Are We There Yet?

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” [Acts 1:6].

As some of you know, Jane and I honeymooned on Hilton Head Island, way back in late August 1971. We’ve been back for at least one week each year since that first matrimonial excursion. When the kids were small—our youngest, Gray is now 37-years-old and has three of his own—they said what all children heading to the mountains or the beach say as soon as their homes are out of sight, “Are we there yet?”

In the first lesson appointed for this Sunday, Acts 1:6-14 [Ascension Sunday/the Seventh Sunday of Easter, RCL, Year A], the disciples show their own impatience by asking Jesus essentially the same question. “Is it going to happen now? Are you going to turn the tables on the evil ones now? Are you going to right all wrongs, settle all debts, make everything the way we’ve always wanted it to be, now?”

Jesus gives His disciples—gives us—a response that is difficult to hear. He says, “It isn’t for you to know these things. They are appointed by the Father” [Acts 1:7].

Are we there yet?

The businessperson sits with his/her pastor one quiet morning. The parishioner says, “You know, Pastor, it’s been four years since my business opponent did me wrong. When will Christ make it right?”

The estranged wife relates to her friend and confidante, “We sit in church each Sunday and pray for justice. Bill (supply a name) left me for her nine months ago. I gave him almost 18 years. Now I feel utterly humiliated. When will my justice come?

The Good News is that when His disciples asked their impatient question, Jesus didn’t just say, “Not now.” Instead, he shared that God the Father had a plan for them, a plan that would unfold, a plan that might not be according to their timing, or even their liking, but a plan, nevertheless, that would be important, and compelling, and vital to the world. In not so many words, Jesus asked them, “Do you trust in God the Father?”

If so, Jesus told them, then they should be His “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” [Acts 1:8]. We can easily miss part of Jesus’ point through the English translation. The word that gets translated as “witnesses” is the same word that, in other contexts, is translated as “martyrs.” Witnesses—martyrs, what’s the difference? Sometimes not very much.

Are we there yet? Perhaps not yet, but we’re getting closer.

According to St. Luke, just as Jesus had said this, “He was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” [1:9]. The church celebrates this as Ascension.

The Reverend Dr. Tom Long offers an interesting observation about this important moment in the life of the church. In some notes that I took some years ago during a talk Tom was giving at Duke Div School, he allowed that his examination of the Gospels had led him to the conclusion that, within the holy texts, heaven is mainly “not about blue skies or life only after death.” Instead, heaven is the life that is now coming toward us from God. It’s the life of the world to come, “a life that overcomes our present age.” He posits, therefore, that the opposite of heaven is not hell, but rather “the world that is passing away.”

Long continued that when Jesus is “taken up to heaven,” there is no spatial claim, but rather an announcement that Jesus has been taken up “into the very life that is now forthcoming toward us.” Long concludes:

And so, we don’t so much go to heaven; heaven comes to us.

Are we there yet?

No, but It’s almost here.