If you ever have a chance to do a church tour around England, make your way to Norfolk. The motto of the village of Walsingham, in a reference to it's pre-Norman Conquest roots, is “Welcoming Visitors Since 1061,” and it is home to the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham. And it is there, in the Chapel of the Ascension, that you will find it. Typically English, and typically weird.
On the ceiling is a circle in the shape of a cloud, and sticking out of the circle are two ceramic feet, dangling down. The last things the Apostles would have seen as Jesus ascended through the clouds. And as you stand there, looking up, a docent will often walk up behind you and say, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” Then she will wink at you and move the tour on to the next stop.
It's funny. After all these centuries, we are still looking up. Waiting for Jesus to come with Clouds Descending, saying, “OK, I'm back. Move aside and let a professional do this.”
But remember what the angel actually told the apostles: “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven."
I think maybe we ought to interpret it differently. The way Jesus went to heaven the first time was from the ground up. And the first time was hard, and it was difficult, and it was humiliating.
On Good Friday we contemplated a Christ so helpless. so in thrall to the powers of this age, that we might easily have forgotten that God was in him and with him.
Everything had been thrown against him. Everyone had worked to silence him. We held him down. We nailed him down. We murdered him. And maybe we were distracted then, forgetting that it was God who consented to be there humiliated.
For if God were not in Christ on that first Good Friday, then Jesus’ cross is simply another of the world’s griefs: one more item in that tally of blood and violence which marks our history from the biblical murder of Abel, through Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to the latest act of inhumanity here on our own day.
The cross of Jesus is different precisely because in a unique way God was involved in it; God was afflicted in all our afflictions.
And now, on the other side of the Resurrection we have a Jesus who is “exalted. . . with great triumph to [God's] kingdom in heaven.”
It is a picture so glorious with a transformed Christ that all we can imagine seeing are just the soles of Jesus' feet as he disappears up into the clouds.
And maybe now we are so distracted with contemplating God in full glory, that we can forget that it is humanity, our humanity, which is in Jesus as he ascends to heaven. If it were not our humanity that was here exalted, then the Ascension would be no more than a pleasing story of a god who comes and goes as he will, and would have little to do with us.
But Christ’s Ascension reminds us that the risen life which we are promised will have a purpose, just as this life has a purpose.
That purpose is union with God, nothing less. But just as Christ's Ascension to heaven began on Earth, I think that union with God, re-union with Christ, will begin here, too.
I don't have a clue what this means; I can't imagine what this all means. But, in the borrowed words of Flannery O'Connor, “Everything that Rises Must Converge.”
As Jesus rises, the Spirit of God dwells in each of us, and we converge with God, seeing a bit of what God sees from that heavenly perspective while remaining rooted firmly here on earth.
Rather than a selfish image of salvation and personal well-being, this act of Ascension challenges us to bring God's Spirit back to earth, that is, to live Jesus' values in our world.
I think that from time to time we do, indeed, catch glimpses of it. We caught a glimpse of it in a baby in manger. We caught a glimpse of it in the Transfiguration. We caught a glimpse of it on the cross.
But we also catch a glimpse of it in our own human endeavors, when Christians fight to keep other people from oppression. When they stand up to dehumanizing regimes. When they put their bodies in the way of those political and social machines that soulessly grind others down.
We catch glimpses of it when followers of Christ perform simple Jesus acts of giving, washing, feeding, and praying.
We catch glimpses of it in music and art and literature and performance, when people of goodwill around the world let that Spirit, known or unknown to them, guide them to reach out and touch others in moving and life-changing ways.
We even catch glimpses of it in the form of ceramic feet peeking out of the clouds above an altar in England.
And by all these glimpses we are assured of this: that there will be in that risen life, as Saint Paul says, a glory to which the sufferings of this present age are “not worth comparing.”
It is in the light of that promise that we dare open our hearts to the Spirit of God, and dare try to live as Christians—attempting all those crazy things to which the gospel invites us, such as forgiving our enemies, doing good to those who do evil to us, striving for justice rather than profit, and turning the other cheek.
We do not do this because we think it leads to successful lives as the world measures success, or because we think it makes us perfect and holy. Most likely, if we succeed at this, such living leads to a cross.
But most importantly, we try to live like this because God is like this, forgiving those who do evil, and loving the good and the bad alike. And we try to be like God because as Christians we know that, when Jesus Ascended to heaven and left his Spirit here with us on the ground, it became our destiny.