…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.

On Saturday, we headed up I-93 for a journey deep into the wilderness of New England. We packed up a big bag of snacks and drinks, put on our shorts and walking shoes, and piled into the car for the drive out to the woods for our hike. And then, after about ten minutes, we piled back out of the car; not for a bathroom break or a flat tire or snack, but because we’d reached our destination.

Yes, your three city slickers had made it to the parking lot at the southernmost point of the Middlesex Fells, and that was about as far into the wild as we were going to go.

I grew up around the Fells—walking on the trails as a kid, running on them as a teenager, being rescued by an ambulance on a hot summer day for heat exhaustion in college, and so on. And I’ve always been amazed at their dual nature. We used to get lost in there, inexplicably turned around, emerging from a run two miles further down South Border Road than we thought we were. You can fit a whole cross-country course in there—a whole water supply, a zoo, for goodness’ sake!—and at times, it feels as if you’re deep in the woods. But then you hear the ever-present hum of traffic driving by, and remember that you’re never more than about a mile from an interstate highway. You could wander on those winding trails for days, living on roots and berries, creating a miniature Man vs. Wild experience without ever leaving Medford.

Or you could do what we did and just walk up the trail to Wright’s Tower and enjoy the view.

The coolest thing about this particular view, I think, is how different the place feels when you’re looking in two different directions. If you stand next to the tower, and look southeast, you see Boston’s whole skyline, in all its glory, stretching practically from Chelsea to Brookline and everything in between, and in the foreground, the long stretch of I-93. If you squint through your binoculars, you can almost see Saint John’s! (Well… maybe if we put it on stilts.)

But if you turn in the other direction and cover your ears, you’ll think you’re in the heart of the woods: there’s nothing to meet the eye but trees on rolling hills.

So where are you, as you’re wandering through those woods? Is it a forest or a highway? A place to see the city or a place to see the woods? A weekend hiking expedition or a ten minute drive? Is it simply a matter of perspective? Or is it, simply, both? Is it, like so many things in life, all these things at the same time, more complicated and more beautiful than we could ever really put into words?

I forgot to take any pictures; but here are two, taken by someone else!

“Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
(1 John 4:11-12)

            These verses from the First Letter of John hold a special place in my heart. I’d never read them until I was in college, a young adult trying to come to an adult understanding of faith. I was a thoughtful and naturally-skeptical person trying to reconcile everything I knew about science and philosophy with what I thought I knew about Christianity, and John’s words gave me somewhere to start: some fundamental place where heaven and earth collided, where humanity and God intersected. And that place was not in a book of theology or in a quiet chapel or in cathedral filled with song. It was in love.

            That’s not to say God isn’t present in the rest of these. Of course God is. But John puts God, first and foremost, in love: in God’s self-sacrificing love for us, and in our love for one another. “No one has ever seen God,” John admits, acknowledging the fears and doubts of every faithful person who’s ever searched for God. But “if we love one another, God lives in us.”

            On Sunday, we lit the fourth Advent candle, the one that symbolizes love, and it remains burning this week. But this theme of love does not end with the season of Advent—any more than hope, peace, or joy end. It finds its fulfillment, in fact, in the season of Christmas. This passage from 1 John becomes the epistle for Morning Prayer on Christmas Day, as God’s love becomes manifest in Christ, as the God who is love becomes one of us. And God’s love does not just inspire us to love. God’s love is not just reflected in us. God’s love is perfected in us.

            Our world is full of God, because our world is full of love. Even in the most difficult and desperate and painful situations—you might even say especially in the most difficult and desperate and painful situations—we human beings persist in loving one another, and God persists in dwelling in us. We often wonder where God is in those dark moments, and that’s the answer: God is with us, in the love and care we offer one another.

So “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” (1 John 4:7)

“For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:24-25)

“We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered,” (Hebrews 6:19–20)

I’m reminded of the countless Christmas-morning scenes in which all the overfunctioning spouses who’ve taken on the responsibility of Christmas shopping for the whole family—themselves included—claps their hands with delight at the sight of a perfectly-wrapped box among the presents they’d wrapped the night before, exclaiming with anticipation: “Ooh, I hope it’s that new novel I’ve been waiting for!”

When you bought the presents yourself, this can only be play-acting or amnesia.

Hope isn’t hope, after all, if hope has been seen. And yet this means that hope comes with an element of paradox. It is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul,” the thing that keeps us steady in the stormy seas of our lives, and yet it is and must remain unseen. The Christian hope—that God has redeemed us and will save us from our own fragility and death, that the end of our lives in this world is not the end of the stories of our lives, that we will one day rise again and see God and one another face to face—will always be for us a kind of certain uncertainty, or maybe an uncertain certainty.

If we somehow really knew that it was true, if we had irrefutable evidence that our hope would be fulfilled, our hope would not be hope. It would be something more like the anticipation of opening a gift you wrapped for yourself. But we do not know: we hope. Our struggles and our doubts and our uncertainties are to be expected, because our hope has not been seen, and it’s an incredible hope.

But anchors are rarely seen, at least by most of us. Unless you are the sailor who threw it overboard, you have no reason to be certain there’s an anchor there at all. It could just be a length of rope, trailing down into the water, leaving you adrift. And yet you trust that the anchor is there. And even better yet, the anchor works, even if you doubt it’s there at all, because its effect is governed by the laws of physics, and not by your belief in the laws of physics.

The hope that anchors your soul is not your hope, after all. It is God’s gift in Christ, who was born as a human being, who plunged down into the depths of our world, experienced every facet of human experience, and tied God to our fate forever. And it’s Christ’s hope for you, not your hope for yourself, that is healing and redeeming and saving you day by day.

May the God of hope fill us with all joy and peace in
believing through the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Romans 15:13

On Monday, my family celebrated the long weekend with a trip to our old end of Cambridge: a visit to a favorite bakery and a few hours’ playing and walking around at Fresh Pond. As we stood at one of the lookout points there, looking across the water, we were treated to one of those sights people pay big money to come and enjoy in New England this time of year: the dappled vista of a forest mid-transformation, with green giving way to red, orange, and gold, not only tree by tree but leaf by leaf.

But the beauty of autumn is a peculiar thing.

The beauty of fall foliage, after all, is both the revelation of the leaf’s true nature and the sign of the leaf’s impending decline and fall. The green color we see most of the year is something of a mask. It comes from the chlorophyll that allows the leaf to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into energy, As the days grow shorter and cold weather approaches, the tree begins to retreat into itself. The “true color” of each leaf, beneath the uniform green flood of chlorophyll, is revealed. But the more of the leaf’s color appears—the less chlorophyll there is—the less energy the leaf is generating, and the closer it is to death.

And it’s the same with fall. Those of us who loathe the winter (that’s me) cherish every warm and sunny day, knowing it may be the last, such that a single seventy-degree day feels better in October than a week of them in June. It’s the knowledge that the winter is drawing near that makes a fall day’s beauty especially sweet.

In a world in which sweetness and sadness are often mixed together, we go through a thousand variations on this theme. Parts of our lives are peeled away to reveal truths about ourselves we’d never known before. Parts of our lives are made more precious by the knowledge that they are soon coming to an end. Parts of our world are made more beautiful by their very instability, by the fact that the leaf won’t stay a mottled orange-green forever.

Even so, that sadness is never absolute. The death of a leaf is not the death of the tree. This autumn is not the end of time. The seasons of our lives will continue to change. And even at the very moment the leaf falls, when its story seems to be at an end, new life is already being formed within the tree.

So “Glory be to God for dappled things,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote,

… All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.