Ascension Sermon “Kin-dom of Heaven” 5/21/23

In our scripture reading today, the book of Acts begins with a letter describing Jesus appearing to the disciples over the 40 days after the passion, and then eventually rising up to heaven. Also, in the gospels,  Jesus often talked about God’s kingdom, or kin-dom, of heaven here on Earth that is available right now.

Here at Broadway, when we say the lord’s prayer, instead of using the word kingdom, we say kin-dom. This is a way of acknowledging that meanings change over time, and metaphors can become more or less useful, depending on how a culture changes. For example, in the time Jesus was alive, and also  in the time of the King James translation of the bible, people were accustomed to living in kingdoms – governments ruled by kings. Caesar of Jesus’ day was thought of as having ultimate power, and so in claiming a kingdom for God, Jesus was using a metaphor to subvert, or turn upside down, the expectation of a human ruler having the most power. Jesus was trying to say that God was more powerful than even the mighty king. This would have been shocking at the time.

Times change, people change, government changes, the definitions of words change. The metaphor of kingdom doesn’t ring true the same way it used to, especially here in the United States, where we have a democratically-elected president, not a king.

In our present time, the word kin-dom comes closer to the world that God wants for us, because the word kin is about relatedness. God offers us oneness with God, and connection with each other and all of life. We now understand ourselves to be part of an ecosystem, where we are dependent on and in relationship with other species of life, and the planet itself. We also now understand how delicate this balance of life is, as we are faced with a future of climate chaos due to carbon pollution that humans have created. Our new understandings merit new words.

God is bigger than what human beings can comprehend. God came before us, God created us, God lives within us and all around us, and God will be here after every person in this room is gone. God exists without limit, God is infinite and eternal. God exists far beyond our imaginations, beyond our thoughts and feelings, and beyond what words we use, or the metaphors we employ to describe God or God’s promises.

While God is huge beyond all human ability to understand or comprehend, we as humans are small, limited, finite. We have no choice but to try to understand God from our own perspectives, using metaphors of experiences we already have. That is why, even though God is infinite and eternal, our understandings of God do change over time. It is because our understandings themselves are limited, because we are limited. We cannot make ourselves as big as God, so we have to begin our ideas about god by using ideas that are within our own understandings.

That is why we use the word kin-dom, instead of kingdom. We have outgrown the old metaphor of God as King, because we ourselves have grown past kings. When we say God is a shepherd, that is also a metaphor, specifically a metaphor that made sense to folks who worked with the land and with livestock. God has been described in the bible using a wide variety of metaphors. God is called a Rock, water, breath, wind, fire, place, light, lamb, lion, and more. God is ineffable, that means that God is bigger than anything we can understand or describe. The best we can do is start with our current level of knowledge, and work from there.

In the time that the book of Acts, the book from today’s scripture reading was written, the world itself  was understood to consist of 3 layers. As the people of that time understood it, there was Earth in the middle, and Earth was flat. That’s where people lived. Underneath Earth was the underworld, sometimes thought of as hell. Over top of the sky, was heaven, and that’s where the stars, sun, and moon were fixed into place.

In the description of Jesus ascending into heaven in today’s verse, the assumption is made that this 3 layer world is all that exists. This was before humans knew that the Earth was round, that the Earth rotated, along with other planets, around the sun, or that there were endless suns across the Universe, what we think of as far-off stars, many with planets of their own. None of this was understood yet. The image of Jesus rising to heaven was a metaphor. Carl Sagan is quoted as saying, “​​if Jesus literally ascended into the sky and traveled at the speed of light, then he hasn’t yet escaped our galaxy.” In 2,000 years, at the speed of light, he would still be in the milky way.

God is forever, God is bigger than we can imagine. AND it’s also true that humans are still learning, evolving, growing. Our thinking expands and change, and so it is okay for our words to change.

If kingdom can become kin-dom in order for us to better connect the meaning of Jesus’ ministry to our work in the world today, then how can we look at the Ascension, Jesus rising up into heaven, in the Acts verse we read earlier? 

I spoke in my January sermon about how I believed that the Heaven on Earth that Jesus speaks of is the same as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s idea of the Beloved Community, a community in which everyone is cared for, absent of poverty, hunger, and hate. I still feel that these two visions are the same. It is a vision of the world where ALL. OF. US. are living out God’s promise of love and forgiveness with each other. We can create heaven on earth now, in our relationships with one another. Jesus shows us the way, through his forgiveness of us, how we can create a world of peace, harmony, and everybody getting their needs met.

On May 1st of this year, so about 3 weeks ago, scientists published a study of 4 people’s brain waves before, during and in the moments after death. 4 people were studied, all of whom were in a coma without any chance of survival. For all of the people, around 30 seconds to 2 minutes AFTER their hearts stopped beating, scientists observed a fast flurry of neural activity moving across the whole brain in the form of gamma waves. The scientists weren’t entirely surprised to see this activity, as they’d already seen the same thing in rats, however, it still hints that maybe consciousness may be an observable thing. Maybe our spirits, or our souls, are simply waves of energy that can be measured in those minutes after the heart beat has stopped.

I’ve already discussed that God is bigger than we can imagine, God is infinite and eternal. God is everywhere. Maybe the metaphor of Jesus “rising” up to heaven wasn’t really about going UP at all, at least not in the sense that the sky is UP. If God exists in everything, if God is everywhere, and if human consciousness might be observable in the form of gamma waves moving between neurons, then maybe Jesus leaving Earth to go to Heaven is more like entering the space between. Entering the space between atoms, entering the space between people, entering the spaces that seem empty but are actually full.

After all, Jesus is always here with us, right? We pray to Jesus just as we pray to God, and expect and believe that Jesus hears us wherever we are. Jesus is in this room with us, even though we don’t see Jesus with our eyes or feel his skin with our fingers. In that sense, he is never gone, he is never somewhere else, so the idea of him rising to heaven is only a metaphor for him joining the heavenly ALL-THAT-IS, the fabric of this world, the fabric of reality. The ascension of Jesus is not about him leaving us to go somewhere else far away, it’s about the beginning of the next phase of the world, where the holy spirit will enter the hearts of his followers and spread God’s promise around the world by preparing a table where all people are welcome, it’s about honoring the spaces between us by realizing that all people are God’s beloved and that we are to love one another and welcome one another. We’ll talk more about the Holy Spirit next week on Pentecost, but until then, remember that Jesus is not somewhere far away, he is here in our hearts, he is here in our relationships with each other and the world, he is here in the space between atoms and he is everywhere, just as God is everywhere. All we need to do to connect to the love of God, the love of Jesus, is to open our hearts. May we find the willingness to do so. Amen