Your Absolution Comes from the Only Still Point in the Cosmos

The Ascension of Jesus as the Anchor for Sinners

Eastertide wraps to a close this week with the Feast of the Ascension. Don’t feel guilty if you didn’t have it marked on your calendars. What was once the high holy day when Christians rejoiced that God has made Jesus King over all the nations of the Earth is now just a Thursday.

It’s not hard to see why Ascension is largely ignored. For one thing, if Christ has been given dominion over the Earth, then Jesus doesn’t appear to be doing a very good job. As Woody Allen jokes:

“If God exists, he’s basically an underachiever.”

What about the horrific war being waged against Ukraine? Yet another violent mass shooting, no doubt, in 3, 2, 1…Perhaps going from carpenter to King was too big a promotion for Jesus. Maybe that’s why we ignore the Ascension.

But surely one reason we ignore the Ascension is the embarrassing, unbelievable imagery of it.

The Ascension is the perfect example of everything that is wrong with Christianity in the modern world.

It’s a primitive, superstitious picture in a rational, scientific world.

The physics of it are all wrong. Jesus is lifted up into the air like he’s drunk too much fizzy lifting drink. Jesus, the first astronaut, going up, up, up and away, exit stage heaven. Why wouldn’t we ignore such a ridiculous image in the twenty-first century? It’s fantastical. It’s the perfect example of why it’s so hard for modern people to take the Bible seriously. To take belief in God seriously.

“Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” the two angels ask the eleven remaining disciples. But why wouldn’t they be looking up to the sky? Isn’t that the whole problem with the Ascension? With believing in God in general? Those disciples, and the ones that came after them, the ones who wrote the creeds and compiled the canon, they believed God was “up there.” They believed the Earth was a flat, disk-shaped place around which the sun and the stars revolved.

Not only that, they believed the Earth floated on water, with the underworld below and heaven above just beyond the clouds. And it gets more embarrassing. They believed that between heaven and earth was more water, water that could inundate the Earth at any moment were it not for the firmament, seriously the “firmament,’ a sky-colored bowl that sits over the earth and holds back the oceans of universe.

It’s laughable.

And they believed in a Being who lived “up there” above the Earth. Beyond the clouds and the firmament. Up there. In heaven.

And isn’t that the problem the Ascension makes unavoidable for us?

We know God’s not up there, not above the clouds, not beyond the firmament.

Ascension calls BS on our unspoken secret:

we know that the God portrayed in scripture doesn’t exist. And if that God doesn’t exist, who’s to say God exists at all?

Where the disciples lived in an age where everyone believed in a God up there and disbelief was inconceivable, we live in an age where no one believes in a Man Upstairs and disbelief in God altogether isn’t just a possibility it’s the fastest growing faith in America. Maybe that’s the reason we ignore the Ascension. It reminds us that we live in a different age.

But we didn’t get here overnight. It’s been a long time coming.

In 1637, Rene Descartes, a philosopher and mathematician, helped give birth to the modern world in which we all live. Descartes was plagued by the anxiety that everything he’d been taught to believe to be true might be false. Descartes locked himself away and set out to strip away all his received certainties — even 1+1 = 2. Descartes wanted to arrive at what can be known apart from revelation. Apart from God. Where the ancient starting point for all knowledge had been God, Descartes’ starting point was himself, his own interior life.

I think; therefore, I exist, Descartes concluded. With Descartes, we became the center of the world. Not God.

And when we became the center of the world, the goal of life shifted too. From “The chief end of man is to love God and enjoy him forever,” as the catechism begins, to “the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.” With Descartes, we became the center of the world and the starting point of all knowledge and ever since Descartes what it means for something to be “true” is that it’s true to us. To our senses. To our experience. We didn’t get here overnight. It happened so slowly we’re not even aware of how shaped we are by it.

We know what those ignorant fishermen in the Gospels do not. We know that the universe is expanding.

Changing.

In transition.

And we know all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from all the other galaxies in the universe at the same time. They’re moving. It’s called the galactic dispersal. We know the Earth is moving around the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles per hour and does so while rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles per hour. The universe, the stars, the earth everything is constantly moving and changing and expanding. And so are we. We lose 50-150 strands of hair a day (which is worse news for some of us than others). We shed 10 billion flakes of skin a day. 90% of the dust in our homes is made up of the dead skin we shed. We’re in transition. Every 28 days we get completely new skin. Right down to the atoms and cells, we are constantly moving and changing. Even bodies we bury in the ground keep changing; when God raises them from the dead, they will not be the same atoms they were when they were buried.

Not only do we know that there’s no firmament, we know there’s nothing “firm.”

Nothing is stable or constant. Nothing is unchanging. Nothing is not in transition. Everything is constantly moving, in flux. Everything is transitory, momentary. Moving from one way of existing to a new way of existing.

But that begs the question, a question even better than the one the angels ask on Ascension Day:

If everything is constantly changing, if we are constantly changing right down to the hairs on our head and the skin that we shed, then how can we be the measure of all things?

How can something in motion, something constantly changing, be the measure of anything?