Sermon for Ascension Day, Thursday 26th May, 2022
Lectionary Readings for Ascension Day
Acts 1: 1–11
In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over the course of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. ‘This’, he said, ‘is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’ So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He replied, ‘It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’ When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up towards heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’
Luke 24: 44–end
Then Jesus said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’ Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
(the Collect) “…that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens, so we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him continually dwell”
(Acts) “…he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” the angels said: “This Jesus…will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
(Luke) “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”
(Eucharistic prayer) “…and by his ascension, gave us the sure hope that where he is we may also be.”
Sermon for Ascension Day
Human beings have only human language to use
to try to express what cannot be expressed
in any words at all.
So we grope dimly toward a way to describe our sense of the Divine— that which is greater than ourselves—the ineffable, unspeakable, most Holy God.
With the name of this High Holy Day, Ascension, we are invited to lift our thoughts upward, to a place called Heaven that also cannot be described in human words, because it is a place of our deepest longing, not a mapped region of the geographer.
If the end-point of all our hopes and dreams is also, like Jesus,
to ascend to this Heaven,
to leave behind our cramped and narrow and very particular given human existence, with all its contention and conflict,
its fears and failings,
its distress and disappointments—insignificant and catastrophic— we might say that we long to enter into a place and state of blessedness: of rest and peace and quietness at the very least,
as in the lines of last night’s compline.
A state of blessedness. What is that? Because we haven’t known it “down here.”
We lift our thoughts “up there,” because “down here,” in the raw reality of human existence, we struggle and sweat for ever-higher status and more money in the nice countries, but in the not-so-nice countries we hear that bodies are blown apart by bombs that are intended to kill.
Earthly scenes are in such terrible and vivid contrast to heavenly ones. We keep trying to raise our eyes to heaven above, as the scenes down here below, the scenes of human outrage and the violation of bodies, are unspeakable.
Souls above, bodies below. Is this the inevitable dichotomy, the inevitable separation?
There has always been, in the Christian tradition,
the affirmation of the integrity of the human person.
The Spirit of God that gave life to human bodies created them as good. As Paul said: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?”
It mattered very much to the early Christians who were defining the faith that it centered upon the embodied Son of God.
Jesus lived a very human life. He was flesh and blood.
In his earthly life, Jesus sought out the company of other human beings. He listened to them, talked with them, ate with them, embraced their equally dusty and sweaty bodies on the road. His human body was bloodied on the Cross as he died there.
Christians don’t believe in a distant Spirit-God—-we believe in a God whose ardent love for His creation overflowed in the sending of a living Son, his own living Being, who enfleshed the Most High God to live with human beings on the created earth.
Jesus’s life was a life of compassion and heartache, of passion for truth and justice. Above all, of the intimacy of a self-giving love.
Christians have always, through time, wanted to live that kind of life, and at the end of life, to go to the place where that kind of life and death led Jesus.
Christianity is, at its heart, about the necessity of human community. About knit-together souls and bodies standing with and caring for and lifting up from the compromising but inevitable dirt of life those fellow human beings who share our common given human life. If this is what we do, then this will lead us to that place where He has gone before.
When I was 22 I went to Jerusalem. I stood inside the Church-now-Mosque that honors Jesus’s ascension into heaven. It holds within it a rock that is said to bear the imprint of Jesus’s right foot, the last point of contact as he left this earth. (The section bearing the left footprint was moved to the al-Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount in the Middle Ages, since Islam also acknowledges the sanctity of Jesus’s ascension. It was a nice ecumenical gesture.) I stood there looking down on that indentation in the rock and I thought, “What is this all about? This is an indentation in a rock!” And I walked away from there with nothing changed, for me. No “Aha! This proves it! Now that I have seen the exact place, everything has now fallen into place!”
What I believe, I believe.
Indentations in rocks are interesting, but proof of nothing like Ascension.
It is a tenet of Christian faith, and what I believe, that in some way that words cannot fully describe, Jesus, having finished with his earthly life, returned to the Father God who had sent Him. But having left the physicality of human life he yet remains with us, abiding with us in love, in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. This is the mystery, but also the reality, of the Trinitarian God of the Christian faith.
We are living in a world of loss. This is a fact. We rail against it with all the words we have, but each day brings a diminution of our human powers—to think, to articulate words, to act. This is what it means to be human.
We have a precious inheritance—the belief of the early church, the words of the early church—that emerging church that was trying to understand what Ascension meant for them.
Luke says: “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.”
The words of the Acts of the Apostles say:
“He was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”
If we embrace this recorded declaration of the early church, a church that also held up the words, “faith, hope, and love” as the essence of the Christ who lived among us—- if we embrace not only the language of faith but the life of faith with all the force of our human being, we will defeat loss. This is, I believe, the intention of the loving and good God who created us.
I believe that in some way that will always remain a mystery, we will indeed ascend, as did Jesus, to dwell in the presence of God forever.
I believe that this is what heaven is—to be separated from God no longer.
In the meantime, as we wait in faith, and hope, and love,
for our own ascension to that place where God is,
amid the loneliness and alienation of our human world,
may we pass the time in the embrace of those who most need us, as Jesus showed us how to do,
He who said as He left: “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
The Revd Dana English
Trinity College Chapel
Cambridge
May 10, 2018
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The early Christians of the Holy Land, prior to the conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D., honored Jesus’s ascension in a cave on the Mount of Olives. By 384, the site of worship was moved to its present location, uphill from the cave. The first church on that site was built around the year 390; its construction financed by a wealthy Roman aristocrat, Poimenia, who had embraced the message of the Gospel.
The Byzantine church was destroyed in 614 by the armies of Shah Khosrau II during the Persian invasion of the Holy Land; it was rebuilt in the late seventh century. The reconstructed church was also eventually destroyed but rebuilt again by the Crusaders in the 12th century. This structure was destroyed by the armies of Saladin, leaving only a partially intact outer 12 x 12-meter octagonal wall surrounding an inner shrine, a martyrium.
The remains of that open-to-the-sky structure still stand today, though the Arabs built a dome atop the open eight-sided building, filled in the arcades, and added a mihrab indicating the direction of Mecca.
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The observance of this Feast of the Epiphany is of great antiquity. Eusebius seems to hint at the celebration of it in the 4th century. At the beginning of the 5th century, St. Augustine says that it is of Apostolic origin, and he speaks of it in a way that shows it
was the universal observance of the Church long before his time. Frequent mention of it is made in the writings of St. John Chrysostom, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and in the Constitution of the Apostles. The Pilgrimage of Aetheria speaks of the vigil of this feast and of the feast itself, as they were kept in the church built over the grotto in Bethlehem in which Christ is traditionally regarded as having been born. It may be that prior to the 5th century the act narrated in the Gospels was commemorated in conjunction with the feast of Easter or Pentecost. Some believe that the much disputed forty-third decree of the Synod of Elvira (c. 300) condemning the practice of observing a feast on the fortieth day after Easter and neglecting to keep Pentecost on the fiftieth day implies that the proper usage of the time was to commemorate the Ascension along with Pentecost. Representations of the mystery are found in diptychs and frescoes dating as early as the 5th century.