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The Seventh Sunday of Easter Where were you in 1965? Remember what a year that was? There was so much promise and so much heartache. It was the year when the long journey toward Civil Rights for blacks in this country culminated with the Voting Rights Act. Martin Luther King was marching in Montgomery and Selma. Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Act, that to this day provides Medicare or Medicaid to most of us sitting in these pews this morning. It was the year of the Second Vatican Council. 1965 was also the year of a troop surge in Vietnam to 400000, and the first mass protests against the war. A young Episcopal seminarian from EDS, Jonathan Daniels was murdered in Alabama. Malcolm X was assassinated. And it was the summer of the riots in Watts. Hurricane Betsy devastated New Orleans that fall, and it was the first year of our first energy crisis, when the entire Northeast suffered a blackout. Well, in 1965, I was 11 years old, and what I was doing when I wasn’t trying out for little league or adding to my vast pet collection or learning about the birds and the bees was memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism, all 28 pages and 107 questions and answers. Each and every Saturday night after supper, my mother would prepare me for my Sunday School class the next morning by having me recite several of the catechism answers at a time. In the ferment and fury of that year, another voice was calling. “What is the chief end of man?”, was the very first question of the catechism. “Man’s chief end,” I recited, “is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” I couldn’t possibly have known then how I would absorb these words into my soul, but it was not long after I memorized them that I began to hold them up to all the divisions over race, and the war, the strife and pain in the world that surrounded me. Where is the glory and oneness Jesus promised I have often wondered since? How do you enjoy God forever when the heart of man is rent asunder with corruption, greed, and rage? How can Jesus come to us again in the same way he went into heaven, if the unity and glory he envisioned is still so far off? What exactly is eternal life, and how do we inherit it? Our Gospel this morning, I believe, begins to help with these questions. For in this final discourse before his death in the 17th Chapter of John, Jesus gives a very simple definition of eternal life. He equates eternity with knowing God, both in this life and the next. Jesus, you see, beheld the glory of God in the immediacy of his earthly life. And he says that now, those who belong to him, are already partakers of eternity. The Feast Day of the Ascension, which we celebrated this past week, traditionally focuses our attention on the ascent of Jesus to the right hand of the Father, to a place which transcends all time and space. Our Creeds proclaim this. Our collect this morning speaks of the exaltation of Jesus to the high Kingdom of Heaven. And in our lesson from the Acts of the Apostles recounts that Jesus was lifted up in a cloud and taken away from the sight of the Apostles. Our Gospel, on the other hand, takes another view. The ascent into heaven, in this prayer of Jesus, is not conceived as a journey to some far-off, distant place. Rather, in the mind of Jesus, ascension ultimately is about our being with God and God being with us. Right here. Right now. We experience heaven, Jesus says in his prayer to his Father, whenever we experience the oneness that he and the Father experience in each other. And if this is true, if we experience the glory of eternity as we are drawn into the oneness of God and being one with each other, than the only obstacle, the only impediment on our way to heaven is division, discord, separation, and schism. The only thing standing in the way of our experiencing God’s eternal glory in this life is our divisiveness. In our world. In our country. In our communities. In our relationships. And in ourselves. In the year 2008, I am still wondering about all of this. Now, when another foreign war divides us as a people. And now, when the divisions of race and class, and between rich and poor have only widened with time. And now, when it is customary to demonize those you who are different than you, or those you disagree with. I wonder about how far we fall short of the glory of God in the Episcopal Church as long as we stand a house divided. Or how far we fall short of God’s glory here on Cape Cod as long as homeless people sleep in bogs next to empty, vacation-home McMansions. I wonder, too, about myself, and the ways that all the strife, and enmity, and divisiveness that besets the world also is found lurking in my own heart. And today, I also am wondering anew about this Gospel. For Jesus was truly the Son of God because he himself had experienced eternity. He had received a foretaste of heaven because he had become one with God. He could anticipate enjoying God forever because, in this life, he had begun to enjoy God in the here and now. In this, the ascent of Jesus into heaven began in his earthly pilgrimage. And so it can and must with us. For, friends, those of us who are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, are called to bring all divisions to an end, we are called to bring reconciliation to all of Creation, we are called to join heaven and earth in our lives, in our relationships, in our world. For now we do “know that everything God has given Jesus is from God. Now we know in truth that Jesus is of God. Now we believe that God sent Jesus into the world so that we may, indeed, have eternal life, right here, right now, in our oneness in and with the Holy Trinity and in and with each other. Friends, we are partakers of eternity in the here and now. In this Eucharist, we are made one with Christ. In this heavenly banquet, we are drawn into the great mystery of these stirring words of our Lord: “All mine are yours, and yours are mine. Holy Father protect them in your name, so that they may be one, as we are one.” As we are fed with the bread of life and cup of salvation, we are united with Christ and one another, and we made one with all God’s people in heaven and on earth.
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