The Whatever on High Atop the Thing

Ascension Day and the life we live

Today marks a strange day in the Church Calendar commemorating one of the stranger events in the life and ministry of Jesus, and what we do with it theologically gets even stranger than that. Ascension day occurs on the 40th day after Easter Sunday. After weeks of appearances, fish fry meals, teaching about the Scriptures and the Kingdom of God, Jesus ascends to heaven, so says the Creed. Luke’s Gospel says he was carried away. The Gospels and Acts bear witness that he takes the Messianic throne at the right hand of God—a signal that victory is achieved and the reign of the King has come.

Triumph is an easy key for Pentecostals and charismatics to sing to. The combination of the revival’s “Power in the Blood” and the experience of the outpoured power of the Holy Spirit supplementing a healthy diet of Scripture oriented to a life of being “more than conquerors” drives a spirituality overflowing in confidence, anticipation, and not a little bit of entitlement for many.

And then your life hits the bricks and “Jesus Take the Wheel” feels a much more apt anthem. To be sure, it’s not tied to a particular dollar amount, or relationship status, or job satisfaction. There are absolutely desperate Pentecostals who walk in a triumphal faith, and struggling believers with a few first world problems, but the fact is that the expectation of victory, as they defined it, is the basis of whether their spirituality is flowing or flailing.

I get it. When rejection, loneliness and betrayal haunted my steps from childhood into adulthood, I didn’t have any theological resources to handle the apparent defeat in my life. In my teens, it just seemed like the mark of a particular call, perhaps prophetic, like Jeremiah.¹ When I went to college, I learned to sing the psalms, and some of them I really internalized for the first time. Music opened my heart and ears to the voice of lament in the life of God’s people. But lament still had ties to victory…except for that lone Psalm 88, which had no conclusion of praise but stood there for all eternity as the uncomfortable witness that not everyone had a happy ending.

Tolkien was my theologian of the dark night of the soul. His life and writings showed a path for faith in the midst of suffering and defeat that I couldn’t find in my Pentecostal communities. Stories, dragons, and tears and battles lost that offered a path that does not depend on winning. He had a theology of Hope – a hope that is not based on what is seen or touched or possessed. It is a hope that is anchored in the One who sustains everything and its chief fruit is defiance.

Defiance is what anchored me when job after job didn’t work out and application after application offered no interview. Defiance kept me on course when ministry was elusive and no one except my family believed in my call. Defiance built a church and preached 100 sermons when there was no money in the bank and no one left to help. Defiance gave me the power to keep silence in the face of awful accusations until the truth won out. Defiance opened the path to unlikely areas of service and unwinnable situations. And defiance meant holding out for marriage until I was 34 years old and a series of failed relationships behind me.

Defiance changed my life. It’s defined my theology. And I recognize it in Stephen the Deacon and Evangelist. Stephen’s defiance got him killed, but it also made him a witness to the Ascension. Yes, in his final amendments, Stephen looks heavenward and the Messianic King is no longer seated, but standing at the right hand of God ‘s throne, ready to welcome his suffering servant home.

The beauty of the Ascension is that Christ’s work is not done. And the good news about this absence is that Jesus stands up for us in heaven to strengthen us on earth. Because in the time that we await the victory, his reign will show up in the sorrows of our lives.

1. You gotta feel some kind of way as a teenager to try to explain your troubles as a divine destiny.