Easter 7b.06                                                     

The Christian story begins with Jesus
        coming down from Heaven at Christmas
               and going back to Heaven at the Ascension.
The Creed says,

        “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven...
        (then) he ascended into heaven and is seated
               at the right hand of the Father.”

Those images of up and down come from a time
        when people thought of reality as a 2-layer cake

               – heaven above and earth below.
Since Copernicus, it hasn’t been possible
        to take those up & down images literally,
        but it’s possible to take them even more seriously.

It is, however, possible to see through the metaphor to the meaning,
        to shift our attention from the fingers
                pointing at the moon to see the moon itself.

To understand the Ascension we have to back up
        and look at the Incarnation.
The world floats in a sea of mystery,
        the finite is an island in the infinite,
                what we know is a fleck of foam
                         on an ocean of the unknowable.
That mystery, that infinity, that unknowable reality is God.
That’s why St. Paul calls God that within which

        “we live and move and have our being,”
        and that which we see as “through a glass darkly.”

So God is up there, not in the sense of astronomical geography,
        but in the sense of being “over our heads” so to speak

                 – that which none of us can ever get.

And what we cannot understand, we tend to ignore.
If we can’t understand it, we can’t control it,
        so we may ignore it and hope it will just go away.

We may live with a limited world view,
        like people who never venture outside a single room,
                 and so believe their room is the whole world.
It is not our fault if we fail to understand the awesome mystery
        out of which the universe is born,
        but it is a grievous failure of consciousness
                 to be oblivious to that mystery.

Such obtuseness leaves us alternately despairing,
        then smugly self-satisfied,
        when we should be curious and amazed,
        when we should be reciting the Vedic prayer,

                “O Wonderful. O Wonderful.”

The Incarnation is that mystery giving us a clue.
Jesus is that clue.
He teaches, heals, forgives, dies, and rises from the dead,
        all in ways that defy our assumptions,
        and break open our limited world view.

But the historical Jesus doesn’t stay with us,
        doesn’t provide all the answers.
Instead, he recedes into the mystery,
        ascends to heaven, so to speak,
                 and takes our awareness with him,
        turns our eyes toward to the transcendent
                 source, destiny, and meaning of existence.

Our consciousness is like a fish,
        and Jesus is the hook.
Our consciousness is caught by his revelation
        and drawn up into the mystery.

This is where so much of the popular writing
        about Jesus these days goes wrong.
Ever so often, we have a spasm of thinking
        we’ve discovered the historical Jesus.
We reconstruct a picture of a very human teacher
        who said a few interesting things, then died.

In itself, there’s no real harm in that sort of speculation.
But speculation is just what it is,
        always based on very little evidence.
The danger comes in the conclusion.
Historical Jesus writers usually want to reduce Christianity
        to a philosophy based the teachings of Jesus
                  as they have reconstructed him.

But Christianity is not limited to the teachings
        of the historical Jesus.
Christianity was born in the Apostles’ encounter
        with the Risen Lord.
And our faith is in the Risen Living Lord
        who is our point of connection with the mystery.
He is the one who has lived this mortal life
        as one of us,
        but has ascended, so to speak,
                  into the Divine Reality, the mystery itself.

This is the Christ we see in Russian icons
        and hear about in Mozart’s Missa Solemnis.
This is the Christ we pray to
        and sing about in our hymns.
Jesus, our oh-so human fellow mortal,
        ascends into the Divine Reality,
                  taking our consciousness with him.

And yet, Jesus says in today’s Gospel lesson,
        we, ourselves, are not taken out of the world.
Quite the contrary, we are sent into the world,
        just as the Father sent Jesus into the world.

We live here in the world,
        with a heavenly perspective,
                  with a sense of the holy mystery.
But remember that mystery isn’t somewhere else.
It’s right here in this world.
It’s the unseen aspect of everything and everyone we meet.

It may help to remember another picture of reality,
        not the 2-layer cake of Ancient Greece and Israel,
                  but he concentric circles of Celtic mythology.
According to Caitlin Matthews,
        In Celtic myth, the Otherworld is an inscape
        of ... the land. It has it’s specified gateways
        or crossing places, but it is not conceived of
        as being up there or out there.
        It lies close to the borders of the manifest world.

That image underlies C. S. Lewis’s
        The Chronicles of Narnia.
The child heroes reach Narnia,
        not by going up and away from earth,
        but by going into a small wardrobe,
                  which opens into a whole world.
In the last book, they go on from Narnia into Aslan’s kingdom
        by escaping into a cave.

As they go deeper in, they discover
        the cave is bigger on the inside than it is
                  on the outside.
It opens into a vast, beautiful space

        – that is paradoxically inside
                  the smaller outer world.

When the children’s friends in England tell them
        they’re describing a make-believe world, they say,

        “No. Actually Narnia is more real than this.”
When they reach Aslan’s kingdom, it’s even more real.

C. S. Lewis is saying the Kingdom isn’t above us,
         but within us, within everything.
It is in fact the real basis of everything.

So, Jesus says, we are not taken out of the world.
We are sent into the world with new eyes,
         eyes that see a bit deeper

         – not deep enough to have some special understanding
                   that makes us wiser or better

         – but deep enough to make us wonder and marvel,
                   to be curious and reverent before each other.

If we see the world with such eyes,
         we cannot judge it, cannot condemn it,
                   cannot be uncaring toward it.
If we see the world with different eyes,
         we treat it differently.
We treat it with compassion and respect.
We practice what Dean James Fenhagen calls

         “a holy worldliness” and “worldly holiness.”

                                                             Amen.