Up and Here

Acts 1:6-14
First Reading for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year A)

I can’t remember if the question was “Where is God?” or “Where is heaven?” But it was a question that the pastor of the church I grew up in asked frequently and he wanted the congregation to physically respond by pointing to the ceiling. I remember one time him encouraging folks to hold their fingers aloft when not enough initially responded. He cited this week’s passage—the Ascension of Jesus—as the reason for the belief that heaven is up.

I never pointed up. This is probably my dad’s fault. He drilled into my siblings and me that words and specifics matter. If Jesus ascended to a heaven that was literally up then it would posit that somewhere out in the vastness of space was heaven. It would also be an up that was up from the Middle East at a certain moment in earth’s daily rotation and revolution around the sun. Odds are the up-pointing of a 1990s congregation in upstate South Carolina was lightyears in the wrong direction from the literal up of Jesus’ ascension (this is giving you some insight on what a strange kid I was).

I am not sure whether our pastor believed that heaven was literally up out there in space or in some kind of sky bound pocket dimension or what. It wasn’t a malicious act, but it bugged me. Beyond the logistics of literalism, it galled me that everyone was told to point up as if heaven was some kind of fixed point that we could comprehend. Much later, I also realized that casting heaven as the sky neglected a major theme of what Jesus preached throughout his ministry: that heaven is also breaking through here on earth.

That is the big message isn’t it? The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. It’s breaking through. God is not just in the sky and looking at us from a distance. God is here and on the move. God is with us. Heaven and earth are colliding and somehow, someway that which is broken will be healed.

It’s a beautiful message; full of hope and pregnant with possibility. It is also a challenging message because it means that we cannot confine God to certain parts of the stratosphere, our weeks, or our lives. If the Kingdom of Heaven is breaking through all around us then our faith cannot be afterlife-focused or restricted to certain buildings or places. It calls on us to carry our faith with us at all times, to have our eyes and ears open for the ways in which God is unleashing heaven all around us. In such a world, we don’t get to clock out of following Jesus.

Heaven as a fixed place versus breaking through all around also ought to shape how we think about the church. The president made much hay about re-opening churches this past weekend, but this indicates a limited understanding of what the church actually is. It is the difference between understanding the church as a building that operates on Sunday mornings and the church as a people who are always about the work of God at all times. If someone asks, “Where is the church?” you cannot give the most true answer by pointing at a single place. The church is everywhere a follower of Jesus is present joining God in all the places that heaven is breaking through.

Indeed the last thing that Jesus tells his followers before he goes up is that his followers will receive the power of the Holy Spirit: God with us, guiding us, comforting us. The Holy Spirit is here so that those who follow Jesus can be witnesses to heaven breaking through in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. The whole story is about how Kingdom of Heaven is expanding far and wide.

Where is God? Where is heaven? It is up. Yet it is also here. Look for it. Seek it out. Join together with it.