An Ascension Day Eucharistic Witness

                Whether we observe the day liturgically or not, it is the Day of Ascension. According to tradition, which is rooted in the Gospels and Book of Acts, at some point after the day of Resurrection, Jesus bid farewell to his followers and ascended into heaven. If we get caught up in the spatial questions, we miss the point of the day. The message of Ascension is that Jesus will no longer be physically present with the disciples, but they won’t be left alone as Jesus will send the Spirit to empower them so that they might bear witness to the good news. In these accounts, Jesus tells his followers to wait until that day before they begin their mission to take the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53).

                I will be drawing on the reading from Luke 24 in my upcoming sermon (I’m pulling from the Ascension readings for the service), and focusing on the call to wait for empowerment before beginning the work of proclaiming the good news. As I was beginning my preparation, I picked up Karl Barth’s book God in Action. I did so because I was drawing from Andrew Root’s book Churches and the Crisis of Decline, which points us to Barth’s early ministry and writings that encourage us to wait on God so that God might be God.

                In the course of reading through the chapter on the “Christian as a Witness,” where Barth insists that “the original and real witness is God Himself and He alone” [God in Action, p. 99]. For Barth, whatever witness we offer is rooted in God’s prior witness. Thus, “A man becomes, is, and remains, God’s witness because God Himself bears testimony Himself” [God in Action, p. 101]. (Just a note here on the masculine language—it’s not how I would speak but this is the nature of the translation of a book published in German in the 1930s).

                This word about God being the preeminent witness, which undergirds our witness, leads me to the point I want to make. This has to do with the role of the Lord’s Supper in our witness. Many readers will be well aware of the ban on communion issued by the Archbishop of San Francisco to Nancy Pelosi, a ban that stands in contrast to Pope Francis’ own declaration that he would not ban anyone from the Table (though I’m not sure he’d welcome me as a non-Catholic, but that’s a different issue). Getting back to Barth and our witness, he suggests that we become witnesses through baptism, but remain witnesses through the Lord’s Supper. It is through this Supper that Christ feeds and nourishes us with his body and blood, leading to everlasting life. It is he says a sacrament of hope, such that “we do not live our Christian life between birth and death, but between the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.” This sacrament continues to proclaim the “presence of Jesus Christ on our behalf.” [God in Action, pp. 111-112 (pages from 1963 Round Table edition)].

Here is the word that I want to take note of because speaks specifically of our witness and the Lord’s Supper.

A witness is always a man who is on his way to the Lord’s Supper. His eyes are ever on the advent of Christ in a firm hope: Christ for me! And in that spirit, he will remain a witness. For he does not stand on the foundation of his own goodness and piety and sincerity but on the sole foundation that God will vindicate himself as God; for he has already justified himself in Jesus Christ against every man for every man. Since it has happened once for all—It is finished! —our future and the future of the world is clear, and the path through the world lies open also for the witness of Jesus Christ. His stand is fixed under the sign: Thy Kingdom come! [God in Action, p. 112].    

That statement, that “a witness is always a man who is on his way to the Lord’s Supper,” is what caught my eye. It is our gathering at the Table that nourishes our witness to God and God’s realm, which is revealed in Jesus who instituted the table at which we remember him, so we can bear witness to God’s realm. But, as the Ascension texts remind us, we do this in the power of the Holy Spirit, upon which we wait, until God is ready to pour out the Spirit on the church. That mission to which we are called is for the good of God's creation, which is clearly broken as a war in Ukraine, along with deadly shootings at a supermarket and another school attest.  

Image Attribution: JESUS MAFA. The Ascension, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48398 [retrieved May 24, 2022]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact).