ASCENSION DAY

40 days after Easter the church celebrates the Ascension. The Resurrected Jesus takes his friends to the Mount of Olives one last time. As we just heard, a cloud appears and Jesus departs within it. The church gives us 10 days to contemplate this mystery - of separation and deep connection. “Do not leave us comfortless” we pray, “but send us your Holy Spirit, the Comforter.” But we have to wait within this liminal time order to grow in exquisite ambiguity - to grow toward a maturity able to accept the gift and responsibilities of the Holy Spirit.

A chaplain at the hospital – we’ll call him Dave – told me about his first Ascension Day as a student hospital chaplain. He was visiting with a very sweet older Jewish gentleman, who told him about one of his daughters who lived in London with her Anglican husband, and that he admired their accepting and understanding relationship. In the course of the conversation, he remarked that a priest had just visited his Catholic roommate and mentioned that it was Ascension Day. To Dave’s great dismay – after all, he was certainly new at chaplaincy and actually was still trying to figure out what denomination was the one for him – the patient asked him what Ascension is.

Of course, Dave knew more or less what it is, and the traditional ways that Ascension is explained. Jesus disappeared from earth to join God in his heavenly home so that the Holy Spirit – the Paraclete in John’s gospel – could come and be with us. We also celebrate that Jesus left so that he could ‘be present everywhere.’ The early Christians felt the presence of Christ after the Ascension; they celebrated it when they met for Eucharistic meals. And, of course, we celebrate Christ’s departure every week when we come to church to celebrate Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. So, as one would expect, Ascension is enmeshed in Christian images. He wasn’t sure how meaningful this language would be to a Jew.

Then there’s the image of Jesus ‘going up to heaven.’ Every Sunday in the Nicene Creed we affirm that Jesus ‘ascended into heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father.’ In my experience, though, even Christians have a bit of trouble visualizing what is going on here. Some of us ask, ‘where is heaven, anyway?’ We no longer see the world in three layers, with heaven ‘up.’ I think of it more like ‘beyond’ – beyond time and space as we know it. An image that fits better for some is that heaven is the very heart of God. But many Jews don’t find heaven to be a meaningful idea, so he was thinking there with his patient that he’d like to somehow get to Ascension’s relevance while skirting the ‘heaven’ part, if possible. 

Christians haven’t always observed Ascension as we do now. The early church’s Easter celebration was a unified commemoration of the passion, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ. It wasn’t until several hundred years later that we separated the observance of Ascension by 40 days from Easter. It’s good because it implies that the mystery of resurrection is so vast that it needs 40 days to begin to be adequately contemplated. It’s so important that we need time to be really ready for it. But, there are also problems with the specifics of Christ’s leaving, and how to visualize it. One scholar complained that ‘most contemporary Christians think of the resurrection as a two-stage rocket, the first stage getting him off the ground and the second launching him into outer space.’ 

Well, I don’t think Dave said much of that to the patient. That sweet man was so sincere, nearing the end of his life, and lying in a hospital bed trying to find clarity on issues that were important to him. In our work as chaplains, we’re accustomed to looking for meaning and hopefully universal truth in our spiritual work with patients. We’re used to trying to think beyond the details. So, after the fact, Dave and I were discussing what might be the meaning of the Ascension for us today.

Well, we thought, first, there’s a sense that God finishes what God started. God came to us in Jesus, and so must return. There’s a sense that because we celebrate Jesus’ coming at Christmas, for closure we need to celebrate his leaving. He showed us that flesh and blood are good. He restored the goodness of creation. When God put on flesh in Jesus, he not only came to us, but God brought us to God. There’s a unity to God’s actions that reminds us that the disunity and incompleteness of mortal existence isn’t God’s final word. 

Also, there’s the sense that in returning to God, Jesus the Christ, the Risen One, took our suffering humanity to God. We can be sure that now God knows the very worst of human agony. Nothing we can suffer isn’t known in the most personal way by God – the eternal Christ experienced it as we do.

Another sense of the Ascension is that now, Christ isn’t bounded by time or space as we know it. By the power of the resurrection, Christ is revealed as being eternally present. This happens by the power of the Holy Spirit, but that’s getting ahead of our story here today. Today we’re celebrating that Christ left. 

There may be a place in us where we miss Jesus. We return to worship weekly, our sense of God’s absence perhaps driving us here to seek God’s presence. But we know that Christ is always available to us. Always with us. That is what makes our future God’s. We’re in that space between Jesus’ presence and Christ’s promised presence, and yet we know that he is present, working in us. Helping us to act as he taught. Especially when we reach out to others.

A great metaphor for all this is our worship itself. We come to church, know Christ in the Eucharist, but we don’t stay here in church. The last words of our service are a dismissal: ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ – sending us out into the world to do God’s work. We think of the Ascension similarly. Jesus left not because his risen presence wouldn’t be with us, because it is, but because we need to be in the world. Not hanging around the church, or sitting at his tomb, or idly waiting around for him to return. We need to be in the world serving God by acting as God in Jesus showed us. 

The Church gives us 10 days to practice dwelling in the ambiguous time of the Resurrected Christ vanished, and the Holy Spirit not-yet-come. I’ve read that in the mystical life, Ascensiontide is the Dark Night of the Soul, the anguished sense of abandonment after a solid period of union. The soul cannot cling even to this union. The last threads of attachment must be broken in the darkness of unknowing before the completion of the Christian transformation – being “sent” into the world as bearers of Love. 

But the mystics testify to a stunning paradox. The abandonment IS the union. It is in the Dark Night of the Soul that Lover meets Beloved and transforming union takes place. “He will be IN you.”

Dave really couldn’t remember what he said to his gentlemen. He said he just stumbled around with little coherence. But to his amazement, all of a sudden that patient got tears in his eyes. He said: ‘You know, I think the chance of humankind to survive and not destroy ourselves is with the Protestants. They seem to be able to reach out to all. In a way that no one else does.’

Dave was so surprised that he couldn’t speak for a minute. God was at work there, as always. That patient wasn’t worried about himself as he lay there, but all of humankind. And he thought we Christians were the key.

In all the hope I can muster, I agree. Jesus gave us a mission to all nations. To seek and find the Christ in everyone. To do that because we know that the future is in the hands of the ever-present Christ, who showed us how to do it. Who physically left our temporal world to return to God’s time, and to break into our world giving himself to us anew. Eternally freeing us to bring God’s kingdom now. Not absent, but present to us in a wonderfully new and grand form. 

The miracle of the mystery of faith. 

Thank you, God!