Icons are usually pretty straightforward: Disciples gathered around, Jesus rising to heaven, maybe a rainbow breaks out. Weird ones show just Jesus’s feet dangling in the top center of the picture, focusing on the comically awe-struck faces of the disciples. But the sublime ones express the mystery that is at the heart of the Ascension in a way that promoted thought and wonder.
One of my favorite images of the ascension of Christ is one by Salvador Dali, painted in 1958. It’s actually called Ascension: Pieta. This is not one of his stranger paintings with crutches and melted watches, or impossibly spindly, toothpick-legged horses or robotic humanoid figures.
This one is hyper-realistic. Christ is depicted floating directly over the viewer’s head, so you see bare feet, thighs, ribcage expanded like a diver getting ready to plunge, arms outstretched, hands powerfully flexed, straining and grasping at the air. Jesus’s chin is pointed skyward. The feet are smudged; Jesus’s time walking with the disciples is over.
But this diver is plunging upward, upward into the center of perhaps the nucleus of a cell, but more probably the center of an atom. See, this painting was inspired by a dream he’d had years before, soon after mankind first began creating atomic weapons. Dali depicts Jesus entering the nucleus of the atom, literally becoming one with all, part of the building block of the universe, which is actually a beautiful way of thinking about God using a scientific metaphor. Dali’s Christ turns thus bodily transforms a figure of destruction into a hope for new creation and unity.
One of my favorite images of the ascension of Christ is one by Salvador Dali, painted in 1958. It’s actually called Ascension: Pieta. This is not one of his stranger paintings with crutches and melted watches, or impossibly spindly, toothpick-legged horses or robotic humanoid figures.
This one is hyper-realistic. Christ is depicted floating directly over the viewer’s head, so you see bare feet, thighs, ribcage expanded like a diver getting ready to plunge, arms outstretched, hands powerfully flexed, straining and grasping at the air. Jesus’s chin is pointed skyward. The feet are smudged; Jesus’s time walking with the disciples is over.
But this diver is plunging upward, upward into the center of perhaps the nucleus of a cell, but more probably the center of an atom. See, this painting was inspired by a dream he’d had years before, soon after mankind first began creating atomic weapons. Dali depicts Jesus entering the nucleus of the atom, literally becoming one with all, part of the building block of the universe, which is actually a beautiful way of thinking about God using a scientific metaphor. Dali’s Christ turns thus bodily transforms a figure of destruction into a hope for new creation and unity.
The "pieta" part of Dali's vision shows Dali’s wife Gala posing as the Jesus’s mother Mary, looking down on the world, weeping; knowing how her son has suffered and continues to struggle against the evil in the world. Yet even here the risen Christ, on his way to heaven, acts to unify with what we have used all our vanity and skill to break apart, offering to bring peace where we have unleashed destruction. Dali uses the Ascension to insist on the inherent unity of faith with science, and of Creator and creation, with Christ as the mediator.
Given that the Feast of the Ascension is about Jesus leaving his disciples and ascending to heaven, one might wonder, first of all, how this is something that should be celebrated, and whether anyone in their right minds can actually believe it happened at all. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen sarcastic pictures of Jesus dressed like an astronaut noting that, unless he obtained warp speed, even after 2,000 years he would still be zooming through the space in the Milky Way, our own galaxy.
Given that the Feast of the Ascension is about Jesus leaving his disciples and ascending to heaven, one might wonder, first of all, how this is something that should be celebrated, and whether anyone in their right minds can actually believe it happened at all. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen sarcastic pictures of Jesus dressed like an astronaut noting that, unless he obtained warp speed, even after 2,000 years he would still be zooming through the space in the Milky Way, our own galaxy.
The meaning and truth of the Ascension, or any biblical account, does not depend upon whether writers 2,000 years ago could describe what they experienced and witnessed with scientific precision. The Bible was never meant to be a scientific text—nor was it ever meant to be used to oppose or contradict science, reason, or knowledge. Whether in theology or in literature, great stories can expose deep truths about ourselves and our world even using fictional events and characters. The beauty of the Anglican strand of Christianity is that most of us are quite willing to imaginatively engage with both science and faith, and see them as complementary.
For instance, we no longer believe in a three-layered cosmos, with the Earth surrounded by waters and held up by pillars. And hopefully most of us have abandoned the idea that the Earth is flat too. Hopefully!
We now know our galaxy alone has 50 galaxies within it, with maybe as many as 100 billion stars, most with their own systems, and that there are possibly 200 billion galaxies in the observable universe. That we know of right now. Where “heaven” is in relationship to all that is not a fruitful line of inquiry for most of us.
But that doesn’t mean that the Ascension is untrue. It is true in what it expresses—that Jesus lives, and is available to all of us and seeks out relationship with all of us that we may change the world. While in his earthly ministry, as a human he accepted certain limitations. He couldn’t be in two places at once, for instance, and so his ministry was limited to a small part of the world. Even in his resurrected body, he was still limited to this constraint until his ascent.
It's funny—we supposedly live in a scientific age, but most people’s actual knowledge of science, mine included, is not that great. Yet we use the tools of science to assault anything that threatens our own assumptions. We are now at the point when people simply block themselves off from information they don’t like—a perversion of not just the so called scientific revolution, but the tactic of tyrants and despots throughout history.
Yet God created us for wonder. And that’s part of what faith is all about.
So what might we take from the Ascension that would have meaning in our own lives? There’s enough there for a book (or many). It is about the uniting of creation with God, the completion of the unification of human with deity that began with Jesus’s entry into the world and continues after his return to God. It is the same mystery we celebrate every time we prayer together the Eucharistic prayer and unite ourselves with the ongoing heavenly banquet before God’s throne.
The Ascension is a mystery.
WHAT heaven is, and the kingdom of God is, is what Jesus came to us to reveal— and, as our scriptures today remind us for us then to reveal to the world. And he was clear that it was not a place as a state of existence beyond life and death. He was clear that it IS a state of existence that we could and do participate in, seeking it, working for it, NOW.
Heaven, the kingdom of God, is now—where peace, justice, equality, communion, compassion, generosity, abundance, grace, sacrifice, the common good, empathy—otherwise known as love in action-- reign. And we are called to help exemplify that and build that with our voices, our actions, our advocacy, our time, our choices, and our very lives.
And where Hell is now, where violence, injustice, oppression, hatred, contempt, deprivation, want, fear, selfishness, destruction, and cruelty—otherwise known as evil and sin, from individual to systemic-- reign. And we are called to resist that not just with “thoughts and prayers,” but with our voices, our actions, and our advocacy, our time, our choices, and our very lives.
That’s where Jesus’s Ascension comes in. The Ascension is the fulfillment of the Incarnation. In Jesus’s birth, God entered time and history. In the Resurrection, Jesus defeats death. In the Ascension, humanity is taken into the Godhead, for the Incarnate One sits at the right hand of God in his humanity and well as his divinity. Creation becomes one with Creator.
Jesus returns to God, the first resurrected one, completing the work in incarnation, in which humanity and creation become physically, truly one with God. Through Christ we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to witness to the Good News of God’s dream for us. Through Jesus’s Ascension, he is no longer rooted to any one place but becomes available to all as a living, loving presence in each of our lives. Through Jesus’s Ascension, the focus of Jesus’s followers moves from “What must we do to be saved?” to “What can we do to serve God and each other?” Inward to outward. From Jerusalem throughout the world.
Jesus’s leave-taking as necessary for us to continue to grow toward spiritual adulthood and fuller discipleship. Jesus promises he will NOT leave us orphaned, as we heard in our gospel reading last weekend; but he also commissions us to carry on his work in the world as both individual disciples and as a community known as the Church. Jesus honors us by placing the task of witnessing to him and his gospel in our hands.
We are not called by Jesus to stand looking up. We are called by Jesus to look around. To look around, to see the wounds of the world, wounds human hands have inflicted all too often and human silences have made worse. We are then called to look within, to look within our hearts and to the very atoms of our bodies and all creation, where Christ longs to dwell. To look within, and then around again, and see the wonder of the intricacies of creation, signposts of God’s love that is also embedded into the very atoms of this world.
The great 20th century poet and songwriter Bob Dylan underwent a religious conversion in the 1980s, and became a Christian. He wrote a song that combines this acknowledgement of the sinfulness and the beauty that is woven through our existence. It’s called "Every Grain of Sand:"
In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There's a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair
Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I behold this chain of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment, I can see the master's hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand
Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
And the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay
I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey, I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand
I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream, in the chill of a wintery light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, at times it's only me
I'm hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.(1)
Yes, we can see the heartbreak of this world. But we can also see the wonder. Then go, empowered by love, and BE Christ’s own hands and heart to heal and reconcile. Because we know we are not alone.
The point is, we are not supposed to just stand there as Jesus ascends, gazing up at heaven, waiting for God to “do something.” We are commissioned to go do something—lots of things—ourselves in ministry to the world. We can do this because we know that God, Trinity and Unity all at once, is still with us within us, in every bone and sinew and atom, challenging us, inspiring us, urging us to practice resurrection in every thing we do.
Today, we celebrate the risen and ascended Christ, risen to his glorification so that he can intercede for ALL of us, risen, but never gone, never leaving us alone. And we can look around this creation that God tenderly created and continues to love and treasure, and be filled with wonder and awe. And then joyfully, filled with wonder, to take up Jesus’s call to witness, to reconcile, to heal, with every blessed, sacred atom of our beings.
For instance, we no longer believe in a three-layered cosmos, with the Earth surrounded by waters and held up by pillars. And hopefully most of us have abandoned the idea that the Earth is flat too. Hopefully!
But that doesn’t mean that the Ascension is untrue. It is true in what it expresses—that Jesus lives, and is available to all of us and seeks out relationship with all of us that we may change the world. While in his earthly ministry, as a human he accepted certain limitations. He couldn’t be in two places at once, for instance, and so his ministry was limited to a small part of the world. Even in his resurrected body, he was still limited to this constraint until his ascent.
It's funny—we supposedly live in a scientific age, but most people’s actual knowledge of science, mine included, is not that great. Yet we use the tools of science to assault anything that threatens our own assumptions. We are now at the point when people simply block themselves off from information they don’t like—a perversion of not just the so called scientific revolution, but the tactic of tyrants and despots throughout history.
Yet God created us for wonder. And that’s part of what faith is all about.
So what might we take from the Ascension that would have meaning in our own lives? There’s enough there for a book (or many). It is about the uniting of creation with God, the completion of the unification of human with deity that began with Jesus’s entry into the world and continues after his return to God. It is the same mystery we celebrate every time we prayer together the Eucharistic prayer and unite ourselves with the ongoing heavenly banquet before God’s throne.
The Ascension is a mystery.
WHAT heaven is, and the kingdom of God is, is what Jesus came to us to reveal— and, as our scriptures today remind us for us then to reveal to the world. And he was clear that it was not a place as a state of existence beyond life and death. He was clear that it IS a state of existence that we could and do participate in, seeking it, working for it, NOW.
Heaven, the kingdom of God, is now—where peace, justice, equality, communion, compassion, generosity, abundance, grace, sacrifice, the common good, empathy—otherwise known as love in action-- reign. And we are called to help exemplify that and build that with our voices, our actions, our advocacy, our time, our choices, and our very lives.
And where Hell is now, where violence, injustice, oppression, hatred, contempt, deprivation, want, fear, selfishness, destruction, and cruelty—otherwise known as evil and sin, from individual to systemic-- reign. And we are called to resist that not just with “thoughts and prayers,” but with our voices, our actions, and our advocacy, our time, our choices, and our very lives.
That’s where Jesus’s Ascension comes in. The Ascension is the fulfillment of the Incarnation. In Jesus’s birth, God entered time and history. In the Resurrection, Jesus defeats death. In the Ascension, humanity is taken into the Godhead, for the Incarnate One sits at the right hand of God in his humanity and well as his divinity. Creation becomes one with Creator.
Jesus returns to God, the first resurrected one, completing the work in incarnation, in which humanity and creation become physically, truly one with God. Through Christ we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to witness to the Good News of God’s dream for us. Through Jesus’s Ascension, he is no longer rooted to any one place but becomes available to all as a living, loving presence in each of our lives. Through Jesus’s Ascension, the focus of Jesus’s followers moves from “What must we do to be saved?” to “What can we do to serve God and each other?” Inward to outward. From Jerusalem throughout the world.
Jesus’s leave-taking as necessary for us to continue to grow toward spiritual adulthood and fuller discipleship. Jesus promises he will NOT leave us orphaned, as we heard in our gospel reading last weekend; but he also commissions us to carry on his work in the world as both individual disciples and as a community known as the Church. Jesus honors us by placing the task of witnessing to him and his gospel in our hands.
We are not called by Jesus to stand looking up. We are called by Jesus to look around. To look around, to see the wounds of the world, wounds human hands have inflicted all too often and human silences have made worse. We are then called to look within, to look within our hearts and to the very atoms of our bodies and all creation, where Christ longs to dwell. To look within, and then around again, and see the wonder of the intricacies of creation, signposts of God’s love that is also embedded into the very atoms of this world.
The great 20th century poet and songwriter Bob Dylan underwent a religious conversion in the 1980s, and became a Christian. He wrote a song that combines this acknowledgement of the sinfulness and the beauty that is woven through our existence. It’s called "Every Grain of Sand:"
In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There's a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair
Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake
Like Cain, I behold this chain of events that I must break
In the fury of the moment, I can see the master's hand
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand
Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer
And the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay
I gaze into the doorway of temptation's angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name
Then onward in my journey, I come to understand
That every hair is numbered like every grain of sand
I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer's dream, in the chill of a wintery light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, at times it's only me
I'm hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.(1)
Yes, we can see the heartbreak of this world. But we can also see the wonder. Then go, empowered by love, and BE Christ’s own hands and heart to heal and reconcile. Because we know we are not alone.
The point is, we are not supposed to just stand there as Jesus ascends, gazing up at heaven, waiting for God to “do something.” We are commissioned to go do something—lots of things—ourselves in ministry to the world. We can do this because we know that God, Trinity and Unity all at once, is still with us within us, in every bone and sinew and atom, challenging us, inspiring us, urging us to practice resurrection in every thing we do.
Today, we celebrate the risen and ascended Christ, risen to his glorification so that he can intercede for ALL of us, risen, but never gone, never leaving us alone. And we can look around this creation that God tenderly created and continues to love and treasure, and be filled with wonder and awe. And then joyfully, filled with wonder, to take up Jesus’s call to witness, to reconcile, to heal, with every blessed, sacred atom of our beings.
Amen.
Preached at the 505 on May 20, and at the 8:00 and 10:30 am Holy Eucharists at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.
Readings:
Citations:
1) Bob Dylan, "Every Grain of Sand," from the album Shot of Love, 1981.
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