The Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, transferred this year from Thursday to the Seventh Sunday of Easter, is the last of three figures in a triptych.  The first two figures are the crucifixion and the resurrection.  This last figure completes the Easter liturgical cycle and tells us where Christians should be in the life they share with the Risen Lord.

            According to our Christian faith, we now share with the Jews, not only the privilege of being a people of the Book, the Hebrew Bible, but also the opportunity to be a sacramental people before all nations.   We are also the people of a New Testament that identifies God with us through the gift of Jesus Christ, God's Word in our humanity.

            The Ascension of the Lord teaches us that we are not just those who receive bits and pieces of God's gifts, but rather the significant community that bears the responsibility of living like Christ, in love with the world.  We are a special people with an opportunity to serve our world with the same love that provoked creation, freed Israel in Egypt, returned the Judeans from exile in Babylon, and brought Jesus through death as we die to resurrection as God lives. 

            It is sad that so few Christians have the opportunity to see through their life into the dignity that God gives us in what we say and do before the world.  The Acts of the Apostles today points out how we become a sacramental people.  We are the group that shares Christ's life, all of his life.         We are those who are supposed to offer our lives in the dangers of a world that believes in power and wealth.  We are to be its contradiction and its salvation.  We are meant to live out our lives with the same sacrificial love that so moved Christ in his life among us.  As he represents the eternal outpouring of God's life in creativity and freedom, so must we.  We are invited in our baptism to live and die in that sense of giving time to those who live with us.  As Jesus comes through sacrifice and death to resurrection, so must we.  

The letter to the Hebrews tells us that Christ lives and dies in order to establish our unity with God through the humanity we share with him.  Through his resurrection we occupy the same sanctuary with him and share the authority of Christian life.  Christ's authority loves and serves others.  For us there is no other authority.  We are not on earth to order anyone to do anything.  We are here to serve, to make sure that all have life, that everyone eats, that there is a home for each one, that there are jobs to provide creativity and freedom.  This is what Christ was for us in his life; this is what we must be for the world. 

Christ continues to accompany us in our life and the gospel, both of these realities necessarily bread broken for everyone's nourishment.  Christ's Spirit animates us in the details of our life, defending us when we need defense and encouraging us when we slacken in our efforts in favor of justice, love and compassion in our world. 

There are some who exemplify this way of living Christ's life.  On May 19^th, when ten young men were being ordained to the Catholic Church's ministerial priesthood in Chicago, Jack Egan, one of the nation's great examples of the Gospel, died just a few yards from the Cathedral of ceremony.  The Spirit that the newly ordained received in their ordination is the same Spirit that moved Jack in his life.  He certainly understood his own ministry, to invite and allow others' mission and ministry to grow and flower.  The names of the people he served are many and Jack knew each of them intimately.  May those ordained as he died allow the Spirit to work in them as he did.

 In today's Gospel, Jesus tells the disciples that all who witness to his life, death and resurrection in their lives will receive the power of God.  That power is always creative, free and founded in our love of others and our obedience to God's alliance with us.  It is the life of the Spirit.  We must ask ourselves whether we believe actively in the human community and whether we are fearless in the face of the arbitrary empires of our world that attempt to co-opt human life, opportunity and will.

Do we believe that Christ is with us always, that no one but Christ has the power to give a hopeful future to the exiled and abandoned, and that we are the people who share the great strength, creativity and freedom of his love?