Sean C. Capparuccia

17 May 2026

Ascension Sunday

Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 42; Eph. 1:15-23; Mark 16:9-20 

The Resurrection of our Lord, Easter, is now six weeks behind us, and I am still amazed at how fast time is moving. It’s almost as if God was getting bored watching history play out and bumped it up to 1.5x speed.  Which is all the more reason to come to church; to sit down and be still; to worship with one another and enjoy our “sanctuary in time.” There is a song that goes like this, “Yom zeh, l’Israel, orah v’simcha, Shabbat menucha,” which means, “This day, for Israel, is a day of light and joy, a Sabbath of rest.”  We are Israel, and this is our day of rest.  All that is to say, I hope you find it – week after week – both restful and joyful.

And so, on this Ascension Sunday we celebrate Christ’s final appearance to His Disciples after His resurrection; and Christians have celebrated this day since the beginning of the Church.  And as a major Christian festival throughout the world, it also has with it some interesting lore. In Wales it is very unlucky to do any work on Ascension Day, and it is especially bad luck to do any washing on this day. In other places, the weather on this day is a harbinger of weather to come: if it is sunny, summer will be long and hot; and if it is raining, crops will do poorly.  But if it does rain, be sure to collect some of it as rain collected on this day is good for all diseases of the eye. And, gifts given to the blind and the lame on Ascension Day will be rewarded with great wealth for the next 12 months.[1] 

Who knows where these myths and legends originate, but I find it interesting here that in this last one, giving gifts to the blind and the lame, how it ties into the Scriptures for today.  In Acts 1:3, we read that Jesus, after His resurrection from the dead, “presented Himself alive….by many convincing proofs, appearing to [the Disciples] over a period of forty days…” In the Gospel, Mark records that Jesus “appeared to the eleven… and reproached them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who had seen Him after He had risen” (Mk. 16:14). Of course, Mark is talking about Mary Magdalene who saw Jesus at the graveside, and the two who were walking to Emmaus who ran all the way back to Jerusalem to tell the others about what they had seen. But they didn’t believe them. And when Jesus showed Himself to them, what did the absent disciple, Thomas, say? “Unless I see Him and put my fingers in the gaping wound in His side, I will not believe.”  How unfortunate that Thomas is labeled “the Doubter” when the truth is, they all doubted. Every one of them said in his heart, “Unless I see Him for myself, I will not believe.”

And that is why we have the Creeds, so that at least every week we say, “I believe in Jesus Christ…Who ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”  Now, whether you truly believe it or not is between you and God, but at least we proclaim it! So, you see how this ties in to the blind and the lame. I think that many of us, at some point in our lives, perhaps even now, have trouble believing these basic truths. We are, by nature, blind and lame. And this is why the Ascension of Christ is so pivotal.

By nature, we want to see in order to believe; at least if it is hard to believe. At some point I would like to do a series in Genesis and discuss the Creation. Now, I already said that I’d also like to do a series in Revelation, too, so unless you get rid of me beforehand, I plan to be here for a good long while so I can get all these series’ in that I want to do.  Obviously, no one was there when God created the world and we have two very prevalent and conflicting theories of what happened, don’t we? One on side we have what our Bible says happened, and on the other we have what non Bible-believing people say. So, some day we’ll talk about that in-depth. And this is important because, at least for me, a natural-born skeptic, I don’t like being railroaded into believing things that aren’t true. I have always balked at the statement, “Because I said so, that’s why.” Or even, “The Church teaches…” You know, maybe the Church is wrong on certain things, I want to know. I believe that God gave us reason so that we could use our reason to be reasonable and make reasonable choices and deductions. As someone once said, “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof-text.” I don’t want to make the Bible say what I want it to say; I want to say what the Bible is actually saying. Which brings us back to the text.

Before leaving them, Jesus reminded the assembled disciples of what had been told them some time ago, that, “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not too many days from now” (Ac 1:5). And He said, “…you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you; and you will be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and Samaria, even to the remotest parts of the earth” (Ac. 1:8). This is what Luke recorded.  Mark recorded Jesus as telling them, “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to all creation. He who has believed and has been baptized shall be saved; but he who has not believed shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:15-16).

There’s a lot to unpack in these final words, isn’t there? But the Disciples were to wait in Jerusalem for what the Father had promised. They were to wait for the big gift from God the Father Himself. Back to that in just a moment.

Into the Sky

Continuing in Acts 1:9, After Jesus said what He had to say, “He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight.” In other words, He began to ascend until He was hidden from sight by a cloud. Have you ever released a balloon? I mean, wrote your name and telephone number and tied it up and sent it into the heavens expecting that some day soon you’d get a phone call? “Hey, this is Billy in Nebraska. I found your balloon.”  When I was a kid, whenever I got a helium balloon I’d do that. Just the thought of this balloon flying over miles and miles, not knowing where it will land. That was always a neat thought to me. And when we release a balloon, don’t we just watch it until it’s a tiny speck and keep watching until it can’t be seen anymore?

I was wondering what actually happens to balloons when they are released like that. I found that as a regular latex balloon rises, it expands, which makes it continue to rise. Obviously, some latex is stronger than others, but a typical balloon rises to between 5 ½  and 6 ½  miles into the sky before it pops. That’s about the cruising altitude of a jetliner. And it usually takes your average ballon 90-120 minutes to get that high. We probably figured something like that, but here’s what I didn’t guess. When the balloon pops, it doesn’t just pop into a few big chunks like when you pop one on the ground.  At 5-6 miles into the sky, the air gets pretty cold and the latex freezes and becomes extremely brittle. And then at some point it shatters like glass into a million tiny pieces. So, in general, a couple things to consider: there aren’t big chunks of latex falling to the earth being eaten by possums and things, that’s good. The other is that your note that you tied is just a note on a string laying somewhere, depending on the winds, 15-100 miles away. So, maybe someone from Raleigh will call, but not Nebraska. Nevertheless, they make biodegradable latex just for this purpose. (Maybe we could make a bunch of notes that say “Come to Trinity” and release them every few months.)  Mylar balloons, by the way, do not shatter, they go up about a mile or mile and a half and then drift back down. So, definitely a closer radius with mylar.

Anyway, it is always fascinating to see things float up into the air. But what goes up must come down…. Except Jesus!  And watching the Messiah go up was probably even more spectacular. The Disciples just stood there watching, even when He was far out of sight. Picking back up in the Acts passage, two men dressed in white suddenly appeared, angels obviously, and stood there with them. Then they said, “Men of Galilee, why are you just standing here looking into the sky? This same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in just the same way as you have seen Him go” (Ac. 1:10-11).  In other words, “Guys, He’s coming back! Now go and do what He told you to do.” All those times He spoke about leaving and going away; then He was crucified; then He came back to life; now He’s gone and left again seemingly for good. Jesus had taken His disciples on a veritable emotional roller coaster.

But what they needed to realize, and here’s God’s word to us here, is that Jesus had to go up in order for the Spirit to come down. They were to wait for the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father would send and Who would help them accomplish the task given by Jesus. His Ascension was the guarantee that the greatest thing of all was going to happen.

I do believe, after 2000 years of waiting in these “last days” that God’s chosen race has gotten a bit complacent. And it has happened many times throughout history – it ebbs and flows. There are times of complacency and then times of great movement in the Church. And at our time in history, it has been a long time since there was a great movement in the Church. There have been little revivals here and there, sure, and God has certainly worked in individuals’ lives, but nothing on a grand scale for a long time. Some people are predicting a big revival soon – maybe its wishful thinking, maybe its just doing the math. But what we do know is that the Spirit moves when, where, and in whomever the Spirit wants to move.

When Christ ascended, He was signifying that His work was done. “It is finished,” He said. Tetelestai. Now we are in the age of the Holy Spirit who is working to bring to life those whom the Father has given the Son. Jesus prayed, “Father, I desire that those whom You have given Me will be with Me where I am in order that they will behold My glory which You have given Me” (Jn. 17:24).

Beloved we have not seen Christ’s glory yet. But if we are in Him, we will see it and it will be the most glorious thing anyone has ever seen. Perhaps we are waiting for Christ to come back and clean up all this “mess” in our world. You know what? That’s not what’s going to happen when He comes back. That’s what He did the first time He came.

You remember that everyone was waiting for the Messiah who would, what? free Israel from its oppression and whip the Romans? And we know now that they were barking up the wrong tree. He came to free His people, but it wasn’t from the Romans – it was from sin and death. “It is finished.” He did it. He destroyed death. Now death is nothing but a doorway into glory, it’s not a trap door that leads to nothingness. Christ ascended and went to go and prepare the place that every single one of His people will come home to. If we’re waiting for some further victory to happen, we will be waiting in vain. The victory is His; it’s not something that is going to be His. When He comes again it won’t be to fight for His people, it will be to receive His people.

Charles Spurgeon wrote, “In His ascension, Jesus bore all of His people with Him… Not one of the number shall fail to come where the Head has entered, or else Jesus [would be] the head of an imperfect and mutilated body”[2]  He will be presented with a spotless and unblemished Bride; a bride with all ten fingers and all ten toes and everything that makes her perfect. So, as Spurgeon noted, not one will be missing and not one more will be added. Every saint whom the Father has given to the Son will be there present and accounted for.  Ephesians 1 tells us that the Father has put – not is going to put but has put – all things under His feet and “made Him head of all things to the Church.”

Beloved, the Ascension is not just another milestone in the life of the man Jesus who is called the Christ. It is the personal guarantee that He came, He saw, and He conquered. In His body, in His flesh and blood, even now He “sitteth at the right hand of God the Father.” He is “far above every principality, authority, power, and dominion, every name that is named in this age and in the age to come.”  There is nothing and no one who is not under the sovereign rule and authority of Jesus Christ.  It is hard to grasp how humiliating it was for the King and Creator to come to earth as a human, because we are human. We think we’re the greatest thing in the world.  Well, so does my cat.  But He who descended has now ascended back into His glory.

And just like anything else in history, we can believe it or we can stubbornly refuse to believe and say, “Well, unless I see it, I won’t believe it.”  But here’s the part that every unbeliever misses: when you are given the Holy Spirit, belief is a given. The Holy Spirit of God testifies to the truths of God. People don’t have to struggle with whether to believe the Scripture or not: the Holy Spirit absolutely convicts us of it. In other words, unbelief is not really a heart problem, it is a spirit problem. I know we often call the heart the spirit and vice-versa but it’s more a matter of intrinsic versus extrinsic. The problem is not in here, it’s what the Holy Spirit out there does in you.

Again, the passage from Ephesians says that the Father will give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of Him. Not just “belief” in Him; not just a mental or academic assent to Him, but knowledge of Him. Through the gift of the Spirit, we don’t just know about Jesus, we know Jesus.

 Anybody can decide to believe anything they want, but that’s not how God operates. He creates right belief within you. He changes your heart. He changes your will.

So then, coming back to the beginning, what do we do? We repent and be baptized and believe on Him Who died for us. And then we go preach and teach; we baptize and disciple; we worship and fellowship together until He comes back. That’s all we have to do. Christ simply returned to where He came from. It is we, His people, His Bride, who are destined for high places. Is He calling you? Simply say, “Yes, Lord.”

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[1] David Pickering, Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions  (London: Cassell, 1995), “Ascension Day.”

[2] C. H. Spurgeon, Christ’s Triumphant Ascension in FGB Issue 243, Spring 2018 (Pensacola: Chapel Library). 43.