A sermon given by the Reverend Sarah Grondin, at St. Jude’s Oakville, on Ascension Sunday, June 1, 2025.
I speak to you in the name of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Today we’re celebrating the feast of the Ascension, and it seems a bit like the poor cousin among church festivals… it’s often overlooked, and passed over, since it doesn’t land on a Sunday.
The Ascension occurs 40 days after Easter, and this year that was on Thursday of last week.
There are a few places where it would have been observed on the day, most places who choose to observe it will transfer it to today as we have, but I suspect even more places won’t bother with it at all.
This seems like terribly unfair treatment for one of the church’s great feasts, and an event that the writer of Luke-Acts thought important enough to narrate twice. So why does the Ascension often get skipped over in our worship? I suspect that part of it at least, is that we really don't like goodbyes, and we don't quite know how to celebrate this one.
I’m sure we’ve all had the experience of saying goodbye to someone, or something, and we know that goodbye’s can be quite emotional. Goodbyes also often lead to transitions, and those can be both exciting and scary, sometimes at the same time. But they can also signal a new beginning after a difficult event has occurred. The disciples in our readings from Luke-Acts are in the middle of all these possibilities.
They’ve just undergone an emotional roller coaster: they watched as their leader was beaten and crucified, they experienced 40 days with their resurrected Lord, and now they await a new phase of relating to him, not in bodily form as they've become accustomed, but through the Holy Spirit.
It must have been hard for the disciples to watch as Jesus ascended. They had already lost him once, but got him back again. And now it seemed they were losing him again! But what the disciples have yet to understand, is that Jesus going to the Father means that the Spirit will now be poured out on all of God's people. Jesus tells the disciples that they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon them; and that they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
The language here of the Spirit moving might sound familiar… it rings of Gabriel's words to Mary in Luke 1. Both Luke's Gospel and the Book of Acts begin with God's Spirit moving in the world to bring about something new. In Luke 1, it’s the birth of the Messiah, and in Acts 1, it’s the birth of the Church and its witness to the world.
Over the course of the book of Acts we learn that the moving of the Spirit happens in God’s time and we have to wait and trust in God’s promises. But if there’s anything harder than having to say good-bye,it’s having to wait—particularly when we don’t know how long the wait will be.
How many of you have heard of the Marshmallow Experiment? Basically, it’s a psychological study about the importance of waiting. The researcher would bring a child into a private room, and the kids were around 4 or 5 years old, and the researcher would put a marshmallow on the table.
The child would then be offered a deal. The researcher was going to leave the room, and if the child didn’t eat the marshmallow while they were gone, they would be rewarded with a second marshmallow when the researcher returned. But if they ate the first one before the researcher got back, they wouldn’t get a second one.
The researcher would then leave the room for 15 minutes, and come back to see if the child ate the marshmallow or not.
The camera footage of these kids waiting is hilarious… Some jump up immediately and eat the marshmallow as soon as the researcher is gone. Some of them squirm and wiggle in their seats for a bit, before giving in and eating the marshmallow. But my favourite ones, are the kids who nibble teeny-tiny bits off the marshmallow, hoping no one will notice!
The study, which has been repeated many times, has shown that very few children are able to wait and experience the delayed gratification. But those who did, later went on to have much higher success in school, in their careers, in their physical health, in navigating social situations,
and resisting substance abuse.
We know that there are huge benefits in learning how to wait well. But it’s still soooo hard!
If there’s more than a couple of people ahead of us in line at the grocery store we start grumbling. If our internet browser doesn’t instantly load a new page we get impatient and wonder why it’s taking so long. I tell my kids all the time, they’d never have survived dial-up!
We want what we want, and we want it now!
Well the disciples weren’t very fond of waiting either, and they ask Jesus if now is the time to restore the kingdom to Israel.
In the first two chapters of Luke’s Gospel, we have the joyous outpourings of Mary, Zechariah, and Simeon, which all speak to Jesus being the true fulfillment of God's promises to Israel. But what God has in mind isn’t just bringing Israel back to “the good old days,” like so many hoped. Instead, God desires to bring Israel to its yet-unrealized goal of being a light to the whole world.
The disciples may have thought they were on the verge of inheriting an old-style kingdom, one that was built on power, force, and occupation…they wanted what was rightful theirs as God’s chosen people, and they wanted it now! I wonder if they were surprised to realize that in fact,
they were on the edge of God's mission to redeem all nations, a mission that would direct the rest of their lives, and one that should be central in ours too.
Taken together, our passages today from Luke and Acts offer us a model for waiting on God that is rooted in hope, experienced with joy, and lived out by worship. Just as the cloud-gazing disciples were brought back to their senses by the two messengers in robes, we’re also called away from idleness to faithful waiting.
In Acts, the first great task of the disciples after the Ascension occurs when they hike back to Jerusalem and wait. In time, the disciples and the rest of Jesus' followers, will go forth to all the world and bear witness to Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. In time, the realities that Jesus spoke about: the kingdom of God, the forgiveness of sins, the breaking of chains that bind people, will come into clearer view. But not yet.
This waiting is an important part of celebrating the ascension. It's all too easy to skip over though, because it feels like nothing is happening…but this pause makes an important point
about how God interacts with God’s people. Presumably, the Holy Spirit could have come
immediately after Jesus' ascension, but God choose to wait.
It's in this time of waiting that the disciples learn, or begin to learn, that they need to be a responsive community, a community that waits upon God’s initiation. Whether they walked back to Jerusalem after the ascension with eager energy or paralyzing fear, we don't know.
All we know is that they have to wait, and that this waiting has an active quality to it.
It goes beyond merely sitting around and contemplating the past and future. No one is navel gazing. The disciples wait in a secluded room upstairs where they constantly devote themselves to prayer. The group remains sequestered, yet expectant.
In their waiting, they obey Jesus' recent commands. But even more, they express a readiness for all of the wild stuff yet to come. The waiting conditions them to be attentive to God, so that when the time is right, they’re ready to respond. They wait in a context of enormous and unclear expectations. They live in uneasy anticipation of the new realities that Jesus has initiated. They’re not waiting because they don’t know what else to do, but because they expect big things to come from God. Things in which they will be privileged to play an important part.
Very practically speaking, the Ascension also meant that the disciples had to learn how to live as followers of Jesus without his physical presence. But as they discover, none of the things
that Jesus did or taught ends with the Ascension. Through their carrying out of Jesus’ mission,
the church continues to proclaim, to teach, to love, and to serve in Jesus' name. Through the work of the Spirit, the disciples continue to encounter Jesus.
And here’s the thing… we aren't left staring at where Jesus used to be either, because through the Ascension, we too continue to encounter Jesus. We encounter Jesus in the preaching of the Word and through the Sacraments, through the fellowship of the Church, and through ministry with the poor and the oppressed.
When Jesus ascended it wasn’t goodbye, but it was a transition from one way of being a follower of Christ, to another. And while we wait on the Holy Spirit to give us our marching orders, we too need to practice that same faithful waiting.
We need to seek God in prayer and wait with expectant and ready hearts to receive the gift of the Spirit so that we too can join in carrying out Jesus’ mission of spreading love in all the hard to reach places.
Being a follower of Jesus can be a wild ride… and it’s certainly not for the faint of heart. But as we learn from the actions of the disciples, waiting for God to act is a community event. Waiting with others is an act of solidarity. The disciples don't scatter and go to their own homes to await a private spirit-filling. They joined together in a specific place to await God's action on them all—just like we’re gathered here today.
We gather together in prayer and worship, because we believe that God has something to say to the world—to say to us! That’s why it’s so important to fully celebrate the ascension. The end of Luke echoes the waiting of advent at the beginning, by leading us into another time of waiting
“for the dawn from on high to break upon us.”
Jesus has promised us that the Spirit is coming. May God help us all to practice faithful waiting,
so that we can be ready to respond when she calls. Because when the Spirit comes upon us,
we don’t just get a second marshmallow, we become witnesses to the power and glory of God.
Amen.
