Airports are buzzing, Ferries are full. The inns have no more room. It’s the time of year when you are most likely to hear the plaintive question, “are we there yet?”

Today is the seventh and final Sunday of Easter. According to tradition, the risen Jesus completed all his earth-bound duties on the fortieth day after the resurrection. We call this Ascension Day. Always falling on a Thursday – just three days ago on our calendar.

On that original Ascension Day Jesus’s closest followers saw him lifting off and headed toward space. Which, in their minds was not so much an astronomical journey as a spiritual emancipation and return home. Also, the space into which Jesus departed was not outer space, or deep space, but the spaciousness and the home port that is God.

Meanwhile, the believers on the ground graduated from the school of following Jesus into their new vocation of guiding others to God in Jesus’s name. Like many newly fledged students, they had plenty of raw information and enthusiasm but little experience or wisdom. They moved out to spread the faith on the road. How soon did they begin to ask, “Are we there yet?”

The texts of Acts, Revelation, and the gospel of John show us that Christians were nowhere near “there” yet. Paul’s missionary journey in Greece records events from about 51-53 CE. John’s gospel and the Revelation are both from about 90 CE.  They had all hardly begun.

What we tend to celebrate as evidence of successful mission and faithful following was considerably more hit and miss. As testaments to the gloriosity of Christian faith, often a miss. As witnesses to God’s enduring grace and love, aka the glory of God, better at hitting the mark.

Paul maneuvered his way into Greece with Silas after experiencing inexplicable spiritual pushback in Asia Minor. Introducing Lydia to the Way of Jesus and subsequently baptizing her into the community of faith was a good beginning. But then a young slave girl began to haunt them.

She was an enigma, earning her keep telling fortunes. Spiritually gifted, she correctly identified Paul and Silas as servants of “the Most High God” bringing deliverance. How is that bad?

But it seems that her Greco-Roman spirit was not missionary-approved. At first they tolerated her. Finally, with no discernable compassion for her well-being, and with annoyance, Paul cast out the spirit.

He did not concern himself with the effect this would have on the young girl’s place in society or her safety but left her to the questionable mercy of her owners and market driven society. An unfortunate theme for future generations of Christian missional efforts. In gospel terms a miss.

The narrative instead follows the misfortune of the missionaries who were unjustly detained, beaten and imprisoned. Here Paul and Silas do the right thing after the ruinous earthquake. It takes no imagination at all to see this as a God-moment of deliverance from bondage. Here is a gospel hit.

The men stayed put when they could have escaped. This saved the jailer from taking his own life, believing that he would be executed at the hands of Roman authorities for failure to perform his duty. Out of gratitude for what he’d experienced at the hands of Jesus’s representatives he joined the Jesus Way. Gospel hit again!

The jailer’s household was very happy about his change of allegiance, which might say something about what kind of road the jailer had been on before that. So this is a gospel hit too.

Turning to the book of Revelation, the hit or miss is found not in content, but in application. These words were a hit with their original audience – people who were not free to practice their faith. People experiencing violence, social dislocation, and even death for believing that Jesus was God’s Way of light and truth.

In John’s Revelation these people heard hope and deliverance. A home for the homeless, free and clean water for anyone thirsting, life restored. The voice of Jesus, the Spirit, and the faith community all inviting, welcoming.

But for later generations this became a cautionary tale emphasizing divine retributive justice. Jesus is coming. You’d better be ready. You have to get this right. Or you’ll pay.

And so the spiritual point is utterly missed. It isn’t a matter of judging how others are doing with their lives. It is about judging how we are doing with our life. Are we leaning into the Way of Jesus? The way of integration and relationship?

Which leads us to John’s gospel. This message, too often regarded as impenetrably mystical, is not to be missed. This is Jesus’s prayer of purpose. He moves from the essential unity of God and Jesus, to the unity of the disciples, to the unity of the world.

Isolation, division, othering, rejection, hatred, and every spirit of disunity, are the ways of evil. It is an ancient and alluring lie to suggest that they accomplish any good purpose.  Inclusion, community, mercy, and grace are the Way of Jesus, always moving toward God. It is a journey of intimate and infinite love.

What does it take for anything to become a hit? It requires a groundswell of enthusiastic sharing from one person to another. Bringing people along and showing them what you have seen and heard. Entering fully into the spirit of it all: body, mind, and soul.

Until we are no longer asking, “Are we there yet?” Until one day we find ourselves beautifully one with the Indivisible, the Ineffable, the Source of all that is. Until we realize, this is the there for which we were always longing.