Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 1, 2025, the Seventh Sunday of Easter, at St. Mark’s, Berkeley.

Collect: O God, the King of glory, you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven: Do not leave us comfortless, but send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Readings: Acts 16:16-34, Rev 22:12-14, 16-27, 20-21; John 17:20-26

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

Our readings for the last few weeks of Eastertide move with such breathless anticipation towards Pentecost that it’s easy to lose sight of the major feast we just celebrated on Thursday: the Ascension. Properly speaking, the Ascension itself is the end of Eastertide, and for the nine days between then and Pentecost, the church lingers in a kind of suspended animation, full of anticipation, full of eagerness to get started on our mission in the world, but still waiting for the promised Holy Ghost. Maybe you know, the classic devotion of the Novena, nine days of prayer, takes its origin from these nine days when the disciples waited and prayed between the Lord’s ascension and the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.

But since we’re waiting anyway, it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the magnitude of what’s just happened in the Ascension. This is the sort of feast that makes skeptics like to jeer. “Oh yes,” they say, “Jesus rose from the dead, never more to die again. Then why don’t I see him today, why isn’t he on the news, what have you done with him Oh, he ascended into heaven you say? Well, isn’t that convenient.” It won’t surprise you to hear me counter, that the Ascension is much more than a convenient way to dispose of Jesus’s body. It’s essential to complete the work he began when he took on human flesh in the first place. 

And what work was that? This is really important, I can’t say this enough, Jesus did not come just to tell us important things, though he did do that. He did not come just to be a good example, though he is that too. He did not come just to comfort and to heal, though thank God that was a big part of his mission. He didn’t even come just to forgive sins, though of course he is the only one who can, and he does, gladly, as many times as it takes. No, more than all these things on their own, he came to change something fundamental about human nature and about creation itself.

One of the old Christmas antiphons puts it succinctly: speaking of God, the antiphon says, “What he was, he remained; what he was not, he assumed.” In other words, though God had made human beings in his image, he was not himself one of them. In the Incarnation, however, the second person of the Trinity assumed, put on, fully inhabited for himself, human nature. His name, Emmanuel, famously “God with us,” means that now, no matter where we human beings may find ourselves, there God has gone ahead of us, as one of us. Wonderful – alleluia! – this is the Christmas Gospel, and it’s the reason the whole heavenly host split the heavens singing, “Glory to God in the highest.”

But that’s not all. At the other end of the journey is the Ascension. The first pope Leo, the one we call The Great, wrote in a sermon in the 5th century, that Christ, “in descending to earth, had never been absent from his father; and, in ascending up to heaven, had never withdrawn himself from his disciples.” What he’s saying is, if heaven came to earth at the Incarnation, then at the Ascension, Earth is raised up into heaven. At Christmas, God became a human person. At the Ascension, that human person sits down at the right hand of God; and with him, there in heaven, there is all of human nature, indeed all of creation itself. Heaven has come to earth, and earth has come to heaven. What before was separated is now joined forever.

Wait just a minute, you will say, are you saying I am now already in heaven with Jesus? How is that possible? I don’t feel very much in heaven most of the time. My life still feels very earthly. My mother still has dementia, the world is still a mess, people are still dying of overdoses, bombs are still falling, there are still families who can’t afford a place to live, hurricanes and wildfires still ruin whole regions. I still screw up all the time, I still put my own needs ahead of others. There is too much hurt and crying and pain and wrongdoing for this to be anything like heaven. How can you possibly say I am now in heaven with Jesus?

I’m afraid in this case the good news and the bad news are both the same piece of news. While we are in this life, we only have one foot in heaven with the Lord, while the other foot is firmly planted on earth. But think: this is exactly why the sin, death, and suffering bother us so much, because we do have one foot in heaven, and we know deep in the fiber of our being, that we are meant for more than all this. If we were wholly of earth, none of it would bother us very much, it would be just the way things are. Our very feeling of discomfort, of being off balance here, points us to see that we do indeed have one foot in heaven. The first and last prayer of every Christian is the first petition that Christ himself taught us, that on earth it may be as it is in heaven. And we have confidence in so praying, because the whole work and ministry of Christ is to stitch heaven and earth together. What before was severed, he has now joined, ad by his grace, his power, it grows together more and more.

This has lots of implications for our lives and how we understand the experience of being in the world. For one thing, it suggests that the deeper we go in prayer, in self-examination, in contemplation; the further we penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos in mathematics, physics, string theory, and whatever comes after that; whatever our chosen pursuit, whatever our charism, the higher we climb, the more we find we are not alone, that somewhere along the way we have passed through a door, that there is Another who has arrived there ahead of us. There is an Encounter deep within the heart of our being. If we shrink from it, then something vital in ourselves shrivels and dies, but if we embrace it, then that Encounter grows to encompass us and the whole world we occupy, filling us with love and beauty and grace.

Second, it suggests that a big part of our work as Christians is to make plain for all the world to see the marriage of heaven and earth: to treat every person with the same dignity as the Son of God, to love creation as the reflection of his glory, to grow in faith, hope, and love. It means much of our worship and mission consists in an Ascension-style lifting up, holding up before the presence of God everything in our lives, everything in creation, that does not yet reflect the truth, beauty, or goodness that we know it was made for, starting with our own hearts and extending to everything we encounter.

We do this in a special way at the altar, when we offer bread and wine to become for us the Body and Blood of Christ. But we do much the same whenever we pray, whenever we give thanks, whenever we exult, whenever we work to feed, clothe, visit — both those who love us and those who are otherwise unlovable. This is the Ascension at work, and it accomplishes, in our own small ways, the work God has been about from the beginning: to stitch heaven and earth ever more closely together, till God be all in all.

Third, it is strong medicine against despair. One of the things the presence of heaven does is to heal our memories: it reveals the good God has made of all the ruin we have wrought. It would have been better, of course, had the ruin never happened. But God is in the business of making good what we have spoiled, and when we begin to have eyes to see, even the worst and lowest and darkest moments of human existence, of our own lives, will start to shine with a higher light, as the door which Christ’s Ascension opens in our hearts floods even the grave  with God’s own life and love, and we find restored to us more than we thought we had lost.

Heaven has come to earth, and earth has been raised to heaven. This Ascensiontide, as we wait afresh for Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit, let us take courage, and with joy enter the work that knits heaven and earth ever more tightly together. So our senses and our wits, our bodies and our souls will be healed, and with all creation we will come to know and breathe the many splendors of God’s love.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.