What kind of elevator is the Ascension?

Lectionary Link

7 Easter Cycle  A      June 5, 2011    

Acts 1:6-14        Ps. 68  

1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11   John 17:1-11               

   Last Thursday was a major feast day of our Lord and there were five people here to celebrate this major feast day.  It was the feast of the Ascension of our Lord, sometimes a forgotten feast between Easter and Pentecost because it occurs on a Thursday and therefore does not get the benefit of Sunday billing.

  It does let preachers off the hook to explain the phenomenon of someone rising into the clouds and going out of sight.  Most of us are not members of the flat earth society and we do not hold to the ancient cosmology of the netherworld, the flat earth, the dome sky and beyond the dome sky, heaven, the abode of God.  Up and down does not mean much for people who live on a globe in a vast universe, though it does mean something for us in simple perceptual relationships.

  As Christians, we are people who re-enact the drama of salvation each year in the cycles of the church seasons which are comprised of events in the lives of God’s people and more particularly, the life of Jesus Christ.  We have an annual teaching curriculum in the presentation of salvation history to focus upon different aspects of our lives of faith.

 We know that in our lives there is much that we do not see nor understand.  That mystery in itself is a continual lure for us to continue to try to know as much as we can.  Today, in our time of scientific knowledge, many have come to find a conflict between the ways in which we know scientifically, and the ways in which we know things through faith.

  People of faith may be looking forward to the day when scientists invent a microscope that can present a visualization of “spirit” as the most sub-microscopic particle smaller than neutrons, protons and quarks.  People of faith, may be waiting for a macro-scopic way to travel to the far edge of an expanding universe to provide the biggest picture of all.  It probably will not make much difference for our faith, because as humans we perhaps have to embrace that we know things differently and use language, symbols and expression differently in our different ways of knowing.

  Physicists attempt to give invisible answers for the visible world.  People of faith use more the language of art and love to speak about other parallel realms.

  Whether we live in the world of ancient cosmologies or our own age with a cosmology that will be regarded as primitive by people of the future, to be human is to be possessed with language and with the ability to formulate meaning and asking what is the worth of this world and my life in it.

  On this Ascension Sunday, we contemplate the movement something like an elevator between the parallel universes in the ways of knowing and in the language that we use to find meaning.

In Christian faith, we have inherited the annual drama.  God off stage and unknown, but revealed in Laws, and inspiring prophets and wisdom teachers.  God, occasionally as sending messengers, angels, who make visual, the invisible to indicate the communication between inner world and outer world.  God entering the human stage in the person of Jesus Christ, thus validating the human way of knowing things that are more than human, God exposing human nature as being threatened by the very notion that God could be known in human form,  God in Christ constituting holy friendships on earth to create a community, God in Christ leaving the visible realm to prove that God has never left this visible realm but only needed to awaken people to the closeness of God’s Spirit who could be known intimately to those who could be made aware.

  And so we are a part of this annual presentation of Salvation history and we must each year re-write its compatibility with our own age and with our own lives.

  On this Ascension Sunday, you and I are asked to advance in the art of living in parallel universes.  Up and down are not necessarily just perceptual visual phenomena; up and down are  parallel phenomena of inner realm and outer realm and the ways in which we use words and in the ways that we come to meaning in our lives.  And our lives have many, many meanings.  And what makes them exciting is that we always have more meanings to discover.

  The prominent image that is presented to us of Jesus Christ today is that he prayed to God his Father for his friends.  Here we have Jesus Christ as the chief symbol of one who lived best in both realms; he was a fully divinized human being and so even in his human life, he already lived an ascended life.  His communication between the realms of experience was complete.  And he revealed to us that at the heart of living, life is intensely personal because God is like the best human parent who we can experience as a wonderful friend and mentor for our lives.  That is what Jesus revealed about God.  We, Christians, have wanted to make Jesus so special that we want Jesus to be an only child.  But that is not what Jesus wanted; Jesus revealed God as his mentor Father, so that you and I could know that God is mentoring parent for us and that friendship and relationship and communication is what is at the heart of finding meaning in our lives.

  If we believe that friendship and communication are the highest values of life, perhaps we can survive situations where friendships and communication seem not to be present in this world.  Jesus praying to his Father and wanting his friends to discover this same relationship reveals to us what we regard as most important in our Christian faith.

  Today you and I are invited to pray.  Pray in all of the ways that we can.  Prayer is the art of communication; it can be done alone or in community; with word, song, liturgy, ritual, silence, and our acted deeds in the course of everyday life.   Prayer is the attempt to find our voice in language to work at communication between the various realms of our being; to communicate between our inner lives and our outer world.

  Today on this Ascension Sunday, you and I are ascending and descending with Christ as we try to weave inter-relationship between the realms of our lives.  We are trying to bring concord between our inner realms of desire, hope, and quest for what is ideal, beautiful, perfect and complete and our outer worlds where everything is in some state of becoming, of being developed, of going through rites of passages and phases of abrupt discontinuities.

   Jesus prayed and showed us that we live not in just physical and visual up and down worlds, we live in inner space and outer space and we have words to bring the two together.  And from the realm of where words come, we realize that we are born to seek meaning for our lives.  And the meaning of our life is known as we pray, as we find our voice before God and with each other as we hope for the best meanings of all for ourselves and for each other.  Let us Ascend with Christ today in our prayer; let us find our voice before God so that we can live and speak the Good News, the Gospel of God in Christ.  Amen.