Sunday After Ascension
When I was young I often wondered about what heaven might be like, as I think we all did. Especially in those moments when someone in the family, or a family friend dies and you’re trying to wrap your head around what it means for them to be gone but to be gone somewhere else. What is it? Where is it? What’s it like? I would wonder.
When I would ask, the answers I received from adults seemed authoritative and I had no reason to doubt them but of course, what do any of us know about such questions that we can say with authority? From the answers I received what I could piece together was that heaven must be just some kind of really good, much better version of here. There was no indication that we would be lounging on clouds like cartoons, or that it even looks like clouds or the sky at all, so the best I could imagine was that it was just here but without the negatives: no work, no pain or suffering, we’re just free – we like to think – to enjoy ourselves.
When you’re seven or eight thinking about this that means that heaven was a palce where you could play Nintendo with no time limits, there was no homework, and you could have ice cream for supper, stay up late and not be tired, maybe even watch movies beyond your age-rating. The truth is that we all have these images – fantasies, really – of what it must be like, and mostly it looks the way we want it to look, a kind of paradise shaped like and after our own desires. A truly scary thought when we consider that its usually when we try to shape ourselves or our lives according to our desires that things go off the rails.
There has been something of this tension in the lives of the disciples since Easter, now 40 days or so ago, being witnesses to the very thing that they had been promised but being unable to fully see it because these events were not in the shape of what they wanted. There’s a kind of sadness in them each time that Jesus appears in his resurrected body and disappears again; the events have all been laid our for them and none of this should be a surprise, there’s no twist ending, but yet there’s a grief that this is not taking the shape that they want.
Even today on this Sunday on which we celebrate Jesus’ Ascension to the Father, his being taken up into heaven we know that this was not at first a moment of celebration. There they stood, agape, gazing upward to where the cloud had covered and received Jesus, seemingly confused, watching to see if he’d come back, sad at his departure. Jesus even warned them of their own confusion, he told them in John 16 that sorrow would fill their hearts – pain will come before the joy, but still they struggle with it; what is a further unfolding of the good news of Jesus’ resurrection can barely be recognized as such because it’s not, at that point, the good news on their terms, the good news as they imagined it.
This should, I hope, sound familiar to us because it is often the cause of so many of our own struggles; all the time we try to shape the good news, shape hope, the future and our lives according to what we think is good or what we want. This past weekend at Synod, one of the big refrains we heard over and over – which was baked into the very title – was that of hope, that we must have this continual, unflinching, unwavering, aggressive hope, and so we should. But there’s a certain point at which with everything the more we assert something to be true the farther we drift from knowing why we’re saying it, or what we’re saying it in response to.
This theme was hope in the face of changing church, hope in the face of a wildly secularized society (and an increasingly secularized church); now, no doubt we’ve had hope since 2001, yet since then the Anglican Church in Canada has shrunk by about 40% - how long do we repeat hope like a mantra, and avoid talking about the elephant in the room? Avoid talking about the pain of it all, the feelings of exhaustion or futility? At a certain point these repeated phrases feel like meat hooks pulling your mouth into a grin, with a neon sign flashing above you “everything is fine.”
You see, the pain of the Ascension – the pain that accompanied the loss of Jesus as an earthly companion for the disciples – was not an unfortunate sidebar of the greater hope that’s being fulfilled, his going away and the disciples confusion and pain was an inseparably necessary part of Jesus’ fulfilling a greater hope, and it’s these moments in our lives or in the life of our church that we have greater difficulty being thankful for. What things have we lost, endured, suffered, that ultimately were good for us or led to some positive outcome or change, but didn’t seem it at the time? What is there in our lives that we know we must, however painfully, let die or let go of in order to grow, but struggle to do so?
St. Augustine said about this event that the disciples were stuck in a mode of understanding Jesus with the head but not with the heart, understanding in mind but not in spirit, and what it took to shake them from this, what it took to open their minds and their hearts to a deeper and spiritual understanding of who this Jesus was, was this confusing and painful parting of their dear friend from before their eyes, “They could not be filled with spiritual understanding unless the object of their earthly love should go from before their eyes,” says Augustine. But what this gives way to, what this opens up for them is the possibility of new joy a new spiritual life, made possible by the in-filling of the Holy Spirit that they will receive at Pentecost. Unless the seed dies the tree will not grow; unless they endure the loss of something that isn’t less true but maybe not the fullest expression of what it truly is (Jesus), they cannot know the fulness of the transformative life he is giving them. If we are only ever stuck in heart and mind down here, how can we ever, “in heart and mind thither ascend and with him continually dwell…” as the Collect prays today?
The Ascension of Jesus, recounted in the Acts of the Apostles that we heard in the second lesson, is an event of great importance for a host of reasons, but in a very big and important way it shows us, like the Transfiguration of Jesus shows us, our destiny and our end as Children of God. The biggest problem with thinking that heaven is just sandy beach in the Caribbean and endless Pina Coladas, or endless Nintendo, or even just an eternity enjoying the perfect life with those we love is that these things are still only a mirror of our desires and not that fullest and most abundant life that Christ told us he came to give. We may not even know yet that this abundant life is what we want.
This was spoken at Synod and it is true – churches are struggling or empty not because what we offer is irrelevant to people, but because we’ve done a brutally poor job of helping people to see that what we offer here is actually what they are searching for in every other corner of their lives, but will never find.
The point is that the Ascension shows us God’s will for us, that we may ascend like Christ in heart and mind to that full life that God offers us, but the trick is that we need to want that will to be our will; we need to desire not what we desire for ourselves, but for what God desires for us.
I think this is why, in the Gospel, Jesus says, “The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned.” To those who ask, it is given, as he says; the condemnation comes not from God, but from ourselves who, if we spend our whole lives chasing things in the mirror in front of our own desires will be condemned to live a life very far from the fulness and abundance that God offers us in the new life of Christ.
The Good News for us, particularly today, is that the Ascension of Jesus shows us our true end – the fullness of the transformation made possible through that new life, but the really good news is that the transformation has already begun and we needn’t stand gazing up into heaven like the disciples because the spirit by which we are transformed and through which Christ lives in us, has already been given to us.
