May 18, 2022

Immanuel Evangelical-Lutheran Church and School – Upper School Choral Service

The Ascension of Jesus, like the virgin birth and the resurrection, challenge us with things that seem more like story or myth than actual events. And yet the epic stories capture our imaginations. There is a longing for them to be true, because they make sense of the world.

For many years C.S. Lewis, captivated by myths, remained an atheist. His conversion to Christianity, thanks in part to J.R.R. Tolkien, was in recognizing in Christ the “true myth.” In other words, all the other stories are shadows of the one true Story. Lewis put it this way in a 1931 letter to a friend about becoming a Christian:

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.

Like the resurrection of Jesus, His ascension can only be known through history, that is, through the eyewitness testimony. But what is, to use the language of C.S. Lewis, what is God expressing in this event?

The last stanza of our featured hymn tonight flips on its head the idea that the Ascension is about escaping the bondage of human nature. The entire Christian story is about the rescuing, the redemption of human nature. At Christmas God took on a human body. On Good Friday God took that human body into death, then through death to resurrection. “Touch me and see,” Jesus said to His disciples. No phantom, He showed them His wounds. He ate fish and bread.

Thus the hymn explains that Christ has raised our human nature / On the clouds to God’s right hand. Being human is about living in the world God made in the bodies God gave us. Getting married, having babies, sending them to a Lutheran classical school, walking, running, hugging, high-fiving, fist-bumping, water-splashing, wind-feeling, garden-tending, garbage-removing; feeding, clothing, bandaging, caressing. Human life is unimaginable apart from the body. The goal is not to escape the body, but for the body to be liberated from its bondage to corruption. This Christ has done.

The Ascension of Jesus shows us the destiny of the human person: Christ has reopened the way to the Father. God didn’t make you for death, but life. Live in your body a life of mercy and meaning. For Christ has crushed the tomb, and crashed open the way home. +INJ+