Ascension 2025
Glorious Day (chorus)
OT:
Pastor Andrew Loginow
Daniel 7.13-14
NT:
Pastor Bobby Owens
Acts 1.6-11
Song:
Crown Him w/ many crowns
Historical Reading:
Pastor Zachary McGuire
Apostles’ Creed
Song:
I stand amazed
Confession & Pardon:
Pastor Michael Champoux
Song:
Jesus is better
Sermon:
Dr. Alex Loginow
Ascension 2025
Introduction
On September 20, 2019 The New York Times published an article in the Sunday opinion section by Pico Iyer entitled, “The Beauty of the Ordinary.” These are the opening lines:
“Falling in love is the easiest thing in the world. But staying in love, we all know, can be one of the hardest. How do we keep the glow, the sense of unending discovery, alive once we’ve pledged ourselves to familiarity? And how to sustain the sense of anticipation that deliciously quickened the honeymoon? Put differently, how might we be enchanted by discovery’s opposite — routine — and find in constancy a stimulation as rich as novelty provides? The story of every marriage, perhaps, is the story of what happens after the endless summer ends.
‘To learn something new,’ the wise explorer John Burroughs noted, ‘take the path that you took yesterday.’”
Iyer talks about how in Japan the ordinary changing of the seasons are treated with a reverence and excitement that almost feels religious. He writes:
“Every time the cherries begin to blossom, people flock into the parks because, in 10 days or so, the frothing pink flowers will be gone; and every time the maple leaves blaze in late November, my Japanese friends and family throng into temple gardens in much the same spirit that people of any faith may gather in temples or cathedrals. To be joined in a congregation; to be reminded of something larger than ourselves, keeping us in place; to catch moments of light in a season of mounting darkness.”
This article is an invitation to find beauty in the ordinary. Ordinary feels like a cuss word in our modern Western culture wherein we’re all raised to be as individualistic as possible and chase our dreams. Between social media, the 24-hour news cycle, and a society obsessed with what’s going viral, we’re interested in everything but the ordinary.
This is the tension we find ourselves in on this Ascension Sunday. Last Thursday was Ascension Day, 40 days after Easter, the day the Lord Jesus ascended to heaven. Ascension initiates a trilogy of Holy Days that we celebrate starting today – Ascension, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday – and this triad of Holy Days marks a new season on the church calendar that we call Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time is the season representing the Holy Spirit and lasts from Ascension until Christ the King Sunday, which is the last Sunday of the church year before we start all over again with Advent.
During Ordinary Time we reflect on the ordinary means of grace that the Holy Spirit uses to change and shape our hearts in this time between the ascension of Christ and His 2nd coming. The preaching of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments – Baptism and the Eucharist –, the beauty of the ordinary in marriage, the home, the church, these are God’s ordinary means of grace that He uses to bring us to faith and to sustain our faith. And on this Ascension 2025 we hear an ancient Word from God; a Word that was written long before Jesus’ disciples watched Him ascended into the clouds. And while this Psalm was written hundreds of years before Jesus’ ascended, Jesus’ forefather, King David, was inspired by the Holy Spirit to glimpse into the shadows and give us a preview of this often overlooked, non-negotiable tenet of the Christian faith – the ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ.
God Above (vss 1-2)
And that’s the 1st thing we want to notice about this Psalm is the superscript – A Psalm of David. Don’t skip over that; it’s Spirit-inspired Scripture. It used to drive me crazy, I think they’ve fixed it now, but for the longest time on the ESV app, if you would listen to the passage, the vocalist, narrator, reader, whatever, didn’t read the superscript of the Psalms. This is part of the text; they’re in the Hebrew manuscripts.
And Psalm 24 is a Psalm of King David, the man after God’s own heart, the shepherd boy who slayed Goliath and became the greatest king in the history of theocratic Israel. This was a song, a hymn written by King David to be used liturgically – the people of Israel sang Psalms like this is worship. In fact, the Hebrew word translated as “Psalm” here (מִזְמוֹר) literally means melody. This was a song written by the king, sung in worship by the congregation.
And the song begins by acknowledging our God above.
The earth is yhwh’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.
King David harkens back to the very beginning, back to Genesis 1-2 creation language, to remind us that there is one true and living God and God is the creator of everyone and everything. Here David does what we all ought to do in every aspect of our lives and that is begin with God. God created all things for His own glory, He sustains all things for His own glory, He providentially governs all things for His own glory, so it is only because of pride and foolishness that we would consider anything in our lives or in this world without first considering God. The fool says in his heart there is no God.
Now I would assume that most of us would not say, “there is no God;” probably not many atheists in the room. I mean, you never know, but probably a safe bet that most of you are here because you believe in God. But how often do we say “there is no God” with the way we live our lives? How often are we pragmatic atheists?
How different would Monday – Saturday look if we were atheists? How often do we approach our work, school, marriages, parenting, our suffering, our sin as if there is no God? How foolish! The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, for He has founded it and established it. God sovereignly ordains all things for His glory and for our good; we should submit all our lives to God and seek Him, trust Him, obey Him with every thought, every word, every deed!
Fallen Man (vss 3-6)
The problem is we can’t do that, at least not perfectly, because we’re sinners. That’s what David’s getting at when he asks the devastating question of verse 3:
Who shall ascend the hill of yhwh? And who shall stand in his holy place?
The hill of yhwh, God’s holy place is not generic, or ethereal; no, David is speaking of Mt. Zion; the temple. The temple is where yhwh dwelt among His old covenant people. It was a microcosm of the Garden of Eden, representing God’s blessing and rule. David is asking, who is worthy to dwell with God; who is worthy of God’s blessing?
And the answer is verses 4-6 is damning. The person who has clean hands and a pure heart. The person who does not lift up his soul to what is false. The Hebrew literally means, “you do not carry your soul, your living being, your life, self, person, desire, appetite, emotion, or passion to emptiness or vanity.” The worthy person does not swear deceitfully; does not lie.
Who can ascend? Not me; not you; not King David. King David did not have clean hands and a pure heart. After David’s egregious sin with Bathsheba and Uriah, David begs God to give him a clean heart (Ps 51.10). Who can ascend?
In his song, “Lord Remember Me,” Andrew Peterson reflects on which of us might be worthy to ascend:
There is none righteous, no not one
We are prodigal daughters and wayward sons
We don't know the half of the hurt we've done
The countless we have killed
Our priests are cheats, our prophets are liars
We know what the law requires
But we pile our sins up higher and higher
Who can ascend that hill?
The bad news is none of us are worthy of God’s blessing. We have inherited Adam’s original sin and we all practice sin in thought, word, and deed, by what we do and by what we leave undone. We do not love God with our whole heart; we do not love our neighbors as ourselves. We don’t keep any of the Law, the 10 Commandments, and so we’re guilty and justly deserve eternal conscious punishment in hell.
This had to be especially heavy for David to write, because according to God’s Law, the King was supposed to be this worthy one. Like Adam in the garden, the King represented the Old Covenant people before God. Verses 5-6 tell us of the blessing mediated to the people from God through the King, the anointed one: blessing and righteousness would mark the generation following the one who seeks the face of the Lord. But we already noted that David was not worthy and the kings after him don’t get any better so what’s the answer? Is there any hope? Who can ascend that hill?
The Ascended King of Glory (vss 7-10)
How can that question not make us drop our heads in guilt and shame and hopelessness? But it is in the dark pit of that question that the light shines through in verses 7-10. And that light shines forth in the form of a 2nd person plural imperative – lift up your heads. It’s the same Hebrew verb in verse 4 (נָשָׂא) warning against lifting up our souls to idols, to what is false, to emptiness and vanity. But now David redeems the verb for us with the command: lift up your heads!
And what do we see when we lift up our heads? The King of glory! Verse 8 asks another question: who is this King of glory? The answer: yhwh, strong and mighty, yhwh, mighty in battle! ywhw of hosts, he is the King of glory!
And what’s curious about Psalm 24 is that David seems to be describing this King of glory as one who is simultaneously a righteous man and yhwh. How can that be? Well, David couldn’t see this clearly yet, but what was veiled in type and shadow in the Old Testament is revealed in the New Testament and the answer is the Lord Jesus Christ, He is the King of glory. Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one, who is truly God and truly man; Jesus is the righteous Law-keeper and yhwh himself.
Jesus was unequivocal about this; in John 5 He declares, before Abraham was, I AM. The Lord Jesus identified as the covenant God of Israel, and this is the very reason why Israel wanted Him dead. How can Jesus be both human and divine? St. John tells us that the Word was in the beginning with God and the Word was God….and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1.1-2, 14).
Jesus is the Son of God, the eternal 2nd person of the Holy Trinity, and as we confessed earlier in the Creed, He was conceived by the Spirit and born of the virgin. Jesus is the only person ever to have clean hands and a pure heart. Jesus never lifted His soul up to what is false; He never swore deceitfully. Instead, Jesus was lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness so that all who lift up their heads to Him can be saved. And that salvation was accomplished on the 3rd day because just as the Romans lifted Jesus’ body on the cross, God lifted Jesus’ body up from the dead by resurrection.
Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? Jesus can. Jesus did. Forty days after He resurrected from the dead, the Lord Jesus ascended to the right hand of God the Father almighty where He sits in session ruling the church triumphant in heaven, and the church militant here on earth, and the whole rest of the world for that matter. And Jesus will return one day to raise the dead, judge the world, and make all things new. This is the good news. This is the gospel.
And so, your response to the gospel must be to lift your head and see the King of glory! Look to Jesus. Take this knowledge of the good news, assent to it, and transfer your trust to Jesus alone. Receive Christ by faith.
When you lift your head to see Jesus, the Spirit will change your heart, and you will feel the desire to stop lifting your soul to what is empty and vein. You will repent of your sin. You will humble yourself, confess your sin, and turn from your sin. And then we live the rest of our lives looking to Jesus through the ordinary means of grace – the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments are the ordinary means God uses to keep our heads lifted to Jesus.
These ordinary means of grace remind us that it is not the work of our hands that elicits the grace of God. Righteousness is not infused. Faith does not precede regeneration. We are not saved by good works. We are not even saved by our faith. We are saved by the object of our faith – the King of glory who is worthy to ascend. So, drop your hands and lift your head.
Conclusion
So, back to the original question – “How might we be enchanted by discovery’s opposite — routine — and find in constancy a stimulation as rich as novelty provides?” Is it possible? In a world infatuated with discovery is there any enchantment in routine? Can constancy ever provide a stimulation as rich as novelty? Brothers and sisters not only is it possible, but we have no other option.
The grace of God is mostly mediated not in discovery, but in routine; not in novelty, but in constancy. Ordinary Time in general, and Ascension in particular reminds us that it is in the ordinary means of grace – the preaching of the gospel, the administration of the sacraments, in marriage, and in the home, and in the church – that the ascended and seated Lord Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, is saving us, He’s persevering in us, He’s molding us into the image of the King of glory; one who ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty. “To learn something new take the path you took yesterday.” To find God’s grace take the path you took last Sunday and the Sunday before that and the Sunday before that. To quote Andrew Peterson one more time,
Go back to the ancient paths
Lash your heart to the ancient mast
And hold on, whatever you do
To the hope that's taken hold of you
And you'll find your way