Ascension Liturgy

"But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." (Ephesians 2:4-6)

"...And those whom he called he justified, and those whom he justified he glorified." (Romans 8:30)

"While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven." (Luke 24:51)

I've spent a fair amount of time wondering what those first two passages mean.  Specifically, it's the verbs in the past tense that throw me off: God "raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus," then "those whom he justified, he glorified."  I've been 'glorified'?  The coffee stain I just put on my pants surely suggests otherwise.

But the elegant logic of Scripture bids me reconsider the alluring temptation to think that my immediate, measurable experience of the world explains its totality, that everything that is true about the universe can be measured in tangible phenomena.  Despite the stain on my pants, I am - as part of the Church - a member of Christ's body (1 Cor. 12:27); Christ's body ascended to heaven (Luke 24:51); I, then, have ascended into the heavens "in Christ" (Eph. 2:6).  It's a pleasant thought.

I wonder, though, if too often we have done just that and reduced this glorious reality to a "pleasant thought" or "comforting image."  If we have ascended "to the heavenly places in Christ Jesus," then that reality means something for our daily lives.  More importantly, it means something for the Church, because it is not actually you and I - considered as individuals - that ascended with Christ: it is His body, the Church, that He took away in a cloud almost 2,000 years ago.  And if the truth of the Church is that she is both already feasting with the Bridegroom and not yet partaking in the wedding supper of the Lamb, then we have to ask ourselves how she lives out this tension in tangible, incarnate practices.  Does the fact of the Church's ascension have any tangible impact, and can we really say that the ascension of Christ means something for us now?  The early Church found an important, oft-forgotten answer to this question in her weekly gathering of worship, her time to exist as church, as an assembly of the Body of Christ.  Foundational to the early-Christian conception of worship is that, in worship, we participate in the glorified, ascended reality of the Church at the wedding feast, and it is this participation that makes the rest of the Church's functions at all possible (evangelism, mission, etc.)

Consider the following from Alexander Schmemann:
"[The early Church] realized that this ascension was the very condition of their mission in the world, of their ministry to the world.  For there – in heaven – they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this ‘liturgy of ascension,’ they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the ‘joy and peace’ of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses…In church today, we so often find we meet only the same old world, not Christ and His Kingdom.  We do not realize that we never get anywhere because we never leave any place behind us." (For the Life of the World, 28)

Thus the church constructed her weekly worship - her liturgy - around this fundamental idea: that in worship, we participate in the reality of our ascension in Christ.  Worship is, to use Schmemann's phrase, ascension liturgy.  The hymns we sing join with the heavenly chorus of the seraphim; we shake hands, greet, and (in some traditions) kiss those around us as common family members at the heavenly supper of the Lamb; we listen to the teaching of the Word, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, for in heaven we see Him whose revelation will continue to astound, allure, perfect, and draw us for all eternity; we come to the Lord's table to take the body and blood of Christ, which makes present the wedding feast and Him whose love calls us to a place there.  The hymns of heaven are our hymns; her feast is our feast; her communion is our communion.

Perhaps one of the most essential notions about the Church that needs to be recovered today is that the Church does not assemble on Sundays merely to teach, to learn, to sing songs, and to "be edified."  She assembles on Sunday - the day of resurrection - to practice for the Kingdom, to partake in her already glorified destiny, to eat the food and drink nourishing those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.

This also explains why the early church explicitly referred to her worship - and continued to do so for over 1500 years - as "the liturgy." Liturgy, in Greek 'litourgeia,' literally means "the work of the people."  The Liturgy of the Church is her unique work, her unique joy and privilege to participate in that which she enjoys in heaven.  Only the Church - since only the Church ascended to heaven in Christ - can do this unique "work."  Only those who have already ascended to the wedding feast can partake of Him who feeds His Bride for all eternity in the bread and wine.  Again, Schmemann is helpful:
"The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber.  And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in singing and ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole ‘beauty’ of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful.  Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the ‘necessary.’  Beauty is never ‘necessary,’ ‘functional’ or ‘useful.’  And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flowers, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love.  And the Church is love, expectation and joy.  It is heaven on earth" (30-31)

Heaven on earth - we gather together on Sundays for nothing less than to make this a reality.

To give these thoughts an immediately practical bent, it seems to me that a recovery of the Church's weekly worship as "ascension liturgy" is vital for combatting a poisonous tendency: to make our services "seeker-friendly."  Yes, the Church is not the Church without mission, evangelism, and a ferocious commitment to love, but we have to ask ourselves this question: is evangelism the fundamental point of the weekly gathering, the "Sunday experience"?  Christians have almost without exception seemed to think that the answer, in fact, is 'no.'  Evangelistic and outreach opportunities, foreign missions, Sunday schools, and opportunities to talk to and engage with "the curious" are necessary church structures that serve to spread the Kingdom of God in love.  Again, the Church is not the Church without them.  But that special time when she gathers for worship, to do her unique work that only she can do (i.e. perform her unique liturgy), is for the purpose of ascension.  Thus the entire point of gathering is to do something that will inevitably seem foreign and perhaps crazy to the happenstance person who wanders in church off the street.  He should be welcomed with arms of love and invited back for further dialogue and inquiry, but that dialogue is not for the Sunday assembly.  The Sunday assembly is for the ascension of the Bride.  And it is only from the source of ascension in Christ that we can go back into the world with light, joy, peace, and the evangelistic zeal of those who have tasted the goodness of the Lord.  This is where we find our tension between the "already" of ascension and the "not yet" of a world crying out for redemption.  The Church is that middle ground, that point of departure, literally, that "Passover" where the two realities collide, and it is this Paschal existence which is the foundation of her mission and her daily life.

To close, I'd like to simply offer the words of Romano Guardini, who beautifully encapsulates the nature of what happens when the church practices her ascension on Sundays:

"It speaks measuredly and melodiously; it employs formal, rhythmic gestures; it is clothed in colors and garments foreign to everyday life…It is in the highest sense the life of a child, in which everything is picture, melody, and song.  Such is the wonderful fact which the liturgy demonstrates: it unites act and reality in a supernatural childhood before God."

And such children we are and will forever be.