Ascension C - "BRB"

Acts 1:1-11

In 1976 in his book The Selfish Gene biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins coined a word, a term, that may prove to be Dawkin’s most important and lasting contribution to the cultural conversation. The word Dawkins coined was Meme. The word meme derived from the Greek word mimasis from which we get such words such as mimic, mime, and imitate. Meme is an idea, behaviour, style, or image that gets passed from one person to another.  

Mind to mind. Person to person. Group to group through imitation.  A meme is a mimicked scene played as a joke.  It is a shared image, endlessly modified, riffed on, and re-mixed.  As they tumble through our culture memes carry areas of meaning as they take images that are recognizable, powerful, and invites us to see them as recognizable but in a different way.”1

Take, for example, the image at the top of this page.

This meme takes that familiar image of the Ascension of our Lord visable in countless painting including one in our own Memorial Hall and superimposes the letters “BRB” on the bottom.  For those of you not steeped in Instant Message or Internet shorthand “BRB” stands for “be right back.”

This meme, like most all the others, has no small measure of truth to it.  The disciples expected Jesus to “Be Right Back.”  After all he had been coming and going from their lives ever since Mary’s encounter with him in the garden.  He blasted into the room they were gathered on the first evening after hearing the wonderful, yet unbelievable, news. He appeared again the following week to Thomas because he had missed Jesus’ first drop-in.  He appeared to two of them as they walked dejectly out of town and met them where they were on the road to Emmaus.  He made breakfast for them on the beach.  

Strange to us, but to his disciples, Jesus’ comings and goings were getting to be old hat.  Even today, which had a hint of finality to it, there was no reason to expect that he wouldn’t “be right back.” 

You can tell this by the question they ask him.  This is not a going away question. This is a “what are you planning to do when you get back” question.

“Master,” they ask, “are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? Is this the time?”2  What they really want to know is “are you going to free Israel from Rome now and restore us as an independent nation?”3

“In Luke's account, the disciples have followed Jesus throughout his ministry yet remained fundamentally confused about his mission ... expecting political restoration rather than spiritual transformation.”4

They had to have known that political restoration never occurs calmly and quietly without a battle.  Political restoration usually involves restitution.  It is the stuff of which wars are made. 

Look around the globe.  It’s all there!  You don’t need me to enumerate the flash points in Ukraine, Gaza, the Sudan almost too many to mention where occupied land, or land which is believed to be occupied, or one nations land that another just plain wants to occupy, calls forth restorations and sets off a never ending cycle of retribution that costs the lives of thousands, if not millions, of innocents.

“The disciples ask the nationalist question.” says Dr. Willie James Jennings in his commentary on the book of Acts that I have quoted here often.  “When will we rule our land, and become self-determining, and if need be, impose or will on others?”  It is not limited to nations or political powers but is rooted in “the deeply human desire of every people to control their destiny and shape the world into their hope-for eternal image.”5

Even after all that time of following Jesus the disciples just can’t shake the desire they have carried with them from the youth.  Politically they have lived for the time when they could wrestle power from the hands of the ruthless Roman occupiers and rightly restored it to the people of Israel.  

They are going to be members of Jesus’ cabinet.  They are going to get the corner offices and issue directives to their minions. They have waited long enough.  They want to have what they want to have and they want it here, now.  

Maybe that is why Jesus had to tell them to go home and wait.  

“As they met and ate meals together, he told them that they were on no account to leave Jerusalem but ‘must wait for what the Father promised . . . ’”6

It’s not a “not ever” it is just a “not yet.”  It will take place but not on their timetable and certainly not in the way they expected.

No wonder all they could do at this moment was stare up into the sky.  Amy Butler Bass once said of this:

You can imagine their confusion and downright horror.  They were ready to follow him to whatever was next. And then . . . away he went. Away. Unbelievably, there they were on the hillsides of Galilee hands cupping their eyes, staring up into a brilliant blue sky, trying desperately to understand what Jesus was up to now. And then he was gone. I have to admit that if I had been among the group of disciples there I also would have stared, mouth gaping open, at the clouds in the sky and the wisp left behind as Jesus ascended.7

Suddenly, he was gone, ‘vanishing into the fog like the end of a dream too good to be true.’”8

As Barbara Lundblad once said of this moment: “Jesus’ disciples must have felt the earth slipping beneath their feet at the thought of being left alone.”9

But were they?  Or, would he be right back? That seems to be the angel’s message when she said “why are you standing here staring at the sky? Jesus has gone away to heaven, and some day, just as he went, he will return!”

But were they?  Or, would he be right back? That seems to be the angel’s message when she said “why are you standing here staring at the sky? Jesus has gone away to heaven, and some day, just as he went, he will return!”10

While they waited for Jesus to be right back there was work to do. It was time stop staring and get going, time to stop pondering eternity ... withdrawing from the world and recommit yourself to it. The text continues, “Then they returned to Jerusalem.” They did not go off into the desert to meditate; they went to work.”11

So it is for us as we “live here among real people who have bills to pay, and children to raise, and parents to be cared for, and questions to be answered.”12

Biblical scholar, Martin Culpepper, said it best in his commentary:

Where the Lord's physical hands and feet are no longer present, the ministry of the hands of countless saints in simple and sincere ministries continues to bear witness to the Lord's living presence. {It is in}  the daily testimony of the faithful that the Christ still lives and the work of his kingdom continues.13

Christ still lives and his work continues when, in the lives of his people, others discover that there is no need for him to “be right back” because he’s never been away.

______________

1.   Scott Black Johnston, “Say Amen to Hands.”  Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. May 18, 2025 

2.    Acts 1:6. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

3. Acts 1:6.  (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible Carol Stream, IL: Tyndall House Foundation, 1971]

4. Ministry Matters, “Four Pages for Ascension Sunday Year C,” MinistryMatters Home, accessed May 30, 2025, https://ministrymatters.com/2025-01-15_four_pages_for_ascension_sunday_year_c/.

5. Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Publishing, 2017). 17.

6. Acts 3:1-5. (MESSAGE)

7. Amy Butler, “‘Don’t Just Stand There Do Something,’” A Sermon for Every Sunday, May 6, 2024, https://asermonforeverysunday.com/.

8. Barbara Brown Taylor, Gospel Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1995), 80.

9.  Barbara Lundblad, “Commentary on Luke 24:44-53,” Working Preacher, November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ascension-of-our-lord/commentary-on-luke-2444-53-4#.

10.  Acts 1:11. (TLB)

11. John M. Buchanan, “Into the World.” Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. 24 May 2009.

12. William H Willimon, “The Body of Christ,” Pulpit Resource, Year B, 43, no. 2 (2015): 29 – 32.

13. R. Alan Culpepper, Luke: The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. IN (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2005), 490.