A teacher asked the children in her Sunday School class, “If I sold my house and my car, had a big garage sale and gave all my money to the church, would that get me into heaven?”
“NO!” the children all answered.
“If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard, and kept everything neat and tidy, would that get me into heaven?”
Again, the answer was “NO!”
“Well,” she continued, “then how can I get to heaven?”
In the back of the room, a five-year-old boy shouted out, “You gotta be dead!”
Do you think that young man was right? Do you have to be dead to get into heaven? Heaven is God’s abode, isn’t it? So, if heaven is where God is, then anywhere God is, is heaven. In other words, it’s not so much a location as it is a state of being.
God is everywhere, isn’t he? So, in a sense, heaven is everywhere. When our Lord Jesus began his ministry, he preached, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Without saying it explicitly, in uttering that simple sentence, he was saying, “You’ve been looking for the Messiah, right? Well, I am the Messiah. I am here to usher in the kingdom of heaven and wherever I am, that’s where the kingdom of heaven is.”
We’re here today celebrating the sacrament our Lord Jesus gave us. We remember his teaching that “whenever two or three are gathered together in his name, he is in the midst of them.” We know that as we celebrate the Holy Eucharist, as we consume his body, we literally bring the presence of Christ into our own bodies. And so in a very real way whenever we gather together to worship we experience a little bit of heaven. We are in heaven right now, to a degree.
I say to a degree because God doesn’t require us to center our focus on him, to center our lives on him. It’s possible that you’re here physically, but not focused upon God at all. Maybe you’re thinking about what you’re going to have to eat tonight when you get home, or maybe you’re focused on how badly so-and-so treated you and you’re plotting your revenge. When we focus on ourselves, with God somewhere on the periphery if anywhere, then we are choosing not to be in heaven.
Or maybe you’re focused on God to the very best of your ability. When we focus on God, allowing him to be in the center of our lives, then we are choosing to live in heaven. I said to a degree also because, in our sinful condition, we can only imperfectly focus on God at the best of times. I think that’s what St. Paul meant when he said, “For now we see in a mirror dimly.”
We are in this wonderful season of Easter, when we celebrate the event that opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers—the passion, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. That event changed all of human history, reconciling God with his people. We became participants in that event through our baptism. Through Jesus’ death on the cross, our access to God the Father is always available to us.
Now, today, the 40th day of Easter, we celebrate another aspect of that event—the ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ into heaven. That means that Jesus took our human flesh with him into the Godhead. That is, it was that human flesh that was resurrected, and the resurrected body of Jesus was somewhat different from his pre-resurrection body. For instance, Jesus could pass through the solid door and appear in the locked upper room at will (Jn 20:19), yet Thomas could feel the wounds in his hands and side (John 20:27); he could be recognized or not by mortals as he chose (Lk 24:16); his body required no nourishment, yet he could eat (Lk 24:30ff, Jn 21:9ff). It’s that body that he took up into heaven with him.
When we say in the creeds that we believe in the resurrection of the body, it’s that kind of resurrected body that we can look forward to. The Christian doctrine of resurrection teaches that while body and soul may appear to be temporarily separated at death, the body and soul are both eternal and inseparable. We speak of the resurrection of only the body because while the body dies, the soul is immortal. At some point after death the body is resurrected as an immortal and incorruptible body and is reunited with the immortal soul, which did not die with the body. The whole person, both body and soul inseparably united, is what Christ saved by his death and resurrection. So when we do die and our immortal soul goes to heaven, ultimately we can look forward to a resurrected body as well.
Of course, Jesus is also fully divine as well as fully human, so his ascension into heaven means that he can, through the Holy Spirit, be anywhere and everywhere at will. The collect for this day states that he has “ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things.”
Last Monday I visited one of our parishioners in the hospital. I anointed him and gave him holy communion. The two of us were there in the room, but there were really three. Jesus was there, too. In prayer, I asked our Lord Jesus to stay with this person and to sustain him with his presence. And then we both received Communion, thereby bringing the actual physical, tangible presence of Jesus into our bodies.
Over the years, I’ve done that countless times, and Jesus has always been there. And all of your clergy have done the same thing countless times. And Jesus is always there.
And he doesn’t just show up in hospital rooms with clergy ministering to the sick. There was a Bible study yesterday morning and Jesus showed up for that. He is present at every mass, every class held in this parish church, and he even shows up at EYC. He is present in all of our homes as long as he’s welcome. And guess what, he shows up at First Methodist Church, too. And at First Baptist Church. And at St. Martha’s Roman Catholic Church. He is present throughout this city, throughout this country, and all over the world. Furthermore, he has done it for centuries. He’s responsible for the building of schools and universities, hospitals, orphanages, homeless shelters, and of course great cathedrals and little country churches.
He is able to fill all things because he ascended into Heaven. John Keble, who is memorialized in stained glass in our priests’ sacristy, wrote of this day:
The sun and every vassal star,
All space, beyond the soar of angel wings,
Wait on his word: and yet he stays his car
For every sigh a contrite suppliant brings.
He listens to the silent tear
For all the anthems of the boundless sky –
And shall our dreams of music bar our ear
To his soul-piercing voice for ever nigh?
Nay, gracious Savior – but as now
Our thoughts have traced thee to thy glory throne,
So help us evermore with thee to bow
Where human sorrow breathes her lowly moan.
And so, this great event that we celebrate today, the ascension of our Lord into heaven, leads us back to breaking the fixation we have with ourselves and focusing God and on the needs of others, and in the process we will find ourselves in his very presence, even heaven itself.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Fredrick A. Robinson
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota, Florida
Ascension Day
May 13, 2021