Ascension Sermon
Christ’s Legacy
My middle and high school years were spent at a small all-girls school in downtown Honolulu. St. Andrew’s Priory is an Episcopal school founded by Queen Emma Kaleleonalani and the Episcopal Sisters of the Transfiguration. Queen Emma traveled the world and brought the Sisters and The Episcopal Church to the islands. The Priory, as we call it, was founded on Ascension day of 1867 for girls in Hawaii to receive an education. As a school rooted in both the Anglican tradition and the Hawaiian monarchy we had deep connections to ritual and to liturgy.
To this day, every Ascension Eve, the junior class stays all night to decorate the 20 foot coral cross that the school is built around. The class creates, with more flowers than I can explain, a stunning piece of art that represents who they are as a group and presents it as a gift to the graduating seniors. The two classes sing to each other and the senior class hands the school over to the juniors, entrusting them with the care of Queen Emma’s legacy while surrounded by both the girls who are anxiously awaiting their time to decorate the cross and the women who have long since moved on from their time as students there.
Queen Emma died in 1885. The sisters no longer run the school. The monarchy was overthrown in 1893. The state capital has been built across the street from the campus since Hawaii became a state in 1959. And still, girls circle a coral cross, covered in flowers, and sing to each other about the legacy they carry on. A legacy rooted in the love of Queen Emma, who came to know Jesus and believe that her faith called her to bring equality and education to the girls of Hawaii.
Today, we too celebrate the Ascension. Arguably one of the wildest parts of our faith. Jesus, who had died and was resurrected, walked with his friends for forty days, and then, withdrew from them and ascended to heaven. Literally lifted up into the clouds. As a church we are dedicated to science and fact. We pride ourselves on knowledge and understanding. And yet, there is no scientific explanation for the ascension.
A seminary friend sent our class a funny meme this week that said, Ascension Day; when Jesus started working from home. The Ascension is one of the times in our life as a church that we are called to lean heavily on the mystery of faith. And the truth is, that HOW it happened is much less important than WHY it happened.
When God was walking around with skin on there was a clear point person. Healing, teaching, and community building were all through Christ. A student isn’t going to teach the class when the teacher is still in the room. And, as we will see next week when we celebrate Pentecost, we are sent help in the form of the Spirit but She is universal, within all of us, while Jesus was a single man, in the middle east, teaching radical love.
The ascension matters because we became the legacy. We are the healers and the teachers and the community builders. From the apostles that first began the work to us now, we are the manifestation of God with skin on. The ascension requires us to be the hands and feet of God in the world, living out the teachings of Christ- which we only know because those before us did the same.
I didn’t first know about Jesus through sermons or through the Bible. It was through Aunty Maryalice, who always made sure that every child at church had a part in the Christmas pageant. And by the unknown fairy god-person in my town that sometimes left cash in an envelope on the window of my mom’s car. And how when a person experiencing homelessness started sleeping on the bench outside our little beach church we left baskets of food and blankets instead of an eviction notice.
And I’ve seen the way that you are the legacy of that love-through meals, and phone calls, and Saturday morning altar guild, a well placed joke when the experience is too difficult to bear, and backpacks of food for Agnor-Hurt students. See we, we are the legacy of Christ. In His time on earth, Jesus was always working to bring the marginalized to the center. Jesus was always seeking out more justice, more inclusion, more love.
While it’s tempting to focus on His Star Wars-like exit from earth, the reality of the ascension is that it was when we were left to do the sacred work of loving the world into wholeness. Work that began with Jesus and has been carried on through generations of believers is now left to us. Jesus withdrew, he did not disappear. Jesus made space for the community he planted to grow into a cloud of witnesses who live out the call to love God … love our neighbor … and love ourselves in a million different ways.
See, the kingdom of God that Jesus preached about his whole ministry is impossible unless we show up as His legacy of love.
It is only through us that the resurrection and ascension mean anything. It is only through us that loving God, loving our neighbor, and loving ourselves brings light to the world. St Teresa of Avila’s prayer reminds us that we are tasked with being Christ’s legacy…
Christ has no body
but yours,
No hands, no feet
on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which He looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are His body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
And as Christ’s living legacy we say, Amen.
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