This past year when all the churches in our nation and around the world closed their doors to quarantine, I was struck by the concept of spiritual silence. I missed going to church, participating in worship, seeing my friends and neighbors gathered together. I missed the sun shining through stained glass windows, the sound of voices harmonizing together, sharing smiles during the offering of peace, and joining together in communion with the Lord. But more than that I felt a spiritual heaviness and wondered what I would see if I could peel back the curtain and peer into the heavenly realm. How was this lack of corporate worship manifesting in ways we cannot see, where angels and heavenly armies go to battle for us? For the first time in the 2000 year history of the church, the entire world stopped gathering together at the Lord’s table, stopped praying together, stopped singing in worship together. I don’t believe God needs our praise, but I do believe we are created to worship him and that our souls need to worship him.
I knew that God was bigger than this silence and that he would carry us through the trials of this year. Death has already been defeated, Jesus has already won, and I can rest in the truth that my sins are paid for and I am welcomed as a child of the king. And yet I carried a deep heaviness in my spirit. There is power in our faith community, in lifting our voices together, praying together, communing together in the Eucharist.
I continued to ponder this worldwide spiritual silence as we made our way through the 2020 Easter season. I began to think about the first Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost in a new way. Just imagine the fullness of heaven on that first Ascension Sunday when Jesus return to heaven, his mission complete. I imagine it was certainly not silent as all the faithful rejoiced at the homecoming of their Savior. Heaven was now eternally, triumphantly complete. Overflowing abundance of joy, of grace, of souls made perfect through the blood of the lamb, the sacrifice of our great God. This year as we come together on Ascension Sunday I will be reminded of the fullness, the abundance, and the beautiful noise in heaven and on Earth. And I look forward to loud, crowded, noisy masses in the future when we can sing again, when children shuffle in their seats, and babies coo or cry. Let all creation cry out in praise!
“Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, oh death, is your victory? Where, oh death, is your sting?” (1 Cor 15:54-55).
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