Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord (B) – May 29, 2022

St. Paul – Lyons, KS

Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47:2-3, 6-9; Ephesians 1:17-23; Luke 24:46-53

The Split We Accept

One of the things that I have talked to you a lot about is this split we experience between the “Faith” and “my real life”—this split we just kind of accept. There is the “Faith” and all of this stuff we’re supposed to believe and do as Christians, as Catholics. But then there is “my real life,” all the stuff that goes on in the “real world.” This split that we set up stems from the solemnity we celebrate today, or at least a misunderstanding of the Ascension. Jesus was taken up, he ascends to the highest of heavens, he “floats off,” he’s gone. And now that he’s “gone,” up up and away, we blame this split on him: he left, apparently. And now being a Christian, a Catholic just means that you believe certain things about this Jesus guy (who’s gone) and you are supposed to live a certain way, vote a certain way, follow certain rules or something.

So what happens? When you live “Faith” like that, faith just becomes a wager, a huge bet: it is better to bet that there is a God and heaven and hell exist and be wrong, than it is to wager, to bet that there is no God, and heaven and hell aren’t real…and find out that they are. So you better bet that it’s a real thing! And what does that turn into? Well, the connection between the “Faith” and “my real life” is just: believing certain random things, and living my life a certain way in our. And so we do that: we believe certain things that we’re “supposed to believe,” and follow certain ethical principles—and then hope for an eternal reward, to cash in on our wager.

And a lot of us take this very seriously; we take this bet, these beliefs and ethics very seriously! We defend them! When others ridicule or question them, we stand up for them! “This is my belief!” But here in the United States, what we’re really saying is, “I believe this. I have a right to believe this. And I have a right for my beliefs to be tolerated politically and respected by others.” That’s what people hear, anyway: “I have invested a lot of emotional energy into this belief, and in a way, I’ve staked the credibility of my life on it. So if you mock it, you can expect a fight.” We see this played out all the time: “Ok, well freedom of religion. You can believe what you want in your personal ‘religion.’ You do you!” Does that make sense? Christian, Jew, Muslim, two-headed lizard god, Call of Duty, football—whatever it is, “You want to believe that, you want to live your life like that, fine. You do you.”

What Our Kids and Grandkids Are Looking For (…and so are you)

Ok. This is why when our siblings, when our kids or grandkids, when our friends abandon it, the “Faith”—that’s why we get so upset. Yeah: I’m worried about their soul, their eternal salvation; I raised them different; they need to believe the right thing, behave the right way. But usually it comes back to, “I have invested a lot of my emotional energy into this belief, and in a way, I’ve staked the credibility of my life on it. I have made a huge bet myself on this. Therefore, they should too!” And we put it in “religious” terms: their “soul” is at stake; I don’t want them to go to hell; I want them to be right with God. Does this sound familiar?

“Shouldn’t they know better? I wish they would just go to Mass.” What are they doing when they abandon it? Why do they do that? What are they looking for?

And look, I can’t give you all of the answers, but one thing they’re looking for is something real. They want something really real, something that isn’t superficial and fleeting, something that is authentic, something that grips them and changes them, changes their life. They want something that reaches their heart, their whole life. And this is a good thing. Because we’re all looking for that.

That is the cry of the human heart—every heart. We want something real, something authentic! We want work that matter, that isn’t pointless. We want relationships that are deep and real, not just people who scroll by on Facebook and give us a like now and then. We want to dream big, and not just have wishful thinking. We want something real!

What we experience so often, though, is a lack of something real—things seem so artificial and fleeting. And our kids and grandkids, our siblings and friends—what they see and experience in the “Faith” so often is something that isn’t “real.” They are very perceptive to the disconnect, the split—a disconnect and a split we may turn a blind eye toward—and they don’t buy it. They recognize the sincerity of your belief, of my belief, sure! They respect that belief. But then—what’s the line? “You do you. If that’s what you believe, if that’s how you want to live your life, you do you.” They make their own wager, their own bet. They go after what is real. They decided to live their best life, to be a good person. And they go looking for what is real. Money, job, their live-in boyfriend, football, you name it.

Salvation: The Waking Up of Our Hearts to Reality

We want to ask the wrong questions: Why don’t they believe? Why don’t they follow the rules? Why don’t they get it? But again, those are precisely the wrong questions. That leaves everything at the level of ideas and rules. We need what’s real. Something that touches their real life.

The better questions to ask—and you have to start by asking yourself, if you want to become an evangelist and be a convincing witness to the faith—better questions are: What happened to you? Why do you live your life like that? Why do you want others to have what you have?

Do you see what I’m saying? We reduce the faith to “believe these things and not those” and “behave a certain way, do things a certain way, vote a certain way.” And these are important! But they only make sense if they flow from something, if something happened, something happened that changed everything and now we live our life completely differently, we see reality and believe in things in a completely different way.

Again, I use marriage as my example all the time, but marriage is exactly the same way. Do you love you wife more because you know she got her wisdom teeth out when she was fifteen? Does knowing that he sprained his ankle while riding a skateboard make you love your husband more? No. Just knowing certain thing and believing certain things doesn’t make you love them more, but it enriches a love that is already there. Waking up in the middle of the night to get the screaming baby: Does make you love your wife more? No. Does cleaning up pee off of the toilet make you love him more? No. But why do you do that? Well it’s because you already love them, something already happened. You take care of that screaming baby because you love your wife. We do these things to show our love.

But something happened first! Something had to have happened! You saw her across the room, your eyes met, and all the fireworks went off. She was it. Something happened; everything changed; and all of a sudden you wanted to know everything about her, you wanted to do everything you could to show your love for her—and you still do, even though it has been difficult at times..

Do you see what I’m saying? Something happened to you. It changed what you were interested in, how you looked at the world, how you lived your life. You felt more alive, more like yourself, more real. When you met her you became more you, more real. And you wish that everyone could experience such a fulfilling and incredible relationship. 1) Something happened; 2) it changed how you lived your life; and now 3) you want others to have that experience too.

“You will be my witnesses”

The great mystery of the Ascension is not Jesus flying up up and away to heaven. No, that would be lame. We think of “heaven” as this place far away, up in the clouds. When “heaven” is the way to talk about the realest place there is, where everything is as real as it gets: real relationships, real happiness, real love, the really real. Jesus ascended—but probably better for our ears is to think Jesus dove into the depths of what is real, he took our human nature, our humanity and plunges it into the depths of the life of God himself. What we are searching for when we’re searching for something real, something authentic, something profound—we’re searching for Christ, we’re searching for what the Ascension guarantees us.

This can sound abstract, but we’ve probably seen it before. When someone has this, you recognize it. You want it. You see these people and ask: “What happened to them? Why do they live their life like that? I want a piece of what they’re eating!” This is what people ask when they met the saints. There are great stories of people meeting Pope John Paul II, and they would meet him at breakfast while he was stuffing his face with Corn Flakes. But immediately they would recognize a weight behind his presence, a gravitas, something really real. Mother Therese, same thing. This four foot nothing Albanian nun would walk into a room of Bishops and Cardinals and royal dignitaries and presidents—and she would dwarf them all. Why? What happened to her?

What we read time and again in the Gospels, what we hear over and over about the Apostles, about Mary Magdalen, the Samaritan Woman, Zachaeus, the Man Born Blind—time and again what we hear is that as they stayed with him, something happened. They were changed. They became more real, more themselves, more authentic than they could have imagined. And the way they lived their life changed. Why? Because Jesus had a big list of rules to follow “or else”? No, they lived a certain way because they wanted to preserve this reality, they wanted this experience they had with Jesus to remain, they wanted to live the truth of reality, they wanted this to continue (again, think of marriage: you have to live that reality a certain way and it falls apart). Something happened, it changed how they looked at life, how they looked at the world, how they lived—and then they went out because they wanted other to experience that too.

We read at the end of Luke’s Gospel today: “You are witnesses of these things.” These people went out, and simple shared what had happened. And the Lord did the work through them with this power from on high. When people met them, they encountered the Reality behind this experience, Jesus Christ himself.

Begin by asking—in prayer, in adoration, sit in silence—and just ask: What happened to me? Why do I live my life this way? And why do I want others to have what I have, to experience what I have experienced? The Lord is still present. And as we continue to announce what has happened, the Lord will continue to work through us a bring other closer to himself.