The Seventh Sunday of Easter - 2008

The Revd Frieda Van Baalen Webb, Priest Associate, preached this sermon on The Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 4, 2008.

 +In Nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.

Today is the Seventh Sunday of Easter, the last Sunday of the Easter Season. On Thursday just past, forty days from the Sunday of the Resurrection, the Church kept the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ into heaven. Because the practical realities of modern life so often keep us from weekday liturgical celebrations, we generally miss the opportunity to reflect on this fourth of the Principal Feasts of the Church Year. We miss the opportunity to enter, through imagination, and in spirit, what the earliest Christians experienced, and to make their experience our own. Without that participation, it is hard, I think, to grasp what is happening in the event of the Ascension. Luke tells us, in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, that Jesus spoke to his friends, and “as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Luke 1.9). For those of us, which is most of us, who are firmly grounded in earthly time and ideas, these words might conjure a picture of Jesus going up and up, infinitely, like a balloon or rocket, becoming a smaller and smaller dot, until he simply disappears into the stratosphere. The whole idea seems a bit silly, or at least, highly unlikely. Maybe it would be safer not to talk about it at all.

But recently, I visited my friend Dorothy, who resides in a nursing home in Orchard Park. She seems to spend a lot of time thinking about such things. In a conversation about the Resurrection and the experiences of the people who saw and talked with Jesus in those forty days before his Ascension, she asked, “Where is Jesus?” Well, to begin to answer her question, I think we need to free ourselves, if we have not already, from the simplistic idea that we are here on earth, with heaven somewhere up there (gesture) in the sky, and hell somewhere down there (gesture) under the earth’s crust. The reality of heaven exists all around us –– not up or down, but everywhere; not now, or then, but always. When Jesus was received into the cloud, he was received into the dimension of the eternally Real, which is to say, into God. I have no doubt that those who were present at the moment of the Ascension did, in fact see something, as I am sure they did on the occasion of the Transfiguration, when Jesus, with Peter, James, and John were all overshadowed by that same cloud. The cloud is the Shekinah, the cloud of God’s glory, which, in Jewish tradition, both conceals the presence of God, whose essence no one can look upon and live, and at the same time, by its brightness, reveals his presence. As we entered Lent with that image of the glory of God, so we leave the Easter Season with the very same image. The Lord Jesus, in the fullness of his humanity and his divinity departs from the apostles, and returns to his Father, completing a circle. The Word became Flesh and lived among us (John 1.14) in the Incarnation. The Word made Flesh was restored to his place with the Father in the Ascension.

We are not, I think, meant to understand the Ascension as primarily physical. It is not about defying gravity, or about the geographical location of heaven. It is about God, who became fully human, the human and the divine united in the one man Jesus Christ. That is Christmas. At the Ascension, the resurrected, glorified, perfected body of Christ became, for all eternity, part of what God is. As Athanasius of Alexandria said in the fourth century, God became human in order that we might become divine. For what Jesus takes to heaven is not his single human life, but the life of the world. This is the completion of God’s plan for us, whom he made in love. Jesus is the means through which our human life, in all its finitude and broken-ness, is taken up to be filled, fulfilled, and sanctified by the abundance and health and wholeness of God’s own boundless life.

 So, the Ascension is also about us. The church has struggled, from its very beginning, with those who would say the only part of us worthy of God is our spiritual nature. As humans, we are uncomfortable, sometimes even embarrassed, by the unavoidable truths about our human-ness. We have appetites; we are mortal, and will surely die; we have difficulties in relationships; we have joys and setbacks in our search for God; we have feelings and emotions that sometimes get the better of us. These things, and so many others that are part of what it is to be human, are things we often treat as less than holy, and somehow separate from our spiritual and religious lives. But the Incarnation and the Ascension are meant to teach us that it is a good and holy thing to be human. It is an important enough thing that God did it. That is not to say everything about humanity is wonderful and admirable. We know that, when we read and hear the news of our community and of the world. There is, to be sure, war, and poverty, and disease. There is greed and exploitation, fear and suspicion of those who are, somehow, different. Seemingly random acts of brutality are perpetrated by some of God’s children on others of God’s children.

 But in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, God has shown us pain and death do not have the final word. The world put Jesus on the Cross, to die the most shameful of deaths, saying, “This is what we think of a man who claims to be the Son of God”. God raised the Lord Jesus from the tomb, saying, “This is what I think of my Son”. God does not look down pityingly from his heavenly throne on our trials, with some abstract idea of what our life is like. In Jesus God took all of human life to himself, and brought it to heaven. God knows what is it to be human because God remembers what is it to be human.

Where Jesus is, to answer my friend Dorothy’s question, is “With God, as we are meant to be, in the fullness of time.” For now, we pray, in confident hope, that the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised, will come, as he said, to teach us everything, remind us of all he said to us (John 14.26), to comfort us, strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before (BCP, p. 226). As we come to the Holy Table to be fed with the Body and Blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, may we know ourselves, each and all, to be his Body, made in love, made holy, to do his work in the world.

Amhn.