Ascend

Scripture: Ascension, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

A waitress recently asked the visiting Dalai Lama about the meaning of life. “That’s an easy question,” he answered. “The meaning of life is to be happy. Now, what is happiness? That’s a hard question.”

What is the meaning of life, the purpose of life? Perhaps it really is just to be happy. But what is happiness? We tend to think of happiness as something that happens to us, like a meteor falling from the sky. If so, happiness depends on external things: money, clothes, weather, cookies. If you have a cookie, you’re happy. If you have a beer, you may be happier. Such is life. Alas, this confuses happiness with feeling happy, much as how we often confuse love with feeling in love.

But this is not the traditional understanding of happiness, which has little to do with externals and everything to do with who we are and who we want to be. The old understanding of happiness might better be understood as virtue; thus, a truly happy man is a virtuous man, someone who lives a virtuous life. And a virtue is nothing more than a good habit. It takes proper knowledge and diligent practice. The cardinal virtues, for Christians and non-Christians alike, have ever been prudence of mind, justice of will, fortitude of passions, and temperance of appetites.

If you learn how to think well, will well, and act well, these things become habits, become virtues. We seek out the good and we conform ourselves to the good. A virtuous person is a good person, a happy person, and, most importantly, a free person. By this understanding, you can be poor, or sick, or alone, or imprisoned, and still be happy, because happiness stems from virtue, and virtue cannot be taken away. So the purpose of life is to be happy. But real happiness comes from within, and may involve, in fact, undergoing a great deal of hardship in this life.

For a Christian, the one perfectly virtuous Man, Who is, in fact, Goodness Himself, is Jesus Christ crucified. On the Cross we see a Man Who is perfectly happy.

Now, all people of goodwill seek out the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, not just to know these things but to participate in them. When we find beauty we want to behold it, to cherish it, to participate in it. That’s why we sing along with songs, dance along with music. That’s why a young man, enraptured by a young woman, puts aside his own life to marry her; he sees in her deep beauty, and wishes to participate, in that, with her, as one.

Just as strongly as beauty, we seek truth. That’s why human beings are natural born explorers, adventurers, philosophers, and scientists. That’s why we all have deep within us the religious instinct, the search for meaning, the quest for something more, something True. And when we find truth we try to live it out for ourselves. So too we seek the Good, not just to know it but to participate in goodness, to be better people, virtuous people, happy people. Goodness, Truth, and Beauty—find them, know them, join them, so that you yourself can seek to become a good person, a true person, a beautiful person. That’s the purpose of life. That’s what makes us happy.

Now, of course, the question becomes, “What is truth?” What indeed? There are objective truths that we call facts, and subjective truths we call opinions. There are also spiritual and moral truths that we can neither grasp as solid fact nor dismiss as ephemeral opinion. And at the end of the day, all truth is God’s. For us, for Christians, truth is not a collection of proverbs nor an overarching ideal, but a Person: an actual, flesh-and-blood human being; Who also happens to be God.

Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. When we seek out the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, we find them all most perfectly convened in Him. And keep in mind that we don’t simply want to know the Good and True and Beautiful; we want to participate in them, and so we want to participate in Jesus. We want to be One with Him, to join in Him. Then we can share in His goodness, truth, and beauty, then we can be virtuous and saintly, then we can be happy—forever.

It really is a love affair. There’s a reason that God’s relationship with humanity is spoken of, time and again in the Bible, as a marriage, an absolute act of self-giving love. God’s bride is Israel, Christ’s bride is the Church, and He loves us as a groom deeply enthralled with his wife, as a man and woman who want to be one with each other to share in the goodness and beauty they each see reflected in one another’s eyes. God wants to be One with Man and Man wants to be One with God. That’s the Bible. That’s the story. That’s the love of our lives.

That’s why religion, in its purest expression, offers to us the unbridled ecstasy of a newlywed couple, and why turning from God tears open the ragged emptiness and agonizing loss caused by adultery. They say God is a jealous God. We are all jealous, terribly so, of losing the people whom we love most in this world.

Today we celebrate one of the most misunderstood and neglected of all the holidays in the Church year, for today we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord into Heaven. This is the climax of the Paschal Mysteries, the climax of the Atonement. And so it is the climax of the love story between God and humankind.

I said that God wants to be One with Man and Man wants to be One with God. That’s literally what atonement means: atonement means “at-one-ment,” the union of we poor banished children of Eve with our Creator and Father in Heaven. It began with the Incarnation, when God the Son chose to take on flesh in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary—to live as a fetus, in perfect vulnerability for nine months, and then enter into our world at Christmas “through the guts of a girl.”

The Atonement continued with Jesus’ life as a baby, a toddler, a youth, a young man. It continued as Jesus laughed and wept and learned and taught and loved and lost. For 30 years the Atonement was a quiet life, a humble life—just like all of ours. First God became a Man, and then He lived like one.

Around age 30 Jesus took the proclamation of His Kingdom to the world, fulfilling all the promises that God had made to Israel and to the nations. For three years He taught the ignorant, comforted the mourning, healed the sick, rebuked the wicked, fed the hungry, forgave the sinner, and raised the dead from their graves. And then He gave everything for us—poured out His very life and blood and Holy Spirit—from a wicked Cross, upon which He died at our hands and for our sake. And He descended into Hell, to save the lost and shatter the gates and raise the souls of God’s people to the Beatific Vision of bliss.

He rose on Easter three days later, having loved us all the way to Hell and back. And He showed to us what the Resurrected life would be like: free from hunger and sickness and division and death. And then, most astonishingly, He rose back into Heaven from whence He’d come, body and soul, taking His humanity with Him. Do you see the culmination? God came down to earth, down in the mud and the blood, even down into the land of the dead. And His mission climaxed by raising Man up to be One with God forever. In the Incarnation God came down to be with us; in the Ascension He pulls us up to be with Him.

God and Man are One, in Heaven, forever. We are not invited to sit next to God in Heaven—my God, no! We are invited to participate in God, to join in the eternal dance of the Trinity, to become One with perfect Goodness and Truth and Beauty forever. The Ascension is our apotheosis, our deification! We do not become gods, but we enter a perfect union, an indissoluble marriage, with the One True God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And yes, we lose ourselves, and yes, we finally become who we were always meant to be, just as in a marriage. And we are invited to live forever as saints, forever beautiful, forever good, forever happy. It is the perfect and truest end to the perfect and truest love.

The meaning of life is not to be successful or rich or famous or even remembered. The meaning of life is to seek out God in all things good and true and beautiful. It is to grow closer to our One True Love, every day, in whatever way we can. Live in Christ, and we truly will be happy. Live in Christ, and we truly will be saints.

Thanks be to Christ, in Whom we all ascend. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.