In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles appointed for today, we remember what was celebrated this past Thursday:  that on the fortieth day after His Resurrection our Lord Jesus Christ ascended into Heaven.  . . . Now, in a more ancient and simpler day it was adequate to say that Jesus ascended above the clouds where He sits beside God, enthroned “up there”; just out of sight.  . . . In a more ancient and simpler day that belief gave comfort:  the Lord God is over us; the Lord God is above us, looking after our necessities.  . . . But in our day the matter has become complicated by the fact that we have been “up there” . . . we have been above the clouds; . . . indeed, we have circled the earth and visited the moon and gazed into what lies beyond, . . . and we have not found any thrones … nor have we seen God away off in the distance waving to us.  . . . Profane minds get hold of this and they ridicule the Church’s belief in an attentive God.  The occasional academic and odd bishop, hoping to attract the unchurched, ridicule your beliefs and postulate “scientific” notions which conform to the physical evidence, crafting them into more “relevant” beliefs and declaring them to be truer than those musty, dusty Church beliefs from the Middle Ages, . . . and people accept it as true!  Even the Faithful accept the pronouncements of profane minds … so that the average Christian of twenty-first century Western society is a compound creature:  he (and she) is a creature of holy hopes . . . with profane beliefs; . . . you pray like saints, . . . but you live like thieves, wrongdoers, and mischief-makers.

    But consider this:  . . . if we have been above the clouds and visited the moon and gazed into what lies beyond . . . and have found no thrones . . . nor seen God away off in the distance waving to us, . . . then perhaps we have misunderstood what Holy Scripture is telling us.  Perhaps the Bible isn’t wrong so much as we’ve understood it wrong.  Perhaps the Bible never intended to say that the Ascension of Jesus was spatial.  Perhaps the word “ascension” describes something else.

    Saint John tries to explain this very thing to us.  The portion of his Gospel appointed to be read today begins at the first verse of the Seventeenth Chapter.  That first verse says, “When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, . . .”.  . . . When Jesus had spoken what words?  . . . Well, John says, Jesus prayed the things you have heard today after He had said,

In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.

Our Lord Jesus has said that the profane minds of faithless people will misunderstand what you believe and ridicule you (and, in some places, they will do even worse); our Lord Jesus has said that you will have tribulation; . . . but to be of good cheer, He says, . . . because He has overcome the world.  . . . But what does Jesus mean by saying He has overcome the world?

    Well, you see, a profane mind believes in only what is immediate; . . . not in what is eternal.  This is because a profane mind defines itself in relation to the world around it and is governed by the immediate events of its world, . . . because the profane mind’s chief object is self-protective:  what it believes makes immediate provision for individual needs of personal self-gratification, stability, and security.  … Unfortunately, a society which is dominated by profane thinking becomes the very thing it wishes to avoid.  It goes something like this:  because my needs must be served now, . . . your needs are less important and must wait behind mine.  But to your profane way of thinking that kind of treatment is unjust, and so you demand your rights.  . . . Pretty soon everyone is clamoring for “justice” but no one ever receives it . . . because “justice” must fit their particular needs.  . . . And so, profane society becomes a frustrate, unstable, and insecure chaos.  Profane thinking (which has the world as its definition and object) . . . profane thinking is a journey into moral lawlessness.  And so, we have report of a more than insignificant percentage of priests of the American Church having done unspeakable things to choirboys, . . . because while they may pray like saints . . . they have been trained to live like thieves and wrongdoers and mischief-makers.  … And, in spite of our best efforts, schoolchildren continue to murder one another and their teachers, . . . because our Supreme Court, having misunderstood the Constitution’s provision for no established Church . . . to mean no religion at all, has created an educational ethos that aspires to nothing higher than a life-style of theft, wrongdoing, and mischeif-making.

    But Jesus says, “I have overcome the world.”  And after He says that, Saint John tells us,

[Jesus lifts] up His eyes to heaven and [says], . . . “Father, the hour has come [for the Son] . . . to give eternal life to all whom thou hast given him.”

Jesus says that there is an alternative to moral lawlessness and death; . . . Jesus says that He has come to us to give us eternal life.  . . . And then John carefully explains what Jesus means by eternal life:  eternal life is first, to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom God has sent, . . . and second, one knows the only true God and Jesus Christ by receiving the words which God gave to Jesus to give to us, . . . because, third, the words which Jesus has given us bring us into the presence of God’s glory; bring us into the presence of the shining effulgence of God’s real and eternal and immediate presence.  . . . In other words, to simply say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”; . . . to simply remember one of Christ’s parables . . . brings you face to face with the real and eternal Lord your God!

    . . . Saint John says that Jesus prayed to our heavenly Father,

I glorified thee on earth, having accomplished the work which thou gavest me to do; and now, Father, glorify thou me in thy own presence with the glory which I had with thee before the world was made.

. . . Jesus prays to ascend to the Father, not spatially but hierarchically!  Jesus prays to resume the higher glory He had as the Son before His divinity was clothed in our humanity so that we could look upon the Son and not be overwhelmed.  . . . But here is the thing to pay attention to:  Jesus prays that His humanity will ascend to the higher glory with His divinity!  In other words, the ascension of Jesus makes the proper dwelling for humanity to be with the Son; . . . the ascension of Jesus makes our proper place to be in the Presence of God!

    So you see, . . . Saint John carefully explains that to ascend to God’s glory is to attain to a higher state of life:  . . . a state of life which is not spatially above the earth and among the clouds, . . . but a state of life which has, in Christ Jesus, overcome the world -- a state of life which is neither defined by individual need nor governed by worldly events; . . . but a state of life which, measures individual needs and the effects of worldly events according to a knowledge of “the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom [He] sent”; . . . a state of life which shares Christ’s glory by remembering and living the Father’s Word.

    That is how Saint John explains the Ascension.  It is a higher life.  Jesus has returned into that life because it is His natural home.  . . . And now it is your natural home if you dwell in God’s Word Who is Jesus.  . . . Or, as Saint Luke puts it in his account of the Acts of the Apostles,

[Jesus] said, . . . “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.  But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses . . . to the end of the earth.”

. . . Don’t trouble yourself, Jesus says, with matters beyond your authority.  You have power; you have the very Spirit of God.  . . . By your baptism into the Death and Resurrection and Ascension of Christ Jesus . . . the very Spirit of God has come upon you.  . . . The very Spirit of God has come upon you with power to overcome the world whenever it rears up and threatens to bloody you.  Moreover, you have the power of God to witness to the higher life that is in the Word Who is Christ Jesus; you have the power of God not to live like thieves or wrong-doers or mischief-makers . . . but to live so that your living and your speaking will sanctify the world, . . . and, even more importantly, so that your living and your speaking will sanctify profane minds.  You have the power of God to sanctify profane minds by your living and by your speaking; you have the power of God to illuminate the dark and fearful places of human hearts with the felicity of Christ . . . that they might receive God’s grace to abandon lawlessness and come to life.  . . . And when the strife is o’er; . . . when your mortal substance can do nothing else but to fall asleep in Jesus, . . . it is by the power of the Holy Spirit that each of us shall ascend to the higher life that it has been our privilege in Christ to know and to model and to preach.  . . . By your baptism into the Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus you have received this power from God.  . . . And today the Lord God Almighty shall bestow this same consoling and shielding and enabling and redeeming power upon Alexa Margaret Berger.  God will give her the power, but it falls to each one of us, . . . especially to parents and godparents, to be models of this higher life; . . . to give Alexa Margaret the means, by prayer and worship and Sacrament and Sacred Scripture, not to be deceived by profane minds and profane thinking, . . . nor to regard thieves and wrongdoers and mischief-makers as heroes and icons of liberty.  . . . To that end, continuing of page 301 in The Book of Common Prayer, let the Candidate for Holy Baptism now be presented.