…he ascended into heaven
            and is seated at the right hand of the Father…

The Feast of the Ascension, which we celebrate today, is one of the stranger days in the church calendar. The Ascension seems simultaneously to make no sense and to capture a fundamental truth. It’s a day of paradox and mystery, a day about an event in the past that’s really about our lives in the present.

The Acts of the Apostles tell us that Jesus remained with the disciples for forty days after his Resurrection, appearing to them and teaching them even more about the kingdom of God. (Acts 1:3) And then, on the fortieth day, “as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:9) The same Jesus of Nazareth who had descended from heaven and who had risen from the dead now rises again, lifting off from the face of the earth to return into heaven.

There’s just one problem with this picture. (Not the Rembrandt, but the idea.) Heaven isn’t “up,” at least not in any sense we can tell. It may’ve made sense to think so, thousands of years ago, but we’ve built telescopes and spaceships, put astronauts on the moon. As the classic Space-Age Soviet propaganda poster put, cosmonauts have scoured the heavens, and look—“No God!” To say that Jesus “ascended” into heaven and “is seated at the right hand of the Father” seems to make a spatial claim that simply doesn’t fit with what we know of physics, at least as it exists in three-dimensional space.

And yet at the same time, the Ascension captures a simple, daily truth. Christians have always expressed a belief in the Resurrection, in the idea that Jesus rose from the dead. And it’s obvious enough that he’s no longer walking around on the Earth. And yet—while it’s not so common in our tradition as in others to talk about our faith in terms of a personal relationship with Jesus—it’s equally true that many people, from the earliest disciples to the most modern people of faith, seem to experience his presence in their lives. The Ascension is one way of expressing that truth: Jesus is no longer with us, and yet he is.

And in fact, the same modern physics that make this make no sense, start to make sense of it, too. Heaven can’t be “up,” in the sense that it’s some point in the universe found by going in one direction or another from our planet’s molten core. If heaven is a place at all, if it’s a reality can be found somewhere, it must be something else—something like another dimension, another reality that can be moved into and out of, another world that overlaps with and interpenetrates our own.

And in fact, that’s quite good news. Because if heaven and earth are two separate things, one up, and one down, and Jesus has gone away, then Jesus is gone. But if heaven is another dimension that exists across our three, then Jesus is still here. He is with us. He can still teach us, and guide us, and comfort us. And that heavenly reality in which he lives is not a realm completely different from our own. It’s one that we can see, sometimes, hidden within our own. And at the Ascension, Jesus didn’t leave us to go somewhere far away. He left off existing in a particular point in space, so that he could return to being everywhere at once; as one of the collects for the day says, he “ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things.” He leaves the realm of ordinary space and time, becoming timeless and universal; giving each one of us the chance those few disciples had to see him face to face.

Almighty God, whose blessed Son our Savior Jesus Christ
ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things:
Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his
promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end
of the ages; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and
reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory
everlasting. Amen.