Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. Make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. The Opening Prayer God our Father, make us joyful in the ascension of your Son, Jesus Christ. May we follow him into the new creation, for his ascension is our glory and our hope. And we ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. A Reading from the New Testament from the Acts of the apostles, first chapter, first through the 11th verse in the first book, Theophilus I dealt with all that Jesus did and taught until the day he was taken up.

After giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen, he presented himself alive to them by many proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during 40 days and speaking about the kingdom of God while meeting with him, he enjoined them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. And when they had gathered together, they asked him, lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? He answered them, it is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, through Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up and a cloud took him from their sight while they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood by them.

They said, men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking up at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven, will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven. The word of the Lord God mounts His throne to shouts of joy, a blare of trumpets for the Lord A reading from again the New Testament, the letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians 173. Brothers and sisters, may the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation resulting in knowledge of Him. May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe, in accord with the exercise of his great might which he worked in Christ, raising him from the dead and seating him at the right hand of the heavens, far above every principality, authority, power and dominion, and every name that is named not only in this age, but in the one to come.

He put all things beneath his feet, gave him his head over all things to the church which is his body. The fullness of the One who fills all things in every way. The Word of the Lord. Hallelujah. Verse. Go and teach all nations, says the Lord.

I am with you always until the end of the world. A reading from the gospel of St. Luke taken is from chapter 2446 to the 53rd verse. Jesus said to his disciples, thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins would be preached in his name to all the nations beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. Behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you.

But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. Then he led them out as far as Bethany, raised his hands and blessed them as he blessed them. He parted from them and was taken up to heaven. They did him homage and then returned to Jerusalem with great joy. They were continually in the temple praising God. The Gospel of the Lord.

Satan. Satan. These next three Sundays are very important feasts that we’re focusing on. And this one is the Feast of the Ascension. And then next Sunday it’s the Feast of Pentecost. And then we close this Easter time with the Feast of the Holy Trinity.

What I can sense the Church is doing is trying to put us into the right disposition, the right place to begin what we call ordinary time throughout the summer months and through the time of Advent, when we listen attentively to the teaching and the experiences that people had of this figure, Jesus. So I want to look at a kind of. I want to start with a kind of broad stroke picture of this mysterious thing we call this thing we call redemption. You know, God Came and became one of us and saved us from something horrific. So let’s look at it. First of all, I just want to start with the image of God creating human beings and setting them on this earth and taking a risk, a chance, and giving them the one thing he didn’t give to any other thing that he created, and that was free will.

So he has now created these beings that can actually turn away from him and reject him and do anything they want to do if they set their mind to it. And he started with them in a beautiful, idyllic kind of place, much like we begin our own lives in this world in childhood, and everything is in harmony, and everything seems one, and it’s a beautiful time. And then as we develop and as the story developed, we see that all of a sudden, you know, independence and autonomy begins to fill the human race, which is Adam and Eve, symbolized in Adam and Eve. And what we see in them is this choice that they make to basically be autonomous from God. That’s one of the fundamental things we see in that story in Genesis, that they thought they could be equal to God. They could know what God knows and have what God has, but not necessarily because he’s steadily giving it to them, but because they can possess it.

And that was the lie that was given to them. And the result of that is that they had to struggle on their own. Then, if they chose to be on their own, God said, okay, here’s I’ll sew you some clothes, and I’m going to send you out into the world, and it’s going to be tough. And so then he gave them the law. And the law was something to help them in their choices and to guide them. And they struggled and struggled to follow the law and really basically couldn’t do it very well at all.

There are those moments that are very powerful when God looks at the human race and just says, this is just a mess. I’m going to start all over again. I’m going to get rid of them all. He saves a family and then continues the work. It’s an interesting story, not unlike our own stories of struggle with understanding who God is and how we surrender to him. But anyway, it took the course eventually, where God said, the only thing I can do is come down and show them more dramatically, more clearly who they can be.

That’s what Jesus came into the world to do, to show them who they can be. Human beings filled with spirit. And they needed something. They needed something that would break open their hearts and their souls to the Presence of God. Because Jesus, it seems to me, came to teach more than anything else, the teaching of presence. He came into the world to do something, to open men and women to this mysterious power of God dwelling within them, partnering with them, and enabling them to do this work in a new context.

It’s a new creation is the way it’s described in Scripture. So, so the work of Jesus is to come in the form of a human being and then to say, look, this is what potentially human beings have within them, this capacity for divinity to dwell within them. It’s what you rejected back in the garden, and it changes everything. And so we have this thing called redemption. Then when Jesus went through the process of redemption. And the interesting thing about redemption is it has something to do with surrendering and submitting to a destiny that God calls us to.

And there’s a kind of dying to it that is so essential. And that’s what Jesus did. He gave into a plan. And the plan seemed so ridiculous to the disciples that they thought it was not a good plan at all. So they really basically felt that this was a stupid idea. But when Jesus gave into his destiny and gave into what it is that God was calling him to, even though it looked to the world as if he was truly destroyed, but he wasn’t, it was in the act of surrender that he gained all this ability to come back, in a sense, and be with his disciples.

So what he wanted so clearly to show them is that when we do the grieving and the suffering that is so part of our lives, when we go into that and accept it, we come out of it a new person. We come out of it, in a sense, in a risen form. And so Jesus makes sure that they understand that those things that are destiny for us can never destroy us. They can only bring us to fuller life. And so Jesus comes back and spends 40 days with his disciples, and they’re absolutely, totally convinced that he isn’t gone, that he wasn’t destroyed. I mean, 40 days with a person who is dead in a bodily form would convince anybody that this is a mysterious, marvelous, wonderful thing that they are experiencing.

And then when he gets ready to leave that time that he spent with them with a resurrected body, that’s where we pick up the story today. And in both the acts of the apostles and in the Gospel, it’s so clear what happened, that he was with them. He told them that there was going to be something given to them. And this is the part that I can’t. I can’t explain it. I Don’t know exactly how it worked, but what Jesus was saying is, I have to return to the Father so that when I return to the Father, then it’s possible for my Spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of my Father and myself will come and dwell within you.

So I have to do all these things. You watched me go through all the things that I had to do in terms of my death, suffering and passion. And then you see me rise. But then I must go back to the Father. And what I’m going to do when I’m with the Father is I’m going to be your advocate. I’m there for you.

I’m there to continue to be a source of grace and teaching for you. And the way it comes to you is in the form of Spirit. So the Spirit is going to come. And what’s important about the second reading from Ephesians is that it says what is promised is wisdom, wisdom that brings knowledge of who God is. So what is the work of the Spirit in you and in me? And we’re going to celebrate that next week in Pentecost.

What is this gift of God’s Spirit in us producing? Well, let’s look at that, those two images. It’s wisdom. And you know that wisdom is something that goes beyond logic and goes beyond cause and effect. It’s a kind of understanding of something where we’re wide open to allowing something to happen that doesn’t make a lot of logical sense, but we believe it. We know it’s true.

So this wisdom is given to us. And the wisdom is regarding the full nature of who God is. And if you’re going to look at who God is, you’re looking at what he’s doing for you. So the ascension is the invitation on the part of Jesus to His disciples, to all of us, to be open, radically open, ready to receive this gift of wisdom that’s then going to show us who he is. And I’m thinking to myself, you know, this is such an interesting image. Who is God?

Who is he to you? I have a sense of who he is to me, which has radically changed since I was 18, 19, 20 years old when I went into seminary. I don’t know if I had any sense of. I knew God existed. I knew that he was a personal God, and I believed in Jesus. But I think what I basically felt about God is that he came into my life to tell me all the things that I needed to do in order to please him so that I could get the reward of eternal life or the reward of a good life.

So it seemed to me that primarily what I was looking at when I thought about God or what I was grasping in my imaginations was a kind of good teacher who would tell me what to do in order to get what I needed. And what I realize now is the only. There’s that dimension to Jesus. He’s a good teacher. But what’s so often not understood and what I think we need the Spirit to help us to understand. Because the way it unfolds is totally mysterious.

That we have a God who has created for you and for me, an entirely new world, A new world, something radically different. And that we, if we understand it fully and we surrender to it, enter into a new creation. And there are dimensions to this new creation. And one of them is a kind of unity, a oneness. I love those images in the Old Testament, in Genesis, of Adam and Eve in the garden. And there’s always this sense of such harmony and oneness and walking with God.

And everything is. You know, everything is connected, you know. And yet in this world that I live in so often I can go through a day and I feel nothing more than being scattered. My attention is being pulled in 20 directions. And I try to cover all the things that I’m responsible for. And then I hear things that are going on in the world that worry me.

And there’s oil spilling in the Gulf, and then there’s this war, and then there’s this economy. And then there’s these problems on Wall Street. And, you know, it doesn’t seem to have any kind of uniform or any kind of unity or connection. And so what I’d like to see happen to us is that we would be open to this idea that there is a gift that is given. It’s called the spirit that comes into us. That when we’re open to it.

And notice that St. Paul says in this letter that what we need to do is to have the eyes of our heart see it. And that’s so much the image of wisdom. The eyes of your heart, you know, not the eyes of your mind, but the eyes of your heart. And that just says to me that it’s more in the area of feeling. It’s more in the area of intuition.

It’s more in the area of something you kind of know without knowing how you know it. But if you could believe that this promise is real, that God is really creating for you and for me a way of seeing the world where everything is interconnected, then if you presume that it is, it’s not that you can figure out first that it is, and, oh, now I believe it is. No, presume that it is, and then begin to wait to be in the sense and to feel the connections. It’s a very, very important exercise in terms of our spiritual lives to have some way of sensing that every single thing that’s going on is somehow connected to the other things that are going on that are connected to the needs that your soul has, that your heart has, that the culture has, that everything has. It’s all working together for the good. That’s the promise.

Because if you don’t have a sense, if you don’t have a sense of God as an agent in the world that is working for you and doing radical things for you, then it seems to me he ends up simply being a tour guide through this whole thing and a teacher that tells you what you have to do and not to do in order to get to the goal. That’s such an oversimplified, impersonal, shortsighted way of imagining this God. When Jesus says, I’ve come into the world to give to you something so radically new that it changes everything and that there’s a unity in the universe because of what I’ve done, there’s a oneness that we need to be aware of. That kind of language is all, all through the New Testament. And I often wonder, what was it that so electrified the converts to Christianity? And I don’t think it was the fact that there was just this story of a man who died and came back.

I don’t think that would have. I don’t think that would have changed that much. It would be such an interesting thing to believe that that happened. But, I mean, it’s got to be that that event did something more than just present a human being who was dead and then came back and then somehow went up to heaven. There’s something that he did in that act that is so essential. If you think of it as divinity coming down and entering into this whole messy sort of thing we call life, and somehow charging it with connection and grace and unity, then you begin to sense something that’s very exciting, very challenging to be a part of.

So my prayer with you this morning is that we somehow open our hearts, the eyes of our hearts, love that image, and somehow enter more fully into this place where we’re more conscious of what this God has done and is doing for us, what it means that he dwells within us, and what this wisdom really is that helps us to see exactly what he’s doing within us. It’s like first we believe and then we experience. Not experience and then believe. So believe with me in this most amazing promise that as this figure Jesus ascended into heaven and he made a promise. That promise is real. It has everything to do with the new life that he’s inviting you and me to live.

We could not possibly live without his help and without his teaching and without his presence. Closing Prayer Father, on this Feast of the Ascension, we ask you to awaken in us a longing for what it is that you promise so that our hearts will be open to the mystery of your gifts, especially the way they mysteriously work in our lives and draw us into a place of oneness and wholeness. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen. The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program, is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts.

Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued support. Without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a NonProfit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey. Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher, Producer produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2020.