Sermon transcript:
This is one of those weeks where I read the scripture and think: what are we supposed to do with this? Jesus just…sort of floats up into the sky like Mary Poppins. What possible difference does that make in our lives?1 But, the other scriptures for the week aren’t clicking with me either. You’re getting an ascension of Jesus sermon by default.
The first thing that sticks out to me is Luke wrote both the Gospel and the book of Acts. So, the ascension is a hinge. It closes one chapter—Jesus’ earthly ministry—and opens another—the life of the church, empowered by the Spirit as told in Acts.2 It’s a handoff. And if we’re honest, it’s not an upgrade. Wouldn’t you rather have Jesus than the church? Rachel Held Evans names that discomfort with painful honesty:
“Dear Jesus, … I’ll be honest, … Ascension Day brings up some abandonment issues for me. I know you promised we wouldn’t be alone, … I can’t help but think that if you’d stayed a little longer, we might have avoided the Crusades. … Or that time we used the Bible to justify slavery and invoked ‘Manifest Destiny’ to slaughter women and children. We’ve made a mess of things, Jesus, often in your name. We could use a little micromanaging.”3
Anybody else think we could use a little Christly micromanaging in our day? There’s something in us that longs for it—for someone powerful enough to step in, clean things up, make it all make sense. Someone to impose order on chaos, certainty on confusion, and maybe even reward the “right” people while sorting out the rest.
You can feel that longing all around us. In times of rapid change and instability, people start to crave simplicity, predictability, and control. And that craving often gets channeled into a willingness to trade freedom for security. Not our freedom, of course—usually someone else’s. But we tell ourselves it’s worth it. We tell ourselves it will make things safer, clearer, better. What it really does is free us—from the hard work of love. Because love is demanding. Love asks questions we’d rather avoid. Love exposes systems that benefit us. Love calls us to listen when we’d prefer to speak, to change when we’d prefer to stay comfortable, to repair what we didn’t break but are still part of.
Authoritarianism offers an escape from all that. No wrestling with history. No need for repentance. No responsibility to change unjust structures. No entering into the pain of others. Just certainty, order, and the comforting illusion that we’re on the right side. Freedom from the hard work of love.
The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky saw this clearly in his story The Grand Inquisitor. In it, Jesus returns during the Spanish Inquisition. The crowds recognize him. They adore him. And the church arrests him. The Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus in his cell and explains why Jesus must die.4 “You gave people freedom,” he says. “And it was too much for them. You burdened them with its sufferings.5 We fixed that. We gave them certainty. Bread. Security. We took their freedom off their hands—and they were grateful.”6
It’s a devastating critique. The Inquisitor insists that people don’t really want freedom. They want safety. They want someone else to decide. The Church obliges, doling out beliefs and limiting choices in exchange for the promise of salvation. Security brings happiness; freedom, only misery.7
And then he waits for Jesus to respond. Jesus says nothing. The silence stretches. The Inquisitor grows agitated. Anything—anger, argument, condemnation—would be easier to handle than this silence.8 Finally, Jesus stands, walks over, and gently kisses him on the lips. That’s it. No rebuttal. Just love. Because the kind of transformation the Inquisitor needs can’t be argued into existence. It can only be awakened.9 Love has its own logic. It refuses coercion. It refuses to override freedom—even when freedom is used badly. The Inquisitor is left with a choice: if he genuinely wants to follow Jesus, there is no liberation from the risky responsibility and hard work of love. Choose he does: he opens the door and says, “Go…and do not come again.” Jesus leaves.10
That’s the ascension in miniature: Jesus refuses to stay and run the world by force, or even by perfect clarity. He refuses to override human freedom—even when we make a mess of things. Because it wouldn’t be love. Rachel Held Evans puts it like this: “And so here we are, charged with being your hands in the world. Your eyes. Your laughter. Your tears. Your healing. Your teaching. Your feet on the ground.”11
That’s the handoff. And it’s not a light responsibility. We must allow love to take on our flesh, inhabit us. It’s intimate, as intimate as a kiss. We will be asked to love people we don’t understand and might not even like. We’ll be asked to give—our time, our money, our attention—in ways that cost us something. We’ll be asked to apologize, to forgive, to rethink what we thought we knew. That’s what the Grand Inquisitor was trying to avoid. It’s why he needed Jesus gone.
So why accept this? Why not show Jesus the door? Because there is grace here, too. Look again at the pattern in Luke. Jesus doesn’t just disappear. He prepares them. He gathers them together in community. He teaches. He reminds them of what matters. He promises that they will not be alone. He blesses them. Then and only then does he pull back and withdraw.
It’s less like abandonment and more like a parent stepping back and saying: you’re ready. I trust you. You have what you need. You have each other. And I am still with you, just not in the way you expect. Maybe the ascension isn’t about Jesus leaving as much as it is about refusing to be held onto in the wrong way. Not as an object of worship. Not as a mascot for belief. Not as a divine problem-solver. Instead, as a living presence—love itself—ready to take shape in us, if we’re willing. Ready to call us into a beloved community.
That’s what the disciples discover. Luke tells us they return to Jerusalem and the temple with great joy and gratitude. Which is strange, if you think about it. Nothing about their external situation has improved. The risks are still there. The uncertainty is still there. But they are different. They return to the place of their fear and failure—Jerusalem—but they return changed. Open. Courageous. Connected. Ready. They step into the freedom and responsibility of love, and somehow, that produces joy and gratitude. Not because it’s easy but because it’s real. It’s living from the heart.
In these certainty-seeking, authoritarian times there are still people who live and love this way amid pain. A Rabbi sharing her experiences in Minnesota this past winter said this: “…alongside the sadness and outrage, there was still music. There was laughter. There was joy. There was strength. One pastor who serves a local immigrant community said he hoped that those outside Minneapolis would, ‘remember us not by our fears but by our dreams, dreams for what this world could and should be.'”12 Vulnerable. Open. Connected. Joyful. Grateful.
And maybe this is the final image to hold onto: as Jesus ascends, Luke tells us he is blessing them. And nowhere does it say he stops. His hands are still raised. The wounds are still visible. And the blessing continues.13 Not from a distance, but through us—through our hands, our healed wounds, our choices. The ascension isn’t an escape from the world. It’s an invitation deeper into it. Into freedom. Into the hard, risky, beautiful work of love. Ascension, who knew? Amen.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 Nadia Bolz Weber, Frightened And Foolish: a cheerful little ascension sermon for terrible disciples, The Corners, https://thecorners.substack.com/p/frightened-and-foolish, May 21, 2023
2 R. Alan Culpepper, Commentary on Luke, New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, vol.9, Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1996, pp. 486.
3 Rachel Held Evans, From the Lectionary: An Open Letter to Jesus on this Whole Ascension Business. https://rachelheldevans.com/blog/from-the-lectionary-an-open-letter-to-jesus-on-this-whole-ascension-business, May 30, 2014.
4 Living Hour, Jesus, Dostoevsky & The Grand Inquisitor, https://livinghour.org/progressive-christianity/jesus-dostoevsky-grand-inquisitor/
5 Living hour
6 Jessica Reeg, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor: Free Will vs Authority, God and the Good Life, https://godandgoodlife.nd.edu/resource/fyodor-dostoevskys-the-grand-inquisitor-free-will-vs-authority/
7 Reeg.
8 Reeg.
9 Living hour
10 Reeg
11 Held Evans
12 Rabbi Nora Feinstein, On Minneapolis: Responding with our faith, National Council of Jewish Women, https://www.ncjw.org/news/on-minneapolis/. January 25, 2026.
13 Bolz Weber.