29 May 2022 is Ascension Sunday, a celebration of Jesus’ ascension to be with God, following Jesus’ death and resurrection.

The main focus of Rev. Geoff McKee’s sermon is on Ephesians 1:15-23 but he also refers back to Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness by the Devil, explaining an important parallel between these things.

There is no video of the service for today available and instead you will find the text of the sermon, below.

Main Scripture for today

Ephesians 1:15-23 (The Message Translation)
15-19 That’s why, when I heard of the solid trust you have in the Master Jesus and your outpouring of love to all the followers of Jesus, I couldn’t stop thanking God for you—every time I prayed, I’d think of you and give thanks. But I do more than thank. I ask—ask the God of our Master, Jesus Christ, the God of glory—to make you intelligent and discerning in knowing him personally, your eyes focused and clear, so that you can see exactly what it is he is calling you to do, grasp the immensity of this glorious way of life he has for his followers, oh, the utter extravagance of his work in us who trust him—endless energy, boundless strength!

20-23 All this energy issues from Christ: God raised him from death and set him on a throne in deep heaven, in charge of running the universe, everything from galaxies to governments, no name and no power exempt from his rule. And not just for the time being, but forever. He is in charge of it all, has the final word on everything. At the centre of all this, Christ rules the church. The church, you see, is not peripheral to the world; the world is peripheral to the church. The church is Christ’s body, in which he speaks and acts, by which he fills everything with his presence.

This week’s sermon for Ascension Sunday

On this, the seventh Sunday of Easter, it is our custom to set aside the
prescribed lectionary readings for today, and to take up instead the readings for
Ascension Day.

Ascension always occurs on a Thursday.

Its celebration is far too significant to be passed over and hence our focus today.

I would like to speak primarily from the Ephesians text which challenges us to live in the reality of the ascended, exalted Christ.

The temptation of Jesus in the wilderness is recorded in all the Synoptic Gospels.

There are particular, specific details in Matthew and Luke’s Gospels.

You will remember the third temptation, when Jesus was taken to a high mountain where he was shown all the kingdoms of the world. All of this would be given to him if he would pay homage in worship to Satan.

In other words the object of his mission to bring God’s kingdom to earth would be fulfilled in an instant.

G.S. Barrett, the Congregationalist minister, described this as “the old but ever new temptation to do evil that good may come; to justify the illegitimacy of the means by the greatness of the end”.

But that would not do, for Jesus understood that his ascension to the mountaintop and beyond would only be effective through the laying down of his will and his life before his Father. There were no shortcuts.

Today, we read about disciples looking upwards as Jesus disappeared from view.

The angels challenged them to stop gazing and get on.

The mysterious nature of the ascension must not distract followers from the reality that they must get busy following.

Standing, rooted to the spot is not consistent with living in the reality of the ascension.

So what is?

Well, whether we find it helpful to view heaven as existing somewhere above us; literally ‘heavens above’ or not, the truth is that heaven is God’s space and central to Jesus’ understanding of who he was and what he was sent to do, was that God’s kingdom would come and his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven – that ultimately God’s space and our space would be brought together in a new reality that has everything to do with the new creation that is being revealed in Jesus Christ.

We pray for that outcome every week in the words of the Lord’s Prayer.

And we do so confidently because of our belief in the reality of the ascension of Christ.

The ascension is no minor add-on to general atonement theology. It is integral to it.

Karl Barth preached an outstanding sermon reflecting on Ascension Day which has been published in his collected writings.

He focused upon the healing benefits of the ascension of Christ for the human race, weighed down by shame.

The Christ who would not yield to Satan’s invitation and so be enveloped with the
shame of failure, is able to shed his radiance over all of us, so that what applies
to him, applies to us.

Barth went on:

“What is true and valid in heaven, what Jesus Christ has done for us, what has been accomplished by him, man’s redemption, justification and preservation, is true and valid on earth also”.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

So, let’s look at the Ephesians’ text in Chapter one and Verses fifteen to twenty-three.

In John, chapter seventeen, Jesus said: “My prayer is not for them alone. I
pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them
may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us
so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory
that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one”.

Here, explicitly, Jesus related his conferred glory to an actual unity which
ultimately leads to the world’s belief in his mission as God’s mission.

Ephesians chapter one picks up on the implications of Christ’s ascension, his glorification to the right hand of the Father, in relation to the unity of the Church in its function as the body of Christ on earth now.

Whatever we may feel about the effective unity of the church, and there is much that we might want to say on that, this text has much to say too, about how it looks from God’s perspective.

It assures us that the exaltation of Jesus Christ ensures that the unity of the
Church is secure in the only genuine demonstration of authority that we know.

Now that the Son of God is with the Father, God’s plan to be recognised as God
of the whole world is underway. The Church is Christ’s body now and all things
on earth are placed in submission to the Church’s task as herald and
embodiment of the kingdom coming.

The Ephesians text also assures us that the Church has been empowered to
embody the unity which has been secured by the ascension.

It is not right to argue, in the face of contrary evidence in practice, that the Church’s unity is merely a notional concept that is established in heaven but not effective on earth.

Paul wrote about the immeasurable greatness of God’s power, a power not
confined to the act of ascension or exaltation but made available to all who
believe. Next week, in the celebration of Pentecost, we will declare the truth of
that from our own experience, but we must not forget this week that the same
power is realised in the Church from the basis of Jesus’ position at the right hand
of the Father.

Finally, the Ephesians’ text is emphatic that the unity which the Church finds in
God is stronger than any divisions that the Church faces on earth.

In no sense does Paul stick his head in the sand, ignoring the tensions that frequently
surface as the Church struggles to remain faithful to its calling. The first
Christians were Jews, the apostle Paul among them, but his calling was very
particularly to the Gentiles. His early missionary journeys led to the
establishment of Christian communities in Asia Minor which inevitably included
folks with Jewish backgrounds as well as Gentile converts. Tensions based on
the different cultural backgrounds, as people tried to work out what being a
Christian looked like for them, threatened to escalate to enmity and division. The
modern Church knows much about living in tension with the threat that some
will tolerate fellowship no longer, for all sorts of reasons, and divide.

That does not in any sense lessen the reality of Jesus’ ascension and the unity of the
Church that results from God’s perspective. Instead it reminds the Church on
earth that unity in God is stronger than the threat of any divisions we may face.
We must never rest content with division as a normal state of affairs but instead
must ever seek reconciliation in Christ’s Church for the sake of the world for
whom we are Christ’s body.

It is believed that John Wesley, the Anglican preacher and evangelist, whose life
and witness inspired the Methodist movement, once said:

“I want the whole Christ for my Saviour, the whole Bible for my book, the whole Church for my fellowship and the whole world for my mission field.”

The ascension of Christ is an integral part of the whole Christ, as his ascension
drew the whole Church into fellowship for the sake of the whole world.

May we all be led through this celebration of Ascension to remember again that through the progress of Christ to glory all that is true and valid in heaven is true and valid on earth too.

Amen.