Feast of the Ascension, May 12, 2024
Acts 1:1-11, Luke 24:44-53
by Allison Courey
As I studied for this sermon in my backyard over the past week, two little mourning doves were learning to fly. I watched as they fluttered their wings for the first time and then launched from my neighbour’s yard into mine. I looked at their tiny faces, surrounded by awkward bits of baby fluff, and envied the simplicity of their lives. All they need to do in life is learn the rhythms and needs of their own bodies: when to sleep, what to eat, how to sing and fly.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible, we learn that creation worships God simply by being itself. As the psalmist sings in Psalm 148, “Praise the Lord, mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars! Wild animals and all cattle, creeping things and flying birds!” The birds don’t debate about the meaning of life or how to know God; they honour God simply by knowing themselves and caring for their bodies.
For Jesus and his first followers, it wasn’t a jump to conclude that if the tiny mourning doves glorify God simply by knowing and caring for their bodies, then humans can do that too. The Franciscans call creation “the first bible,” because by immersing ourselves in creation we can meet God, just as we can meet God by immersing ourselves in the books of scripture.
The Hebrew bible is full of commandments about caring for our bodies, including the teaching about sabbath. In the surrounding ancient cultures, people worked long hours, seven days a week. But in Israel, not only slaves and women, but even donkeys were supposed to have a day off. The difference was rooted in the opposing values placed on the human body. The surrounding cultures tended to consider the body an enemy of the human spirit. Greek asceticism in particular taught the importance of denying the needs of the body in order to reach spiritual enlightenment.
In early Christianity, the gnostic movement took this idea from the Greeks and taught that the body was evil and the spirit was good. But Gnosticism was condemned by the early Church because our Jewish heritage, and therefore Jesus himself, believed that God made the body good.
In our readings about the Ascension this morning, we find the strongest argument from the Christian faith in opposition to the Gnostic teaching about the human body. Jesus has just spent more than a month hanging out with his friends, showing them that he is not a disembodied spirit. He eats, talks, walks, and shows them his wounds. And now, as he leaves them to return to God, it is in the fullness of his physical body. It’s as if Jesus is saying, See? Human bodies are as much a part of God’s good creation as the stars and the birds. Even the holiest human to ever live, God himself, retains his physical body.
Recently, my brother in law asked me, “Do you believe that the Ascension really happened?” And my response was simply that he was asking the wrong question. John Dominic Crossan, a theologian who specializes in the historical context of the New Testament, says that he understands the Ascension as a parable because it explains deeper truths than historical details ever could. For example, do we believe in the parable of the Good Samaritan? Absolutely. Do we think it took place in history? It really doesn’t matter, because what’s important is what the story tells us about who God is and who we are.
Whether the Ascension happened as it’s described or not, what it teaches us is that we’re inheritors of a radically embodied faith which knows that God created us good in body as well as soul, and that to worship God begins with taking care of ourselves.
American social worker Nedra Glover Tawwab, who is so wise she could be mistaken for a black female Jesus, says that self care is not about spending money (which of course Jesus didn’t have). It’s about trusting that you know the rhythms of your own body better than anyone else, and then meeting those needs. If you read the Gospels through this lens, you will notice that Jesus was really good at knowing when he needed a rest, needed to push back, to leave, to say yes, to say no.
What this means for us is that the first way we worship God is not by going to church, or working hard, or always answering our phones. The most important way we can worship God is by knowing and caring for our own bodies.
But if you are anything like me, this isn’t something you grew up hearing in the church or anywhere else. This is because modern thought, coming out of the enlightenment, tends toward the Gnostic separation of body and mind. As we came into the mechanical age, we started seeing our bodies as necessary evils and our minds as “the important part” of us that could work and make progress.
Another thing that keeps us from thinking about caring for our bodies as an act of worship is substitutionary atonement, a doctrine that developed (at least in part) out of the enlightenment. In a nutshell, substitutionary atonement teaches that people are bad and God only came as a human in order to kill his son and save us from ourselves by a blood sacrifice. Following this narrative, it is difficult to believe that God is good, never mind that we are. And if I have been so awful from birth that I am personally responsible for God’s death, it is reasonable to think that my body should be punished, not cared for. This is where the Protestant work ethic comes from, along with many harmful ideas that make us feel like we always need to be more and try harder.
But this is not the God that Jesus knew or exemplified for us in the Ascension. Jesus worshipped God by getting rest, taking space, walking away from toxic relationships, upholding personal boundaries, spending leisure time with friends, and eating well. Granted, it was probably easier to do all that in the first century! Scripture tells us of a God who celebrated the human body by becoming one of us in the incarnation and giving us new physical life in the resurrection. In the Ascension, Jesus returns to God while retaining his physical body.
Contrary to the images we might have received of the ideal Christian, Jesus was not a workaholic or a doormat or even a yes person. Because even as a child, Jesus heard the Torah read in the temple and learned that God made people good. He observed the little birds learning to fly and saw that they were able to worship God just by taking care of themselves. And when Jesus returned to God, his body went with him like a shout to all of creation: God made you good!
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