Ascension Day - Thursday, May 30, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve, OHC
Ascension Day - Thursday, May 30, 2019

Acts 1:1-11
Ephesians 1:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

The wrong place to begin is to ask, “What happened?”  But, if we were to begin there, of the big mysteries of the faith, I would rather talk about Easter.  Maybe that is why I got assigned to preach Ascension.  I do not claim to be able to explain miracles, but I can in some sense at least imagine the resurrection.  In the darkness of the tomb, beneath the linen shroud, specific things happen - blood begins to flow, neurons fire, nerves awaken, muscles twitch.  The same body that was on the cross, buried, and sealed in the tomb has been raised.  Then the gospels go out of their way to tell us of Jesus’ physicality in eating, touching, even revealing his scars after the resurrection.  Although he is also clearly different, he is there, he is present in a way that corresponds to how we naturally want to understand presence – a particular someone who is somewhere, even if he does occasionally vanish into thin air.  The ascension, as an event equally in time, equally involving Jesus’ body, forces the inevitable question, “Where did he go?” which is a bit of an improvement on the wrong question, “What happened?”, but only a bit.  The word in the text is “up”, which does not help very much if we think merely in the categories of natural physics.  Ascension invites bigger questions, even the meaning of simple words like “where” and “go” and “up”.  A new consciousness is needed.

Keeping open to what some of these words might be pointing to, we remember that the ascension is two realities.  The first is that Jesus, continuing as fully human and fully God is at the right hand of the Father in heaven, interceding for us, ruling and reigning over the universe.  His physical, risen body is “somewhere”.  The second is that, as Leo the Great says in his sermon on the Ascension, the visible presence of Jesus has passed into the sacraments.  It is not half in heaven and half here, but heaven and earth are joined in the risen, ascended, exalted body of Jesus the Christ.  Jesus’ particular human life is joined to heaven.  Jesus’ ascended life is joined to earth.  Jesus is not now dismembered from human life and experience, but adorned by it, fully glorified in the very flesh that was born, lived, died, was raised, and ascended. Glorification is the passing from the specificity of his earthly and even risen life to the yet incarnate, but universal state of life as and in heaven.  Jesus participates in the beyond time and space of his presence with the Father and the Holy Spirit which is called heaven, and under the veil of the bread and wine of the Eucharist, the water of Holy Baptism, and the other outward and visible signs of sacramental grace truly continues his ministry of presence and work among us in his Church.  By his very ascending into heaven, to the realm or office of reality beyond our present senses, he is able then to descend continually and universally and gift us with the inward and spiritual grace of his life through the Holy Spirit.

All that to say that we do not proclaim a mere memory of someone who once was but is no more; or worse yet a mere spiritual presence to which we may look for ideas and concepts.  Given that, I would like to explore the notion of an ascension-informed and infused spirituality.  Meaning that if heaven and earth are joined, if the presence we proclaim is indeed the case, what might the longing for union and transformation be like?  What we believe about how Jesus is present in and to our souls informs what spiritual life will be, the nature of what kinds of persons we are invited to become.

We say with confident faith that Jesus is present here, now.  Through the Holy Spirit and within our sacramental celebrations, that is real and true.  However, Jesus’ absence to our senses and direct encounter is a quality of his presence.  This mystery is often neglected as an aspect of maturity in Christ and misunderstood as something wrong, not working, a failure to unlock the secret to bliss.  As N.T. Wright says in Surprised by Hope, “…the one who is indeed present with us by the Spirit is also the Lord who is strangely absent, strangely other, strangely different from us and over against us, the one who tells Mary Magdalene not to cling on to him…”  And then Louis-Marie Chauvet has this wonderful phrase in his book Symbol and Sacrament “the presence of the absence” of Jesus, which for him is the essence of faith.  Because it is by faith that we are taught to long, to hope, to watch, to wait, to love.  It is the very presence of the absence of Jesus that stirs the cry “Come, Lord Jesus”.  So this spirituality is an awareness of soul that he for whom we most deeply crave is seen in glimpses, through a dark glass, not as yet see face to face.  Our prayer and other spiritual practices are energized by the expectation that we will, in our own death and resurrection, join the incarnate Christ in heaven and become like he is.  But this hope is less our comprehension of the meaning of the mystery of the ascended Christ and more the acceptance of the dazzling wonder of his strange otherness.  The resurrection accounts and the conversion of Paul give us some stories of this.  Jesus’ untouchability for Mary Magdalene, his disappearance from the table at Emmaus, the ascension itself, the bright light of his appearance to Paul all apply metaphorical language to an experience which leaves as many questions as answers.  It is a pattern which continues to operate within our own discipleship: the transformation begins in the encounter, but echoes long after Jesus is “gone”, because he is not gone.  He is present in his absence.  His withdrawal is part of his coming.  He is both processing and recessing at the same time.

So we are invited within our souls to dance with the paradox that Jesus is both “somewhere” in a way that makes encounter possible and real, but never circumscribed within our containers of understanding or located exclusively in this and not that, only with us and not also with them.  This is where the nature of the mystery directly confronts our stubborn pride and selfishness.  We like to re-particularize God in ways we can define.  Rather than inhabiting the mystery of the presence of the absence of Christ in this life, we rush to fill the void by creating a Jesus of our own design.  But Jesus is not available to be hired as the mascot for our projects or the guru for our narcissistic self-enlightenment.  He does not enter into our conflicted “us/them”, “in/out” categories which say, “If we are right, those who are different must be wrong.  If we believe the Bible, those with a different interpretation must be lesser Christians.”  Certainly there is right and wrong, truth and falsehood, yet Jesus presents a way of reconciliation and justice that begins within the individual human heart and then works itself out into the surrounding community – rain on the just and the unjust.

 A spirituality of ascension is a willingness to accept that while by God’s grace we are at times given consolation and peace, the presence can also visit us in an acute sense of absence.  Prayer is abiding in the growing capacity to be visited by the strange otherness of the ascended Jesus.  It is an intimacy that will not yield to familiarity and comfort according to our categories, but evokes humility, reverence, and service.  The gift of this absence is that it can clear the way of images and metaphors that may have served a purpose at one time, but that now get in the way, too narrowly define the relationship or are features of an earlier phase and need to be replaced with different images, or none at all.  There is a wisdom saying, “If on the road you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.”  I would adapt it to say, “If on the road you meet a Jesus who is nothing more than a larger version of yourself, who agrees with you, likes what you like, hates what you hate, kill him.”  That is not the transcendent Lord, but an invention of your ego.  When the simultaneity of transcendence and immanence opens up in us, we will encounter the Lord who will say and do things we do not like or understand.  He will love people we would rather he not.  He will seem slow or inactive in relation to my agenda for instant change, immediate satisfaction.

As we gather in a few moments around the altar, where Christ deigns to be present to us under the veil of bread and wine, we participate directly and physically in the joining of heaven and earth in Christ’s ascended presence.  This great mystery is the demonstration of Christ who passes from heaven into bread and wine, from bread and wine into us, and from us into the world to live and proclaim the dazzling wonder of the One who fills all things and with whom we will dwell forever. Amen.