The Ascension of Our Lord/ The Seventh Sunday of EasterA Sermon based on Luke 24:44-53
In the name of Jesus; amen.
Today isn’t actually the Ascension of Our Lord. The Feast of the Ascension happened this past Thursday. It is the day when we remember that Jesus ascended into heaven after his resurrection. It is also the day when he makes a promise to his disciples that God will send the Holy Spirit which will baptize them with fire.
The gospel reading for today, which is actually the 7th Sunday of Easter is from John 17:1-11
“After Jesus had spoken these words, he looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed.
‘I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
But Thursday wasn’t just the day when we remember the Ascension of Jesus. Thursday was also Yom Hashoah or Holocaust Remembrance day. Since 1989, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, performs a ceremony called "Everyone Has a Name" in which the names of all of the Holocaust victims are read aloud. 6 million names of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Political Prisoners, French, Lithuanian, and Russian people are read aloud so that they are not forgotten.
My senior year of seminary there was a bus trip planned to go to the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Everything about the museum is purposeful and symbolic. When you arrive you are given a passbook with the story of someone who was a victim of the Holocaust and at certain points along the way you were supposed to open up the book and read a piece of their story.
The name of my person was Dora, a 19 year old Jewish girl who escaped being taken away to a concentration camp and joined a group of resistance fighters. When the people she was with were caught by the Nazis they revealed that she was a Jew. The Nazis shot her in the head, tied a rock to her feet and threw her in a river.
At one point you go through this tunnel like bridge where the walls are covered with pictures taken of all the inhabitants of a little village in Lithuania. Hubby’s father had been a Lithuanian Jew and as we looked at the pictures of these people together he mentioned the fact that it was quite possible that he could be related to someone in one of those pictures.
At the end of that part of the exhibit we read that not one person in those photographs had survived a massacre inflicted by the Nazis.
These aren’t exactly pleasant memories and yet when things like this occur we have to remember. More than 10 years have passed since I went to the Holocaust museum, but I remember Dora’s name and I remember the rows and rows of photographs of people my children could be related to. Those memories connect us and bind us to one another.
Jesus ascended into heaven 40 days after he rose from the dead in order to make a place for the Holy Spirit. In John’s gospel Jesus prays that God would make us one. “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
The Spirit comes because Jesus ascends and works to gather us together into one body… to make us one with each other.
The Spirit makes us one. The Spirit gathers us together and makes us sisters and brothers, not just in this community of faith, but out in the world too.
Dora was my sister; those people in those photographs were my sisters and brothers.
The Spirit offers us many, many gifts, but this is a gift that was given to the world. Too often we have forgotten to make use of it, to remember that Jesus prayed for us to be one and that God then sent the Spirit in order for that to happen.
But we have been given that gift all the same; the gift of connectedness is a gift for the whole world. It is a healing gift because helps us to see those things about others that make them just like us while at the same time it gives us the ability to honor and respect those things that make us different.
Listen to the words of the communion hymn we will sing today:
“Sing! Sing a new song! Sing of that great day when all will be one! God will reign, and we’ll walk with each other as sisters and brothers united in love.”
Remember that love. Amen.
