Every Place a Holy Place

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord

Reading: Acts 1:1-11

The disciples are confused again. And honestly, it’s hard to blame them. Jesus has just floated away into a cloud. Not metaphorically… Literally. (This has got to be one of the weirdest and most wonderful feast days in the liturgical calendar, right up there with the day we celebrate St. Peter’s chair.)

Then, while they’re staring up at him, presumably with their eyes wide and mouths hanging open, two angels in white robes turn up (as they always seem to do when things get confusing) and say: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?”

I don’t know about you, but that question has always struck me as slightly ridiculous. If I’d just seen my recently-resurrected friend take off into the stratosphere, I’d be staring, too!

This comical moment, however, isn’t really about the disciples and their charming, relatable confusion. It’s about redirecting our gaze toward the mystery of Jesus.

One way to think about the Ascension of the Lord is as the end of Jesus’s earthly ministry. The long rescue mission that began on Christmas Day has come to its conclusion. The Savior has done His job. Now He’s heading home.

But there’s another, better way to see this feast. Rather than the end of something, the Ascension marks the beginning of a new era in salvation history. It’s not reminding us of Jesus’s absence; it’s the revelation of a new kind of presence.

After His Ascension, Jesus is no longer bound by the limits of a single, physical body in a single place and time. He now fills every place, every moment, every corner of creation.

To better understand what this all means, we need to rewind a bit. In the Old Testament, God was found in particular places: the burning bush, the cloud on Sinai, the tabernacle in the wilderness, the Temple in Jerusalem. These places were holy, set apart, and access was tightly controlled:

"Who may go up the mountain of the Lord? 
    Who can stand in his holy place?
The clean of hand and pure of heart, 
    who has not given his soul to useless things..." (Ps 24:3-4)

Not just anybody could draw near to God. Holiness was dangerous. Even the priests and the Levites had to he careful. When David recovered the Ark of the Covenant and brought it back to Jerusalem, one of the oxen pulling the cart stumbled. A priest named Uzzah put out his hand to steady the Ark, and he was struck down on the spot, becoming a perpetual warning to clergy who play fast and loose with the rubrics at Mass (2 Samuel 6:3-8). It’s no wonder that when the High Priest entered the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur, he did so with a rope tied around his waist, just in case they had to drag his body out again.

Then Jesus showed up. And He broke all the rules.

He touched lepers (Mk 1:40-42).

He healed on the Sabbath (Lk 13:10-17).

He praised the faith of pagans (Mt 15:21-28).

He invited tax collectors and prostitutes out to dinner (Mt 9:10–13; cf. Lk 15:1–2).

In short, He brought the holiness of God out of the sanctuary and into the streets. And even though He wasn’t a priest, at the end of His earthly life, He offered the greatest sacrifice of atonement ever made … not in the Temple, but on the Cross.

Finally, when He breathed His last, the veil of the Temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And just like that, the holiness of God was no longer closed off. The boundary was gone. God became approachable.

That’s where today’s feast comes in. If we take this broad view of salvation history, then the Ascension is the completion of Jesus’s whole mission. He first brought the holiness of God out into the world, to every suffering and broken human heart. Now, He brings humanity with Him into the holiest place of all.

He doesn’t leave His body behind like an old coat. He brings it with Him into Heaven. All of it. The wounds. The beauty. The scars. The joy.

That means (and this is kind of a big deal)…

Your body? Your story? Your loves? Your wounds? They all belong in glory. There is space for you in God.

And as if all that weren’t enough, there’s this: Heaven is not some faraway place Jesus disappeared into while we’re stuck down here on earth, waiting for Him to come back and pick us up. As Paul puts it in the second reading, Christ now “fills all things in every way” (Eph 1:23). Or in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, the whole earth has become an altar: “Through your own incarnation, my God, all matter is henceforth incarnate!”¹

The veil has been torn. The boundaries are gone. Heaven and earth have started to overlap. They are not yet perfectly one, of course, but the great transformation is underway, an unstoppable reconciliation that will culminate, as Revelation says, in the “new heavens and the new earth” (Rev 21:1).

And all of this brings us to… Pride Month.

Yes, really. Because today isn’t just Ascension Sunday. It’s also June 1st. And I think that’s more than a calendar coincidence.

Again, dear friends, here is the message of Christ’s Ascension: There is no part of your life—your identity, your body, your desires, your joy—that is too messy, too human, too unclean or impure or queer to be taken up into the love of God.

It’s heartbreaking that some Christians still cling to a purity-based, Old Testament model of holiness. They seem to long for a “smaller, purer Church,” as Cardinal Ratzinger once speculated the Church in this century would become.² A Church of insiders, who check all the right boxes, and outsiders, who are told to sit quietly in the vestibule until they get their act together.

That’s not how Jesus operated. He didn’t make sure people were ritually pure before healing them. He didn’t check their credentials before calling them. He didn’t wait for them to be “ready.” He simply loved them, and drew them into communion.

If we take the Ascension seriously, then the Church cannot be a kind of bunker for the saved, clinging nervously to grace while the rest of the world burns. The Church is not a perfect society for the perfect. No, the Church is the place where the transformation of the world is already underway, the crack in the firmament where heaven and earth overlap, and the love of God is breaking in.

And where is Jesus?

I’ll tell you where He isn’t. He isn’t waiting politely in the sacristy for all the sinners to quiet down and shape up so that Mass can begin. He’s already out in the world, just like He was in Galilee and Judea, showing up in all the places He’s not supposed to be: in queer joy and chosen families, in every act of awkward honesty and tender courage it takes just to be yourself in a world that often doesn’t know what to do with you.

I’ve had the privilege of spending a lot of time with Eastern Christians, and there’s a moment at the end of each Divine Liturgy that always stays with me. The priest steps out from behind the iconostasis and offers a piece of blessed bread to anyone who wants it. (Anyone—not just the baptized, chrismated, or canonically regularized.) As he places the little morsel in your hands, he says: “Christ is in our midst.” And we respond: “He is and ever shall be.”

That’s the mystery in miniature. Christ is not gone. He’s not waiting for us to get it together. He is here, in our midst, giving Himself to us.

So today, as Pride Month begins, hear this clearly:

You don’t need to be anyone other than who you are to be loved by God.

You don’t need to become holy before you’re welcome in the Kingdom.

You don’t need to earn your place.

You just need to trust that you belong.

The Ascension means that every place is now a holy place.

And everybody—every wounded, searching, beautiful body—is already caught up in the mystery of God.

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Reflection Questions

• Where have I seen Christ show up in the “wrong” places? How did I respond?

• Where have I been trying to earn my place?

• What might it look like to let go of that striving and trust that I already belong?

1. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “The Mass on the World,” in Hymn of the Universe, trans. Simon Barrows (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 19–33.

2. Joseph Ratzinger, “What Will the Church Look Like in 2000,” in Faith and the Future (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 103-116.