Today is the last Sunday of the Easter Season. It’s hard to believe, but we’ve spent as many weeks celebrating Easter as we did preparing for it during Lent. Are you bored with it? This week we’ll take down the cross and switch the white paraments to red for Pentecost. I’m quite sure that you’ve already put away your Easter decorations at home—maybe you did that a month ago already. That’s fine, as long as you haven’t stopped celebrating the Resurrection. We Christians worship on Sunday because Sunday is the day Jesus rose from the dead. Every Sunday service is a mini Easter celebration. That’s because the message of the Resurrection is central to our whole faith. Without the Resurrection we’d be completely wasting our time. The resurrection is what makes life worth living. The resurrection is what makes our deeds live on after us. The Resurrection Lives On!

But, sadly, you can’t always tell that by looking at Christians. In our sinfulness we restrain the power of resurrection. You see that even in the apostles on the day of Jesus’ Ascension. They were thrilled to have Jesus alive again, but they were sad to see him go back to heaven. In fact, they weren’t even expecting it. They were so hopelessly focussed on this life and this world. The last thing they had on their minds was heaven and the life to come. For three years with Jesus, they stubbornly clung to their millennial hopes that Jesus was going to establish a worldly kingdom. He’d set up headquarters in Jerusalem, they thought. James and John asked if they could sit on thrones next to Jesus in his new palace. They had it all figured out—yup, the millenium is about to begin. St. Paul would later write: "If only for this life we have hope, we are to be pitied more than all men." But on the day of Jesus’ Ascension, that’s exactly what the disciples had: hope only for this life. They asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"

They were happy to have their teacher alive again, but because they were so focussed on this world, they missed out on the most important, thrilling and lasting joys of the resurrection: That their sins were all forgiven and that their bodies, which would die, would be raised to life again, and go to live forever with Jesus in heaven. Their misguided hopes for an earthly kingdom of glory had been popped like a bubble on that dark Friday afternoon. But—lo and behold—Jesus came back to life! Wasn’t it only natural for them to revive their depleted hopes for earthly glory? It was natural, all right, but it was wrong. And it had the real potential of keeping them from realizing the true power of the resurrection in their lives. Much later, the Apostle Paul, while facing death and living far away from Old Israel had it right. He wrote: "I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead. ¹² Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. ¹³ Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, ¹⁴ I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. ¹⁵ All of us who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you." (Phil 3:10-15) Paul had been brought to a clear understanding. He knew the power of the resurrection. That’s what made him such a marvelous witness. But on the day of Jesus’ Ascension—ten days still before the Holy Spirit came and fixed their broken understanding, the Apostles were still mixed up. By focusing on the earthly, they restrained the power of the resurrection in their own lives. That meant, of course, that they were still unable to declare the real power of the resurrection and change the lives of others—which was precisely the mission Jesus was leaving them with.

Nineteen hundred and seventy years later, we modern-day disciples still get mixed up in the same way. We confess the resurrection weekly in the creeds. We celebrate it annually, with great fanfare. But the power of the resurrection often gets hidden in our own lives and witness too. We’re covered often enough by clouds of despair, grief, and discouragement, as we, just like the disciples, get all wrapped up in our here and now right here on earth. We forget all about our own coming ascension. ‘Forget that pie in the sky stuff. I want things to go my way right now’ we often think. We want miracles. We’re looking for our own private millennium.

But if that’s what we’re hoping for, we going to be just as disappointed as Jesus’ first disciples were. If we’re walking around with our eyes firmly fixed on the earth and it’s things and cares, we’ll never be able see "the golden sunset bright’ning in the west." We’ll fail to remember that "soon, soon to faithful warriors cometh rest." By failing to focus on the real power of the resurrection, we destroy our own chances of bubbling over with excitement like the Apostle Paul.

But God isn’t ready to give up on us yet.

2. The real power of the resurrection is right here for us.

The prayer of Paul in today’s Epistle is very timely: "I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe." (Eph 1:16-23) The real power of the resurrection is right here for us every day.

Since Easter Sunday, we’ve heard a number of readings from the book of Acts. In those readings we’ve once again heard how Jesus spread his spiritual kingdom across the ancient world through the preaching of the Gospel. As the early Christians kept their focus on the real power of the resurrection—its power to forgive sins and set us apart for the life to come, they were ready and eager to witness to their faith. And the Holy Spirit kept working the miracle of faith from one territory to the next. It was Jesus who made that all possible by the power of his resurrection. That’s why Luke starts the whole book of Acts, and his account of the Ascension with these words: In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach.

The Jesus who was powerful enough to rise from the dead, was not going to let his followers cower in their upper rooms for fear—even in the face of martyrdom. His spiritual kingdom needed to be spread—everywhere. And so he came to them again and again through Word and Sacrament, and put eternity into their hearts. Through those miraculous means he would keep equipping them with the Spirit, and make them bold proclaimers of the resurrection. That was Jesus’ Ascension promise to them: "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

God has ways of making us bold, even when we’d prefer to remain silent and shy. Plenty of Christian martyrs surprised even themselves with their courage to confess Christ when their lives were on the line. What gave them the power and the courage to remain so bold and faithful? What gives us the power and strength to keep on faithfully plugging at it? It’s the power of the resurrection—the faith-given ability to store up for ourselves treasure in heaven. We know that everything on this earth that will be destroyed, but that we and all we do for Christ will live forever in the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus’ Ascension command, was that the power of the resurrection be brought to all the world. When we carry out Jesus’ command, miraculous things happen. The message of Jesus’ resurrection is not just words. It’s the "power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes." When we proclaim the Gospel, God brings spiritually dead people to life. Real people are added to the kingdom of God. People who were going to hell are now going to heaven. Bodies that were bound for decay and eternal suffering, are made temples of the Holy Spirit and prepared for resurrection and restoration in heaven.

Our preaching is not in vain, and neither is your faith. Our risen and Ascended Christ will come again to be Lord of the living and the dead on the great day of resurrection to come. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. "Men of Galilee," they said, "why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven." Jesus will come again with glory, to judge both the living and the dead.

In our sinfulness we may try to make the resurrection a ho-hum event. Satan may tempt us, just like Jesus’ first disciples to lose sight of the resurrection’s power and glory by bogging us down with anxieties about the here and now, and longings for an earthly kingdom of glory and ease. But God in his grace keeps putting the resurrection into our hearts and lives by the message first witnessed through the apostles. To a world bound in slavery to death and decay, they boldly went out with the vision of Jesus’ ascension in their minds, and the message of his resurrection on their lips, and the whole world was set on fire. By His word, God still turns things upside down. Through his Word, he lifts us above the mundane and by its power he fundamentally and dramatically changes us. His makes our ho-hum existence into a hallelujah experience, as long as we forsake our millennial delusions of peace in this life, and look forward to the real hope he’s promised. Just as surely as we’ve been resurrected from spiritual death and given new life, we shall live forever with Christ through the second resurrection when our Lord returns. "Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain." The Resurrection Lives On!