Clergy are often tempted, on this Sunday, not to preach about the Gospel or Epistle, but to preach about the Gospel from three days ago: the Ascension.  You can’t really blame us.  After all, the Ascension is a holy day of obligation, a day that it is a sin to skip Church, a MORTAL sin, a major feast, one of “the big five;” it ranks right up there with Pentecost, Epiphany, Christmas, and Easter.   But because it comes during the week, unless there is some other flashy activity (as if ascending into heaven isn’t flashy enough), attendance in our modern world is almost always very, very low. And so we clergy are tempted to give the people what they didn’t come on Thursday to hear:   to preach on the Ascension.  I have done so myself more often than I have preached on the Sunday gospel.

This temptation is so strong, that clergy in the Roman Catholic Church are given permission to go all the way and skip Ascension on its day and celebrate the feast on today, the Sunday after, instead.  Despite the urge, we aren’t allowed to do that—although I have to admit it makes a whole lot of sense!  No, this isn’t just a second day to talk about the Ascension, even though I wish it were.  This is a novena.

The word "novena" has the unmistakable ring of Tridentine Roman Catholicism about it to most of us.  I don't know if any Christians other than Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans pray novenas, although all should—it’s a biblical idea.
The word novena, as you probably could tell, comes from the Latin word for “nine.”  A novena is a concentrated nine day period of prayer which has a particular objective.

The first half of the Church year reenacts the earthly life of Christ. We begin with Advent to prepare for the coming of Christ, then in Christmas we see that Incarnation.  In rapid succession follow Epiphany—the manifestation, Lent—suffering,
Holy Week—passion and death, Easter—resurrection, and the ascension of Christ.  And now that we have passed Ascension we are now in the middle of the first novena.

When Jesus went up into heaven at his Ascension, he told the disciples not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, "you heard from me, for John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit."  Nine days fall between Ascension Day and Pentecost.  On Ascension Day Jesus told the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to come to baptize them, and after nine days of praying and waiting the Holy Spirit came.

Today, our Sunday after Ascension Day, is in the early middle of those nine days—Jesus has gone to heaven, but the Holy Spirit is yet to come. Contemplating the Ascension of Jesus raises some extremely important and provocative questions.  Some think that if Ascension Day has any value at all, it is because it makes you think about heaven. Is heaven a place? Is it a physical place? Where is it? Since we say “ascended” do we have to believe in the old “heaven is up; hell is down” idea? Is it beyond the known universe? Is it part of the known universe? Is it just a poetic way of talking about being with God? And more important questions, too—am I going to go there and are the people I love going to go there so we can be together with each other and with God forever?  Ah, but I said I wasn’t going to preach about Ascension, didn’t I?

In today's Epistle, St Peter writes, "the end of all things is at hand." We usually associate thinking about the end of everything more with the season of Advent than with Ascension, but there is a reason we read what St Peter says today.

The Ascension of Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit are not the end of all things in the sense that everything stops and nothing more happens—obviously history has kept right on going for nearly two thousand years since those events
and doesn’t seem like it’s ready to stop.  No, the Ascension of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit are the end in the sense that they are the finish, the completion of God's decisive invasion into the midst of human history.  When he steps into human history again, it will be to bring human history to its close. Jesus went back to heaven both to get our places there ready for us and to send down the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God could not be any more present or active in the world than he has been since the first Pentecost! What we have been experiencing for almost two thousand years—
and what we will continue to experience until God brings the final curtain down —is his action to draw all people to him through the Spirit.

We are here to try to bring people to God ourselves to hasten the time of his coming again. We are not going to learn any more significant or different information about God or what he wants of us. We have everything we need to know now in the Bible—which the Holy Spirit wrote and the Church collected & authorized—and in the Church—which interprets for us what the Holy Spirit meant.  (that means something that all the protestants don’t understand, by the way, that there are no do it yourself kits—--it is the Church’s job, not the individual’s, to interpret Scripture)

To use a phrase made tired and boring—not to mention annoying—by television evangelists who misinterpret the Revelation to St John, we are living in the time of the end. We see Jesus up in heaven. He is at God's right hand because it is the place of honor. He is sitting down because his priestly sacrificial work is finished. He is pleading our case before his father by presenting at the heavenly altar his own blood he shed to forgive our sins.  He is our mediator—our go-between—and our advocate—the one who speaks on our behalf and makes our case.

I said earlier that this is the “between” time.  We are between the Ascension and Pentecost in the Church Year, but we are in a bigger sense between the Ascension of our Lord and his return at the end of time.  Theologians call this “already-not yet,” for we are already redeemed—Christ has already won—but we do not yet see the fullness of Christ’s victory.

We are here in this between time, living, trying, failing, repenting, —turning back toward God—and being forgiven and receiving grace all the time. We are waiting eagerly for him to come again—to leave the throne room for one last time
to come down here and bring history to an end, and gather us up to take us then where he is now.

Here is how St. Paul says it will happen,

"For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words."

The comfort in these words is in the knowledge that our baptism makes us one in Christ, children of God, and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven!  And you’ll find that no greater comfort——no better choice——is available anywhere!