Sermon for
Year C

May 17, 2007

The Feast of the Ascension

The Rev’d Lloyd Prator
St. John’s in the Village
New York City

Luke 24: 49-53

I am a fairly skeptical guy, and I have to admit that for a long time I have had difficulty with the Feast of the Ascension. I am not readily the sort of person who thinks about people making mysterious disappearances and being taken up into heaven.

And yet, I find myself oddly attracted to this festival and often enjoy thinking about it and writing about it.

Today I would leave two ideas with you to consider about this feast.

First, this is a story about the significance of the human body. It is the body of Jesus that is taken up into heaven. It is not as if the Father took some little scrap of divinity from Jesus and took that into heaven. He took the body. This reminds us that bodies count, in the scheme of God's salvation plan. Ours is a very concrete, realistic, tangible religion. This mystery of the ascension, all couched in the splendor and aura of the transcendent is Gods way of turning us back to the reality of time and history. The mystery of the ascension reminds us that because bodies are important in God's scheme of things, they should be important for us, too. The ascension is the justification for the church building hospitals to care for the sick, witnessing against human rights abuses in China, Cuba and Africa, and standing for genuine effective economic development in poor lands. We do these things because, in the Ascension, God tells us that bodies count. There is, in fact, one of them in heaven!

Second, the ascension is a reminder that ours is an adult religion. Throughout the gospels, the4 disciples find that with Jesus they can do anything, without him, they are lost. It would be an easy thing for our religion to have developed in a way that infantilizes us. You know, “I can't do a thing, it is all up to God.” That is not what Christianity teaches. Jesus goes away from his disciples in order that he can be with them in a new way. This new way is not as the constant companion on the road, the one who touches and heals every illness, the one who eases every burden and pain. Jesus is to be with his people in the form of the spirit. The spirit which comes at Pentecost, in ten days, and which dwells in us, working in our spirits, working in our minds, forming our intellect in order that we, as mature men and women, may make the decisions God has in mind for his world. And to make them not as children blown every which way by each new idea, but as mature men and women who live in Christ because Christ lives in them.

The consequences of this feast are very long ranging. In a sense, this is a feast about absence, about those moments when we look for God longingly. This is a feast about suffering through grief and feeling lost. This is a feast about being left behind. It reminds us that our God knows everything that there is to know about the human condition, including the pain of life without those we love. But it is also a feast about anticipating God doing a new thing, being with us a new way. Christianity walks a narrow path between excluding too many new ideas and including too many contemporary concepts. We have with us, or will have with us in just ten days, the presence of the spirit of God. But that spirit is not a custodian that keeps us safe from the challenges and trials of the world. It is a spirit which drives us out into the world, but at the same time tells us that God intends to be in our hearts and that, as we have celebrated throughout the Easter season, the powers of evil and darkness have finally been overcome and that death was just the gate of life. It is that mystery which makes the Ascension not just an ethereal mystery to be examined with the raised eyebrow of a skeptic. It is a feast which, paradoxically, is about precisely the challenge of living in this world, in the here and now.

And that is where the mission of the Church takes place. Here. Now.