The Ascension of Our Lord
Texts: Luke 24:44-53;
Eph 1:15-23; Acts 1:1-11
You Tube: https://youtu.be/aKwisK3RbGk
Sermon Take-Home Notes
TRANSFORMING OUR PAIN INTO COMPASSION,
THE FUEL TO WORK FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE
I am swapping Gospel Readings,1 which I’ll explain in a moment. This is the Gospel according to Luke, the 24th chapter:
44Then [Jesus] said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you — that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” 45Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46and he said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48You are witnesses of these things. 49And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
50Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. 51While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. 52And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; 53and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
OK, so why swap Gospel Readings? I honestly can’t recall ever doing that before. But let me explain for a moment. One of the more important festivals of the Church is to observe Ascension Day forty days after Easter Sunday. That always places it on the Thursday before the 7th Sunday of Easter. So each year churches make a decision about whether to use the readings for Ascension Day or the 7th Sunday in Easter. My decision in recent years has been to go with a hybrid, using the Easter 7 readings except for the First Reading, where I swap in the Acts 1 story of the Ascension for the First Reading, like we did today. The Gospel Reading in your bulletin is for the 7th Sunday of Easter, Jesus’ prayer for the unity of the human family.
So why did I switch back to the Gospel Reading for Ascension Day? It has to do with having attended our Synod Assembly the past two days. We are in the third year of choosing a theme for the Assembly around four Core Values we claim for our life as a synod. This year’s Core Value is Compassion. Compassion. And Bishop Erickson in his sermon Friday evening made a seemingly strange connection: that compassion for followers of Jesus often emerges by going through pain. God graciously has a way through Jesus of transforming our pain through the compassion shown to us by others. And our pain is thereby transformed into our having greater compassion for others.
He began by being more vulnerable than I’ve ever seen from a Bishop. He told the story of one of the most painful times in his life. After he and his wife Lynn had their first child, Lynn suffered three successive miscarriages in less than three years. Upon having suffered the third, he was so devastated that he couldn’t think about leading worship the next Sunday. They just had to get away, a trip to the family farm in Iowa. But Bishop Paul, then-Pastor Paul, totally struck out in finding a pastor to replace him at the last minute, so he called then-Bishop Rogness to let him know about the vacancy. Bishop Rogness had an unexpected response. He said, ‘It just so happens that I’m not scheduled to be anywhere in particular this Sunday, so I will fill-in for you. You take-off and get away. You need it. And we can talk when you get back. I’ll take care of everything this week here for you.’
In his sermon, Bishop Erickson immediately followed that story by reading this poem by Pastor Steve Garnaas-Holmes (a person whose poetry I’ve shared several times with you). It has an intriguing title: “Steward Your Pain.”2 Let me read it to you:
You are a steward of all you are and have,
your riches, your gifts, your abilities.
It matters what you do with them.
You are also a steward of your needs, your wounds.
You are a steward of your pain.
What will you do with it?
Many people are poor stewards of their pain:
they feel hurt or fear, and they don’t know what to do with it.
They turn it into anger, resentment, blame and violence.
They make others bear their pain.
Others have pain as well—even deeper pain,
the agony of abuse, or generations of oppression—
and they turn it into compassion.
They let it fuel their work for justice and healing.
Your pain is part of your story, part of who you are.
Steward your pain well.
Let Jesus help you carry it, and see where it goes.
Turn your suffering into love.
Turn your pain, your suffering, into love. Dear Siblings in Christ, I believe that this is our superpower. Following Jesus, we are graciously able to turn our pain into compassion. It’s why I swapped the Gospel Readings: for that one phrase where Jesus is teaching his disciples how to read scripture around the basic fact “that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day.” It’s the second time in Luke 24 that Jesus has said this. I believe it’s one of the more important phrases in the Bible to understand, because the Risen Jesus says it twice, on Easter, no less. The first time is when he’s on the road with two disciples to Emmaus. He’s about to explain the whole of Scriptures to them, and asks them, “Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” (Luke 24:26). Jesus tells us that it was necessary for the messiah to suffer. Why? I believe it’s for this very reason that we’re talking about today. He is teaching us how to steward our pain into compassion, instead of passing it onto others.
Do you see how world-changing this can be? All human beings suffer pain. Often times, we stuff it, with the results of it generally making us sicker. Suffering emotional pain and stuffing it comes out in physical pain. Sometimes, we find ourselves passing the pain on to others. Do you see how important it is to the course of human history if more of us could actually learn with Jesus this superpower of turning our pain into compassion?
Another mentor of mine, Franciscan priest Richard Rohr, puts it this way:
As we go through life, the hurts, disappointments, betrayals, abandonments, and the burden of our sinfulness and brokenness pile up, and we do not know what to do with it all. If we do not transform this pain, we will most assuredly transmit it, usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our work partners, and, invariably, the most vulnerable — our children.
Spirituality is about transforming both history and individuals so that we don’t just keep handing on the pain to the next generation. . . .3
I think this is another one of those fundamental points that we will return to again and again. Jesus came to change history, to save us from ourselves, by making it possible and more likely that we turn our pain into compassion instead of simply passing our pain onto others. In the context of other fundamental understandings I would say that our human problem with violence is precisely this: that we pass our own pain onto others.
And I would amend Rohr’s statement by adding that we do seek to avoid passing the pain onto our loved ones precisely with a politics of violence against other groups of people, who aren’t like us. We don’t want to pass it onto the ones closest to us, so we invent these political schemes for deeming other groups of people less than human. We learn to tell ourselves, most often at the direction of our political leaders, ‘They are not good like us, so it is alright to pass our pain onto them. In fact, it’s their punishment, perhaps, for not being good like us.’ Hasn’t this really boiled down to our primary politics throughout human history? Isn’t this why “politics” is a dirty word for us?
Well, the politics of violence is precisely why the Messiah had to suffer. Jesus took the place of the ones we pass off our pain to. He became the one who somehow deserved our punishment, executed on the cross. He did this so that, on Easter morning, he could begin to change human history toward love and compassion. In raising Jesus — the one we punish, the one on whom we inflict our pain — God makes it possible for us to instead turn our pain and punishment into compassion for the other. Not knowing what to do with our pain is the thing which has, throughout history, split the human family apart. Learning to turn that pain into compassion, like Christ on the cross, is how we can reconcile the human family.
Briefly, I think we followers of Jesus have learned to do this in so many ways, even if we are conscious of doing so. I see it often as a pastor. Just a quick example: When a member becomes a widow, when her husband dies — and the deep and abiding pain that comes with that loss — how many widows, who have already been through turning their pain into compassion, come to console and comfort the one whose pain is fresh? Do you see? There’s so many ways in which we already do this. One more time I’ll say: we will need to return to this point again and again.
Let me end this morning by noticing how this theme is fundamental to what we’ve talked about the last two weeks (Easter 5C and Easter 6C). Racism. White Supremacist Racism has been the chief political scheme that white people have used to attempt passing our pain off on people of color, not only with justification but with political structures that shift the balance of pain to people of color. Jesus blows that apart, right? He tells stories like that of the Good Samaritan who disobeys the cultural rules of hatred between Jews and Samaritans in order to show compassion on the Jewish man lying half-dead on the road (Luke 10:25-37). In the end, Jesus lets himself become the punished-Other on the cross in order to blow up all our schemes of passing our pain onto the more distant Other. Chiefly, in our time that scheme has been racism. Jesus, the indigenous man in someone else’s empire, blows that scheme apart. And more importantly, he gives us the means to begin healing it. By living in his Spirit, he brings a politics of turning our pain into acts of compassion — acts of compassion especially toward those Others who used to be the main targets of our pain.
So let me give the last word, so to speak, to people of color. When people of color invite us to join them in standing against racism, this invitation is itself an act of great compassion. They are turning the great pain they suffer under racism into a compassionate invitation to end racism by working together with us. In many years of working against racism, this is how I’ve generally experienced that invitation from people of color.4 As Steve Garnaas-Holmes puts it, we are learning together to use our pain-turned-into-compassion into fuel to work for justice and peace. This is Good News, right? This is Gospel. That the messiah should suffer in order to lead us into resurrection living. We are raised to new lives of compassionately sharing our pain in ways that lessen it, as we work for justice and peace. . . until that glorious day when, as we’ve read several times during this Easter season, that day when God wipes the last tears from our eyes.5 Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, June 1, 2025
You Tube: https://youtu.be/aKwisK3RbGk
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Ascension Day, on the Thursday before the 7th Sunday of Easter, prompts a choice of readings. In recent years I’ve often used a hybrid of readings from the two lectionary days. Earlier in the week this year, I had opted for the first readings from Ascension and the Gospel Reading for the Easter 7C (John 17:20-26). That’s what was in the bulletins. But for the reasons I explain in the sermon I switched the Gospel Reading to Ascension Day, too. I placed it in my Sermon Notes for the congregation.
2. Steven Garnaas-Holmes, https://unfoldinglight.net/2024/10/21/steward-your-pain/
3. Richard Rohr, Just This: Prompts and Practices for Contemplation (SPCK, 2018), 76-77. Italics in the original.
4. One of my favorite books is an excellent example of a person of color calling all of us to work together for peace and justice: Heather McGhee, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (One World, 2021).
5. Rev 7:17 (Easter 4C) and 21:4 (Easter 5C).
