Last week, a number of parishioners asked that I print out a story I read from the pulpit about a grandfather. I am happy to oblige; this story meant a lot to me. I hope that it means something to you:

A grandson remembers fondly and indeed with awe a long-gone grandfather who influenced him deeply. He was a black man in the deep South, a kind of Uncle Remus figure to generation of children. He told them stories, taught them how to fish and hunt, how to fly a kite, and so on. He owned a little cabin and some land where he lived with his wife and continued to live there after she died. The grandson says that the fateful day came about a year later after his grandmom died. A very valuable deposit of copper was discovered running through his grandfather's property. Some of the business leaders in town came to his grandfather and offered to buy his land so they could start a mining enterprise. The old man, who had not been raised in a money culture, simply wanted to live out his days on the old homestead, so he declined to sell. Still, there was a great deal of money at stake, a great deal. It wasn't long before the atmosphere began to turn ugly. For when the businessmen could not buy him out they resorted to threats. And many of the people, whom as children he had befriended, began to turn on him. Finally, it came down to this. They let it be known that if he was not the property by the weekend, there would be a lynching.

The grandson was terrified. He ran all the way to town to tell the local preacher. The old preacher told him not to worry. He sent the boy home and that night, under cover of darkness, he went to see the old man. The next morning, at the appointed hour, a band of executioners rode up hiding behind their white hoods and masks. They were surprised to see the old preacher come out with the old man and stand beside him on the porch. The preacher spoke. "Look", he said, John know that he is going to die and he has asked me to come out here, since he can't read or write, and make out his will, his last will and testimony. And now he wants me to read it to you".

The preacher looked around at the crowd, held up some old pieces of paper, cleared his throat and began to read. He wants to leave his fishing rod to peter because he remembered the first bass that he taught him to catch with it. He wants to leave his rifle to James because he remembers how he taught him to shoot it. He wants to leave his net to Michael because he taught him how to catch catfish with it. And he wants to leave his hoe to Ethan because he helped Ethan raise crops when his parents were starving". And so, says the grandson, item by item his grandfather proceeded to give away things to the very people who had come out take his life. One by one they began to turn away and leave until there was no one left.

He went up to his grandfather and asked "Grandpop, what kind of a will was that"? His grandfather laid his hand on his shoulder and replied. "The will of God, son. The will of God". If I am an upright man. Today, says the grandson, it was because of my grandfather.

I'm very glad to celebrate with you this feast day of your parish, the Ascension. I heard the highest praises of your parish community and am happy to see for myself the depth of your commitment to Christian life and the liturgy.

Pastors are usually very jealous–and rightly so–of their parish feast day. That's why I'm doubly grateful to your dear pastor, Father John Duffel, for this invitation. It's an eloquent expression of the good friendship we have established in the recent past. After all, he is well known as one of the best liturgists and preachers in town, so my presence here this evening will only confirm and highlight his just renown.

The Ascension of Jesus is not among the most loved and cherished liturgical feasts, because on its own it's a bit sad. It's like that dreaded word "The End" which marks the end of a nice movie; that abruptly disrupts our indulging in a pleasant or enchanting story and takes us back to our daily life, occupations and preoccupations.

The first reading describes the Ascension in a few words: While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?" Meaning: get on with your life, roll up your sleeves, and dream, hope for and pursue something more.

For three years now, Jesus' disciples were used to an amazing life, full of strong emotions; words that would set their hearts on fire and lead them to do unimaginable things, like leaving their families and jobs to follow Jesus. Almost everyday they would witness miracles, conversions, hatred transformed into love, greed yielding to generosity, sadness and despair ending in joy and courage. Then came the shame of the betrayal at the moment of Jesus' passion, and the bewilderment of the resurrection, and the physical presence of the risen Jesus. Now, all of a sudden: as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. This sounded like a cruel "The End."

Our human feasts carry with them a twofold feeling: the dream for a day when evil will finally be overcome, and at the same time the suspension of the present moment with its problems and difficulties. But the moment we see the sign The End, the sadness of the day after plunges us back into reality.

The added value of the Ascension is that we are not to fear the day after. The feast of Easter gave us the certainty that death, evil and suffering no longer have the last word on us. The added value of the Ascension is that Jesus enters into God's glory and with him shares the enduring Life, the enduring Love.

Easter Sunday was not enough. We needed to see that Christ's victory, hence our victory over evil, despair, darkness and death, was a definitive one, that cannot be stolen, or spoiled or taken back. This is what the Ascension tells us.

The letter to the Hebrews explains this by saying: Jesus has entered heaven on our behalf as our forerunner.

In Jesus' time everybody understood very well what forerunner meant. Because it was a word used by peasants, soldiers, fishers and sports men.

For rural people, forerunners were the early produces, the very first fruits of the harvest. The fruits that indicated that sunshine and summer had won over winter, cold and frost. With the Ascension we are told that Jesus as a forerunner has won over death and suffering. And we are following in his steps. There is good reason to celebrate this early fruit, Jesus the forerunner.

Every army had and still has a contingent of specialized soldiers who are sent ahead first to explore the situation, who try to infiltrate into the adversary's ranks and come back to report. With the Ascension, the risen Jesus passed through suffering, agony and death. He went on ahead before us, and now we know that these steps are not the last ones, but that they lead to new life.

When we watch a marathon on TV we can see that at a certain point one athlete spurts forth from the group and starts the final sprint. The onlookers applaud and incite him. While running ahead of the rest, he gets the others to do the impossible in order to reach and overcome him. This is the Ascension: today humanity, the people of God stand up, cheer Jesus, the winner, sing his praises and gain momentum in its Christian commitment.

In former times, maritime cargoes with food used to be preceded by a speed boat whose task was to detect dangers of storms and pirates. The populations living by the seashore knew that when they saw the speed boat, they could count on food and provisions in the near future. The Ascension allows us to stock up on a good dose of hope and trust in God.

Today we can be happy with and proud of our faith in Jesus Christ, happy to be working toward our final victory; happy to be savoring the early fruits, happy knowing that the bonds of evil which dwell in us have been broken; happy to know that we won't starve because the speed boat has already docked.

Our brothers and sisters who work with us, live in the same building, teach in the same school, walk on the same sidewalk, and do not believe in God need to see that we are happy for Jesus' promise on the day of the Ascension: I am with you always, until the end of the age.

After the Ascension, there is a bit of earth with God in Heaven and a bit of Heaven with us on earth. But we have work to do. We must stand on our own spiritual feet and at the same time keep our eyes focused on Heaven our eternal home.

Thank you very much, Joe. That kind introduction says some things about who I am. It doesn't say who I am not. I am not, for instance, a Scripture scholar. I am not–I stress this–a spiritual guide or guru. I am not a theologian, although for both personal and professional reasons I've probably read more than my fair share of theology.

Because I am not any of those things, I don't usually give talks like this evening's, and I don't plan to start, certainly not outside of our own parish, where you know me and can forgive me.

I'm not sure that I would have even volunteered for that if I had known of Joe Hickey's powers of publicity. Lo and behold, here was a story announcing this talk in Catholic New York, one that included references rare in those pages to Commonweal magazine and even A People Adrift. We may not have received the prominence allotted on page 30 to the St. Patrick's annual Carnival and Raffle in Bedford Village–and quite properly so–but we outdid "St. Ignatius Loyola Nursery to Hold Benefit Dinner Dance." I don't know. I have always thought nursery school kids were a little young for dinner dances. I hear they're getting more precocious.

All my life I've been saying those words of the Apostles Creed, "He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father"–or the virtually identical passage in the Nicene Creed–without thinking much about them. They neither posed any great challenge nor offered any great insight. It was really only my worship in this parish, with that large stained glass window of the Ascension in front of me every Sunday, and then, four years ago, reading Luke Timothy Johnson's book on the Creed that forced the Ascension to the forefront of my thoughts.

Before that it was mainly a great dramatic visual–that stained glass window again and many masterpieces of painting over the centuries–and a standard conclusion. An end to the story. A fade-out.

The Lone Ranger riding off into the sunset as someone mutters, "Who was that masked man?" Or Superman zooming off into the sky in the final panel of a comic book while a good citizen of Metropolis says, "Thank you, Superman!"

You needed these images to wrap up the story, but they were add-ons to the real plot. Was the Ascension really an important part of the action, like the Last Supper, the Passion, or the Resurrection? Why did it rate being a holy day of obligation when there wasn't a similar designation for, say, the Wedding Feast at Cana or the Transfiguration or even Good Friday? The Ascension seemed like a postlude to Easter and a prelude to Pentecost. Did it do anything, mean anything, teach us anything, of its own accord?

That the disciples saw Jesus ascend into the air and disappear from sight did not strike me as remarkable. It was a Category Two miracle, as far as these things go, ranked with healing the blind but far below feeding the thousands or raising Lazarus. After all, Jesus had been mysteriously slipping away and popping up throughout the Gospel accounts. Of course I realized that the Creed's language of the Ascension was in some respects metaphorical and symbolic, not literal. Heaven and God were not located literally up beyond the stratosphere. God did not have a right hand or any hands at all, nor was he seated on a celestial throne.

When I stopped to think about it, which was not often, I realized that the forty days between Resurrection and Ascension was a symbolic number, a bookend to the forty days of Lent, a symbolic reprise of the forty years the Israelites spent in the desert and the forty days Jesus spent fasting.

Still I retained a childhood image of Jesus conducting something like an accelerated summer school for his disciples during that period, drilling them in the questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism if not even giving them a kind of Advanced Placement course in St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae or the Code of Canon Law. Maybe the Ascension, preceded by the Great Commission to go forth teaching and baptizing all nations, constituted a summer school graduation ceremony.

Did I realize that the familiar words of that Great Commission came from the closing verses of the Gospel of Matthew, and that Matthew then ends without any mention of an Ascension? No, I did not.

Did I realize that John, too, does not mention an Ascension? No, I did not.

Did I realize that in Mark the Ascension is only mentioned in what is called the longer ending, not found in the earliest and best surviving manuscripts and generally agreed to have been added to the text after Mark's own version? No, I did not.

Did I realize this extremely brief description in Mark's longer ending seems to place the Ascension right after Easter, as does the description in Luke's Gospel, certainly not after an extended period of time? No, I did not.

Did I realize that Luke actually tells the story twice, once at the end of his Gospel and then again in the Acts of the Apostles, and that the two accounts differ significantly, and that it is from Luke alone that we get those wonderful images, including the forty days, though only in Chapter 1 of Acts? No, none of that, either.

It is wonderful what we find in Scripture if we re-read and pay attention.

By this time, you may have lost all confidence in anything I might say about the Ascension, or you may be admitting to yourself that some of these things also escaped your own notice. We can take some comfort in the views of several theologians that the Ascension may be one of the church's most important but most neglected doctrines.

I came across that opinion when I was finally jolted to attention and, like any well-trained journalist, I took my questions to a number of sources: to Luke Timothy Johnson in his book, The Creed; to Peter Atkins, a retired Anglican bishop of New Zealand, who wrote a little book Ascension Now published by Liturgical Press; to Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, who wrote about the Ascension in his Introduction to Christianity as well as in a little book of homilies called Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts, to John Henry Newman in his Parochial and Plain Sermons, and to Leo the Great, whose two homilies on the Ascension were signaled to me by Joe. Of course, it would take me an entire year of Ascension Thursdays to set out all the inspiring and challenging ideas that I have encountered in these sources, let alone resolve their differences, but I will limit myself to four points.

My questions, remember, are Does the Ascension matter and, if so, how? We are not engaged here in some search for the historical Ascension: When did it happen, on the third day or soon after, or forty days later? Where did it happen, in Jerusalem or outside it, at Bethany or the Mount of Olives? Who was present? What were Jesus' parting words? Was there a cloud? Was it followed by the appearance of two "men in white garments," presumably angels, who kick-started the disciples into action?

The fact that even Luke gives us two varying accounts of the Ascension, says Professor Johnson, should liberate us from engaging in this kind literal search for the historical Ascension. "These narratives are written," he states, "to suggest through their choice of symbols the deeper significance of the event."

It is in search of deeper significance that I will touch on these four points:

First and most importantly, what the Ascension tells us about the Resurrection and the Incarnation.

Second, what the Ascension tells us about "heaven."

Third, what the Ascension tells us about an important pair of concepts: God's distance and God's nearness.

Fourth, how we might respond to the differences between Luke's accounts.

So first: the Ascension, the Resurrection, and the Incarnation.

That the Resurrection and the Ascension to heaven and the right hand of the Father are two aspects of a single action is obvious from Scripture and from the language of many theologians over the centuries. God raised Jesus up to his own right hand. Often this is referred to simply as the "exaltation." Scripture may vary in what it says or doesn't say about the specifics of Jesus' Ascension but the New Testament is absolutely brimming with declarations that Jesus has been lifted up or raised up or taken up or is now in heaven or glorified or enthroned or exalted. Johnson points to over four dozen such references in the New Testament.

The Ascension, then, completes the Resurrection. But as a distinct aspect of this one raising up or exaltation, it does so with a distinct symbolic message. The Resurrection tells us Jesus is no longer in the tomb, no longer among the dead. But where is he? He has been restored to bodily life, to the post-Resurrection life of what Paul calls a spiritual body? But what kind of a life is that? Is he still mysteriously flitting around Jerusalem and Galilee, making sudden and surprising appearances?

The Ascension speaks to these natural questions. The Ascension tells us not only where Jesus is–he is with God–but that Jesus is not a concealed figure in waiting, like Elijah or Enoch from the Hebrew Scriptures or the Shiites' Hidden Imam, figures whose manifestations and interventions are sporadic. The Ascension tells us that Jesus is very much manifest and active, in heaven, at the Father's right hand, reigning all the time over all creation.

So the Ascension completes the Resurrection. It also completes the Incarnation.

The eternal Word, the Logos, the second person of the Trinity, became human. John and Paul and others describe this as a descent. The divine Son entered our little, broken human history as Jesus of Nazareth, teacher, healer, and messianic preacher of a restored kingdom, who was crucified for our sake, at a particular time and place, under a particular government and set of authorities.

It is now this very particular Jesus, as fully human as divine, who ascends to heaven. The descent is completed by the ascent. But it is not simply the divine Word, sloughing off an assumed humanity, who returns to heaven like a phantasm or ectoplasm. It is the incarnated Word, Jesus, Israel's Messiah bearing on his resurrected body the features of his time, place and people, bearing above all the wounds of his Passion, who now enters the eternal Godhead.

Because Jesus is human and divine, God incarnate, all humanity receives the promise of overcoming death in the Resurrection. Because Jesus is God incarnate, all humanity receives the promise of sharing God's glory in the Ascension. "I will give the victor the right to sit with me on my throne," it is written in the Book of Revelation, "as I myself first won the victory and sit with my Father on his throne."

The Ascension as completion of both Resurrection and the Incarnation–that is my first point. Second point, heaven.

We speak and think of heaven freely and wholeheartedly when loved ones die. Otherwise, we are often reticent. Our view of heaven suffers from literalism. It is up in the sky. Its floorboards are clouds. It is populated by choruses wearing wings. It is a gated community with St. Peter as doorman and bouncer. It often seems colorless, static, and boring. This is often a subtext when it appears in New Yorker cartoons.

Then, too, heaven suffers from our proper suspicion of easy answers. Too often it is the all-purpose answer to life's mysteries and tragedies.

Finally, heaven suffers from providing the powerful with a manipulative alibi: pie in the sky when you die by and by to compensate for all this world's here-and-now injustices–and to give us an excuse not to do anything about them.

But heaven should not be a challenge to our geography or astronomy. Heaven should not fall victim to our lack of imagination or to our moral weaknesses.

Bishop Atkins has helpfully clarified our symbolic language of heaven and earth. "The earth," he writes, "is the mode of existence proper to humanity, and heaven is the mode of existence proper to God." The two are different but not utterly separate. They interpenetrate. When we pray, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we are acknowledging that penetration; we are also talking not about copying a code or city plan existing in a godly utopia but something more dynamic, a godly mode of existence.

Practically speaking, Christ's ascension into heaven is a reminder, a prod, an invitation to think and talk about this part of our belief–and not just at funerals. In my mind, Christ's movement from earth to heaven, his enthronement in heaven to rule over earth, symbolizes a channel, a passage, between these two modes of existence. I think of the pillar of cloud that guided the Israelites–cloud, too, a symbol of God's presence, is featured in the Ascension. Even more I think of Jacob's ladder: "And Jacob dreamed that there was ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!"

For Bishop Atkins, who may be sending a message to low-church Anglicans who minimize ritual, the Ascension of Jesus to heaven should teach us that the liturgy on earth joins the celestial liturgy in heaven. This is an idea similarly emphasized by Catholics worried that the liturgy became too informal and everyday in the wake of Vatican II. They describe the Eucharist as the earthly sharing in the heavenly banquet. Does that emphasis risk turning the liturgy into an aesthetic performance? Does it deemphasize communal participation or social or moral resonance? You can hear various sides of the argument even in my own household. But I believe that the Ascension puts these questions before us.

The language of ascending to heaven bring us directly to my third point: a pair of concepts that we employ in our understanding of God: distance and nearness.

In ascending, in leaving, in departing, Jesus of Nazareth in his resurrected life takes his distance from his disciples. But in ascending to heaven, he now rules creation. "He is not less active and powerful than in his earthly ministry, but more active and powerful," writes Luke Timothy Johnson. In this rule, in the sharing of the Spirit, Johnson concludes, there is "not a distancing from us but the condition for a new form of intimacy."

It is always delicate to make comparisons between our human experience and the things of God. Our experience and our language can only be a pale and distorting shadow of the ineffable divine. But we have analogies in our experience of this relationship between leaving and coming, between distance and nearness.

We are reminded of parents and children, or sometimes even husbands and wives, who achieve a degree of intimate conversation in writing letters–or even emails–when they parted that somehow seems impossible when they are face-to-face. Not only does it seem that distance can make the heart grow fonder; it can also make the mind grow more sensitive and thoughtful.

Human experience also alerts us to the way that we overestimate our capacity to learn from proximity. If only I could experience Jesus as his disciples did, we think. But Jesus' disciples displayed a remarkable inability to understand him or what he was about. It is similar with many historical figures or even family members. In person, they may be inscrutable or outgoing, they may be quietly articulate or extravagantly larger than life; but access to their inner being may actually be blocked by these powerful surfaces. It may only be years after their deaths that unearthed correspondence and multiple perspectives can piece together a real picture and filter out the superficial from the essential.

The thirst to hear Christ's words firsthand and to know his face and touch is understandable, and for us it will be quenched only after death. But I would suggest that in his cosmic presence, in his sacraments and especially the Eucharist, in the two millennia of saints who have mirrored him in their endlessly diverse ways we have a nearness with him that his disciples may not have had in life and that only his departure made possible.

There are two other ways in which Jesus' Ascension brings God nearer to us. The obvious one is his sending of the Spirit. Again and again, he tells his followers that he must go so that another will come. In last Sunday's Gospel reading from John, for example, Jesus, who has just told his disciples, "I will not leave you orphans" and "In a little while the world will no longer see me," now proceeds to say, "The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name–he will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you." In ascending into heaven, he and the Spirit descend into our hearts.

But there is another aspect of the nearness of God to which Jesus' Ascension into heaven speaks. God, as I reminded us a moment ago, is the ineffable Other. God is not the most powerful, most present, most loving, most knowing thing in creation. God is beyond and before creation and within creation, which is only sustained in existence by God's creative action. That means all our concepts of power, presence, love, knowledge, taken as they are from that creation, can only tell us about God as through a darkened mirror. This creates a problem.

On the one hand, as we all know from catechism, God is everywhere, or as St. Augustine more memorably observed of this God who sustains us in existence every instant of our lives, God is nearer to me than I am to myself. But on the other hand, this God remains so Other that I can only know him through negativity–what God is not–and through these weak analogies.

Jesus, of course, is the answer to that problem. He is the utterly Other made flesh, become one of us. If we want to know what is godly or what is not, what is the real reality and what is illusion, we turn to the words, the deeds, the atoning and loving sacrifice of Jesus. That this flesh-and-blood Jesus is indeed within the Godhead is symbolized and ratified by his Ascension into heaven. The Ascension is not a spectacle of levitation; it is a symbol of incorporation.

Only this morning I was struck by a small report in the paper that indicates how we are challenged in thinking about God. It had to do with "dark matter," that mysterious stuff which seems to constitute a good proportion, maybe 25 percent, of the material in the universe but which we apparently can't see or locate except that its gravitation effects indicates it must be there. (The scientists among you should feel free to correct me.) But now, at least according to this report, a collision 1 to 2 billion years ago of two galaxies 5 billion light years away had produced images of rings supposedly of dark matter.

It is hard to get the mind around concepts like these. Dark matter. A collision of galaxies that ar e 5 billion light years away. Remember that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, so think of what that distance must be! And our God is the creator and sustainer of all that. I think of the title of a book by the feminist theologian Sara Matlaind–A Big Enough God. Big is hardly the word. We have many images and metaphors from Scripture that we use to describe this indescribable God: Father, mother hen, king, ruler, rock of my salvation, sword and buckler. But when we consider reality in the dimensions marvelously explored and revealed by science, the strain on all these images seems overwhelming. That is why it becomes so important and so comforting that we can know God because we can know Jesus, God incarnate.

In writing of Luke's treatment of the Ascension, Luke Timothy Johnson uses the academic phrase, "a dialectic"–I would prefer to say simply an interplay–"of Jesus' absence and presence."

I will finish with my fourth point, my reflections on another "dialectic" or interplay, the one I find in Luke's two descriptions of the Ascension, the one in Chapter 24 of Luke's Gospel and the one in Chapter 1 of his Acts of the Apostles. Let me remind you of the texts, with a few abbreviations:

From Luke's Gospel:

I am sending the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Then he led them out as far as Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them. As he blessed them, he parted from them and was taken up to heaven. They did him homage and then returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple praising God.

From Luke's Acts of the Apostles:

He presented himself alive to them … appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. . . . He enjoined them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for "the promise of the Father …." They asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" He answered them, "It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the holy Spirit comes upon you. . . ." When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there, looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven." Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day's journey away. When they entered the city they went to the upper room where they were staying . . . . [ and] … devoted themselves with one accord to prayer. . . .

Before comparing these passages, I want to admit that reading them reveals all that I have not spoken about tonight, especially the relationship between the departure of Jesus and his return, the Second Coming and the judgment. "Ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father, thence he shall come again to judge the living and the dead." But I wanted to leave something for next year's speaker to explain.

As to the differences, one could argue that the second account merely adds to the first, especially the appearance of the two men in white garments; and that only in minor details are the two accounts strictly at odds. Certainly they can be harmonized, and many fathers of the church easily did so. Cardinal Newman skillfully blended them in one of his sermons on the Ascension. Bethany and the mount of Olives, each rich in symbolic associations, are, I understand, near one another, so that is not really an issue. Jesus ascends in both descriptions following his injunction to stay in Jerusalem until the promised Spirit comes. In both accounts the disciples return to Jerusalem and to prayer.

But these two accounts are also like two songs using some of the same lyrics and melodies but striking a different mood.

In Luke's Gospel, the primary mood is one of fulfillment, a "great joy" expressed in spontaneous worship and blessing God in the temple.

In Luke's Acts, the primary mood is one of uncertainty or paralysis. The apostles are dazed, not joyful. They await direction. They are not going out to the temple in praise but hunkering down in their own quarters in prayer.

How do we feel about these contrasts? In my adolescent days, they would have made me anxious. Christian apologetics treated different New Testament passages like witnesses at a trial, always in danger of being caught out contradicting themselves under cross-examination. I don't think most of us any longer feel that anxiety. We recognize the New Testament as the church's authorized collection of ardent, overflowing memories of multiple witnesses and the various communities they founded or led, witnesses and communities whose lives had been turned upside down by the Jesus event and who were long trying to understand what hit them, often interpreting it with all the suggestive and powerful images and precedents offered by the holy texts of Israel.

That Luke might have portrayed the Ascension as eliciting more than one reaction now seems, if anything, unsurprising and even human. Of the two portraits, it is perhaps the first, with its reaction of spontaneous joy and worship which most challenges our expectations. It is the second portrait of disciples' standing stunned and at a loss that seems most natural. And yet, again, in last Sunday's Gospel passage from John, we heard, "Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. You heard me tell you, 'I am going away and I will come back to you.' If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father." Experience tells us, too, that sometimes a loss, even a death, can conveys a deep undercurrent of joy because it marks something, perhaps a life, marvelously and beautifully completed and fulfilled. And we can feel that joy even while recognizing that the same fulfillment leaves us at a turning point, indecisive and perplexed.

In my reading of Luke, we must simply take in both reactions and emulate both,. Tomorrow we praise and worship God in our experience of Jesus' return to the Father. During the next ten days we gather our forces and prepare ourselves for beginning anew, always beginning anew, with the help of the coming Spirit.

I have spoken about how the Ascension completes both the Resurrection and the Incarnation, what it signals to us about heaven, how it weaves together thoughts of divine distance and nearness, and what different notes are sounded by Luke's two presentations.

I am going to close with another passage from Luke Timothy Johnson:

"If the creed speaks the truth," he writes, "then the question we put to Jesus is not nearly so important as the question Jesus puts to us. If the creed speaks the truth, that Jesus now lives at the right hand of the Father, then 'learning Jesus' is not a matter of scholarly enterprise and casual reading about a teacher of the past, but a matter of obedience to the one who presses upon us at every moment, encounters us in the sacraments and saints and strangers, and calls us to account."

I am tempted to top that off, of course, by asking, "Are you a believer?" Or maybe "Amen, amen. So be it."

Instead, I will merely say that these are some of the thoughts that now run through my mind when I look up at that window. And maybe they will run through your minds, too.

For your patience and your attention, thank you very much.