Readings -http://www.usccb.org/nab/060511a.shtml
Today we find ourselves celebrating the Feast of the Ascension (of our Lord). This feast, traditionally celebrated 40 days after Easter Sunday now often moved to the Sunday following, is rather unique Sunday/Feast Day in the Church’s liturgical calendar.
I say this because the Readings for this Feast force up to “look up” (toward the heavens) in a way that we usually don’t have to. During most of the Liturgical Year we focus on Jesus here on Earth. During the Christmas Season, we remember his birth, his growing up among us. Then during Ordinary Time (and even during Lent) we usually focus on Jesus’ teaching of his disciples. We hear Jesus talking about sheep and shepherds, grains of wheat, mustard seeds, all “down to earth” concepts that remind us that Jesus was here among us. Yet today we celebrate Jesus’ “Ascension into Heaven.”
This in our times poses its own problems. At the time of Jesus, when the Bible/New Testament was written, people everywhere basically understood the world / universe existing in three levels:
* The Dead lived in the Basement (and the really bad somewhere "below" the basement where they were punished)
* We, the living lived on the ground floor, on earth as it were, and
* the Angels and God lived on the floor/floors “above.”
I give the Biblical conception of the world here (Jewish and Christian of the time) but this was basically true across all cultures. The Gods and other heavenly beings lived somewhere “above us.”
Today, that conception is harder to use as we know through telescopes and spaceships that the Cosmos is REALLY, REALLY LARGE. So talking of God being “above us” is something of a problem. Yet, here it must be noted that (1) All traditional cultures, everywhere believed that “the Gods” lived above us and occasionally visited us “from above,” so one would suspect that there must be _something_ to it, and (2) with some tweaking, we can “save/redeem” this image. Many science fiction writers, Star Trek, the last Indiana Jones movie, etc, now postulate that perhaps beings live “in other dimensions” and so perhaps what seemed “up” or “down” to the ancients simply meant ‘to/from somewhere else’ which we do not really know how to describe.
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Ok, of God living “somewhere above” initially may be somewhat initially difficult to talk about. Yet, the metaphor becomes useful to use in another regard. That is, in pretty much _every society_ the people who lived in the tallest buildings were the most powerful (the most ‘godlike’). This again, was true across the whole of civilizations:
The pharoahs (who considered themselves God-Kings) constructed pyramids, the tallest structures in ancient Egypt
The Mayas and Aztecs also constructed pyramids, the Babylonians ziggurats (sort of like pyramids) almost always with a Temple (to the Gods) at the top of the pyramids/ziggurats.
Then pretty much up until the turn of the 20th century, the tallest building in any town in the Christian world was a Church. Occasionally, kings tried to do the same. William the Conqueror constructed the Tower of London, which was the seat of the English king for some time and it was pretty tall (called a “tower” after all). But pretty much up until the 20th Century, the tallest buildings throughout the whole of the Chirstian world were Churches.
That changed in the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century with the advent of skyscrapers. But it only gave support to the metaphor because these buildings began to be built at a time when the influence of the Church/Christianity and religion began an obvious decline.
When my mother first arrived in Chicago in the 1950s, the tallest buildings in Chicago were The Wrigley and Tribune Buildings. Who did they house? The Chicago Tribune (newspaper journalists) and WGN (radio/later TV). In Los Angeles in the 1950s the tallest building, by far, was the City Hall (People here would remember it was shown often in the first “Dragne” crime drama programs on TV at the time). And yes, in the first half of the century, it could be said that Government and The Press were the most powerful institutions in this country.
Who owns/operates out of the tallest buildings today? Isn’t it obvious – Banks (the Sears, now Willis Tower), Insurance Companies (John Hancock Building/Prudential Buildings), Oil Companies (when I was in high school it was called the Standard Oil Building, when I returned 9 years ago, it was called the Amoco Building, now it’s called the BMX building because British Petroleum now owns Amoco and its building). And this is true not just in Chicago but pretty much across the globe. The tallest buildings are owned by the Financial Services companies and/or the Oil industry.
And the metaphor extends even further in these recent years. It is commonly accepted that the current financial crisis that we have been experiencing over the last years was caused by the financial services industry. Its heads and top workers worked in high rises in lower Manhattan and lived in other high rises on Manhattan’s east side – these people both lived and worked “above us.
Even worse these “little gods” “living and working above us” CAME TO BET ON US IN A WAY THAT’S ALMOST REMINISCENT OF HOW THE GREEKS HAD IMAGINED THEIR “GODS” AS ACTING – In the Trojan War, there were two sets of Gods, one aligned with the Greeks, the other aligned with the Trojans and they were observing and betting on the outcomes of the battles below.
In the modern version, in practices which most analysts have said was the principal cause of the current financial crisis, these bankers were both giving loans to little people and then betting against them being able to pay them off. They were turning our lives into a game, into a casino where sitting always above us, they got to bet on or against us.
The image therefore of a GOD WHO LIVES ABOVE US ALL, is therefore arguably a comforting one, reminding all of us (even the bankers, people with power) that we are both ALL GOD’S CHILDREN (all fundamentally equal to each other) and that ALL of us, big and small will have to give accounting of our lives to the same God.
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This then leads us to the last point that I wish to make about the feast of the Ascension. And that is, that it reminds us that God actually has an enormous confidence in us as a race. In the first Chapter of Genesis, we are told that we were created, all of us, in God’s image and that we were put in this world, on this planet to take care of it, to live on it, to find our happiness here. God did not wish to interfere in this process. We’re told in the second and third chapters of Genesis that our first parents screwed-up, messed this up.
The rest of the Bible from that point, in fact, up until this point Jesus’ Ascension (and next Sunday, when we celebrate Pentecost, when we celebrate the Church’s reception of the Holy Spirit) was about God’s _slow_ carefully calibrated plan to put things “back on track” AND as soon as Jesus was able to do so (after Easter) _he headed back home_. Yes, once more we remember that THIS TIME, God left us “the Holy Spirit” to _help us_ make the tough decisions to keep on track. But the message is clear: IN OUR FAITH we are told that we have a God who (1) is above us all, that is, Truly God greater than all the “little gods” that pretend to walk this earth, but also (2) that this True God both loves us and has arguably more confidence in us than we have in ourselves. We have a God who DOESN’T want to be a “micromanager” who ISN’T like the God that most of us of my age and above still grew-up with – one in which God was like an “evil Santa Claus” who looked down at us with binoculars to take note of all our sins and failings. Instead, we’re given a God who has enormous confidence in us, one who, yes, has given us Rules and even that Holy Spirit to guide us, but who really _prefers_ that _we_ run things here (reasonably well) on our own, and assuring us, above all, that He does love us all.
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So then, that’s what we celebrate on this Day, a God who is Truly God, Creator and Master of the Universe _above us all_, but then also a God who has enormous confidence in us and wishes to simply run this world well, to find friends and happiness here, assuring us that as his Children, God loves us all.
What then a Great (and kind) God we have! Amen.
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