Sermon: Psalm 47, Acts 1:1-11, June 01, 2025

Scripture: Psalm 47, Acts 1:1-11

Preacher: Bailey Bjolin

Title:

By the power of the Holy Spirit

open our minds to the Word, your Son,

who comes to us as one of us and

ascends to the heavens to remain with us.

Amen

I know an Anglican priest in Vancouver who tells the story of the ascension as slapstick comedy. The disciples, having witnessed the return of Christ from the dead, and having spent the past forty days feasting and spending time with the resurrected Christ, finally ask: “so, when are you going to restore us to our former glory?”

Jesus, who just spent these same past forty days telling the disciples about the kingdom of God and preparing them for the Holy Spirit, can’t quite believe it. After all this time, they still don’t get it? In response, Jesus reiterates what he’s said over and over: that kingdom power is not found in the kingdom of man, but will come in the power of the Holy Spirit. Then, exasperated, he whips up into a cloud and disappears.

This leaves the disciples staring up at the sky where Jesus ascended, speechless. Maybe they would have waited for Jesus, staring up at the sky, for the rest of their lives. That is, if the angels hadn’t appeared and told them to get on with things.

This telling of the Ascension story really highlights how weird it is. It’s certainly one of the more outrageous and unbelievable stories in the Bible. It also stands out as yet another moment when the disciples really struggle to imagine anything beyond their own worldly horizons. Even in the midst of Jesus’s resurrection and their reunification with him, they are still a people oppressed by powerful forces. They continue to seek freedom from that oppression. The way they conceive of that freedom is through re-establishing their kingdom over and against the Roman Empire.

The problem with the disciples is that, even when they are given every sign and every proof that Jesus proclaims a new Word where truth and justice reigns, they cannot imagine a new world born of that new Word. They can’t imagine it outside of the world they already live in. And that’s why they ask, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” The only way they can conceive of the new world is within the structures of the old.

This doesn’t mean that the disciples are stubborn or that they are intentionally resisting Jesus’s word— it means they are human. Belief is one thing; imagination can be another thing entirely.

The wonderful thing about imagination is that it has no limits.

That also happens to be the hard thing about imagination— you will never really know how far you should go, and whether you’ve gone far enough. And we live in a world that puts restrictions on our what we can imagine. How many of us have been told at some point that we needed to get our heads out of the clouds? That we needed to be more realistic? That we should put an end to childish things?

But since when did belief in the impossible, did the imagination, become something for children, and only children? There’s a well-known verse in the New testament that reads:

“When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11).

The next verse reads, “ For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:12).

Nowhere here does it say, “forget about believing the impossible. Stop using your imagination to picture how things could be.” In fact, I would argue that the this verse is telling us the opposite: that it is in the fullness of our human imaginations that we can approach the full knowing of God’s extraordinary love for us.

I don’t think that we have enough opportunities in our daily lives to exercise our imagination, to practice believing the unbelievable. Our world today is rigidly structured around rules: we have science, which reminds us that flying up into the sky and being absorbed by clouds is not gravitationally possible. We have our social norms, which tell us that we don’t go out into the world and proclaim the Word of Christ to the ends of the earth— and maybe that’s for good reason, in some cases. And we have our political structures, which decree that there is no kingdom outside of empire. Even our churches, often, we refuse to really engage in this difficult practice of imagination. How often have you been in church spaces where Jesus’s miracles were downplayed or explained away? How often have we hidden behind the safety of our rote religious worship without really and fervently practicing our belief in the things that our worship celebrates?

I’m certainly guilty of this. Events like the ascension stretch my imagination. Surely, I think to myself, Jesus didn’t really rise up into the sky in front of his disciples? Surely this story is a tool that the author of Luke-Acts uses as a way of showing Jesus’s power?

It can’t be real, right?

In our world of gravity and reason, there is no room for events such as the ascension. But it is precisely these events which help us to understand the scope of our faith and the incredible potential of it.

There’s a scene in Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass where Alice meets the White Queen. When Alice complains that “one can’t believe impossible things,” the Queen counters by saying: “I daresay you haven’t had much practice.” For the Queen, the thing that keeps Alice from believing the impossible is practice. “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” says the Queen (Carroll, 1871).

What the White Queen is suggesting here is that the more we practice believing impossible things, the more likely these impossible things can happen. This idea is echoed in theologian Walter Brueggemann’s book The Prophetic Imagination.

Brueggemann contends that “the imagination must come before the implementation” of an idea, and the role of prophetic ministry is to nurture fantasy— that is, to help us, together, envision the unbelievable world that God has promised for us (Brueggemann, 1978). Basically, we need to be able to imagine the thing before it can happen.

As Brueggemann notes, imagination is dangerous (dare I say, transgressive). Jesus’s resurrection and ascension, along with the descent of the Holy Spirit to meet us during Pentecost— these actions threaten the Roman Empire and threaten the way things have been done up until now. The imagination helps us to see how ‘alternative’ we really are, as Jesus followers. Therefore, everything we do and say should fly in the face of the way things are usually done in the world. After all, the world we believe in is fundamentally different than the one we often see outside these walls. It is an impossible world that we believe in. We believe in a world where God came down from heaven to dwell among us. We believe in the death and resurrection of that God-among-us. We believe that God-among-us ascended into heaven and is now seated at the right hand of the Father. And in order to remember this man, we eat his flesh and drink his blood once a month.

Our faith makes us do improbable things: it drives us to object to the law of the day if it goes against Jesus’s teachings. It makes us extend unusually generous kindness towards strangers. Some of us speak impossible languages, some of us are visited by visions, and most if not all of us talk to this dead-not-dead, Godamong-us guy on the regular.

It is our belief in the impossible that allows us to do incredible things as Christ followers.

In our story today, we see that the disciples’ imaginations have been constrained by what we would call worldly forces, in particular by nationalistic forces and those forces which are concerned with worldly power.

Now, nationalism is a powerful force— it is powerful, because, as theologian Willie James Jennings notes, nationalism is a vision that “mimics the desire of God for our full common life with each other” (Jennings, 2017). In other words, it can be a way that we understand our connection to one another. But, Jennings cautions, “it is communion without God, or with God simply used as a slogan” (Ibid.). Nationalism can be meaningful, but it is not centred on God, and we should not kid ourselves by believing otherwise.

Put simply: we should not put our national identity before our identity in Christ. After all, our citizenship is in heaven (Phil 3:20), and it is not in those structures that exist in order to gain earthly power (Phil 3:19).

When the disciples are more concerned with the restoration of the kingdom to Israel (Acts 1:6), they are missing what Jesus has told them: that the Holy Spirit is coming down to dwell among them, and that in the Spirit they will be granted power to heal and love others on earth in the name of Jesus. This citizenship is not earthly citizenship, but neither is it divorced from the earth. The disciples belong first and foremost to Christ, and yet that doesn’t mean that they sit back and stare up at the sky, waiting for Jesus to return. Jesus’s ascension is a paradox, but a beautiful one: Jesus ascends to heaven so that he may be with each of us on earth in the form of the Holy Spirit. Through the ascension, Jesus’s presence grows to attend not only to the disciples and believers on earth, but also to reign alongside God in heaven. Jesus is everywhere, and with all of us. When the disciples cannot see beyond their current political context, when their horizons are so limited that they can only conceive of God’s promise fulfilled by human structures, then they cannot imagine the true depth and scope of possibility for anything else.

We are now Christ’s body in the world: that is what the ascension has to teach us. But we can only fully live into this call if we are willing to believe in the unbelievable. We must be willing to practice prophetic imagination that extends beyonds the boundaries of the known world.

Just like the disciples, we have been primed for this kind of belief. Our entire religious tradition is steeped in incredible, unbelievable stories. However, just like the disciples, we can still refuse to believe the unbelievable. I see it all the time: in politics, in our education systems and yes, even in our beloved church.

I’ll give you an example:

This Easter, my girlfriend Julia and I attended an Eastern Orthodox Pascal Vigil in Vancouver. Now, I don’t know if any of you have had the opportunity to visit an Eastern Orthodox Church before, but they are beautiful. They are a delight to the senses, full of gold-leaf icons, beautiful chants, and the smell of incense. The Easter Vigil is a particularly special time, as it is for any church. For the Orthodox Christians, worship starts at around 11pm on Holy Saturday, where we hold vigil over Christ’s body until midnight. The mood is somber and the sung liturgy lulls you into a trance-like state. But then, at midnight— the mood shifts. We light candles and the priest shouts “Hallelujah, He is risen!” And we shout back: “He is risen indeed!” We shout so loud you’d think we actually believed it. You’d think we were actually overjoyed that Christ has risen from the dead. You’d think that this miracle actually happened.

From there, we process outdoors, shouting “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!” We circle the church, holding our candles. Some of the kids in the congregation have been tasked with ringing the church bells, which reverberate through the sleepy residential neighbourhood. We stop at the entrance to the church. The priest stands at the door. He is smiling and he yells again, “Christ is risen!” We answer him in our loudest voices, and then he pounds down the front door to the church and we crowd back into the sanctuary. The priest opens all the church windows as we loudly proclaim that Jesus is risen. Jesus is risen!! He is really risen! And we really believe it!

My friends, how does it feel to really believe in our resurrected and risen Christ? Too often in the United Church I see us giving up the fervency of our belief in exchange for respectability, as if anything Jesus did during his ministry was respectable. What if—we are willing to put aside our respectability and believe the impossible? That feeling doesn’t feel containable within these four walls, I can tell you that.

I want to jump for joy. I want to yell “Christ is risen!” from the rooftops. This belief opens me up to new questions. In practicing this most fundamental belief, Christ’s resurrection. what else can I believe? What else becomes possible?

I would like to invite you to take a minute, right now, to imagine something unimaginable. The end of war. The end of famine. Housing for all. Enough for everyone. Reconciliation. Really, really try to believe it.

It is possible. It is as possible as Jesus’s resurrection and as possible as his ascension into heaven.

But here’s the catch:

This is our responsibility, through the wisdom and guidance of the Holy Spirit. We are Christ’s body in the world. We are blessed by Christ and accompanied by the Holy Spirit to do the impossible. Coming to church on Sunday is simply practice: it helps us to flex our imaginative muscles to allow us not only to envision but also to believe in the world Jesus preached. And what a world that is!

It is a world of restoration and wholeness, one birthed anew through the power of our saviour Jesus Christ!

What if we really believed in it, with all our heart, and all our soul and all our mind? This is how we love God.

So may you go out and work so God can use you, May you delight in the believing the impossible, And may you never forget God’s promise to you.

Amen.