The Ascension: Home Is Where The Heart Is.

Matthew 28: 16-20

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshipped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.’

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. (C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity, Bk. III, chap. 10, "Hope")

In the Sunday gospels of the past two weeks, Jesus was emphasizing our oneness with him. He is in the Father, the Father is in him, he is in us and he will never leave us. Therefore, the feast of the Ascension is not just the celebration of Jesus ascending to heaven; it is also the celebration of our ascendance into heaven with him. This is the anniversary of us becoming Kingdom citizens. If the kingdom of God is within you, then you are in heaven with Christ.

I can just hear your brains turning over: “This sure doesn’t feel like heaven to me.”

One of the most significant turning points in my spiritual life was when I understood that I was not made for this world. Scripture says that we all are “aliens and exiles” or “visitors and pilgrims”. (1 Peter 2: 11, 12) If you accept this as truth, it can make a difference in how you relate to this crazy world. You are in it but not of it, you are a nomad traversing a desert region, you are a stranger in a strange land. You are a landed immigrant, familiar with all the attitudes and customs of the world but not completely at home within it. 

The other day I was talking with a fellow with a lovely British accent and he was reminiscing about  “the Old Country.” It had been quite a while since I had last heard England referred to as the Old Country and when he said it, it struck me somewhere deep inside. What it stirred up in me was a sense of the Kingdom of God. I have roots in God’s country or ‘the Old Country’ and sometimes it almost feels like I have deep-seated subconscious memories of a home I once knew. There are moments when something catches my eye or I read a few lines or hear some song lyrics and suddenly I feel like I’ve caught an ephemeral glimpse of my real home. And I get homesick.

What do I see? What do I feel? What do I hear? It’s hard to describe. I see the colors of desire. I feel a stir of excitement. I hear a voice that’s nothing like a voice saying words that are nothing like words. All I know is that it’s as if a window was very briefly opened and I was graced with a whiff of a fragrant, light filled breeze from ‘the Old Country’. I’m always waiting and watching for these glimpses, these whiffs, that often come from unexpected sources. I can’t make them happen. The Spirit’s breeze blows in his own good time.

What do these glimpses do for me besides give me a moment of sheer pleasure? They offer me tangible reminders that if I belong to a place so graciously beautiful and so familiar it hurts, it must mean that I am more than what this world would have me believe I am. In this world, I am faced constantly with irrational, unhealthy and distorted goals, goals that are almost impossible to attain. Even if I were to achieve one small goal such as, say, a perfect body, I would immediately be faced with a mountain of ideals I have not attained. In themselves, many of these ideals would seem to be admirable but living in a broken world causes a subtle perversion of these desires. This perversion skews our perceptions and contaminates the purity of the goals. When we think we are simply reaching for a good and worthy ideal, most often what we are trying to attain is acceptance. We desperately want to be accepted and, even more ideally, admired and respected. Much of what we do is to gain approval, rise above the ‘norm’ and show that we are worthwhile. We ache to be considered valuable. 

There is a place where we have immense intrinsic value. The ‘Old Country’. Home. This is a place where we have (not just ‘will have’ but have now) great beauty and dignity. This is where Christ went to prepare a dwelling place for each of us. If it were not so would he have told us? His ascension in his glorified body was the grand finale of his saving act – he became the indestructible bridge back to our original home, the place where we truly belong, where we are higher than the angels and a place where we are infinitely full of worth, dignity and grace.

Don’t get me wrong. Being in touch with our kingdom value doesn’t mean we can’t fail, do the wrong thing, say things we shouldn’t, harbor anger or resentment and generally get on the wrong track. But I’ve personally noticed that I am most susceptible to sin when I am focusing on the values of this world and wasting energy on actions designed to gain control and elicit approval, acceptance or admiration. When I am mindful of who I really am, where I came from and where I’m going, I am less susceptible to being stuck in the heart-numbing mud of this earth’s ‘approval mill’. It’s amazing, really, how many of our negative or sinful actions stem from a deep inner need to simply be recognized and loved, which is what we’re really wanting when we seek approval. We just want to know we’re wholly loved, accepted and admired for who we really are – not for what we suspect everybody thinks we should be. Actually, we’d like to know we are more than loved. We understand that God loves us. What we really want to know is that God is wholly contented with who we are.

An anonymous person once wrote that we were put here on earth to help each other get home. Before Jesus ascended to heaven, he commissioned the disciples to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.”  In other words, he commissioned the disciples – and us – to help the world come home.

Next Sunday, June 12^th, is the feast of Pentecost. Why not spend the time from now until that wonderful feast day praying that the Holy Spirit will awaken within you a deep abiding sense of where you really belong…

…and who you are when you’re at home.