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Welcome to Unpacking the Mass with Keith Nestor. On this podcast, we dig into the week's readings for the upcoming Sunday for the Catholic Church so that when you go to Mass, you are ready to hear what God has to say to you through the scriptures. So grab your Bibles and let's get digging. Hey, friends, welcome to Unpacking the Mass. Today we're looking at the readings for the Ascension of the Lord. Beautiful, my friend. The second glorious mystery of the rosary, Jesus ascends into heaven. And you have to wonder, what were these guys thinking when this took place? They just got him back. They were probably thinking, wow, now it's time to get busy. And Jesus is going to lead us into this new phase of his mission, and we're going to be with him doing all these things. And then as he's giving them their final instructions, he ascends into heaven in a cloud hid him from their sight. Can you imagine? It does not get any more crazy for these apostles, does it, than what we see here in the Ascension? So we're going to look at this today and talk about God's mission for the church and how we can fit into that. But before we do, let's begin with a word of prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord, your mission for the world accomplished through the church is so powerful. And because you have ascended, Lord, we know that you have gone to prepare a place for us that where you are we may be also. Help us through these readings today to understand what exactly you've called us to do, to understand what you've called us not to do and what it is to be part of that stream of mission in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Acts, chapter 1, verses 1 through 11, reads this way in the first book. O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen to them. He presented himself alive after his passion by many proofs, appearing to them during 40 days and speaking of the kingdom of God. And while staying with them, he charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which he said, you heard from me. For John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit. So so when they had come together, they asked him, lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it is not for you to know the times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. And when he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up and a cloud took him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes and said, men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven. Our second reading comes from the book of Ephesians, chapter 1, verses 17 through 23. St. Paul writes these that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us, who believe according to the working of his great might, which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in that which is to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. And then our gospel from Matthew 28, 16, 20. Now, the 11 disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him, they worshiped him. But some doubted, and Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son, and of and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I've commanded you. And lo, I am with you always to the close of the age. Beautiful stuff today, my friends. Okay, let's talk about what's going on here in the book of Acts. And this is a reading where all of the A week where all the readings connect in a pretty powerful way. So of course we know that Acts was written by Luke. And when he references the first book in this verse, that's the book of Luke. So Theophilus means lover of God. Now, some people think that that was an actual guy, and some people just think that's basically a euphemism for all of us who are lovers of God. But Luke is explaining that he has written down carefully everything that happened in the life of Jesus, and not everything but the things that he needed to talk about. And now in this book, it's part two of the story. But I love the way that it begins. It begins with these men gathered together and who had walked this road with Jesus and had heard him talk about his mission over and over, but never understood it. And now there's something else that's about to happen that they're not going to understand either. He's about to be ascended up into heaven, but notice what he does, what he says to them. I have a chapter about this in my book, Unpacking the Mysteries of the Rosary, this Second glorious Mystery. And I focus in on the final words of Jesus to his apostles in this particular environment, because final words matter. The last thing you say to somebody is powerful, especially if you know what it's going to be. And think about Jesus. The last thing he says to them, he gives them this mission, but what are they focused on? When is this going to happen? What are we supposed to do? And he doesn't say, all right, guys, it's time for me to tell you everything, because I'm leaving now. You got to know the whole deal. No, he says to them, it's not up to you to know the dates and times. But guess what? There's power that's coming. And we all know what that's going to look like. But they didn't know they weren't going, oh, guys, just hang in there. This is Acts, chapter one, but Acts chapter two is coming right around the corner. And then the Pentecost is going to be here and all of that. No, my friends, they were in that place where they didn't know God's timing, and yet God gives them the mission. And this is powerful. And we're going to dig into what this mission was in a little bit here. But I want to kind of work through the rest of the readings, too, because what's happening here in the Ascension is really another level of fulfillment, as St. Paul talks about in Ephesians, that the church now, with this promise and with this mission, is going to be given a progressive enlightenment and knowledge in the power of God. He says that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give You a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you. This is really why the second glorious mystery, the essential, the fruit of it is hope. Because we understand what God is doing. When Jesus ascends into heaven. He's not just like, all right, I'm done. I'm taking a break from all this. Yes, he is seated at the right hand of the Father. He makes intercession for us, but he's also preparing a place for us. And through the Holy Spirit, is empowering the church to accomplish his mission. And this is beautiful what is happening here in this reading about how everything that Christ went through in his passion, now at the end of it, he's being given this incredible glory. Sit at the right hand in the heavenly places above all rule and authority and power. Jesus submitted himself to the authority and power of Pontius Pilate. Remember, Jesus said to Pilate, you would have no power over me if it had not been given you from above. So Pilate had power given to him by God. And Jesus had to submit himself to that power and allow himself to be crucified. But yet now he is seated in that place and all power. There's no power that he has to be underneath anymore. That's over and done with, my friends. He's put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church. Again, this is the mission. The mission of God for the church is not accomplished independent of of Jesus, but rather through Jesus and his power worked out through the church. This is important. And again, we see this in the Great Commission here in our Gospel, these final words that Jesus gives. We got to talk about this mission, my friends, because the mission is God's, not ours. And this is something that we have to keep in mind because we're so selfish in the way that we look at everything. We think that it's our mission, that we have a mission. And sometimes we'll look at ourselves and say, well, how am I going to fulfill my mission for God? And I think that there's an element of that that is rooted in good things because we recognize that we have agency in our lives and we have. We have choices to make. What are we going to do? We all have to decide what is our life going to be about. But sometimes that decision gets a little more weight than it should get. Because it's one thing to say to yourself, hey, what do I want my life to be about and then make a decision. But we should never make that decision apart from God's mission. And what I mean is this. If we take this sense of mission too far, then we run the risk of hijacking God's mission. Because what we have to remember is this. God has the mission, and the church's role is to fulfill his mission. It's not the other way around. But sometimes we treat it that way. I remember when I was a pastor in particular, there were all sorts of times when church growth experts and authors and theologians and academic people and all these different people and different pastors would come up with these different ideas for what their mission was. I remember when our denomination, the United Methodist Church, rolled out this new mission statement that was probably the result of years of ridiculous meetings and probably tens of thousands of dollars in consultant fees to come up with this mission, which their mission was actually a pretty good mission. It was to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Now, honestly, I think a third grader probably could have figured that out, but it made everybody feel pretty good to slap that on a bumper sticker and say, this is our mission. But yet what does that really help us accomplish? How are we to make disciples? Jesus Christ? What are we transforming the world into? And because that mission was not connected to this promise and authority given by Jesus to obey his commands, it's pretty worthless in my opinion. And that's why I'm Catholic. You see, you can have all the mission you want, but if it's not connected to what Christ said, then where's it going to go now? Why am I beating up on them? Why am I saying that? Because it's pretty clear that obeying Jesus commands is not part of that equation. Because they, among many other denominations, have completely jettisoned a good portion of what Jesus commanded the church to do. So, and that's my opinion. But you can look at it, and that can happen a lot. People can say, well, my mission is to do God's will. But then they can choose to live that out in ways that are inconsistent with what God has said. That's why it's so important that we recognize that this enlightenment, this sense of the eyes being open to what God is talking about here in St. Paul's letter, this revelation isn't given to individual people in and of themselves. Rather, it's given to us in the context of the church of which Christ is the head. Why is that important? Because left to our own devices, human beings are going to completely jack things up and of course, we've seen that in all of the divisions within Protestantism, all with different missions and all with different ideas and all with different tactics and all these things, which is fine to have a diversity of tactics, but it's not fine when it is disconnected from the authority of Christ. And we've seen the results of that, my friends. So we have to understand this concept of mission in the context of the Church and Christ's plan and Christ's conditions for the promises that this mission will not fail. And that's what we see in the Gospel. When Jesus talks about this mission, what does he say? Go and make disciples. We got that. But how? How do we do that? He gives us two things. Baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And lo, I am with you always to the very end of the age. Okay, so this baptism is important. Jesus never downplays that. He doesn't. Oh, faith alone. He doesn't just say whatever you want to do. No, he says this is important. This is at the top of the list of my mission. Because baptism is a sacrament of initiation into the covenant. Baptism fulfills circumcision and replaces that from the standpoint of how do you enter into God's chosen people? Through the grace of baptism. So Jesus, he affirms that and says, this is what's part of your mission. But baptism, any way you feel like it. No. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. That's why the Church is so hung up on that. And if you remember, a few years ago, there was a Catholic priest who, in some desire to be, I don't know, clever or enlightened, I don't know. He changed the baptismal formula. And I believe he said, we baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. I've heard goofy things like that, you know, or Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, or all these things that want to get away from patriarchal masculine language because we can't have that. And what happened? Well, the Church decreed that. Well, all of those baptisms were invalid because you don't jack with the recipe. My friends, we have to do what Christ said. And that's what we see the apostles doing. So baptism. And then. And this is the key, teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. This is why it's so important. And I know I was beating up on the Methodist. I love Methodists. Don't get Me wrong. I still love the Methodist, but just from my own perspective, as I was walking through that and seeing things that were clearly a departure from what Christ had commanded and trying to raise a stink about that and saying, hey, what about this? They would basically say, no, no, that's just your interpretation of the Bible, Keith. We've evolved past that. We're not going to be like that. Well, okay, well, how's that going? How's the mission going? You can have your own mission, that's fine. But if you want to be part of Christ's mission, you have to do it his way. And that's so important, my friends. Now what can happen sometimes is though people, they go, yeah, I'm all in on this, but we can get really hung up on the tactics of the mission over and above the point of the mission. And again, I, I go back to my days in ministry where it seemed like every two or three years somebody wrote a new book about how to do ministry, how to grow a church and what we're supposed to do. And I remember following these things around like they were the special sweet sauce of how we do this. And it all related to different ideas of tactic and it almost became the point rather than the actual mission. So people would get hung up on things like, no, no, no, you gotta do church this way. So I remember like back in the late 80s, early 90s, when the Willow Creek model of seeker sensitive church was becoming all the rage, people like were in these traditional looking sanctuaries, even in the mainline Protestant churches, and they were like, oh, we got to give these places overhaul, man. We have to turn them into more inviting environments so that we can reach the world for Jesus. So, you know, that's when all the felt banners went up. And I know this happened in the Catholic Church too. I'm glad I wasn't around for that. That's when all the felt banners went up. That's when they started trying to do different things. I don't think this happened too much in the Catholic Church, but I remember in other churches they wanted to get rid of things that looked too religious. So one church I attended didn't have a cross anywhere in the building because they thought that was too religious looking. I know, I know. Just hang with me here. So they had like a dove instead or something like that, or they removed everything. They wanted their language to be more inclusive and culturally relevant. So they decided to stop talking so much about different things that might trigger people's response and actually make them think they're at A church. As if you're going to fool somebody. You give your church a cool name like River's Edge or, you know, something, whatever, you know, I mean, there's a million of them, and they always change them over the years. But that people aren't going to realize that they're sitting in a church. I mean, when the dude comes out and opens a Bible and starts talking about Jesus, I kind of think people get the idea. Especially when the offering plate gets passed, it's like, all right. And then someone's like, hey, join a small group. People are gonna. They're not gonna be like, oh, man, I thought I was going to, you know, a TED Talk and a rock concert. This is a church. Are you kidding me? But we got so hung up on these methods that everybody just wanted to overhaul them. And then I remember when it was all about. There was this book that came out called Simple Church, where they're like, we got too many things going on in church. We have too many programs. We got too many different things. We got too many. So we just got to simplify it. So people used to go through all, like, church staffs and pastors would go through their. Their calendars and their programs, and they would just start slicing everything. And I remember I was part of a church that did this, and, man, if you want a way to, like, make everybody mad, start doing that. So you'd have a pastor who'd be like, all right, we're not doing this program anymore. You know, all you little old ladies that like to come in here and, like, knit quilts and stuff like that, we're not doing that anymore. And you, the Boy Scouts, get them out of here. And all these different programs just get that we're doing one thing. And, you know, everyone was like, okay. And I think some of that can be okay. But my point is this. And you have to forgive me when I go off on these things, because I just was such a part of my life sometimes. And let's not pretend that we can't get caught up in this, too. Catholics, hello. Sometimes we can get more focused on our favorite method, that we can make that more important than God's mission. Yeah, it can happen. How does it happen to us as Catholics? Well, let's be real. There are times when we make our favorite devotion and our preference somebody else's prescription, don't we? So, for example, I love to pray the rosary every day. I'm a huge believer in that. Obviously, you guys know that about me, but if I told everybody, that was Catholic, you must pray the rosary every day or you're not a real Catholic. That's not right. And we have to make sure that we don't go beyond what. What the Church mandates to us for these things. But sometimes if we have a particular way of connecting with the Lord, a particular devotional practice or particular thing, we can say, well, this is what works for me, therefore. And it's a good thing, therefore, I'm going to prescribe that for everybody. And it doesn't work that way, my friends. We have to be all about Christ's mission. And individually, we are going to have different ways that we connect to that. But we can't get more hung up on that than we do on Christ himself. And this is a criticism that gets put on us sometimes. You know, sometimes in the liturgy wars, people will criticize, you know, I go to the Latin Mass, but. And one of the criticisms that people will have of quote, unquote, traditional Catholics that go to the Latin Mass, especially if they're militant about it, is people will say, you guys are more concerned about the liturgy than. Than the God the liturgy worships. And sometimes I think, yeah, that's fair. Sometimes I think that we have to be so careful, friends, that we don't put our method in front of the mission and make that the point, because then it can just become another way, another idol that we have substituted for God. None of that might make some people uncomfortable because some people really relate to God through a certain thing. And in some ways, the practice of that thing becomes more important than Jesus. We have to be so careful of that, my friends. It's one of those traps that we have to avoid, because Jesus doesn't get that dialed into this, does he? Now, the church would later work all this stuff out and continues to work all this stuff out. But the most important thing that we have to remember is, is that, number one, God has a mission and his church is there to fulfill it. And he's given specific elements of that mission that can't be hijacked, regardless of the methods that we use to get there. And then the other thing is this. That mission can only be fulfilled by the power of the Holy Spirit working in and through the church and us. He doesn't. This mission that he gives at the Ascension is not marching orders to go out apart from him and do all these great things for Jesus, because remember what he says at the end of the Great Commission. And lo, I am with you always to the very end of the age. And he also said in the first reading, the Holy Spirit's going to come upon you so that you can do this. So we have to avoid that trap, too. We have to avoid the trap of thinking that he's just telling us what to do. And then he's sitting back going, well, I really hope you do it. No, my friends, what we have to do is stay connected to him and be obedient. And I think one of the reasons why he doesn't give them the timing is so they can. This is crucial. Have you ever been the person that's like, God, when is this going to happen? What are you doing in my life? I need to know the details. Are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel now? What's going. The disciples? It's a good question. I don't beat them up for that. I've done that plenty of times. God, what's the deal? What's going to happen with this? Is this going to go down? And. And what does Jesus say? He says, that's none of your business. That's not for you to determine. He gives them the next step, only not all the steps down the road. Probably because he doesn't want them to run ahead of his will. He doesn't want them to get over their skis and jump ahead. And that's something that some of us can do. I think we're wired one of two ways with this stuff. You see, there's a danger if we know too much, if we know God's timing. Let's just say, for example, you know, we knew when God was going to do something. Let's say these guys knew what was going to happen and they knew that it was going to be thousands of years and Jesus still hadn't returned yet in the way that they were told. I think there's two ditches we can fall into, and the first ditch is to say, okay, well, I guess there's nothing for us to do. We got plenty of time. We can chill. Is that how you're wired? If you knew, you know, let's just say that you knew the day you were going to die. If you knew you were going to die in five years. Okay, what would that five years look like? Would you just go, sweet, I got five years, man. I can kick back and take it easy. Some of us are wired that way. And if God told you, hey, here's how much time you have on this earth, here's the mission I have for you, and here's how much time you have, some of you would do the absolute least amount required in that time period, you'd be like those servants who are just like, ah, we don't know when our master's coming, let's just chill. That's one group of us potentially, okay, but there's another group of us that if we knew that we had this X amount of time, we would become so focused on activity and self, I don't know, like self direction that we wouldn't even have time for God. We would take control and just go crazy. Is that you? Is that how you are? If you know you have a certain amount of time to do something, do you feel like you just have to go completely crazy and just over focus on that activity and go crazy and take control? See, I think that that's pretty important, right? We get worked up about God's timing and for some of us that leads to overactivity and for some of us that leads to under activity. I probably could have said all that with just that one sentence, but I think it's important. What does overactivity look like? Coming up with your own mission, going crazy, hijacking it, focusing on your method over the mission. What does under activity look like? You know, I mean, that's pretty easy to describe. Not much. Ah, whatever, whatever, whatever. See, I think that we have to discern who we are in that now. What does it look like for you? If you think about it, we probably have examples in our, in our regular lives when we've done this, you know, when we have been more focused on what we're trying to do in the activity rather than what we're trying to accomplish. Never confuse activity with productivity. A good friend of mine told me that about business. And I remember this. When we were, Stella and I were starting our photography business years ago and there was this period of time where we just tried to do everything we possibly could do, every opportunity, every thing we could do, to just be busy, busy, busy, busy, busy. And yet we were spinning our wheels and we were not profiting anything, but we were super busy. And my buddy told me that, he said, never confuse activity with productivity because working smart doesn't always mean working a lot. Sometimes you have to be targeted in what you're doing and we had to kind of walk through that. And I think that's true in a lot of things. You know, if you think about it, you're trying to get healthy. There's lots of different ways you can get healthy. But if you're so focused because you saw a guy on YouTube who said, you know, you must walk 10,000 steps a day, and you become so hyper focused on walking 10,000 steps a day that you didn't think about your diet, you didn't think about weight training, you didn't think about good sleep and, you know, all of the nutrition you needed. You're just like, all I got to do is walk ten thousand steps. Ten thousand steps. Ten thousand steps. Well, you can nail that, but miss a lot of other things. You see, you got to have balance. You got to have the end goal in mind. And for some people, walking 10,000 steps is going to do it. For other people, it's all about resistance training. For other people, it's all about running. You know, I don't know what it could be, but the point is this. The mission has been given to us by Christ, and we have to remain singularly focused on that mission, recognizing that it's not our mission, it's his mission through us. And then when we do that, we can ask then, lord, help me to understand my part in this and then give me the power to do what you've called me to do. That's really what it looks like, my friends. And how does that play out? That's what the beautiful thing of our lives is. We get to spend our lives fleshing that out. But if you understand that God's given this mission and you also remember that it's connected to baptism and obedience to his commands and his presence with us, then you have the freedom to explore how you can be a part of it. And you don't have to do it on your own. You're part of the church, the body of Christ, the fullness of it. And that's how we see this expressed in the Book of Acts. The ascension is the beginning of this new, incredible thing. And it was a scary thing for them. They're like, what are we going to do? But what do we see? We see those two things I mentioned, don't we? The call to just chill and wait from Jesus, stay here. But yet then, because maybe some of the disciples were the guys that were going to be like, you know, over activity. But then we also see the angel saying, hey, don't you know he's coming back? Which is a call to activity, because maybe some of the other disciples were like, all right, cool, he's gone. We can just take a break, man. We need it. No, friends, it's both. And isn't it? We have to be resting in him and waiting for the steps that he lays out for us, while at the same time, never, never sitting back thinking, ah, I got tons of time. I don't need to be about his business. No, my friends, that's the beautiful thing. That's why I think being Catholic is the greatest adventure of a lifetime. Because in that we are connected to a mission that will not fail. We're invited into it with Jesus and with each other in a powerful and amazing way. And he equips us to do the things that he's called us to do because it's his idea, my friends, that's the mission. That's what the Ascension is all about. As I said earlier, the spiritual fruit of that we pray. The mystery is hope. And how can we have hope? Because we know that he will succeed. The gates of hell will not prevail against his church. That's his promise. And if we remain connected to his mission in his church, that's a promise for us as well. So whatever happens, we know that he wins. And if we're with him, that means we win too, my friends, we're going to see all of that played out. We've been seeing it play out, my friends. And we're going to continue both in our readings and in our everyday lives. And it's exciting and I'm thankful that maybe this is a part of that for you. It is for me to open up these readings and look at them and say, lord, how can I be more fully connected to your mission and empowered by the Holy Spirit to do what you've called me to do for your glory? That's what we want to pray together, my friends. And thank you for being a part of that here on Unpacking the Mass. So, friends, we'll be back next week and it continues. I'm so thankful that you're here with me. Please do me a favor and subscribe to this YouTube channel we're. Or give us a five star review on whatever podcast platform you're listening to. And we're going to continue to move forward with Christ's mission through his church. Thank you so much, my friends. Take care and God bless you.