Today is Ascension Sunday and the Rev. Donald Sensing has some things to say about why the Ascension is an essential part of the Christian faith.
The story of Jesus' ascension is sort of an elephant in the living room of North American Christianity. Clergy of mainline churches like the UMC know what dominates this story but we usually pretend it isn't there. In previous years on Ascension Sunday, I ignored the elephant, too, but today I'm coming clean. What dominates this story is Jesus' bodily ascension into Heaven.Posted by Alan at May 23, 2004 10:01 AMA miracle, in other words. That's the elephant.
The 21st-century Western mind pretends the miracle isn't there. We search for the moral of the story or its implied meaning for our day and ignore the miracle. Lay people are taught, by implication, to do that in our secular school systems and colleges. Clergy are taught to do that in mainline seminaries and divinity schools. Every mention of biblical miracles in my classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School was to show how the event itself wasn't really important and wasn't the real point of the story, anyway. Don't dwell on the miracle - with the unspoken implication being that the miracle didn't really happen or that the event was really an ordinary event that occurred in unordinary circumstances and was mistaken for a miracle. Besides, the people who wrote the Bible were educated for their day, but not for ours, and did not enjoy the benefit of the scientific method as a way of understanding reality.
I certainly do not attack science and some of you may even remember that I have defended science and the scientific method against religious fundamentalism and have exposed the holes in what is inaccurately called "scientific" creationism.
But we have to face the elephant in the living room of 21st-century, North American Christian faith, the fact that the entire Christian religion inescapably rests on miracles. And whatever other points the Ascension stories may have for us in our day, the central part of the story is that Jesus ascended bodily into Heaven.
There is a lot more to the Ascension story than the Ascension itself, but without the Ascension itself, there isn't much else about the story that matters.