Seeking The Sunglasses

Ascension of the Lord – Cycle C

Acts 1: 1-11; Ephesians 1: 17-23; 

Luke 24: 46-53

In today's Gospel, Luke says of Jesus, “As he blessed them he parted from them and was taken up to heaven” (Luke 24:51). The account from Acts paints of picture of Jesus rising into the clouds as the apostles stare at the bottoms of his feet.

For years I believed that this feast day was all about the risen Jesus leaving his earthly home for the last time to forever sit at the right hand of the Father. But maturity has brought me a deeper understanding of the Ascension. Since today is Mother's Day, I'll illustrate my point with a Mom story.

One day my mother was getting ready to go to the grocery. She was searching all over the house for something, and getting angrier by the minute. My brother finally asked, “What are you looking for?”

She was looking for her sunglasses. At that point we busted out laughing. The sunglasses weren't lost - they were perched on the top of her head the whole time!

And so it was with Jesus and the early church. The early Christians spent a lot of time looking up at the clouds for Christ. The first followers believed that Jesus would return soon – perhaps even before those who knew him firsthand had died. There is a legend that at early Eucharistic celebrations, someone was appointed – probably the deacon – to go outside during the celebration and see if Christ had returned. Gradually, the church learned to focus on building up the Kingdom of God here on earth rather than looking expectantly toward the heavens.

We can learn something from the missing sunglasses as well. One of the non-canonical sayings of Jesus states, “A person who sees his brother (or sister) sees God.” In other words, we should be searching for Christ in each other rather than looking for him somewhere else. When we turn to each other in the sign of peace, we are turning to Christ.

And what of the poor and the suffering in our community? Do we see them as the sunglasses we are seeking? I am not talking about an abstract group of people, but of the people who are close to us in our everyday lives: those enduring the poverty of loneliness, of boredom, of emptiness, of seeming abandonment in our nursing homes. Do we seek them out, or do we continue our fruitless search?

Sometimes we look for Christ in the heavens when all this time he has been lying lost and forgotten in the darkness of the poor and the suffering.

How then do we gain the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that we may come to know God? All of the readings today speak of power. In Acts, Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you” (1:8). Paul's letter to the Ephesians refers to “the surpassing greatness of [God's] power for us who believe, ... which he worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at the right hand in the heavens” (1:19). Finally in Luke, Jesus tells his disciples to “stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (24:49).

What an awesome thought – that same power that raised Jesus from the dead and took him into heaven is operating among us. This power is the power of God's love. Without it, we cannot care for those who need our care. We cannot love fully or completely on our own. It is only by tapping into the great reservoir of God's love that we can do this.

The author Annie Dillard, who became Catholic several years ago, put forth the notion that we Christians are like children playing on the floor with our chemistry sets, making TNT. We have access to a power more awesome than dynamite. If we were to fully unleash the power of God's love, the world would be forever changed.

Yesterday our second graders received their first taste of that power in the Eucharist. Let us come now to the table of the Lord and be nourished again by that great power of God's love so that we may see Christ not only in the heavens, but in our midst.

Deacon Darryl J. Diemer

Ascension of the Lord

May 12, 2013

Painting: Ascension by Rembrandt, 1636