whether they are subjected to rigorous theological inquiry as to their suitability to the essential form of churchly proclamation, rather than their merely instrumental capacities with respect to desired secondary ends (e.g., lack of boredom, capturing youths' attention, entertainment, laughs, viral videos). The medium is not neutral, not an instance of adiaphora; the medium is, literally, the message: the word of God for the people of God. If it isn't a word, if it isn't God's word, then it isn't the preaching of the gospel. And that's the whole ballgame.
3.3. Churches and preachers should be wary rather than eager to use new technologies. Technology takes on a life of its own. It masters its domain. Nor is it neutral: a social media app cannot reinforce good habits of sustained attention, for example, because by its very nature a social media app is meant to colonize your attention and destroy your ability to concentrate for sustained periods of time without interruption. Nor is technology master-less; it serves gods, rabid and hungry and insatiable. Those gods are the market and Silicon Valley. Technology doesn't descend ready-made from heaven. It comes from somewhere, and is made by human beings. Those human beings make what they sell and sell what they make for one reason: money. Letting what they make and sell into the church is a dangerous game to play, even if well-considered and well-intentioned. A pastor ought always to be suspicious rather than sanguine about the power of technology in the life of the church—and such suspicion should bear on its use in preaching.
4. Technique is, hands down, the least important thing about preaching. If a pastor has spent the week dwelling in the biblical text for that Sunday's sermon and, from the pulpit, strives, while petitioning for help from God's grace, to preach from Scripture the good news of God's grace in Jesus on behalf of and for the sake of the upbuilding of Christ's body—then the job is done. In a real sense that is the only criterion for any sermon: was that thing accomplished (even, was its accomplishment sought)? If so, then questions of delivery, eloquence, clarity, form, etc., are all secondary, and of little import. If not, if a truly Christian sermon was not even attempted, then all the good humor, articulateness, pathos, personal anecdotes, intelligence, powers of rhetoric, and the rest don't mean a damn thing.
4.1. Method is a matter of prudence, native talent, gifts of the Spirit, audience, context, training, and many more largely uncontrollable variables. A faithful sermon can be 20, 40, or 60 minutes long (or more); it can be done from memory, with a basic outline, or with a manuscript; it can involve gestures and movements and animation or minimal intonation and emotion; it can encompass the whole spectrum of human passions and virtues; there is no platonic ideal of Faithful Proclamation. (Nor, by the way, is there The Biblical Model of it.) Method depends; don't be a slave to method; don't be a disciple of methodologists.
4.2. Preaching should wear its study lightly while depending on it as the sermon's lifeblood. You can spot a preacher who doesn't study from a mile away. A preacher who doesn't read except for what is strictly necessary. A preacher who doesn't read widely, who doesn't read for pleasure, who doesn't read anything but commentaries (though, please, read the commentaries!). A preacher whose primary—or, God forbid, exclusive—allusions and references are to pop culture. A good preacher doesn't flaunt sources and drop names. But the research that informs a sermon should be discernible in the rich substance of it; should be there to be offered to anyone with further questions following the sermon. "Oh, you had a question about that line? Here are half a dozen books I'd recommend on the topic if you want to go deeper on it..."
4.2.1. Speaking of pop culture: steer clear of it. Nine times out of ten an explicit and/or drawn-out reference to pop culture is a distraction and undermines the aim of the reference. Lovers of pop culture vastly overestimate the universality of their pop culture darlings. Harry Potter may have millions of fans, but here's the truth: half of your church hasn't read the books or seen the films. Moreover, pop culture almost always skews young, and playing for the youth is a capitulation to market pressures. A sermon is catholic: it is meant for the one holy church of God—not some upwardly mobile demographic slice of it. Finally, pop culture references usually denigrate rather than elevate the material. What hath Hollywood to do with Jerusalem? Children's movies and science fiction are silly and insubstantial compared with the holy ever-living Trinity and the sacrifice of Jesus upon a Roman gallows. "When Jesus calls a man he bids him come and die—oh and that reminds me of this funny little anecdote from Finding Nemo..." The juxtaposition is absurd, and though congregants might chuckle or wink, in their hearts they know something great and weighty is being set alongside something weak and shallow. Don't do it.
4.2.2. The pop culture rule is a species of the greater genus of illustrations. (Another species is anecdotes.) Illustrations are certainly useful and have their place. But at least two dangers are worth addressing. One is the tendency for illustrations to swamp the text. Instead of the preacher's experience at the DMV illuminating the real matter at hand, which is the text from Scripture, the opposite happens: God's word becomes a bit player in the larger drama of the preacher's life. The other danger is related: illustrations, consistently used, can come to shape the people's minds in the following way. Instead of Scripture being the relevant, formative, immediate influence on their souls—their hearts, minds, morals, imaginations—Scripture is instead pictured as distant, alien, strange, ancient, foreign, irrelevant. And what illustrations do is bridge that gap, translate that language, assimilate that culture into ours, our time and context and culture and language being the dominant factors. Illustrations and stories and anecdotes and allusions need, rather, to serve the relevance and power and relatability and authority of the scriptural text, not reverse the terms and increase the alienation people (perhaps already) feel about the Bible.
5. All that the preacher does, all that the many facets of the sermon strive to achieve, must be in service of the one thing necessary: to speak human words, rooted in God's written word, that may, by the Spirit's grace, become a conduit for the living and eternal Word, Christ risen and reigning from heaven, to speak himself in person, in his saving presence, to his beloved people, that he might justify and sanctify, equip and encourage them in faith, hope, and love; and that they might, when the words are finished, give glory to God—and say Amen.
The Lord Reigns: A Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension
A sermon preached at the Round Rock Church of Christ, Sunday, 6 May 2018.
Opening reading
Hear this word from the book of Acts, chapter 1, verses 1-12:
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Then they returned to Jerusalem…
Prayer
Almighty God,
whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ
ascended far above the heavens
that he might fill all things:
Mercifully give us faith to perceive that,
according to his promise,
he abides with his Church on earth,
even to the end of the ages;
and now, by your grace,
pour through me the gift of preaching,
that what is heard this day through human lips
might be the word of God for the people of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Introduction
I’m not sure if you know this, but in four days there is a special day on the Christian calendar.
It isn’t Easter, which was only last month. It isn’t Christmas, which is still a long ways away. It isn’t one of those days or seasons you might have heard about but never celebrated, like Advent or Lent or Ash Wednesday, or for the especially church-nerdy, the Feast of the Annunciation.
No, this Thursday is Ascension Day. It is the day on the church calendar when, for millennia, Christians have remembered and celebrated the ascension of the risen Jesus to heaven. You may have already put together why it is celebrated on a Thursday: because, as Acts tells us, Jesus appeared to the apostles over a 40-day period, at the end of which Jesus was taken from their sight. And this Thursday marks 40 days since Easter Sunday. In the same way, Pentecost Sunday is two weeks from today, since Pentecost is a Jewish festival of 50 days following Passover—and Pentecost is the time when Jesus, having ascended to heaven, poured out the Holy Spirit on his disciples.
So when I was asked to preach this Sunday, I looked at the calendar and realized I had to preach about the Ascension. Not only because of the timing, between Passover, Easter, and Pentecost, but also because—when was the last time you heard a sermon on the Ascension
Now the Ascension doesn’t always play the most prominent role in our retellings of the work of Christ. When we summarize the gospel, we say, “Jesus is risen,” not “Jesus is ascended.” Or when we stretch it out, we say, “the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.” Or we say that Christ died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, not that he ascended to heaven for our salvation. And that’s perfectly fine: the New Testament certainly emphasizes the cross and the resurrection as the fundamental focal points for understanding the significance of what Jesus has done for us.
But what I want to talk about this morning is how pivotal, in fact, the Ascension is to the gospel story. If you leave it out, the story remains incomplete. And not only does the New Testament not leave it out; once you’re on the lookout for it, you realize it’s everywhere. Just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians that, if Christ is not raised from the dead, we are still in our sins, and our faith is in vain—the same applies here: if Christ did not ascend to heaven, the gospel is no good news at all, and we of all people are to be pitied. Why is that?
Well, here’s a question to ask yourself. Where is Jesus, and why is he there? Hold that thought.
Where Jesus is
As many of y’all know, I have two boys. And when you have a theologian for a dad, conversations about God can get really interesting, really fast.
Now Sam and Rowan have a very strict three-tiered understanding of reality. First, there is our world. Second, there is God’s world. Third, there is Pretend World. Pretend World is where they assign anything and everything that isn’t real, or doesn’t really happen in our world. So they regularly ask me, “Is that in our world? Or Pretend World?” Unfortunately for all of us, Captain America and Luke Skywalker and Scooby-Doo are all part of Pretend World. Pretty much anything we read about in a book or watch in a movie is a part of Pretend World, even if it’s real people acting as if something Pretend is real.
So one day we were reading a children’s Bible together, a story about David. And Sam casually referred to David as belonging to Pretend World. I looked at him, and said, “Sam, David isn’t in Pretend World.” He looked back at me as only an all-knowing five-year old can, and said, “Dad, he’s in the Bible. That’s Pretend World.”
At which point I questioned everything I’d ever said or taught about God and the Bible.
And I said, “Sam, everything in the Bible is in our world. It’s not Pretend World, it’s real!” His and Rowan’s eyes got bigger and bigger as I explained to them that, not only were David and Elijah and Jesus and Peter all not pretend, but I’ve been to where they lived. Israel is a place just like Austin and Abilene are places. Now, David died a long time ago, but he lived in the very same world that we live in. The same for everyone else in the Bible.
Having blown their minds, and corrected for all my fatherly shortcomings, I thought my work was done. But then Sam said, “Okay, but since they died, they’re in heaven with God, so now they’re not in our world, they’re in God’s world.” Yes, correct. “Then where is Jesus?” Remember, Sam, he went to heaven after he rose from the dead, so he’s in heaven with God, too. “But Dad, didn’t you also tell us that, just like God, Jesus is everywhere—even in this room with us? But if Jesus is in heaven with God, how can he be here with us too? Is Jesus in God’s world, or is he in our world?”
To which I said, with rich paternal wisdom and years of deep theological training: Time for bed.
Where is Jesus?
Let me back up and situate the Ascension in the broader context of the gospel story.
In his great love, God sends his Son into the world, to become a human being. Jesus proclaims the good news of God’s kingdom in Israel, teaching and healing and caring for those overlooked by society. He is a prophet mighty in word and deed, bringing judgment and repentance and promise of healing to God’s people. He is a king, the son of David, anointed by the Spirit as the long-awaited Messiah. He is a priest, who through the offering of himself on the cross, makes atonement for sins, and through his resurrection triumphs over the power of death once and for all.
He appears to his disciples, and once they realize they don’t have anything to fear from him—they did abandon him after all—they finally, finally realize who he is and what he has done. So naturally, they ask him if what’s next is what they imagined all along: Kick out the pagan occupiers, mop up the godless nations, and restore the glory to Israel, God’s chosen people of old.
And it is at this point that there is a second twist in the story.
The first twist was that Israel’s Messiah would be a suffering servant, yielding to the sword rather than wielding it. The second twist is that, after his victory over sin and death, he still doesn’t take up the sword to decimate the evil powers of the world—not least Rome, which crucified him. Instead, the risen Jesus says to his disciples: “It is not for you to know when the final victory will come. But wait for the Holy Spirit, who will make you witnesses about me to the ends of the earth.” And he was taken from them.
So the Ascension continues this pattern, so common in Scripture, of an unexpected turn in the narrative, yet one that, in retrospect, is perfectly fitting. It’s true that the Ascension answers a question: Where is Jesus? Sam was right about that. But that’s the least significant part of it. And even then, teaching about Jesus being in heaven can come to signify something entirely negative, or passive: the Ascension explains Jesus’s absence; his invisibility; his silence; even, perhaps, his impotence. It can make it sound as if God left us alone after saving us, and we’re stuck here, helpless, until he decides to show up again.
But that is not what Jesus says here, nor is it what the rest of the New Testament says. So why did Jesus go to heaven? What is the meaning of the Ascension? And why is it good news? I want to focus on six aspects of the Ascension that help to answer these questions, and most of all why it is central to the gospel story.
1-2: Spirit & Presence
Back to Acts 1.
Jesus directs our attention to two consequences of the Ascension: the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the mission of the church. These are intertwined; you don’t get one without the other. The ascended Christ will pour out the Spirit of God on the disciples, and filled with that Spirit, they will be Christ’s witnesses not only in Jerusalem and Judea, not only in Samaria, but in every direction: south to Africa, east to India and China, north to Turkey and Russia, west to Greece and Rome—and, centuries later, the Americas.
So why does Jesus return to heaven?
First, so that the Holy Spirit might be poured out on all flesh. This is the promised gift of God, long prophesied in the Old Testament. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the apostles, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate [the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (16:7)
Why is it better for Jesus to go than to stay? Because for Jesus to go means the coming of the Spirit. And what does that mean? It means God himself abiding in us, both together as a community and in each and every one of the baptized. Once God took up residence in a temple, a house made by human hands; now God takes up residence in the hearts of the faithful, temples made of flesh and bone, created in the image of God himself. The Spirit of God convicts, gives life, and liberates; where the Spirit is, there is life and power: life from the dead and power to live free from sin. The Spirit directs us in the way we should go; the Spirit holds us in the mercy and grace of God; the Spirit gives us words to pray and makes the Father of Jesus our Father—through the Spirit we are sisters and brothers of Jesus and therefore sisters and brothers of one another. The Spirit is the power of God for salvation, the unconquerable divine love who puts fire in our bones to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. The Spirit makes us holy as God is holy.
The Spirit, in short, is the very presence of the living God—and though he is a consuming fire, he does not burn us to a crisp, but like the leaves of the burning bush, like the flesh of Jesus on whom the Spirit descended like a dove—the Spirit’s presence purifies and remakes us, but does not undo us.
This is the second aspect of the Ascension. Even after the resurrection, Jesus was embodied; Christians confess the resurrection of the body, including the body of Jesus. The thing about bodies is that they are located in one place. Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, Emmaus, and Jerusalem. He didn’t appear in Rome or Nairobi or Moscow. What Luke reveals to us in Acts is that Jesus’s Ascension, far from initiating Jesus’s absence from the world, is the beginning of a far more radical and intimate presence to the world. When I teach Acts to students, I do a kind of call-and-response about this to drill this into their heads. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence.
That is the essential thing. The Holy Spirit is the means by which Jesus Christ, risen in glory in heaven with God the Father, is present in grace and power at all times, in all places, to everyone who believes. Where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus, there he is with them—because of the Ascension. Because of the Ascension, through Jesus’s own Spirit, he is present to you and to me, to each and every one of us: speaking, guiding, convicting, calling, justifying, sanctifying, glorifying. Sam asked me how Jesus could be in heaven with God and everywhere else at the same time, including here with us now. The answer is Pentecost. The answer is the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead, who has been shed abroad in our hearts, through faith. The answer is the Ascension.
3: Mission
The risen Jesus tells the disciples in Acts 1 that they will be his witnesses to and among the nations. The third aspect of the Ascension, therefore, is mission. For what does the outpouring of the Spirit create? The church of Jesus Christ. What is the church’s primary purpose? To make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the triune name and teaching them all that Christ commanded.
Had Jesus restored the kingdom at a moment’s notice, only days after the resurrection, guess who wouldn’t be included? You and me. As the apostles slowly came to understand, partly through the ascended Jesus’s special calling of Paul to be the apostle to the gentiles, Jesus goes away not only to become near to all who believe through the Spirit; more specifically, it creates a new time in the world’s history—the time of mission, of witness, of the church. And that time is, as Paul puts it in Romans 11, the time for the gentiles to come into the people of God.
It turns out the good news of Israel’s Messiah wasn’t meant exclusively for Israel. It was meant for the whole world.
The Ascension of Jesus creates the time necessary for the gospel to be proclaimed in every tongue and in every nation on this planet. The Ascension of Jesus is an act of extraordinary generosity on God’s part: it wasn’t time to wrap up the world’s history; it was time to get the news to every corner of the globe, and as time unfolded, to spread the word to each new generation as it arose.
If you aren’t a Jew, and if you weren’t born in the land of Israel in the first century—which means everyone in this room—then the Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. Let me say that again: The Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. God wanted to wait for all of us to have a share in the kingdom of his Son.
As 2 Peter 3 says, God isn’t delaying. What seems like Jesus taking a long time to return is actually a matter of divine patience. God has all the time in the world for us. He’s not going anywhere.
4-5: Exaltation & Reign
In the second chapter of Acts, after the Spirit has been poured out, Peter stands up and preaches to the crowd. Here is what he says at the end of his sermon: “God raised up [Jesus from the dead], and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies a stool for your feet.’” (2:32-35)
Just a few chapters later, Peter preaches again in Acts 5: “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” (5:30-32)
In Philippians 2, Paul writes: “And being found in human form [Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (2:9-11)
Finally in Hebrews, we read this: “When [Jesus] had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high… For a little while [he] was made lower than the angels, [but] now [is] crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death…[and he is] exalted above the heavens…” (1:3; 2:9; 7:26)
Here is the fourth, and perhaps central, aspect of the Ascension: It is the exaltation of Jesus.
Above every name, above every power, far superior to angels, far more excellent than all the fathers and mothers and heroes in the faith who preceded him—far surpassing every measure of excellence and standard of beauty and seat of power we can imagine—above the heaven of heavens, there stands Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the slain Lamb, the author and perfecter of our faith, the Messiah of Israel, the eternal Word of God, the One with the keys of death and Hades in his hands—Jesus, son of Mary, son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam, Son of God—there he stands, enthroned in heaven, bearing the name that is above every name, victor and vanquisher of sin and death, of the devil and all his works—the Holy One, Emmanuel, the Crucified, the Creator himself, our brother, Incarnate, the Alpha and Omega, the One who was and is and is to come, God blessed forever—him, that one, Jesus, he is exalted, raised not just from death to life but from earth to heaven, to the right hand of the Father, to reign forever and ever, world without end, amen.
That is what the Ascension means. That is why Jesus returned to his Father and ours. Because when death could not hold him, this universe itself could not hold him. He returned in glory to the Father’s side, now in the body he assumed for our sake, there to rule not just as God’s Son and Word, but as the Crucified and Risen One, the Messiah and Savior of the world.
To reign, to rule: that is the fifth aspect of his Ascension. Who reigns, who rules? Who is enthroned? Who stands at the head of a glorious procession of victory?
The king. Jesus is the king. The son of David is David’s Lord. Israel’s king reigns, now, over all the earth. He is king of Israel, king of the cosmos, king of heaven. Not for nothing did Paul’s opponents in Thessalonica in Acts 17 accuse Christians before the authorities of “all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” (17:7) There is another king, and his name is Jesus!
The Roman Empire called Caesar “lord” and “savior” and “son of god.” So what titles did the early Christians confess of Jesus? Lord! Savior! Son of God! Why were believers persecuted so often? Because they constituted a threat to the powers that be. Why were believers so willing to suffer and die for the faith? Because they knew who was in charge—they knew the name of the one true King, and his name wasn’t Caesar.
The Ascension means that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is King, and he reigns on high over the affairs of earth. Does that mean that life on earth, for believers or nonbelievers, is easy or painless? Not at all. What it means is this. At all times, in all circumstances, no matter how bad things are or how bad they appear to be—the Lord reigns; Jesus is in charge. The Lord Jesus reigns: He will be with you, because he is with us now, by his Spirit. No power or authority on this earth compares with his power and authority. Nor will any power that stands against him triumph. We know with whom, on whose side, heaven stands, because we know those with whom heaven’s king stood during his time on earth. He stood with the poor, the needy, the sick, the overlooked, the beaten-down, the downtrodden, the meek, the tax collectors and prostitutes and little ones whose weaknesses the powerful exploited. That’s where the king of the universe stands: with the least of these, the sisters and brothers of Jesus.
Which means that’s where we must stand, if we want to be where Jesus is.
6: Intercession
So—summing up so far: The exalted Jesus, reigning from God’s right hand, powerfully present by the Holy Spirit in and to his body, the church, as it continues its mission to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth—that, so far, is what the Ascension means, what it enables.
Remember that Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. We have seen how he rules as king and speaks as prophet, through the Spirit. The sixth and final aspect of the Ascension is Jesus’s intercession for us before God, as priest.
The book of Hebrews teaches us that Jesus is both priest and offering; the offering he made was himself, his own body and blood, a once-for-all sacrifice for sins. In chapter 7 we read this: “For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.” (7:26)
Hebrews goes on to say that, as the one, final, permanent priest, Jesus “appears in the presence of God on our behalf,” for “he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” (9:24; 7:25)
Similarly Paul writes in Romans 8 that “it is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” (8:34)
Finally 1 John 2 says that, “if anyone sins, we have an advocate before the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (2:1-2)
What does this mean?
It does not mean that the Father is against us and the Son is for us, the one angry and the other merciful, as if one Person of the Trinity were divided against another. What it means is that Jesus, our mediator, at once both God and man, fully divine and fully human—Jesus is, now and forever, on our side. He is for us. He is for you. He is Immanuel, God with us. Only now he is human-with-God. On earth, God-with-humans. In heaven, human-with-God.
Our brother, the Galilean, he is in the highest of heavens, the unapproachable, ineffable sphere of beauty and blessedness—he is there, he has as it were taken us with him there, and from everlasting to everlasting he has our best interests at heart.
What sins we commit in the meantime, though we should repent of them swiftly and sincerely, they should not trouble or grieve us, they need not weigh us down: for we have an infinitely patient, infinitely merciful, infinitely willing advocate and priest at God’s side, one who, as Hebrews puts it, “became like his sisters and brothers in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God. And because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” (2:17-18)
Jesus ascended to the right hand of God in order to serve, eternally, as our advocate, priest, and intercessor. Your brother Jesus is not just there with you in the dock; he has the ear of the judge. Now and forever, the verdict is Not Guilty.
Conclusion
After the Ascension, Acts tells us that two angels appear, who say, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” In other words: Jesus will return as he left, coming on the clouds of heaven. So long as the earth and the church’s mission on it endure, we wait for our royal priest, Israel’s Messiah and heaven’s King, to appear, once and for all. The Ascension inaugurates the time of hope, of faith’s patient waiting for the final fulfillment of the promise of the kingdom to come at last, for the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven like a bride adorned for her groom.
Until then, I can do no better than to conclude by quoting Paul in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 1:
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” (Col 3:1-4)
“[This is] the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit 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 also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Eph 1:15-23)
The church’s head is the risen Jesus, and the risen Jesus is Lord, and the Lord reigns from heaven. Thanks be to God.
Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God:
You reign from heaven
With your Father and Spirit.
We beg you, by your grace,
To strengthen us in faith, hope, and love,
That you would raise the eyes of our hearts
To you, glorious in power and love,
Ruling on high with mercy and justice.
Rule us, too, as your body,
As we proclaim your kingdom here on earth,
Awaiting with patience your heavenly appearing,
When the will of your Father will at last be done
Here, in the new creation of your marvelous work,
Where peace will dwell forever.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: Amen.
Opening reading
Hear this word from the book of Acts, chapter 1, verses 1-12:
In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. To them he presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days, and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.” And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” Then they returned to Jerusalem…
Prayer
Almighty God,
whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ
ascended far above the heavens
that he might fill all things:
Mercifully give us faith to perceive that,
according to his promise,
he abides with his Church on earth,
even to the end of the ages;
and now, by your grace,
pour through me the gift of preaching,
that what is heard this day through human lips
might be the word of God for the people of God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Introduction
I’m not sure if you know this, but in four days there is a special day on the Christian calendar.
It isn’t Easter, which was only last month. It isn’t Christmas, which is still a long ways away. It isn’t one of those days or seasons you might have heard about but never celebrated, like Advent or Lent or Ash Wednesday, or for the especially church-nerdy, the Feast of the Annunciation.
No, this Thursday is Ascension Day. It is the day on the church calendar when, for millennia, Christians have remembered and celebrated the ascension of the risen Jesus to heaven. You may have already put together why it is celebrated on a Thursday: because, as Acts tells us, Jesus appeared to the apostles over a 40-day period, at the end of which Jesus was taken from their sight. And this Thursday marks 40 days since Easter Sunday. In the same way, Pentecost Sunday is two weeks from today, since Pentecost is a Jewish festival of 50 days following Passover—and Pentecost is the time when Jesus, having ascended to heaven, poured out the Holy Spirit on his disciples.
So when I was asked to preach this Sunday, I looked at the calendar and realized I had to preach about the Ascension. Not only because of the timing, between Passover, Easter, and Pentecost, but also because—when was the last time you heard a sermon on the Ascension
Now the Ascension doesn’t always play the most prominent role in our retellings of the work of Christ. When we summarize the gospel, we say, “Jesus is risen,” not “Jesus is ascended.” Or when we stretch it out, we say, “the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.” Or we say that Christ died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, not that he ascended to heaven for our salvation. And that’s perfectly fine: the New Testament certainly emphasizes the cross and the resurrection as the fundamental focal points for understanding the significance of what Jesus has done for us.
But what I want to talk about this morning is how pivotal, in fact, the Ascension is to the gospel story. If you leave it out, the story remains incomplete. And not only does the New Testament not leave it out; once you’re on the lookout for it, you realize it’s everywhere. Just as Paul says in 1 Corinthians that, if Christ is not raised from the dead, we are still in our sins, and our faith is in vain—the same applies here: if Christ did not ascend to heaven, the gospel is no good news at all, and we of all people are to be pitied. Why is that?
Well, here’s a question to ask yourself. Where is Jesus, and why is he there? Hold that thought.
Where Jesus is
As many of y’all know, I have two boys. And when you have a theologian for a dad, conversations about God can get really interesting, really fast.
Now Sam and Rowan have a very strict three-tiered understanding of reality. First, there is our world. Second, there is God’s world. Third, there is Pretend World. Pretend World is where they assign anything and everything that isn’t real, or doesn’t really happen in our world. So they regularly ask me, “Is that in our world? Or Pretend World?” Unfortunately for all of us, Captain America and Luke Skywalker and Scooby-Doo are all part of Pretend World. Pretty much anything we read about in a book or watch in a movie is a part of Pretend World, even if it’s real people acting as if something Pretend is real.
So one day we were reading a children’s Bible together, a story about David. And Sam casually referred to David as belonging to Pretend World. I looked at him, and said, “Sam, David isn’t in Pretend World.” He looked back at me as only an all-knowing five-year old can, and said, “Dad, he’s in the Bible. That’s Pretend World.”
At which point I questioned everything I’d ever said or taught about God and the Bible.
And I said, “Sam, everything in the Bible is in our world. It’s not Pretend World, it’s real!” His and Rowan’s eyes got bigger and bigger as I explained to them that, not only were David and Elijah and Jesus and Peter all not pretend, but I’ve been to where they lived. Israel is a place just like Austin and Abilene are places. Now, David died a long time ago, but he lived in the very same world that we live in. The same for everyone else in the Bible.
Having blown their minds, and corrected for all my fatherly shortcomings, I thought my work was done. But then Sam said, “Okay, but since they died, they’re in heaven with God, so now they’re not in our world, they’re in God’s world.” Yes, correct. “Then where is Jesus?” Remember, Sam, he went to heaven after he rose from the dead, so he’s in heaven with God, too. “But Dad, didn’t you also tell us that, just like God, Jesus is everywhere—even in this room with us? But if Jesus is in heaven with God, how can he be here with us too? Is Jesus in God’s world, or is he in our world?”
To which I said, with rich paternal wisdom and years of deep theological training: Time for bed.
Where is Jesus?
Let me back up and situate the Ascension in the broader context of the gospel story.
In his great love, God sends his Son into the world, to become a human being. Jesus proclaims the good news of God’s kingdom in Israel, teaching and healing and caring for those overlooked by society. He is a prophet mighty in word and deed, bringing judgment and repentance and promise of healing to God’s people. He is a king, the son of David, anointed by the Spirit as the long-awaited Messiah. He is a priest, who through the offering of himself on the cross, makes atonement for sins, and through his resurrection triumphs over the power of death once and for all.
He appears to his disciples, and once they realize they don’t have anything to fear from him—they did abandon him after all—they finally, finally realize who he is and what he has done. So naturally, they ask him if what’s next is what they imagined all along: Kick out the pagan occupiers, mop up the godless nations, and restore the glory to Israel, God’s chosen people of old.
And it is at this point that there is a second twist in the story.
The first twist was that Israel’s Messiah would be a suffering servant, yielding to the sword rather than wielding it. The second twist is that, after his victory over sin and death, he still doesn’t take up the sword to decimate the evil powers of the world—not least Rome, which crucified him. Instead, the risen Jesus says to his disciples: “It is not for you to know when the final victory will come. But wait for the Holy Spirit, who will make you witnesses about me to the ends of the earth.” And he was taken from them.
So the Ascension continues this pattern, so common in Scripture, of an unexpected turn in the narrative, yet one that, in retrospect, is perfectly fitting. It’s true that the Ascension answers a question: Where is Jesus? Sam was right about that. But that’s the least significant part of it. And even then, teaching about Jesus being in heaven can come to signify something entirely negative, or passive: the Ascension explains Jesus’s absence; his invisibility; his silence; even, perhaps, his impotence. It can make it sound as if God left us alone after saving us, and we’re stuck here, helpless, until he decides to show up again.
But that is not what Jesus says here, nor is it what the rest of the New Testament says. So why did Jesus go to heaven? What is the meaning of the Ascension? And why is it good news? I want to focus on six aspects of the Ascension that help to answer these questions, and most of all why it is central to the gospel story.
1-2: Spirit & Presence
Back to Acts 1.
Jesus directs our attention to two consequences of the Ascension: the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the mission of the church. These are intertwined; you don’t get one without the other. The ascended Christ will pour out the Spirit of God on the disciples, and filled with that Spirit, they will be Christ’s witnesses not only in Jerusalem and Judea, not only in Samaria, but in every direction: south to Africa, east to India and China, north to Turkey and Russia, west to Greece and Rome—and, centuries later, the Americas.
So why does Jesus return to heaven?
First, so that the Holy Spirit might be poured out on all flesh. This is the promised gift of God, long prophesied in the Old Testament. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells the apostles, “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Advocate [the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (16:7)
Why is it better for Jesus to go than to stay? Because for Jesus to go means the coming of the Spirit. And what does that mean? It means God himself abiding in us, both together as a community and in each and every one of the baptized. Once God took up residence in a temple, a house made by human hands; now God takes up residence in the hearts of the faithful, temples made of flesh and bone, created in the image of God himself. The Spirit of God convicts, gives life, and liberates; where the Spirit is, there is life and power: life from the dead and power to live free from sin. The Spirit directs us in the way we should go; the Spirit holds us in the mercy and grace of God; the Spirit gives us words to pray and makes the Father of Jesus our Father—through the Spirit we are sisters and brothers of Jesus and therefore sisters and brothers of one another. The Spirit is the power of God for salvation, the unconquerable divine love who puts fire in our bones to take up our crosses and follow Jesus. The Spirit makes us holy as God is holy.
The Spirit, in short, is the very presence of the living God—and though he is a consuming fire, he does not burn us to a crisp, but like the leaves of the burning bush, like the flesh of Jesus on whom the Spirit descended like a dove—the Spirit’s presence purifies and remakes us, but does not undo us.
This is the second aspect of the Ascension. Even after the resurrection, Jesus was embodied; Christians confess the resurrection of the body, including the body of Jesus. The thing about bodies is that they are located in one place. Jesus appeared to his disciples in Galilee, Emmaus, and Jerusalem. He didn’t appear in Rome or Nairobi or Moscow. What Luke reveals to us in Acts is that Jesus’s Ascension, far from initiating Jesus’s absence from the world, is the beginning of a far more radical and intimate presence to the world. When I teach Acts to students, I do a kind of call-and-response about this to drill this into their heads. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence. The Ascension is not about Jesus’s absence, but rather another mode of his presence.
That is the essential thing. The Holy Spirit is the means by which Jesus Christ, risen in glory in heaven with God the Father, is present in grace and power at all times, in all places, to everyone who believes. Where two or three are gathered in the name of Jesus, there he is with them—because of the Ascension. Because of the Ascension, through Jesus’s own Spirit, he is present to you and to me, to each and every one of us: speaking, guiding, convicting, calling, justifying, sanctifying, glorifying. Sam asked me how Jesus could be in heaven with God and everywhere else at the same time, including here with us now. The answer is Pentecost. The answer is the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead, who has been shed abroad in our hearts, through faith. The answer is the Ascension.
3: Mission
The risen Jesus tells the disciples in Acts 1 that they will be his witnesses to and among the nations. The third aspect of the Ascension, therefore, is mission. For what does the outpouring of the Spirit create? The church of Jesus Christ. What is the church’s primary purpose? To make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the triune name and teaching them all that Christ commanded.
Had Jesus restored the kingdom at a moment’s notice, only days after the resurrection, guess who wouldn’t be included? You and me. As the apostles slowly came to understand, partly through the ascended Jesus’s special calling of Paul to be the apostle to the gentiles, Jesus goes away not only to become near to all who believe through the Spirit; more specifically, it creates a new time in the world’s history—the time of mission, of witness, of the church. And that time is, as Paul puts it in Romans 11, the time for the gentiles to come into the people of God.
It turns out the good news of Israel’s Messiah wasn’t meant exclusively for Israel. It was meant for the whole world.
The Ascension of Jesus creates the time necessary for the gospel to be proclaimed in every tongue and in every nation on this planet. The Ascension of Jesus is an act of extraordinary generosity on God’s part: it wasn’t time to wrap up the world’s history; it was time to get the news to every corner of the globe, and as time unfolded, to spread the word to each new generation as it arose.
If you aren’t a Jew, and if you weren’t born in the land of Israel in the first century—which means everyone in this room—then the Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. Let me say that again: The Ascension of Jesus means that God wanted to include you in his story. God wanted to wait for all of us to have a share in the kingdom of his Son.
As 2 Peter 3 says, God isn’t delaying. What seems like Jesus taking a long time to return is actually a matter of divine patience. God has all the time in the world for us. He’s not going anywhere.
4-5: Exaltation & Reign
In the second chapter of Acts, after the Spirit has been poured out, Peter stands up and preaches to the crowd. Here is what he says at the end of his sermon: “God raised up [Jesus from the dead], and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens; but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I make your enemies a stool for your feet.’” (2:32-35)
Just a few chapters later, Peter preaches again in Acts 5: “The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. And we are witnesses to these things, and so is the Holy Spirit whom God has given to those who obey him.” (5:30-32)
In Philippians 2, Paul writes: “And being found in human form [Jesus] humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (2:9-11)
Finally in Hebrews, we read this: “When [Jesus] had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high… For a little while [he] was made lower than the angels, [but] now [is] crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death…[and he is] exalted above the heavens…” (1:3; 2:9; 7:26)
Here is the fourth, and perhaps central, aspect of the Ascension: It is the exaltation of Jesus.
Above every name, above every power, far superior to angels, far more excellent than all the fathers and mothers and heroes in the faith who preceded him—far surpassing every measure of excellence and standard of beauty and seat of power we can imagine—above the heaven of heavens, there stands Jesus, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the slain Lamb, the author and perfecter of our faith, the Messiah of Israel, the eternal Word of God, the One with the keys of death and Hades in his hands—Jesus, son of Mary, son of David, son of Abraham, son of Adam, Son of God—there he stands, enthroned in heaven, bearing the name that is above every name, victor and vanquisher of sin and death, of the devil and all his works—the Holy One, Emmanuel, the Crucified, the Creator himself, our brother, Incarnate, the Alpha and Omega, the One who was and is and is to come, God blessed forever—him, that one, Jesus, he is exalted, raised not just from death to life but from earth to heaven, to the right hand of the Father, to reign forever and ever, world without end, amen.
That is what the Ascension means. That is why Jesus returned to his Father and ours. Because when death could not hold him, this universe itself could not hold him. He returned in glory to the Father’s side, now in the body he assumed for our sake, there to rule not just as God’s Son and Word, but as the Crucified and Risen One, the Messiah and Savior of the world.
To reign, to rule: that is the fifth aspect of his Ascension. Who reigns, who rules? Who is enthroned? Who stands at the head of a glorious procession of victory?
The king. Jesus is the king. The son of David is David’s Lord. Israel’s king reigns, now, over all the earth. He is king of Israel, king of the cosmos, king of heaven. Not for nothing did Paul’s opponents in Thessalonica in Acts 17 accuse Christians before the authorities of “all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.” (17:7) There is another king, and his name is Jesus!
The Roman Empire called Caesar “lord” and “savior” and “son of god.” So what titles did the early Christians confess of Jesus? Lord! Savior! Son of God! Why were believers persecuted so often? Because they constituted a threat to the powers that be. Why were believers so willing to suffer and die for the faith? Because they knew who was in charge—they knew the name of the one true King, and his name wasn’t Caesar.
The Ascension means that Jesus is Lord, Jesus is King, and he reigns on high over the affairs of earth. Does that mean that life on earth, for believers or nonbelievers, is easy or painless? Not at all. What it means is this. At all times, in all circumstances, no matter how bad things are or how bad they appear to be—the Lord reigns; Jesus is in charge. The Lord Jesus reigns: He will be with you, because he is with us now, by his Spirit. No power or authority on this earth compares with his power and authority. Nor will any power that stands against him triumph. We know with whom, on whose side, heaven stands, because we know those with whom heaven’s king stood during his time on earth. He stood with the poor, the needy, the sick, the overlooked, the beaten-down, the downtrodden, the meek, the tax collectors and prostitutes and little ones whose weaknesses the powerful exploited. That’s where the king of the universe stands: with the least of these, the sisters and brothers of Jesus.
Which means that’s where we must stand, if we want to be where Jesus is.
6: Intercession
So—summing up so far: The exalted Jesus, reigning from God’s right hand, powerfully present by the Holy Spirit in and to his body, the church, as it continues its mission to spread the gospel to the ends of the earth—that, so far, is what the Ascension means, what it enables.
Remember that Jesus is prophet, priest, and king. We have seen how he rules as king and speaks as prophet, through the Spirit. The sixth and final aspect of the Ascension is Jesus’s intercession for us before God, as priest.
The book of Hebrews teaches us that Jesus is both priest and offering; the offering he made was himself, his own body and blood, a once-for-all sacrifice for sins. In chapter 7 we read this: “For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens.” (7:26)
Hebrews goes on to say that, as the one, final, permanent priest, Jesus “appears in the presence of God on our behalf,” for “he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.” (9:24; 7:25)
Similarly Paul writes in Romans 8 that “it is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.” (8:34)
Finally 1 John 2 says that, “if anyone sins, we have an advocate before the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (2:1-2)
What does this mean?
It does not mean that the Father is against us and the Son is for us, the one angry and the other merciful, as if one Person of the Trinity were divided against another. What it means is that Jesus, our mediator, at once both God and man, fully divine and fully human—Jesus is, now and forever, on our side. He is for us. He is for you. He is Immanuel, God with us. Only now he is human-with-God. On earth, God-with-humans. In heaven, human-with-God.
Our brother, the Galilean, he is in the highest of heavens, the unapproachable, ineffable sphere of beauty and blessedness—he is there, he has as it were taken us with him there, and from everlasting to everlasting he has our best interests at heart.
What sins we commit in the meantime, though we should repent of them swiftly and sincerely, they should not trouble or grieve us, they need not weigh us down: for we have an infinitely patient, infinitely merciful, infinitely willing advocate and priest at God’s side, one who, as Hebrews puts it, “became like his sisters and brothers in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God. And because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested.” (2:17-18)
Jesus ascended to the right hand of God in order to serve, eternally, as our advocate, priest, and intercessor. Your brother Jesus is not just there with you in the dock; he has the ear of the judge. Now and forever, the verdict is Not Guilty.
Conclusion
After the Ascension, Acts tells us that two angels appear, who say, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” In other words: Jesus will return as he left, coming on the clouds of heaven. So long as the earth and the church’s mission on it endure, we wait for our royal priest, Israel’s Messiah and heaven’s King, to appear, once and for all. The Ascension inaugurates the time of hope, of faith’s patient waiting for the final fulfillment of the promise of the kingdom to come at last, for the New Jerusalem to descend from heaven like a bride adorned for her groom.
Until then, I can do no better than to conclude by quoting Paul in Colossians 3 and Ephesians 1:
“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” (Col 3:1-4)
“[This is] the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit 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 also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Eph 1:15-23)
The church’s head is the risen Jesus, and the risen Jesus is Lord, and the Lord reigns from heaven. Thanks be to God.
Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God:
You reign from heaven
With your Father and Spirit.
We beg you, by your grace,
To strengthen us in faith, hope, and love,
That you would raise the eyes of our hearts
To you, glorious in power and love,
Ruling on high with mercy and justice.
Rule us, too, as your body,
As we proclaim your kingdom here on earth,
Awaiting with patience your heavenly appearing,
When the will of your Father will at last be done
Here, in the new creation of your marvelous work,
Where peace will dwell forever.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: Amen.
The Holy One of Israel: A Sermon on Leviticus 19
A reading from the book of Leviticus, chapter 19, verses 1-4, 9-18.
“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God….
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”
The word of the Lord:
Thanks be to God.
May the words of my mouth
And the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our rock and our redeemer: Amen.
_______________
Some years ago I was listening to a round-table of ethicists discussing a series of moral and political questions centered on human dignity and worth. A token theologian was included in the round-table for good measure. At some point one of the ethicists referred off-hand to how every human being is holy. It wasn’t a major point; it appeared to be a kind of throwaway comment, a premise assumed to be shared by everyone at the table, not least the theologian. But the theologian broke in and brusquely asserted the following:
“Human beings are not holy. Only God is holy.”
The bare, unqualified nature of the flat denial and exclusive affirmation stopped me cold. Surely the ethicist was simply saying in a roundabout way something unobjectionable: that human beings have value, that human life—as many of us are wont to say—is “sacred.” Is it, strictly speaking, true that human beings are not holy? Is it necessary to say so in such extreme terms?
The answer, I have come to see, is yes. The theologian was right—as we occasionally are. God alone is holy. Human beings are not holy. But that is not all there is to say. Because there is an intimate, unbreakable connection between these two statements; for there is an intimate, unbreakable relationship between the two characters or subjects spoken of in them, that is, a relationship between the One who alone is holy and those who are not holy, but may and will and shall be. A relationship of transformation, the name for which is sanctification.
If the Bible is anything, it is a book about sanctification: about the one and only Holy God’s undying and infallible will (1 Thess 4:5) to make holy what is not holy, to sanctify a people, to hallow the whole creation. Indeed, the gospel is the good news of holiness. How so?
Start—as every entertaining sermon does—with Leviticus. Here we are, in the middle of the Torah, listening in as God commands Moses to command the people of Israel how they are to live. And the fundamental umbrella command, beneath which all the other commands take their place and from which they derive their meaning, is the drumbeat of the book as a whole: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2; cf. 1 Pet 1:14). So holiness is a command, but a command to a particular people, Israel, rooted in the nature of a particular God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Hosts and creator of the world.
So at the outset, holiness is twofold.
On the one hand: Holiness is a principal attribute of the only true and living God, the God of Israel. Holiness means: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Holiness means: The idols of the nations are lifeless, they neither hear nor speak nor save. Holiness means: There is no court of appeal, no judge or Lord or sovereign or power, in heaven or on earth or under the earth, which one might petition, to which one might flee for refuge, apart from this God, the imageless and absolutely transcendent One, enthroned between the cherubim. Holiness means: Indivisible, inescapable, unquenchable life, without source or loss, beginning or end—a burning jealousy as unyielding as the grave.
On the other hand: Holiness is unlike other divine attributes, known technically as “non-communicable” attributes because God does not, because God could not, communicate them to creatures. Such attributes include omniscience, omnipotence—the omni’s in general. Whether or not we should understand humanity as originally created holy (I’m ambivalent about that), in a world ruled by the powers of sin and death, human beings are not and have never been holy, much less holy as God is holy. Yet here, right in the heart of the Torah, almost literally at its centerpoint, we hear God command Israel to be holy. So holiness is somehow a possibility, or at least an expectation, for human beings; or, if not for humanity as a whole, at least for Abraham’s children.
What does holiness entail for Israel? It appears to be a sort of image of the divine holiness, a creaturely counterpart to the uncreated holiness of the Lord. Just as God is utterly and unmistakably distinct both from the world and from the gods of the nations, so Israel is to be visibly and clearly distinct in and from the world, set apart from and among the nations. Israel is to be different.
And this difference is to go all the way down, to be inscribed on the body of Israel. Food, sex, hair, land, crops, money, family, parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and ruled, priests and otherwise, rich and poor, landed and homeless, native and alien—holiness touches everything and everyone, it is comprehensive and all-consuming, its details are exhaustive (not to say exhausting), and it knows no such thing as the separation of religious from political from moral from liturgical from family from individual from communal from economic from…(fill in the blank). Holiness encompasses everything, because holiness concerns God, and God is at once the maker of human life and the author of the covenant. There is nothing that is not the business of Israel’s God.
It doesn’t take, however. Or rather, it takes, but it doesn’t do the job. The commands do indeed set Israel apart from the nations, but the living, burning holiness of the Lord God—the jealous fire that cuts to the heart—it fails to take exclusive, permanent hold; it does spadework against injustice and idolatry, but it does not cut them out, root and branch. They keep sprouting up, in the heart and in the land. What must be done to ignite the consuming fire of God in the midst of the people of God without setting them ablaze—without burning them up, leaving nothing but a valley of dead, dry bones?
Before he dies, Moses tells us. Through Moses, God promises Israel that, following its waywardness and disobedience, following its failure to love God and to keep God’s commandments, following its punishment and exile and re-gathering in the land—after all that, then God will perform a mighty deed: “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut 30:6).
None other than God will do so, because none other than God can do so. The mark of the covenant on the body of Israel will cut to the heart. God will make it so, because God is able, and God’s grace to Israel is everlasting. Likewise, the command to be holy is transformed from an imperative to a promise: No longer, “Be holy,” but, “You shall be holy, for I myself will make you holy.” Indeed, circumcision of the heart just is what it means to be holy to the Lord. God will give Israel a holiness proper to human beings, but a holiness from beyond their means or ken: God’s own holiness.
For the Holy One was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, the grace of holiness. The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus, the Messiah and Holy One of Israel (John 1:14-17).
Holiness is incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Holiness touches the body, the flesh and blood of a human being, this one Jew. Holiness cuts to the heart of this one. He is absolutely set apart; he is one of us, but he is not us. He is different. His life is a single sustained offering to the God of Israel, every minute and every action dedicated to the will and glory of the Lord. He loves the Lord, his God and Father, with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He is ablaze with the fire of God’s Holy Spirit, but he is not consumed; his flesh, like the leaves of the bush at Horeb, is not burnt up (Exod 3:1-2). He, Jesus, is holy, as God is holy.
And when God makes the life of Jesus, the Lord’s servant, an offering for sin (Isa 53:10), God does not abandon him to the grave, will not let his Holy One see decay (Ps 16:10; Acts 2:27). God raises him from the dead with power through the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4): The Holy One is alive; the fire is not quenched. And by the will of God, we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Heb 10:10). The righteous one has made many righteous; the Holy One has made many holy (Isa 53:11). For the holiness of Christ is a hallowing holiness, a sanctifying sanctity. As the Father hallows his name (Matt 6:9), so the Son sanctifies himself for our sakes, that we might be sanctified in the truth of God’s love (John 17:18-19); and God’s love, the flaming tongues of God’s holy word (Acts 2:3), has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us (Rom 5:5).
And through the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11), we are a temple of God’s Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), holy bodies bearing the Holy One in our midst, saints circumcised in the heart through baptism into his death. We ourselves are the one body of Christ, set apart from and for the world, ministers of and witnesses to his holiness. He commands us to be holy; he has made us holy; he shall make us holy at the last. For the one who began the work of sanctification among us will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6).
We bear the holiness of God to one another, this unmerited and unpossessable gift of the thrice-holy triune God of Israel. The holy Father, the holy Son, the Holy Spirit: This God, the one God, our God, is with us. We stand in the presence of the living God, at the foot of the sacred mountain (Heb 12:18-24), as God’s holy people—and we are not burnt up.
“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy. You shall revere your mother and father, and you shall keep my sabbaths: I am the Lord your God. Do not turn to idols or make cast images for yourselves: I am the Lord your God….
“When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien: I am the Lord your God.
“You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; and you shall not lie to one another. And you shall not swear falsely by my name, profaning the name of your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not defraud your neighbor; you shall not steal; and you shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind; you shall fear your God: I am the Lord.
“You shall not render an unjust judgment; you shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great: with justice you shall judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not profit by the blood of your neighbor: I am the Lord.
“You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.”
The word of the Lord:
Thanks be to God.
May the words of my mouth
And the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our rock and our redeemer: Amen.
_______________
Some years ago I was listening to a round-table of ethicists discussing a series of moral and political questions centered on human dignity and worth. A token theologian was included in the round-table for good measure. At some point one of the ethicists referred off-hand to how every human being is holy. It wasn’t a major point; it appeared to be a kind of throwaway comment, a premise assumed to be shared by everyone at the table, not least the theologian. But the theologian broke in and brusquely asserted the following:
“Human beings are not holy. Only God is holy.”
The bare, unqualified nature of the flat denial and exclusive affirmation stopped me cold. Surely the ethicist was simply saying in a roundabout way something unobjectionable: that human beings have value, that human life—as many of us are wont to say—is “sacred.” Is it, strictly speaking, true that human beings are not holy? Is it necessary to say so in such extreme terms?
The answer, I have come to see, is yes. The theologian was right—as we occasionally are. God alone is holy. Human beings are not holy. But that is not all there is to say. Because there is an intimate, unbreakable connection between these two statements; for there is an intimate, unbreakable relationship between the two characters or subjects spoken of in them, that is, a relationship between the One who alone is holy and those who are not holy, but may and will and shall be. A relationship of transformation, the name for which is sanctification.
If the Bible is anything, it is a book about sanctification: about the one and only Holy God’s undying and infallible will (1 Thess 4:5) to make holy what is not holy, to sanctify a people, to hallow the whole creation. Indeed, the gospel is the good news of holiness. How so?
Start—as every entertaining sermon does—with Leviticus. Here we are, in the middle of the Torah, listening in as God commands Moses to command the people of Israel how they are to live. And the fundamental umbrella command, beneath which all the other commands take their place and from which they derive their meaning, is the drumbeat of the book as a whole: “You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev 19:2; cf. 1 Pet 1:14). So holiness is a command, but a command to a particular people, Israel, rooted in the nature of a particular God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord of Hosts and creator of the world.
So at the outset, holiness is twofold.
On the one hand: Holiness is a principal attribute of the only true and living God, the God of Israel. Holiness means: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Holiness means: The idols of the nations are lifeless, they neither hear nor speak nor save. Holiness means: There is no court of appeal, no judge or Lord or sovereign or power, in heaven or on earth or under the earth, which one might petition, to which one might flee for refuge, apart from this God, the imageless and absolutely transcendent One, enthroned between the cherubim. Holiness means: Indivisible, inescapable, unquenchable life, without source or loss, beginning or end—a burning jealousy as unyielding as the grave.
On the other hand: Holiness is unlike other divine attributes, known technically as “non-communicable” attributes because God does not, because God could not, communicate them to creatures. Such attributes include omniscience, omnipotence—the omni’s in general. Whether or not we should understand humanity as originally created holy (I’m ambivalent about that), in a world ruled by the powers of sin and death, human beings are not and have never been holy, much less holy as God is holy. Yet here, right in the heart of the Torah, almost literally at its centerpoint, we hear God command Israel to be holy. So holiness is somehow a possibility, or at least an expectation, for human beings; or, if not for humanity as a whole, at least for Abraham’s children.
What does holiness entail for Israel? It appears to be a sort of image of the divine holiness, a creaturely counterpart to the uncreated holiness of the Lord. Just as God is utterly and unmistakably distinct both from the world and from the gods of the nations, so Israel is to be visibly and clearly distinct in and from the world, set apart from and among the nations. Israel is to be different.
And this difference is to go all the way down, to be inscribed on the body of Israel. Food, sex, hair, land, crops, money, family, parents and children, husbands and wives, rulers and ruled, priests and otherwise, rich and poor, landed and homeless, native and alien—holiness touches everything and everyone, it is comprehensive and all-consuming, its details are exhaustive (not to say exhausting), and it knows no such thing as the separation of religious from political from moral from liturgical from family from individual from communal from economic from…(fill in the blank). Holiness encompasses everything, because holiness concerns God, and God is at once the maker of human life and the author of the covenant. There is nothing that is not the business of Israel’s God.
It doesn’t take, however. Or rather, it takes, but it doesn’t do the job. The commands do indeed set Israel apart from the nations, but the living, burning holiness of the Lord God—the jealous fire that cuts to the heart—it fails to take exclusive, permanent hold; it does spadework against injustice and idolatry, but it does not cut them out, root and branch. They keep sprouting up, in the heart and in the land. What must be done to ignite the consuming fire of God in the midst of the people of God without setting them ablaze—without burning them up, leaving nothing but a valley of dead, dry bones?
Before he dies, Moses tells us. Through Moses, God promises Israel that, following its waywardness and disobedience, following its failure to love God and to keep God’s commandments, following its punishment and exile and re-gathering in the land—after all that, then God will perform a mighty deed: “the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (Deut 30:6).
None other than God will do so, because none other than God can do so. The mark of the covenant on the body of Israel will cut to the heart. God will make it so, because God is able, and God’s grace to Israel is everlasting. Likewise, the command to be holy is transformed from an imperative to a promise: No longer, “Be holy,” but, “You shall be holy, for I myself will make you holy.” Indeed, circumcision of the heart just is what it means to be holy to the Lord. God will give Israel a holiness proper to human beings, but a holiness from beyond their means or ken: God’s own holiness.
For the Holy One was made flesh and tabernacled among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. From his fullness we have all received grace upon grace, the grace of holiness. The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus, the Messiah and Holy One of Israel (John 1:14-17).
Holiness is incarnate in the man Jesus of Nazareth. Holiness touches the body, the flesh and blood of a human being, this one Jew. Holiness cuts to the heart of this one. He is absolutely set apart; he is one of us, but he is not us. He is different. His life is a single sustained offering to the God of Israel, every minute and every action dedicated to the will and glory of the Lord. He loves the Lord, his God and Father, with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength. He is ablaze with the fire of God’s Holy Spirit, but he is not consumed; his flesh, like the leaves of the bush at Horeb, is not burnt up (Exod 3:1-2). He, Jesus, is holy, as God is holy.
And when God makes the life of Jesus, the Lord’s servant, an offering for sin (Isa 53:10), God does not abandon him to the grave, will not let his Holy One see decay (Ps 16:10; Acts 2:27). God raises him from the dead with power through the Spirit of holiness (Rom 1:4): The Holy One is alive; the fire is not quenched. And by the will of God, we have been made holy through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all (Heb 10:10). The righteous one has made many righteous; the Holy One has made many holy (Isa 53:11). For the holiness of Christ is a hallowing holiness, a sanctifying sanctity. As the Father hallows his name (Matt 6:9), so the Son sanctifies himself for our sakes, that we might be sanctified in the truth of God’s love (John 17:18-19); and God’s love, the flaming tongues of God’s holy word (Acts 2:3), has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us (Rom 5:5).
And through the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead (Rom 8:11), we are a temple of God’s Holy Spirit (1 Cor 3:16), holy bodies bearing the Holy One in our midst, saints circumcised in the heart through baptism into his death. We ourselves are the one body of Christ, set apart from and for the world, ministers of and witnesses to his holiness. He commands us to be holy; he has made us holy; he shall make us holy at the last. For the one who began the work of sanctification among us will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ (Phil 1:6).
We bear the holiness of God to one another, this unmerited and unpossessable gift of the thrice-holy triune God of Israel. The holy Father, the holy Son, the Holy Spirit: This God, the one God, our God, is with us. We stand in the presence of the living God, at the foot of the sacred mountain (Heb 12:18-24), as God’s holy people—and we are not burnt up.