HOMILY – FEAST OF THE ASCENSION (MOVED FROM THURSDAY)

ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA CHURCH

GREENVILLE, SC – MAY 28, 2006  - 8 & 11 am, 1 PM POOR CLARES

May our Lord ascended from our sight give us His peace.

Gotta go.  Worthy of the call.   Gotta go.

Gotta go.  Jesus departs.  He ascends to the Father.  Except this time He takes flesh with Him.  There is now flesh with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  Fascinating.  When He takes His flesh, all flesh is changed forever.  Flesh now has a new and eternal home.  What the Father has done in raising Jesus from the Dead, and then welcoming Him bodily into His everlasting kingdom, is as much for us as it is for Jesus.  “Why do you look into the heavens?  He will come back just as He went.”

Listen to Philippe Benoit, a catholic theologian writing in 1949.  He puts it best of anyone I have read.  “This new world where Christ reigns and awaits us, is not far from us; it is not outside our world, but transcends it.  It is of another order… and we have access to it through faith and the Sacraments in a contact that is mysterious, but more real and close than any of our contacts with this world can be.  And we are convinced that He inaugurated this new world when He was exalted at the side of His Father.”

This mystery is beyond anything we know.  Flesh sits at the right hand of God. 

All flesh recovered.  Now we gotta go and tell the good news, He will come again.

Worthy of the call.  If there is one thing that makes me go from thinking the “Jesus saves” people are wackos to understanding it, it is that Jesus went to sinners.  He called sinners to share in His work.  He did not require perfect people or rate sinners unworthy of His time, attention, mission.  INSTEAD, He called twits, people who denied Him, fell asleep on Him, betrayed Him, people who hid in fear after He was killed.  I figure in to that bunch, perhaps you believe you do too.

I am “worthy of the call” by HIS decision, not mine.  You and I sit here and He is calls - His decision, not yours, not mine.  Amazing. 

What is the call?  It is the exact same call to each of us – to receive His presence and love and share what we receive.  We share each in our own way, and to the measure we have received. 

Some will receive compassion and turn that around to accompany the poor, lonely, those falsely thought second class.  Others will receive a sense of the order of creation and turn that around by government, teaching, cleaning, healing, accounting, organizing.  Some receive the creative power of God and turn that around by making families, money, building houses, making art, writing poetry.  Others will receive the power of God and show the power in athletic competition, harnessing energy, information technologies.  Some think all these things come from us and are for ourselves alone.  But you know those believe they live from a sense of participation in God revealing God’s self.

God chooses, directs, and we come forward not worthy of the call,

but worthy by the call.

Gotta go.  We dispose ourselves to the fact that there is a God.  We observe God reveal God’s self in the suffering, death, resurrection, ascension and promise of the Spirit.  We come to believe even we sinners are included in this cosmic, divine, weird, “God-within-us.”  It is good news that God chooses us, and we experiment with loving those we might not have.

That is an ascension too, an ascension of ours to the Father, a response in love.

Flesh at the right hand of God and right in front of you.