Why are you standing looking at the sky?

So this week, on Thursday, marked the feast of the Ascension. We hear the Acts account of this experience today. The piece of this story that I want to explore today is not the ascension itself — though that is plenty to sit with. Instead, I want to begin with what happens just before.

Jesus has just been lifted into the sky. A cloud has taken him out of sight. And the disciples are standing there, staring up. Just… standing there. Necks craned. Mouths probably open. And then two men appear — angels, we assume — and say, essentially: what are you doing? Why are you still standing here looking at the sky?

It is, if we let it be, a little funny. These are the people who have walked with Jesus, eaten with him, watched him die and then somehow had breakfast with him on a beach. They have seen things that have no logical explanation. And still, when he disappears into a cloud, their response is to stand there and gape.

But perhaps that is behavior that looks or feels familiar. Because following Jesus has always had this quality to it: this mix of the profound and the absurd, the world-altering and the completely bewildering. We show up. We do the things. We light the candles and say the words and pass the peace and sit with people in their grief and set out extra coffee and we are not always entirely sure why, except that something keeps pulling us back. We belong to this, even when we can't quite explain what this is.

And it turns out Jesus knew that about us — knew that we would need something to hold onto before the cloud took him. So before it does, he says three things. Three things, for people who are about to be standing on the hillside with no idea what comes next.

First, the apostles ask Jesus “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replies “It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”

It is worth noting that Jesus has, at this point, conquered death. And the disciples want to know about the political situation in Jerusalem. We are, all of us, a little slow on the uptake.

In this question and response we hear the disciples wondering, in a sense, ‘when will we return to our glory days, to the way that things used to be?’ In a sense, the apostles were doing something that we do still today, which is hoping for the fantasy of resurrection, rather than the reality of resurrection.

The fantasy of resurrection might tell us today that we will know that Jesus is present with us if we look like a historically successful church: a full house every Sunday, a growing budget, programs that draw crowds. The fantasy of resurrection is about metrics, about visibility, about being able to point to something and say: there, that’s proof.

The reality of resurrection looks different. It looks like a community that knows how to sit with someone in their grief — not to fix it, not to rush past it, but to stay. It looks like the kind of hospitality that doesn’t wait for the right moment or the right person, but simply makes room, again and again, in ways both grand and almost invisible: a meal, an open door, a seat saved, a name remembered. These are not warm-up acts for the real ministry. These are the ministry. Jesus names this kind of work as the work of witness.

As for when — Jesus is characteristically unhelpful. That is not yours to know, he says. God holds the timing. Not us. Not the church. Which is either terrifying or the most liberating thing we’ve ever heard, depending on the day.

The second thing Jesus says just before the ascension: "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you." He is foreshadowing Pentecost, which we will celebrate next week, when God sends the Holy Spirit to the world, in order to accompany the church, the people of the church, going into the world. In this, Jesus is making a promise he will fulfill, as well as reminding us of the continued presence of the Triune God with us in the world.

In some ways, Jesus is soothing our separation anxiety. He knows us well enough to know we will need this — that we are not, as a people, particularly good at being left alone. And so he gives us not a set of instructions, not a roadmap, but a presence. Something that stays. Something that moves when we move and remains when we remain and shows up, as it turns out, in exactly the places we've already been talking about — in the grief-sitting and the room-making and the quiet, faithful showing up. The Holy Spirit doesn't arrive to redirect us. She arrives to confirm that we were never doing this alone.

It is out of that accompaniment — that confirmation that we are not alone — that Jesus names what we already are. Jesus says:

"You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

Notice that he doesn't say: you are invited to consider witnessing, when you feel ready, if the conditions are right. He says: you will be. Not a suggestion. Not a hope. A statement of what is already becoming true about them. And about us.

And then those two men reappear, the celestial hall monitors, essentially asking: why are you still just standing there? They are there to push the apostles, and us, away from scarcity thinking — away from what will we do now that Jesus is not here — and toward a different question entirely: how do we recognize and remain open to see God here on earth now?

Because witness, it turns out, is not a solitary thing. The apostles weren't sent out one by one. They went as people who had already been shaped by one another — by shared meals and shared grief and shared bewilderment. Their witness was already woven through with each other before the Spirit ever arrived. And so is ours. Which is probably why Jesus doesn't say you will be my witness. He says you , plural, together, all of you, will be my witnesses. Already. Still. Here.

There is mystery in all of this, of course — in the timing we don't control, in the Spirit who continues to surprise us, in the witness we're still learning to see in ourselves. But mystery has never stopped this community from showing up.

I look at this community, and I see the same threading already begun. The one who sits with a neighbor in grief. The one who sets an extra place without being asked. The one who shows up, and keeps showing up, and by showing up teaches the rest of us what faithfulness looks like. These are not separate acts of kindness. They are strands of the same cord. And I wonder what it would look like if we started to see them that way — not as separate callings running alongside one another, but as one cord, one people, already moving in one direction. That is the cord that Bishop Craig Loya describes when he writes:

“That we belong to the ascended Jesus, that our beings have been tethered to him, means we are always being pulled toward God’s perfect reign of love, justice, and peace, even as we stumble through this broken and painful world.”

Tethered. To God and to one another. The more we live into our witness, the more those threads pull taut together, until what we are becoming is not a collection of faithful individuals but a people. A body. A church that doesn’t wait for the kingdom to be restored, but that is, strand by strand, day by day, already weaving the kingdom into being, right here.

Maybe that’s what it means to be tethered. You keep showing up. You keep doing the things. And one day you realize you’ve stopped staring at the sky — not because you stopped believing, but because you finally looked down and found what you were looking for was already here, in this room, in these people, in all of this perplexing and ordinary faithfulness. Which is probably what those two men were trying to tell us all along.