Saturday, May 07, 2016
VII Easter, May 8, 2016 ~ The Sunday After the Ascension
Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Year C ~ May 8, 2016
Holy Trinity & St. Anskar
When I awake, I shall be
satisfied, beholding your likeness.
+In
the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity
Our ancient teachers recognized
the Ascension as a Mystery hiding an immense reality. They saw that a literal
interpretation of the account would miss the point. They expressed their
insight by saying that just as the Divine Son never left the Father when He
became Human, so the human Jesus never left the world when He went back to the
Father. Pope St. Leo the Great observed that the visible
humanity of Jesus passed into the Sacraments. Through the Sacraments, we are incorporated
into His glorified Body, and thus we participate in His Ascension to the right
hand of the Father. The Incarnation is permanent, and so humanity ascends with
divinity. As He never left heaven when He came down from heaven, neither did He
leave the world when He was taken up out of their sight.
The account in the Acts hints at this in the
gentle chiding by the Holy Ones who ask the gape-mouthed disciples why they
stand looking up into the sky, “for He will come in the same way as you saw Him
go.” The ikon portrays this redirection of the disciples’ attention. One way
to interpret this teasing is to change the tense: from “he will come” to “He comes
in the way you see Him go.” And after
all, what use is grammatical tense, when speaking of Realities beyond time and
space? I think this angelic redirecting of consciousness is the moment when the
disciples awoke.
When I awake, I shall be satisfied,
beholding your likeness.
Modern cosmology may be more compatible with
this Mystery than the ancient, three-storied kind (heaven, earth, and the
underworld). For we now know that things are not as they seem to our sense
perception. REALLY not as they seem.
The world of appearances, phenomena,
is not the way things are. Most of solid matter is an empty void. The
constituent molecules and elements are tiny solar systems of relationship among
still smaller particles, and in the end, all is energy. On the other hand, the “bright
immensities” are vast beyond imagining. There are an estimated forty billion or
so planets about our size just in our own little galaxy, which is itself one
among billions.
Our senses have been able to figure this out
through observation, but our senses themselves have evolved in response to the data.
Our apprehension of these phenomena is in our consciousness. The world looks
allot different to an insect than it does to us. Things are not as they seem. Appearances
– phenomena – do not give us a reliable
picture of reality.
This is not to say that life within the phenomenal world is worthless – quite the opposite. God’s creation becoming conscious of itself and developing the capacity to love – that is to become like God – is supremely valuable. In fact, the more we analyze phenomena – separating and distinguishing and categorizing what we know through our senses and their extension – the more we encounter relationships. The whole cosmos appears to be a system of relationship. What we encounter at the limits of our probing is the Logos, the underlying organizing Principle of the Cosmos that Christians call the Only-begotten Son, by Whom all things were made.
The other name for this Person is Love. Love is
approached in the mathematics of physics and chemistry and biology, but not
only there. It is also physically visible to conscious perception. In one sense, things may not be at all as
they appear, but the beauty a creature experiences is real. Indeed, that beauty,
which we see and hear and touch and taste, is ULTIMATE REALITY, or at least its
reflection.
Dostoyevsky remarked that the tragedy of human
life is that a paradise of beauty blooms around us but we fail to see it. We must
awaken to it, for only we can perceive the Beauty that is the Reality the
appearances reflect. That is our calling, to bring creation into self-consciousness,
and then to wake up and recognize heaven on earth. As the Psalmist (17 – Exaudi domine) said:
When I awake, I shall be
satisfied,
beholding your likeness.
Our
calling is not limited to passive recognition, however. God also calls us to
defend the beauty of creation and to increase it in our own lives. Furthermore,
we need to understand His promise to be with us always as inseparable from His
observation that the poor are always
with us. When we serve the poor, we
serve Him. The poor are His likeness
to which we must awaken. The poor
are His Body and Blood, in which His Presence is Real as it is on our altars.
Hence, the redirection of the disciples’ attention to Jerusalem – to earth and human society. Thus, Paul and Silas get into trouble for healing the disfiguration of the Macedonian girl, and thereby spoiling her owners’ business. There is a whole other sermon there, but suffice it to say that human dignity always trumps profit, in the Kingdom of God, which is why it is so hard for the rich to enter it. The Apostles not only behold the Beauty of creation; they help God bring heaven to earth. This is why the Church devotes the three days before the Feast of the Ascension, the Rogations, to prayers for the earth and all aspects of creation.
Heaven on
earth. Earth taken up into heaven
and heaven descended to earth. That
is the Ascension.
Our ancient teachers found crucial significance
in the report that the Ascension did not discourage the disciples, but filled
them with joy. The ancient Doctors of the Church noticed that the Resurrection
appearances perplexed and even frightened them, but not the Ascension. Something
had happened to their consciousness. They had awakened. They saw the marriage
of heaven and earth in a mystical experience that was not merely inner and individual,
but interpersonal and communal. This common mystical experience may be what the
Ascension is all about.
Jesus has not left the world but come into it
in a new and marvelous way. Indeed, the whole idea of “up there” and “down here”
is abolished, as Jesus ascends, in the words of the newer Ascension Collect, “far
above all heavens that He might fill all things.” We experience the Mystery in
the singularity of the Holy Eucharist. As Dali’s Last Supper shows us, the moment of Christ’s Death, Resurrection,
and Ascension is re-presented, made really
present in the world of appearance, in the Bread become His Body and the
Wine become His Blood. Now is the Consummation, now He comes as we saw Him go, now
is the vindicating Judgment of this world, now is creation justified and now,
perfect in Beauty, dawns the Eighth Day that has no evening. Here and now is
heaven on earth.
ALLELUIA!
God is gone up with a shout
The Lord with the
sound of
the ram’s-horn!
ALLELUIA!
