Sermon preached at the Church of the Redeemer
by the Rev. Dorsey W.M. McConnell
Sunday of the Ascension
May 8, 2005

 “I believe I understand this, now,” said my friend.  “Understand what?”  I asked.  We had been reading together a sermon by Saint Augustine on the Ascension of Christ, and there was a lot not to understand.  “I understand why this is good news.  I get the point.”  She said.  “Tell me,” said I.  I knew I had this sermon to preach in less than a day, and I was still at a loss.  “It is good news,” she said, “for all the lumbering, proud people walking around, prizing the wrong things, desperate and lonely and too scared to admit it.  This means there is hope for them, help immediately at hand.  It means that Christ is always very near them.”

            Now, I was stunned by these remarks, and I think you should be too.  How can it be that Christ being taken up into heaven should mean that he comes nearer to us than ever before?  Quite apart from the difficulties in the details of this story, (the cloud that covers him, the talking angels), his naïve realism that strikes hard against the wall of our post-modern skepticism, how simply on the logical level, does saying good-bye mean saying hello?  The disciples bid farewell to their master, and from that moment on discover ever-deeper intimacy with him, enfolded in the body of their Lord as his very members, breathing his breath, pulsing with his blood.  And all this begins with a wave, a shout, a disappearance, and among his friends, a huge “what now?”, a few moments of stunned silence, a wave of feeling utterly alone.

            I cannot grasp this mystery, or will not grasp it willingly; holding together the union of opposites in so large a paradox always makes my head hurt.  But I am drawn back to it by the words of my friend who promises that here is relief for my lumbering and my pride.  That’s something worth looking for, you see, because I am so tired of dragging these things around with me wherever I go, and if there is a lighter way to travel, I am ready to hear it.

            By lumbering, I think my friend means, the certain heaviness of being mortal.  On one level it simply means the way we are subject to gravity, entropy and death.  We try to get away from these things, skip a meal, forego a drink, get on the treadmill, stay fit, but in the end we all slow down until we stop.  And on the way, we lumber.  We do not generally go through life like a ballerina in a grande jetté. Rather, we lurch first one way and then another.  We chase down a mirage and trade it for an illusion.  We love hastily, briefly and then suddenly we refuse to love at all; we stumble over ourselves and crush others.  Sometimes we even arrive at the point where, like the fabled beast who loved the beauty, it seems we can hold nothing in our hands without breaking it.

            You would think it might be impossible for such a lumbering creature to be proud, but that is part of the miracle of being human.  For even as I unwittingly destroy what I love, I am too proud to ask for help, for someone to stop me; I pretend that I am more dancer than monster.  I take a crown of my own making and put it on my head and draw a line around my own ambitions and projects, and over this little dominion I make myself King.  I hope that no one will notice what a poor job I am doing ruling this country and they usually don’t since they are preoccupied with their own, doing an equally bad job and hoping I won’t notice either.  And so we all go proudly lumbering on, winding down until the end.

            All of us, that is, except for one.  And this one, this Jesus, has gone up.  He is like us, as the letter to the Hebrews says, in every respect, right down to the scars that adorn even his risen body, for because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.  And he, according to the story, has gone up.  If you find the clouds and the angels get in the way, then set them aside for the moment, and simply posit, for the sake of trying it on, that this Jesus has gone completely into the life of God.  He has done this, so that he might distribute himself beyond the form and frame of a single human being, so that he might be in his flesh wherever God is, wherever any man or woman or child utters consent to his invitation to join him as extensions of his heart and hands, his mercy and righteousness visible on Earth.  Please understand I am not speaking in metaphors here.  If I understand this claim correctly, it means that to say yes to Christ means to be transferred into His body, mysteriously enfolded into the corporeal reality of this ascended flesh even as we walk in this lumbering and prideful world.  If this is true, then it must have the effect my friend promised it would have, to tame my pride and lighten my heaviness, in a way that is like good medicine, immediate, long-lasting and close at hand.

            Once I get over the shock of being grafted into the body of this ascended Jesus, I notice how broken it is.  Even in his risen glory, the wounds are everywhere: his head, hands, feet and side; the scars of his passion are everywhere: the dead of Iraq, infants in the Sudan, prostitutes and crack-babies of the South End, even in the proud and broken and silent ones of Chestnut Hill.  How he still bleeds and sweats and weeps here!  And I who am now a part of him, smell and feel this broken and scattered flesh that is now a part of me; I notice it smells and feels exactly like my own, and I forget what it was I had to be proud of.  By itself, however, this is of little help.  For even as I notice that this affliction of pride is gone, I wonder if everything else has gone with it, every dignity and hope and reason to live, whether I am left humble but still bloody and still lumbering toward my end.

            And then I remember, he has gone up, and has taken his body with him.  Through his wounds he pours the brightness of his heavenly life into the Earth.  Again, I don’t mean this as metaphor.  Through my union with his body, he has poured his spirit into me, breathes for me and in me and through me, feeds me with his sacraments and love, and mysteriously imparts to me the certain lightness of his immortality.  And all this kindles something in me; even on days when I am notably weighed down by depression, or faithlessness, he is at work in me to bring me out into the light and when I emerge, I discover that by grace, I have become more dancer than monster, that I walk more lightly and can even help others do so, because I walk in him.

            Such humility and lightness are unmistakable when you see them, as the face of the ascended Christ.  Because they are not of this world, yet have been joined to this world, they are able to defeat the powers and principalities thereof.  They cannot be crushed by malice, or demagoguery, or the most violent manipulations of terror.  Filled with them, martyrs have sung hymns in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.  Stretched on the rack or hung on the gibbet, they have made jokes about the instruments of their death and with their last breath have blessed their tormentors.   Many of these are great and well-known saints, but there are numberless others, ordinary folk some of whom live nearly anonymous lives in places of deep darkness where they shine like stars.

I have a friend named Bob who is a prison chaplain.  In the jail where Bob ministers, there was an inmate named Angelo, who came there convicted of a violent crime.  The environment of this jail is particularly harsh, so that even as hard a man as Angelo found himself pushed to the limits of what he could bear.  But Angelo found two blessings here.  Through Bob’s ministry, and the witness of a few fellow inmates, Angelo found Christ.  And he found Pookie who, though not a Christian, became his best friend.  Pookie was a slight, shrewd man, who took a great deal of abuse because of his small stature and quick wit, and Angelo found a calling in being Pookie’s friend and protector.  Angelo had never really had a friend before, and even though Pookie was so smart, he never made Angelo feel stupid.  They were loyal and to each other. 

            Once, Angelo and Pookie got caught up in a brawl with a few other inmates and as punishment were locked in a restricted wing.  The cell block was designed so that they could not communicate with one another or anyone else, Pookie’s cell being directly above Angelo’s, the walls and floors soundproofed.  After a long time, Angelo was allowed a visit with Bob, and and a phone call to catch up on news from home.  The news was not good.  By the time he and Bob sat down, Angelo had learned that his wife was planning a divorce, that one child was in trouble with the law, and another struggling desperately in school.  As he recounted all this to his pastor, Bob felt heavy and useless.  What could he say to Angelo, he thought, that would make any difference, that might convey a shred of hope into this hopelessly burdened life?  As he thought these things, Angelo paused, sighed, and then said:  “Aside from all that, it’s been a pretty good day.” 

            At this, Bob started, thinking he hadn’t heard right. 

“A good day?” he asked.  “How?  What do you mean?” 

“Well, I taught Pookie the 23^rd psalm,”  Angelo replied.

“Angelo, how could you do that?  You’re on separate floors.  You can’t talk to each other.  How could you possibly teach him the 23^rd psalm?”

“Oh, I used the toilet,” said Angelo nonchalantly.

“You used what?”

“Oh, yeah.  You see, pastor, we figured out that our toilets share the same pipe, and if we flush them at the same time, the pipe clears and we can talk to each other through it for about thirty seconds.  So we both flushed, and I taught him a verse.  Then we flushed again, and I taught him the next one.  It took a while, but we got there; and Pookie only needs to hear something once, and he never forgets it.    Just before I came down here, I asked him to repeat the whole thing back to me, and he did it in a single flush.  He had to speed up a little at the end, but he didn’t drop a word.”

            Bob tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t.  And he didn’t need to.  It was Angelo who spoke:        

 “It just goes to show you, pastor.  The glory of God is all over the place.  You just have to want to see it.”     

When I think of Pookie, I am embarrassed to look around at the prison house of my own making, made up of the more common and boring sorts of sin, which (as dull as they are) even in small quantities can still kill a person.  I realize that if Pookie’s union with the ascended Lord can pierce the darkness of a real jail, bring hope through a toilet, and give completely new meaning to salvation by water and the word--  if this has all actually happened, then in fact my friend is right.  Christ has turned even the likes of you and me into those who share the lightness of his body and the glory of his rule.  He has done this, not so that we might rise above the world, but so that we might move more deeply into it.  It should come as no surprise that he should press us like balm into the wounded places of the Earth, the wounds of those around us, since we are joined to the broken body of the Lord, and as blessed Irenaeus noted, the cross is medicine for the world.  And the more we do this, the more we will find the Lord’s lightness, ease and joy move in our own lives and see them spread like fire through the lives of others.  For no prison can stand that is filled with men and women who have been freed in Christ, no grave can enclose those who have been raised in him, no darkness blind those who carry his light within them.  For such people will hear and see all the terror and trouble of the world as an invitation, in the words of C. S. Lewis, to move higher, farther, deeper into the love and life of Christ and will bring the world with them.  May we, this day, begin to become such a people.