Rev. Daniel E.

Somers, Deacon
St. James Memorial Church
Homily
May 13, 2018

Ascension Sunday

Good morning. For those of you who were not here last Sunday, I am Daniel Somers, a

transitional deacon anticipating ordination to the priesthood. My wife Julia and I live on a small

farm near Morristown populated by five thoroughbreds, mostly retired, two of whom raced at

Monmouth Park, a host of chickens and assorted others. I practice law in Morristown itself. We

have four children, all grown, and three grandchildren. I was raised as a Quaker outside of

Philadelphia, but since my marriage 39 years ago to Julia, a Scot raised as an Episcopalian, I

have been one of the faithful.

Today is Ascension Sunday. It is also by happy coincidence, Mother’s Day. According

to the church calendar, the Feast of the Ascension occurred on Thursday, but among many

denominations is seldom recognized. This is unfortunate – to me it is the “highlight,” of the

Easter season. Ascension Sunday celebrates the really risen Christ.

On Good Friday, over 2,000 years ago, a man so unlike us died an agonizing and

excruciating public death on a cross for you, me and all of humankind. I had often wondered,

why was this allowed to happen – what purpose did it serve?

In pondering those questions, I have come to some startling conclusions. Those

conclusions were occasioned by my mother’s death. That occurred well over ten years ago.

Being a child of the Enlightenment, and raised as a Quaker where attention to doctrine is

scant if not nonexistent, it was easy for me to have slipped into a skeptical agnosticism. How
could one deity conceivably reign over the billions of stars and countless galaxies populating this

universe, let alone have any inkling about the likes of any of us on this tiny speck in the cosmos?

Moreover, what proof is there of an afterlife? It has been observed after all, “the dead are

the silent majority in the church’s history – as they are indeed in humanity’s. The life after death

is a matter of faith and conjecture.” I would contemplate these and other issues many mornings

while out with my horses as they grazed contentedly in my neighbors’ hay fields. Nature’s

simple beauty alone provided me no convincing answers.

Then Claudia Constance Somers, my mother, did the unthinkable – she died. I knew that

she was ill, but she and my father, stoic Germans that they were, kept its seriousness from my

siblings and me. I still remember the telephone call from my father, “Hello, Dad.” “Daniel,

Mom is gone.”

During my last conversation with my mother, she had asked, “When will I see you

again?” The question was answered in dramatic fashion at her funeral service a week or so later.

It was held outdoors on a lovely early July day on the lawn behind our Quaker meetinghouse in

Chester County, Pennsylvania. I am the eldest of four. My father had asked me to come forward

to read Psalm 23 – in the valley of death, the Lord is my shepherd – and say a few words. No

sooner had I finished and turned around to return to my seat, there was my mother standing by

the post and rail fence along the adjoining meadow. She beckoned me to join her, assuring me

that all was wonderful where she was. She had found the promised still waters and green

pastures. Obviously, I declined, telling her all in good time.

With that, whatever doubts I had had about the afterlife were dispelled. My son, Nico,

who is thirty-one, closely observes me, and I suppose still views me as something of a role

model. He commented that I became more spiritual following my mother’s death and that of my

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father sometime later. Having established that there was or is something beyond the realm in

which we presently dwell, other questions came to the fore and still do, such as the nature of the

divine, Jesus’s promise to humanity, the holy spirit, and our place within the universe.

Was this epiphany, this encounter with my mother anything like what happened to the

disciples following the Resurrection? I recognized my mother -- of that there was no doubt.

They, however, were slow to realize that Jesus had in fact returned and was with them. When he

ascended, by that time the scales had been fully removed from their eyes. He ate with them, he

talked with them, he walked with them and Thomas even probed his wounds. Later, Saul of all

people before he became Paul at Acts 9, encountered him on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul,

why do you persecute me?” This was not the work of grief over the recent passing of a loved

one. In Paul’s case, it might have been the work of a guilty conscience for his hounding of

Jesus’ followers and his role in the death of the first martyr, Stephen.

Jesus could have been merely a gifted rabbi without having the godhead attributed to

him. After all, he had profound insights and the gift of healing – a charismatic teacher and

doctor. That, however, was not to be his fate or enduring legacy. Once he accepted his mission

of ministry at the River Jordan and announced it according to Luke at 4:21 to the startled

congregation in the synagogue after reading from Isaiah 61 – “Today this scripture has been

fulfilled in your hearing” – his destiny was clear: sacrificial death, resurrection and ascension.

Christianity would have arisen with or without his body. It was Jesus’s ascension itself,

recounted in Mark, Luke and Acts l:9, not the disappearance of his remains from the empty tomb

or for that matter his resurrection, that established the extraordinary import of his (and God’s)

sacrifice and death. For me, the Ascension is why we are Christians. No less an authority than

St. Augustine wrote of it in the fifth century:

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 This is that festival which
confirms the grace of all
the festivals together…
For unless the Savior
had ascended into heaven,
his Nativity would have
come to nothing…and
his Passion would have
borne no fruit for us,
and his most holy
Resurrection would have been useless.

Augustine is saying, this was no ordinary birth of a baby; this was no ordinary execution. Jesus’

ministry was not just that of a man striving to make a better world. This was God himself who

joined us and returned from whence he came – heaven. As John wrote in today’s epistle lesson,

“God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life.”

Rather, the Gospel writers portray and Paul taught and preached that Jesus had been

raised from death by God, not just corporeally, but to sit in heaven at his right hand. That is the

Jesus portrayed in the Book of Revelation, offering the water of eternal life as a gift. The man

who had been the man who had been crucified lived on for a time – forty days – but then that

man ascended to the Father. In so doing, he paved the way for all who believed to share the

heavenly kingdom.

This is the real import of my mother’s testimony. An afterlife is available to all who as

the Gospels promise are faithful – full of faith. Ascension to heaven is to us the promised

victory over death and defeat of Adam’s curse, original sin.

For me, you – all of us – Jesus had cheated his persecutors in every sense, loved and

healed those in need, while not disavowing his ultimate destiny – that of joining the Father at his

right hand. “Father, I desire that, those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I

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am.” So Jesus entreated God in John’s Gospel at 17:24. In the process, he founded an enduring

religion and granted us, yes – you and my mother and me – access to heaven.

We need not face an ordeal such as Jesus’ – our faith will lead us there.

Ask yourselves: What thoughts on these questions have crossed your minds? Has any

grief, memory or doubt caused you to consider the truth of the crucifixion, the resurrection and

the ascension? For my purposes, all I need are my mother’s assurance (as we are all reminded

every Mother’s Day, mothers do not lie to their children), the disciples’ testimony, the faith

urged by St. Paul, and Jesus’s promise “do this and you will live”. For this one mortal, that is

enough. On this, the observance of Ascension Day and Mother’s Day, an insight from de Saint-

Exupery’s The Little Prince read to me as a child and by me to my children, rings true:

A fox the little prince meets has some of the wisest lines.
“One sees clearly only with the heart,” he says. “What is
essential is invisible to the eye.”

Wiser words have been seldom spoken. When one’s heart speaks, one should listen. In

the name of God, the Creator, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.