“YOU KNOW WHERE HE IS”

Saint John 16. 5-15

Cantate - The Fourth Sunday after Easter: 14 May Anno Domini 2006

Fr Watson

In the Name of Jesus

When the Lord says He is going away to Him Who sent Him, He most emphatically does not mean that He is going away from you, or that He is no longer with you. On the contrary He is as close to you, as present with you as your own skin; as your breath. "Where two or three are gathered together in My Name, there I am in the midst of you." And again, "lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age." How close is the Lord? He is as close as His Name, His invocation: "In the Name of the Father and of The Son + and of The Holy Ghost."

The Lord's "going" is mere change in mode or presence. As a solid can change into a liquid (an Ice cube into water) and still be present; as a liquid can change into a gas (yes, even an "invisible" gas) and still be present, so too the Lord of the Universe can step out of your field of vision and yet remain with you. Because you can't hear the special frequency "dog whistle" but Fido can, does that mean there is no sound? No, of course not. Because you can't see ultra violet or radio waves does that mean they're not there; no of course not.

Friends, do not let sorrow fill your hearts. Never let sorrow fill your hearts. Yes, you will from time to time (maybe even every day, from time to time) experience sorrow, but let it evaporate away in the heat and light of He Who is The Light of the World. We are closer now to our annual celebration of The Ascension of the Lord. But you know, by Faith, that when Jesus ascended to the right hand of majesty that He did not leave you. You take joy and solace at the Feast of the Ascension, not sorrow.

He tells you this morning that it is all for your benefit; it is all for your nurture, care, protection and growth that He go away visually. Jesus can't be seen with your eyes but He can be grasped by faith. How so? When Jesus ascends out of your pupils He sends the Holy Ghost, God the Third Person, into your hearts to testify of His abiding presence.

When a proud Father stands behind his six or seven children in a Christmas photo; his arms outstretched touching each and every one of them is He really with them all? Yes of course He is, despite the fact that they have their faces away from him for the camera, and that His arms don't rest exactly the same on every one of their little shoulders and backs. Jesus is with you too. He fills all things with His glorified Presence. He fills bread and wine during consecration and reception with His Sacramental Presence. He fills His word as it is read, preached, studied, sung and memorized. He fills the Holy Font and the Holy Confessional when His Word is attached to earthly element for forgiveness and remission.

When six inches of snow falls to completely cover a football field, does the 45 yard line experience the same peaceful and white covering that the opposing end zone does? Yes of course; same snow, same presence. Because your eye ball is not your left third toenail, do they thus not share the same blood coursing through your veins? Of course they do! All rooms are part of the same spiritual Castle that is the Church Catholic. All succulent pieces of fruit, figs, dates, grapes, are still part and parcel of the respective branches and vines to which produced them.

The wonderful task of the Holy Spirit is to give to all the Church, all the Bride, all of you Christian brothers and sisters of the Lord, the same Lord - - His comforting and soothing and enervating and dynamic presence; His real reality.

The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of Truth. And who is Truth but the Christ Himself; reality enfleshed. The Spirit guides you into Jesus. The Spirit takes Jesus' words printed on paper with ink and makes them living Words, sharper than any two-edged sword. The Words of Christ first rebuke you for your sin and for your cold hard hearts, and then the Words of Jesus pick you back up and fill you with His love and compassion. Jesus literally picks you up out of the gutter, cleans of the sewage of sin, and pours into you Himself. He transfuses into you His victory at Calvary, His triumph over sin, death and Satan. He clothes you with Himself, into your ears and hearts, and souls and spirits. His Word is Himself.

Yes the Lord could have stayed on our stage with His always visible appearance. This would have been wonderful beyond words for those present in that geographical location. But for others, they would miss out on His visibility unless He was to allow Himself to be visible at more than one place at one time. This phenomenon, while certainly not impossible for God, would be unsettling to humans still living their sinful existence in the confines of space, time, and God's own normal "laws" of physics.

Praise be He gives Himself even more fully than "visible" by sending the Holy Ghost who testifies of Him, Who "martyrs" His very Person and Life into you through your ears by the Gospel and into you sacramentally by the Supper.

The Spirit glorifies Jesus and glorifies you by taking of what is Christ's His Divinity, His perfect obedience of the Commandments, His atoning blood sacrifice on the tree, and declares it unto you, delivers it unto you, seals it unto you + and makes Jesus yours, always, present, to the end of the age.

In the Name of The Father and of The Son + and of The Holy Ghost

“THE ASCENSION MAKES THE DIFFERENCE”

Saint Mark 16. 14-20

The Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord: 25 May Anno Domini 2006

Fr Watson

In the Name of The Father and of The Son + and of The Holy Ghost

You have heard the logistical specifics from Saint Luke. You know the factual story. You hear about this most momentous event in the life of your Lord every Thursday night 40 days after Easter.

The sinner that you are sometimes wrestles with the basic truth. It is, from the world's point of view, a fantastical story---a man rising into the clouds. Yes, it is a miracle, the last miracle that the visible Lord performed. It was awesome, and frightening, for the "12" to see Him floating further away. But was He? Was He floating further away? No, you know that the answer is no. It is a deep-theology reason. It is intense Christological meta-physics. It is the stuff of God-reality. It is scriptural---the Word existing as He reveals His fullness.

What happened between the time of the Lord's Garden Resurrection and His mountaintop elevation? During this period Christ did two seemingly contradictory things.

He was no longer with His disciples. He vanished from their midst after revealing His victory and first-fruits life. He was still with His disciples. He kept coming back into their presence with successive meetings. The purpose of His appearances was twofold. In the first place, Christ wished to confirm the disciples' faith in His resurrection. In the second place, He wished to give them further instruction concerning God's kingdom.

The ascended Jesus no longer shows Himself in a visible form. Does that bother, offend or trouble you? NO! It does not stress you in the least because you believe His Word. You are evangelical-Catholic Christians who trust His Scriptures and trust His Church. You are Lutherans who understand His "means of Grace."

The Resurrection, that mystery in Joseph's hillside tomb, has no witnesses and needed none, since the risen Savior "showed Himself alive after His Passion by many infallible proofs." [Acts 1.3] But after the Ascension from Mt. Olivet, the Savior no longer shows Himself in a visible form to you, His believers on earth. So, in distinction to Easter Sunday, Ascension Thursday took place visibly before the eyes of the Galilean fishermen.

The truth of the event is historically verified for the whole Catholic Church by the eye-witness of the Apostles. It became part and parcel of their Apostolic Preachment.

The ascension took place in an actual upward motion. He Who descended from Heaven into the Blessed Virgin's womb; He Who descended down into the Jordan river; He Who ascended high upon the crucifix, ascended for the final time to the right hand of majesty. What does this mean?

He ascended slowly, and dramatically. He might simply have disappeared, as He had vanished out of the sight of the two Emmaus disciples, but He did not. He was deliberate in His visible finality. As the dogmatician Hollaz writes "it pleased Him to go upward, in order that the disciples might testify of His actual ascension more clearly and confidently."

Christ's ascension accomplished a two-fold goal.

The end of His ascension was not only that He occupied the Paradise of the Redeemed, i.e. heaven, but that He also took possession of the "majesty on high," the "right hand of God." The "right hand of God" is not a mere seat of honor or a seat of rest and repose as the false teaching Reformed maintain, but the heavenly throne of Christ's exalted humanity. The Savior never sheds His flesh; His Incarnation is forever. Scripture teaches expressly in many places "He ascended up far above all heavens, that He might fill all things." [Eph. 4.10]

Peter, in his Pentecost sermon, taught that Christ by His ascension did not enter into a "rest," or into an "inactive state or condition" but into an active divine dominion. Meyer correctly remarks that by Jesus being now a "ruling monarch" His presence is even more real: "prior to His ascension, Christ indeed was Lord and Messiah, however, in the form of a servant, but after laying this aside He has become Lord and Messiah in consummate perfection."

It is so sad that Jesus' ascension, by which He occupies universal dominion according to His human nature, is misused by the Protestant sects to actually "exclude" Christ's human nature from His omnipresence and universal rule in the world and, in particular, in the Church. It makes a difference. The Word is to be believed. The word can not be broken.

Our beloved Formula of Concord rejects the protestant heresy that wrongly hold that because of His ascension into heaven Christ is so enclosed and circumscribed with His body in a definite place in heaven that with the same (His body) He cannot and will not be truly present with us in the Supper. What hellish hogwash. How dare anyone turn the Lord into a "bug trapped in heavenly amber," a "body trapped in an infinite iron-lung" until the end of time, unable to act and "be" as the God He is.

With a wicked anti-catholic agenda, the reformed have for centuries willfully mistranslated Acts 3. 21, so as to arrive with a pre-conceived result. The original text of Saint Luke says Christ must occupy heaven, not Christ must be received, or be circumscribed and enclosed by heaven. Who is holding whom? Does the Lord hold His Kingdom in His blessed punctured palm, or is He pinned up in a Petri dish is heaven's holding tank? Lutheran-Catholics, with our brothers of all ages of orthodoxy, refuse to change Luke's verb into a "passive;" and refuse to make Scripture bow Its knee to the arrogance of Zwingli and his ilk.

Strong words are mandated because it makes a difference. The Word is true. You need to know and believe that you have an eternal "High Priest" Who Is on the throne of majesty in the heavens. You need to take comfort that by "heaven" we don't mean the blue sky of the birds and planes, or the black expanse of the stellar solar systems. Rather we believe as the Word instructs us that "Christ is made higher than the heavens"[Heb. 7.26] Hence He rose in an invisible manner above all heavens.

The "right hand of God" is anthropomorphism, or a figure of speech. The "right hand" is a way of describing an attribute of God by which He does His work, namely, His unlimited power, or His omnipotence.

The Lutheran Confessions, a clear and accurate commentary on Holy Writ, state that "God's right hand is no fixed place in heaven, as the errorists assert, but nothing else than the almighty power of God, which fills heaven and earth." [Trigl. 1025, F.C., SD VIII, 28] Saint, where the God-Man has promised to be for you, in His Word and in His Sacred Ordinances (the Sacraments) there He is; all of Him, the total package, the Personal Union of the Divine and the Human, Jesus' Flesh and Blood. It makes a difference. Because your Brother Christ Jesus Ascended to fill all things, He has ascended into the Baptismal fonts to fill you full of the Water from His side; the water which gushed out from the cross. He has ascended into every pulpit in His church which preaches the full Apostolic power of His life and work, to fill you with forgiveness and strength. He ascends every chalice and paten to feed you His body and blood; not his absent body and blood; not his spiritual body and blood; not His "representational" body and blood, but His divine and human real and genuine Body and Blood.

It makes a difference.

Again, and finally, the Formula of Concord gives you all the Peace, the "Concord" of the Word of God when it says: "We hold, [Augsburg Lutheran Church holds] that in His Church and congregation on earth He is present as Mediator, Head, King, and High Priest, not in part, or one half of Him only, but the entire Person of Christ is present, to which both natures belong, the divine and the human; not only according to His divinity, but also according to, and with, His assumed nature, according to which He is our Brother, and we are flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone." [Trigl. 1043, F.C. S.D. VIII, 78]

This is the Feast of The Ascension of Our Lord.

In the Name of The Father and of The Son + and of The Holy Ghost