Sermon for the Sunday After the Ascension

We all know how difficult and irritating the smallest of wounds can be – think of a slightly ingrown toenail or a hangnail, or a sunburn. Like the tiny mustard seed producing something great, even the tiny hangnail can harass us for days and change even how we use our hand.

A wound is a wound because it’s still in the process of healing, a wound is always something that is ‘open’ in some way, maybe bleeding, maybe susceptible to bleeding or to infection, still uncomfortable. The wound dogs us for days and weeks and reminds us of the original trauma that caused it; even though the initial thing happened a while ago, the unhealed wound makes it feel like the cause of it, that slip of the knife, is still with us, still hurting us.

But when a wound heals we are left with a scar. Wounds bleeds and are ‘open’, a scar is closed, a wound still carries the risk of infection, a scar doesn’t carry much risk of anything at all, a wound still hurts us, irritates us, scars don’t usually hurt at all. In fact, depending on the severity of the wound scars can actually cause a permanent lack of sensation meaning that, in some sense, it’s harder to feel pain in that spot again.

A number of years ago in university all of my wisdom teeth had fully come into my abnormally large jaw, but the bottom row was giving me a bit of discomfort and the dentist said that it was likely just crowded enough that I should have one of the wisdom teeth out. I had never had a tooth pulled before and I remember asking how bad it was and he said hardly bad at all – we freeze it, twist-twist-pull and it’s out in seconds. Easy peasy, I thought.

I had a sense that things weren’t going to plan when seconds turned into minutes. I knew things were probably not going well when the dentist stood to try and get more leverage; and I was certain that things were going very wrong when I heard him, through his mask, whisper a certain anglo-saxon word to himself, and then ask his receptionist to clear his afternoon.

I won’t paint the full picture, but after almost three hours and a traumatic procedure for which I should have been sedated – the monster of a wisdom tooth was out. Not surprisingly, things went better after that: the swelling and pain subsided in a few days, I went back to solid food. Two weeks later, though, and the hole hadn’t healed; it hurt, things got caught in it, and it felt weird, and so I went to the dentist who examined it and, with a pair of tweezers, gingerly pulled out a small shard of my jawbone that was stuck and had hampered the healing.

The point is this: we are all wounded. Each of us has open and vulnerable wounds in us that come from all the things we’ve suffered and experienced. Some are wounded from parents they never had, or parents they had but who never loved, parents who neglected, wounds from the hurt that other loved ones have inflicted on us, wounds from the ways that we’ve hurt ourselves, wounds from the things that happened to us that shouldn’t have, and things over which no one had control, like an illness; we have wounds from betrayal, wounds from betraying others, that is the wound guilt; we have wounds of shame, of grief, of regret.

And like the painful little blister on our toe that changes how we walk, the wounds control our lives long after we were first hurt.

We protect ourselves from the pain of them by resorting to anger, substance abuse, self-destructiveness, by pushing away the love of other people so that we can’t get hurt by them again.

Just like with my tooth and second visit to the dentist, we struggle and hurt because we have yet to deal with that little, nagging piece of the trauma that remains with us, the thing that caused the wound in the first place. If we don’t heal that then the band aids we rely on will keep falling off and the pain will continue. What we want is for wounds to become scars.

Today we celebrate the Ascension of Jesus, which was formally celebrated on Thursday, that day 40 days after his resurrection when at last he departs from this earth and ascends to his Father in Heaven, a moment that he has been preparing them for since the resurrection, telling them again and again that he will leave them, that he is returning to the Father.

Yet even when it happens, as we hear in Mark’s Gospel today, the disciples stand there staring up after him as if he hadn’t told them countless times before that this moment was coming. “Ye men of Galilee,” asks an angel of them, “why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” They stand staring because their own wound of losing their friend and teacher has not yet healed, and is not yet a scar. It all still hurts terribly.

And though he has gone, and though the pain is there for them, his promise to them and to us was that he has and will provide a way of healing human brokenness and sin. Ten days after he ascends, he sends the Holy Spirit, the comforter, to them and by that same spirit many of those who followed Christ would go on to endure unimaginable physical suffering but endure it glady for Christ’s sake. No longer did they stare up into heaven because by, filled with the Holy Ghost, he now lived in them.

For forty days following his resurrection he appeared to the Disciples, and we know from his encounter with St. Thomas who doubts his identity that Jesus’ resurrected body still had the marks of the nails and the wound from the spear on it.

What this shows us is that our wounds and our pain are not apart from who we are in God, unfortunate though they are, but that they are inseparable from us. What Jesus’ going into heaven with the very human marks of suffering on his body shows is that he goes up to take with him all of our brokenness and pain to there be redeemed and healed.

It is in the life to come that we will know wholeness and healing in all its fulness; but this is all also a reminder that the transformation has already begun – we needn’t stand gazing up into heaven because while he has gone from our sight, by the Spirit he now lives in us.

And God by His Holy Spirit is already at work in you, healing your deepest pains; taking your sufferings and your open, painful wounds from being things that you show others saying “look at what happened to me…” to being scars of those wounds that you show to others saying “Look at what God did for me…”

The hardest part for us is being receptive to it – are we prepared to be healed? Prepared to be vulnerable with God, to confess our fears, our pains, and our sins and to ask for healing, wholeness, and forgiveness?

I think this is why, in the Gospel, Jesus says, “The one who believes and is baptized will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned.” To those who ask, it is given, as he says, but it means that we must reach out, admit our weakness, ask for healing, and believe that it’s possible, otherwise we are condemned to simply live with the unhealed wound forever.

We give thanks this Ascensiontide for the suffering that Christ bore for us, for His living of our humanity and submitting himself to experience all that it means to be human. We give thanks not for his abandoning his humanity to rise to glory, but that he rose with the marks of human suffering, the marks that we gave him – a sign that God is redeeming and will redeem every pain and every wound, and we pray as we prepare to receive the Holy Spirit next Sunday that our hearts and minds and bodies will always be places of welcome for that Spirit, always open to what God is doing through it. Amen.