[00:00] In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." Our Lady, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, St. Joseph, our patron saints

[00:43] and guardian angels, pray to the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Today we celebrate the Ascension of our Lord, this great holy day of obligation, which thanks be to God they still celebrate it in this diocese on the actual day, the day that it should be, and that our Lord did ascend on a Thursday. He did so for several reasons, first and foremost because He was trying to show that He is, of course, fulfilling all

[01:16] that was in the Old Testament. And taking those Old Testament feasts, He of course fulfilled them. And first of all, Passover, He fulfilled it by His death at Calvary. And then 40 days later there was a feast in the Old Testament, Old Covenant, and so He wanted to show that He's fulfilling that by ascending into heaven. And then 10 days later on Pentecost, which was the feast having to do with the harvest, to show that it wasn't about bringing in offerings

[01:50] of wheat to God, but to bring in the harvest of souls that the Church was to go out and to bring in by its birth out into the world to bring Christ to souls, to plant the seed and then bring in the harvest of the faithful. But on the Ascension, of course, our Lord chose to ascend on this day, 40 days later, in fulfillment of all of His plan, to show

[02:24] first and foremost the completion of the Paschal Mysteries. It's not just His passion, death, and resurrection, but Ascension, because that is the whole point, is that He did all these things to reward us, you might say. The fulfillment of all that He did was that He would be able to not only take Himself, body and soul, and reside finally in heaven, which is the true home for everyone, but to also give us hope that He's gone ahead to prepare a place

[02:56] for us, that that is where we are called. He's also trying to show that the supernatural is more important than the temporal. He's trying to sanctify the temporal as well, and I think that's why it's so important in our world today that we understand that holy days that aren't on Sunday, in one sense, is to remind us that our faith is not just something that we leave in church on Sunday. You know, this is the mentality that some people think is that, oh, we do that on Sunday and the rest of the week we act like pagans or live

[03:31] like pagans, but our Lord wants to show that these holy days, like there were other ones that we used to celebrate in the middle of the week on different days other than Sunday, like Corpus Christi and during the Triduum, of course, those used to be days in which in a Christian society they were given as to be days that people did not work, so they could focus on the fact that even though you're not a religious or you're not, you

[04:04] know, explicitly doing something that is for the Church, we're all part, members of the Church, we are all part of the mystical body, and everything we do must be sanctified, even the time that we have, and so I think it's important, and I can see this very clearly in Japan recently when I was there, because one of the things that the Church has not been able to effectively evangelize is they have this mentality that Sunday is no different

[04:38] than any other day. Where do we find that? We find that so much today. We've not only not celebrated, made days, holy days an obligation outside of Sunday, but we've allowed, you might say, the world to creep in to Sunday, that we don't even offer and celebrate Sunday as a day of rest, but in Japan they don't have that, you know, for them it's just another work day in some places, and they just, because their whole mentality is that they give themselves to their corporation or company that they work, that's who they devote themselves to,

[05:14] it's almost become, it's almost like the highest authority in their life that they give themselves to, and we went to, we were on a Sunday at a shrine, and after the Mass, there was a religious out there mowing the grass on Sunday, and I thought, you would never, you would not want to give that impression or to not mow the grass on Sunday. We tell people not to do manual labor on Sunday, and it's not a, it wasn't a good witness, and I don't

[05:52] fault the person because they probably did whatever they were told, but it's obviously there's, we can see even in our world today that we don't have an appreciation for the fact that we are to be, as our Lord says, "go out to all the world and evangelize the world," and instead we're allowing the world to many ways to evangelize the Church and make the Church less assertive about the things of God in the world, and that this is a constant

[06:33] tension, you might say, and a struggle that I think that believers throughout the ages have is that I have to be in the world, but not of the world, and how to maintain that properly, and so today we celebrate the Ascension. We should treat it in a special way as a day of a solemnity. It's like a Sunday, and we know that one of the reasons and motivations for the bishops to move the Ascension to Sunday was because they wanted more people

[07:06] to be able to celebrate that mystery. Well, it doesn't hurt you. You can talk about the Ascension on Sunday after the Ascension. You don't have to move the feast. It just doesn't, it seems to be counterproductive of what we're trying to achieve, which is to show that our lives are to be committed to God, and that everything we do, every day of the week, it should be a day given to God in some manner, in some way, and that we pray especially for

[07:45] the Western society especially, and those who are influenced by Western society, that the Church will help form and reclaim some of the territory that it has given up or surrendered because it wants to somehow conform itself to the society instead of helping to transform society to be more and more imbued with Catholic principles. That's why our Lord said "go out to all the world

[08:21] to baptize them." He didn't say go out and pass out Bibles. They didn't have Bibles, but they had the faith, and the faith, what they were teaching was the catechism of the Church, the deposit of faith, and all that they have received, not just in writing but also the oral tradition, and so let us pray especially today for the Church's mission and for ourselves, especially that we be those zealous missionaries that we're all called by our baptism to go out to

[08:58] all the world and to proclaim the good news in our work world as well as in our families and in the Church, you know, when we come together on Sunday and holy days that we're to go out to all the world as the Mass says in the Latin, the Mass has ended. Go and go. The Mass has ended. The Mass is. We are to take what we have received and take it out into the world,

[09:31] and what have we received? We have received Christ Himself, body, blood, soul, and divinity. He has given us all that we need in order to go out and to bring Christ to the world. Let us pray in a special way and ask our Lady to help us to be those zealous missionaries, those zealous evangelists, those zealous witnesses to Christ in our world today. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.