I can’t remember if the question was “Where is God?” or “Where is heaven?” But it was a question that the pastor of the church I grew up in asked frequently and he wanted the congregation to physically respond by pointing to the ceiling. I remember one time him encouraging folks to hold their fingers aloft when not enough initially responded. He cited this week’s passage—the Ascension of Jesus—as the reason for the belief that heaven is up.

I never pointed up. This is probably my dad’s fault. He drilled into my siblings and me that words and specifics matter. If Jesus ascended to a heaven that was literally up then it would posit that somewhere out in the vastness of space was heaven. It would also be an up that was up from the Middle East at a certain moment in earth’s daily rotation and revolution around the sun. Odds are the up-pointing of a 1990s congregation in upstate South Carolina was lightyears in the wrong direction from the literal up of Jesus’ ascension (this is giving you some insight on what a strange kid I was).

I am not sure whether our pastor believed that heaven was literally up out there in space or in some kind of sky bound pocket dimension or what. It wasn’t a malicious act, but it bugged me. Beyond the logistics of literalism, it galled me that everyone was told to point up as if heaven was some kind of fixed point that we could comprehend. Much later, I also realized that casting heaven as the sky neglected a major theme of what Jesus preached throughout his ministry: that heaven is also breaking through here on earth.

Adaptation has been the hallmark of this weird season that we’re in. The important things in life have to continue even as the world as we’ve known it has ground to a halt. We try to do school from home as best as we can. We reach out and connect with friends and family over FaceTime and Zoom calls. We keep going where we are able.

My ministry with my students is the area where I have had to adapt on the fly the most. I am not always sure how we’re doing. The hallmark of a youth group is community and while we can see each other’s faces on our screen, I know that it is not the same as being in a room together or sitting down to a meal with friends.

But you do all you can to try and meet the needs of your community. We’ve kept meeting on Sunday mornings and nights over the internet. We have Bible studies through the weeks and gather once a week to just hang out and play some games. It has been encouraging to see those faces pop up on the screen to still talk about faith and share stories. You adapt. You keep moving forward.

The first Sunday of May at our church is traditionally Youth Sunday in which our students lead in morning worship. As the days of sheltering in place stretched into weeks, it became evident that we were not going to be able to follow the usual script for this capstone to the school year. But cancelling was never an option in my mind. Our church has been doing virtual services for weeks now, so we were going to put our spin on the service.

Like Thomas
I want to see something
That will make me believe

I have no need for nail-scarred hands
Nor wounded sides
Of a Savior back from the dead

But I want to see something
That will make me believe
Resurrection is possible

For I have my doubts
Not in the risen Christ
But in the rising rest of us

There’s a darkness I see
Inside myself
More often than I’d like

And I am tired
Of cruel avaricious kings
And their power-craving priests

The tomb is silent and cold and dark as a starless night. Sealed on Friday, the grave was the lifeless void that first day, so also the second, and so it began on the third. It would persist undefeated. The cold midnight hush would envelope that space until the world caved in.

Yet something stirred. The flutter of a heartbeat; nearly imperceptible. The silence reasserts its dominion for a time before another pulse briefly flickers to life. This is how it begins: a tug of war between life and death. If what the writer of the epistle says is true and to God a day is as a thousand years then decades elapsed between those first new heartbeats.

A thin line of musty air is drawn in and barely inflates the lungs. A breath more shallow than the damp dust from the first drop of rain touching the ground. The sound is a nearly inaudible hiss. A space of silence. Then another wisp of air is drawn in and then another. For some time he hangs there a breath towards the living and a silence towards the dead.

Several hundred, some may say several thousand, years worth of anticipation hung in the air. Like summer humidity that sticks to your shirt the second you step outside, you couldn’t avoid it. Not today. Not on Passover week.

A guy claiming to be the Messiah or at least someone who people said was the Messiah was nothing new. There had been tons of guys going around saying that they were the One; saying that they were going to show Rome what’s what. So a messiah making his way to Jerusalem was about as common as a singer-songwriter making their way to Nashville.

But this guy was different. There was a good deal of discussion over whether he was the right kind of different. It wasn’t so much that he talked like he was the Messiah. Word had it that he had tried to keep a lot of that talk and even tales of his miracles under wraps. But the stories still got out: dead men walking, the blind seeing, demon-possessed pigs plunging over a cliff, and thousands fed with a lunch meant for a kid. It is hard to keep those type of things hush-hush.

His name certainly carried great weight. Yeshua, which translates to Joshua or—as the Greeks put it—Jesus. It means “the Lord saves.” It’s true that tons of people gave their boys this name. What parent doesn’t want their child to be the redemption of his people? You have to name the kid to fit the bill. Poindexter isn’t going to quarterback the state championship team and Biff isn’t going to find the cure for cancer. Joshua, like Messiah talk, was nothing special. But it seemed special. At least with him.

All of this—the miracles, the name, the hope that he was the Messiah—mixed with Passover week like a molotov cocktail. Jerusalem seemed like it could explode at any moment. Roman officials were squeamish enough with all of these people that they had underfoot flooding into the city. The last thing they wanted was for another revolution-driven Messiah to take the religious devotion of the masses and turn it into a riot.