Sermon at Parish Mass, Easter 7 2014

The Ascension of Christ - Andrea Mantegna

Acts 1:6-14

1 Peter 4.12-14; 5.6-11

John 17:1-11

One of my cousins posted a picture of a bird on Facebook, with the caption: “If human beings could fly, we’d class it as exercise and not do it”.

But of course, human beings can and do fly. We can go to the airport and, without thinking much about it, get in a plane and zoom several miles up in the air and hundreds or thousands of miles around the earth until we land in, say, Benidorm. Then there is space flight. If you go out tonight just before midnight and look to the southwest, you may see what looks like a white star rise up and drift slowly from one side of the sky to the other. That star is actually the International Space Station, an orbiting laboratory full of scientists and astronauts doing frightfully clever things. A little dot in the sky, hundreds of miles above the earth, with people on it.

This is part of the world we live in. And that gives us a problem. Not in floating round the earth, or in getting to Benidorm, but in reading the Bible. Because the Bible writers never dreamed of anything like it. For them human beings were entirely earth bound. But for us human flight is just part of the world we live in. We see the world differently.

So, when we read of Jesus being lifted up, vanishing in a cloud, his disciples gazing into heaven, we might wonder, where is he, then? Living in the modern world as we do we might imagine that Jesus is up in orbit somewhere, or floating in space between Jupiter and Mars.

But this is completely not what Luke is telling us. Heaven, in the Bible, is not a place or a direction. It is not above the atmosphere somewhere. Nor is it (notwithstanding the song) a place on earth. In the Bible, Heaven is a different dimension, a different way of being. It is the state of being that God inhabits, free from change, decay, chance, transience, all those things that we know in this dimension that we call the world.

In the Ascension Jesus has left this dimension, and entered that one. He has passed into the shining cloud which, as so often in the Bible, represents the fullness of God’s presence.

Jesus has come from the Father and returns to the Father. But he does not return as he came. He is both God and man. He takes with him the humanity that he joined to himself when he became flesh and dwelt among us. He lived and suffered and died as one of us. In the resurrection Jesus, as one of us, stepped out of time into God’s eternity. And in the Ascension Jesus, one of us, is taken entirely into the life of God.

So, in a way, this is a disappearance. Jesus has left this world. But through the Ascension he has become present in a new way. Being entirely with God he is longer confined by time and space. All times and places are now open to his presence.

Through the Holy Spirit he is present in the hearts of all who believe in him. He lives in his Church, which is his body now, his visible presence in the world. He suffers still in the poor and oppressed and the outcast of the earth, and calls us to seek him among them and to hear his judgement on the injustice of the world. He speaks in the scriptures, read in the community of faith. He is the Word of creation sustaining the cosmos, all things having their being through him.

Because Jesus is entirely present with God, he is also able to be present for us. He speaks about this in today’s Gospel reading as he prays: “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed”. But he also says that he has been glorified in his disciples. Jesus, because he dwells entirely in God, dwells also in those who believe in him.

So Jesus has left the world and gone into heaven, and his disciples remain in the world. But those who believe in Jesus begin to know the life of heaven even now. Jesus, ascended to the Father, is present in our hearts, raising us where he has gone.

If we are disciples of Jesus we live in two worlds at once. Yes, we are still physically in this world of change and decay. But we also begin to live in God’s eternity. “This is eternal life”, says Jesus, “to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”.

Heaven is not just something that happens after this life, or a destination we have yet to reach. Heaven is knowing God, and his life coming alive in us. This present world will change and decay and pass away, but what is truly real will then remain: God, and his life in us. And when everything has passed into God, then Christ will be all in all, filling all things, which is what we mean when we say that he will come again.

In Jesus the two worlds of creation and eternity meet. In him, human nature, an actual body, material and created, has passed into God, the uncreated, the eternal. And he has gone not alone but to be the pioneer, the head of the whole of creation made new in God.

Jesus, ascended into heaven, constantly prays for his church, and sends the Holy Spirit to change us into his image. And through the church he draws the whole creation into the life of God.

Partly this is expressed through our work for the marginalised and those in need, and through our stewardship of God’s creation. But above all it is something expressed and made real through our worship. Worship is fundamentally what the church is for. And worship is about creation entering into the life of God.

The one great act of worship that Jesus gave to his church, and told us to carry on until the end of time, is the Eucharist, the Mass. And that is entirely fitting. The Eucharist is creation entering the life of God. Bread and wine, the perishable products of this perishable earth, are offered at the altar and become the glorified and incorruptible Body and Blood of Christ.

His disciples who gather for the Eucharist become what they receive: the body of Christ, the people who are now his visible presence in the world. Through the Church, the Eucharist renews the world. Every celebration of Mass enacts God’s new creation, and lifts up this world into heaven. “Lift up your hearts!” “We lift them to the Lord!”

So we are not to stand gazing into the sky, like those disciples in Acts, and wondering where Jesus is now. He is in God. And he is also in us. He is with us. He is drawing creation into the life of God through his church. We lift up our hands and our hearts to heaven, which is God and his life appearing in us. And with bread and wine we lift up the whole world, groaning in the birth pangs of the new creation, so that Christ may be all in all.