This week is a week when all I want to do is look up. I find it difficult to look down, because when I do, it brings my spirits down, too. Do you feel the same? It seems that when we look around, the bad news keeps coming. For the second week in a row, we are reminded that the ordinary places of our daily routines are stoked with fear because they can be the sites of gruesome gun violence.
When I look down, I see in the news the anguished faces of parents, weeping outside a school building, wondering about the fate of their child or knowing what has already happened. I worry for the parents who worry about their own children’s safety. I see an intractable conflict across the globe. I see rising prices on everything from gasoline to groceries, which I know means for some, one fewer meal. I see yet another subvariant of a tenacious, awful virus in its third year. I see friends and loved ones suffering. Where is the good news?
And so, it’s very tempting just to look up. If I divert my gaze to the sky, I can escape from this world for at least a bit. If I look up, I don’t have to look down, because when I look down, it drags me down.
Ascension Day would seem like an occasion to look up. It’s obvious why the disciples stood gazing up when Jesus ascended into heaven from the Mount of Olives. It was quite a spectacle. They were rightly gobsmacked and a bit sad too, I’m sure. Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances were now at an end. They wouldn’t see him anymore. They really didn’t want to look down. And when they did look down, perhaps their spirits were brought down as well. Certainly, they saw the biting inequities of their own day. Surely, they saw a world that was messed up, even if in different ways from our own. So, for a variety of reasons, those disciples looked up, choosing for a time to be drawn into awe and wonder, choosing to check out of painful daily existence for at least a bit.
Many people don’t know what to make of Ascension Day. Some cannot get past literal images of Jesus being physically taken up into heaven. Just as the disciples gawked at Jesus’ feet sticking out of the clouds, some in our modern day laugh at a preposterous image and defiance of spatial reasoning. And this only deflects from the deeper meaning of the Ascension. Ascension Day is the feast that helps to locate our vision in the right places. It restores a balance to our vision.
If you ask me, on this Ascension Day, we should claim the Church is primarily a place for two things. The Church is called to gaze up into heaven in worship. And the Church is also called to look back down and around and realize that we have something utterly unique to say to the world, that it is imperative for us to say it, repeatedly, in word and action. We have the good news of redemption, of second and third chances and more, of a peace that passes all understanding, which really is possible if we desire it. We bear the good news that God’s image is in each and every one of us, and if we only really believed that, things might be so much different. The good news could go on and on. This week is a vivid reminder that we have an alternative vision that needs to be proclaimed. Last week was a reminder, too, and countless weeks before that. We could add a long list of weeks where we could have been reminded of the Church’s higher calling, where we could have been called to action.
But too often for us in the Church, our gaze is not balanced between these two places. Our vision is directed to only one of the places. And I wonder, is this why so many people are fleeing the Church for the religion of the workforce? Is this the reason that school and extracurricular activities are chosen over Sunday School? Is this the reason that Sunday brunch tables or the golf course are more popular than the pews? Is this the reason that we see so much despair? If all your faith is put in a failed human system of government or secular mechanisms of change, in a week like this one, it seems there is nowhere to turn.
But there is a dual identity to the Church that is emblemized on Ascension Day, and it is a source of hope. Awe and transcendence must be balanced with on-the-ground action. And when people lose faith in the Church, it could be that they see us gazing in only one of the two places rather than both. So then, why go to the Church for anything? Ascension Day is also conviction day for the Church.
I don’t need to tell you that many in the Church find it all too easy only to gaze up into heaven. They are rightly fascinated with the transcendence of God. But it ends there. To quote Oliver Wendell Holmes, they are “so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good.” Worship becomes an excuse for inaction. Transcendence becomes escapism.
On the other hand, there are others who never look up. Church is simply the place to find community and to relieve privileged guilt by engaging in acts of charity. Transcendence matters little; action is all that matters. The purpose of the Church has become humanist. Jesus is not worshipped; he is followed as an ethical guru.
I wonder if those who choose to give up on the Church have become disenchanted by our distorted gaze. Are we seen as looking too much up into heaven or not looking up into heaven enough? Where have things gone wrong?
Ascension Day is an opportunity to refocus and rebalance our gaze. It seems, at first, that this is a feast only about transcendence and staring up into heaven, a feast to look at dangling feet in the sky. But if we probe deeper into its mystery, we will find an indispensable piece to that heavenly gaze which is often forgotten. Looking up into heaven at Jesus’ feet hanging below the clouds, the disciples stood for a moment in awe before two men in white reminded them to come back to earth. Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?
Look around you. Look at yourselves. When the Holy Spirit alights upon you, you will be the Church. You will be charged with a great task: to do even greater things than Jesus. How’s that for a mission? Jesus’ power will no longer be confined to his physical earthly presence. It will be spread to the ends of the earth in you and me, his living Body.
That message is for us, too. Make no doubt about it: many will call us fools. They will accuse us of gazing up into heaven and putting our trust in something unseen, beyond the clouds. Some will say we should seek only policy and action, not thoughts and prayers. Others see no connection between Sunday mornings as we gaze up into heaven and weekdays where homeless people sleep on church steps and Christians bully one another like children on a playground.
But none of that should be the final word. This evening, we are gazing up to heaven because it’s the beginning of everything we do. If we don’t start there, then very little else matters. The meals handed out to the hungry and the beds offered to the homeless will only be navel gazing, unless we first gaze up into heaven.
But after gazing up, we must look back down. We see the face of Christ in the person at the bus stop and above the hand that gives us change at the grocery store. We see Christ in the faces of parents who have lost children, in the faces of the lonely, and of those who suffer. It’s this face that will call us to a proper response. Only by looking up first will we know how to respond and take action.
Somewhere between the clouds and earth is the deepest meaning of all. It’s the only meaning that can fill the void in our lives. The 70-hour a week job, the countless extracurricular activities, the gym, and the yoga studio may seem to fill our lives with value, but they lack the one thing that Christ alone can give. He corrects our vision and rebalances our gaze. Christ recalls our gaze to this place, this community, the Church. It is here where the vertical and the horizontal meet. Ascension Day is the Church’s strongest charge both to gaze up into heaven and then back down. We look at him, and then we look around. And if we hold our gaze in both places, we will never be left comfortless.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
Ascension Day
May 26, 2022