When we hear that a man is justified, counted righteous, almost all of us imagine a courtroom. A charge, a judge, a verdict, a record wiped clean. It is a tidy picture. But it is not the one Paul is painting. The word he uses, the word our translation gives as “reckoned”, he repeats eleven times in this one chapter, because the whole argument turns on it. And it is not the courtroom word we take it for.

Righteousness, in Scripture, is less a quality you possess than a bond you stand in. To be righteous is to be in the right with someone. So when God reckons a man righteous, he is not scoring him. He is granting him a standing he did not have on his own. And you can hear what that standing is in the Psalms. Who shall ascend the hill of the LORD, the song asks, and who shall stand in his holy place. The righteous one is the answer. He is the one who may stand in the sanctuary and not be turned away at the door. To be counted righteous is to be granted admission. It is the right to come near.

Paul says the promise is made sure to all of Abraham's seed, and then he calls Abraham the father of all of us. The father of many nations. And that is an impossible thing to call him, because by this point his body is, in Paul's own phrase, as good as dead. A hundred years old, his wife's womb long closed. A dead man does not father one child, let alone a multitude of nations. So how is he our father? Paul answers in the same breath, and the answer drives everything else in the passage. Abraham is a father by the God he believed, the God who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. Those nations did not yet exist when the promise was made. God had to call them into being, as he once called light out of the dark water. The power to become a father was never Abraham's own. It was given to him, by the God who makes the dead alive.

There is an older name for the one who is given that standing. He is called a priest. The priest's whole office is to come near, to enter the holy place and stand before God for the people. And the first priest was not Aaron. It was Adam. The garden he is placed in is a sanctuary, and he is set there to keep it as God's holy place and to stand in the Presence unashamed. And then he is stripped of it. He reached for a glory God meant to give him, and lost the glory he already had. He is driven out, and God sets cherubim and a sword at the gate to bar the way home. The priest is exiled from his own sanctuary. This is what Paul means three verses before our passage for today. All have sinned, and fall short of the glory of God. Not fall short of a rule. Fall short of a glory. We lack the radiance the first man wore in the Presence and lost at the gate.

So when God reckons you righteous, the robe goes back on. This is how the Syriac fathers told the story of our salvation, Ephrem above all, and Jacob of Serugh after him. Adam was clothed at first in a robe of glory, a garment of light, and at the fall he was stripped of it, and the Son of God came down to give the robe back, to clothe the naked exile and bring him home. You were baptized into Christ, Paul tells the Galatians. You put him on. Christ himself is the robe.

But perhaps you suspect the robe is only a costume, that being counted righteous is a fiction, a pretend verdict over a real crime. So consider what kind of word God's word is. It is the word that said let there be light, and there was light, a word that has never once described the world but only ever made it. When that God says righteous over you, he is not pinning a label on you from across the room. He is doing to you what his word did to the dark and the deep. He makes what he says. Augustine put it plainly. The righteousness of God, he wrote, is not the righteousness by which God is himself righteous, but the righteousness with which he clothes a man when he sets him right. Clothes him. The verdict is a vesting.

But John Henry Newman saw what lifts all of this above a change of clothes. If God counts us righteous, and his counting is a making and not a pretending, then what is this righteousness he puts on us? Newman's answer was that it is not a quality at all. It is a Person. Christ, he said, is our righteousness by dwelling in us by the Spirit. He justifies us by entering into us. The robe is not something God hands you at the door and leaves you to wear alone. The robe is the Lord himself, put on from the inside. The glory that makes you fit for the Presence is the Presence, come to live in you. So the man God justifies is not only let back into the temple. He becomes the temple. Do you not know, Paul asks, that you are God's temple, and that God's Spirit dwells in you? The Presence Adam was exiled from, that the high priest could approach only once a year and only in dread, now makes its home inside the very person it has just set right. This is what the Greek fathers dared to call our being made divine, and it is nothing like a man hauling himself up into God. It is God giving his own glory back to the creature, and coming to live within the one he has clothed. The Word became man, he wrote, so that we might be made God.

And now you can see why none of it could happen unless the God who reckons you righteous is the God who raises the dead. You cannot stand in that Presence as you are. The glory that makes a man fit for the Holy of Holies is the same glory that burns up whatever is unfit, and you cannot vest a corpse. The people God is setting right are not only guilty. They are dead. To be brought near is to be made alive enough to bear the Presence and not be destroyed by it. The reckoning that sets you right has to be a resurrection, or it is nothing. Which is why Paul will not stop with Abraham. This was written for us too, he says, for us who believe in the God who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. The same word that called light out of the dark, and called a son out of a dead womb, and calls you righteous, is the word that rolled the stone away.

And one last thought draws the whole of it together, and carries us back to that impossible fatherhood. Think of how Isaac came to be. His father was a hundred years old and his mother long past bearing, two bodies as good as dead, and the child of the promise was a life God called up out of that dead-ness. He was, from his first breath, a gift given where there should have been nothing. And every one of us who believes comes into this family by that same gift, a life God gives where there was none. Not by bloodline. But by that one life, given out of death, received through one faith, and worn as one robe. That is what makes this gathering a household. Not that we resemble one another. But because the one life of God has come into us all.

So this is the gospel hidden inside a word we thought we understood. To be reckoned righteous is not a verdict filed in heaven. It is to be raised from the dead. It is to be clothed in the glory the first man lost. It is to be brought back through the sword and the veil into the Presence of God, and to have that Presence make its home in you. The word that raises you is the word that makes us kin. Not by blood. Not by agreement. But by one life, spoken over the grave, and given to all of us.

The water was still on him. This is how Matthew's Gospel begins. Jesus had just been baptized in the Jordan, the Spirit had come down on him and a voice had spoken from heaven, and that same Spirit drove him out into the wilderness. There, at the end of a long testing, the devil took him to the top of a high mountain. He showed him every kingdom of the world, all its power and all its glory, laid out beneath him like a feast. Take it, he said. All of it, today, every crown. Only fall down and worship me.

And he would not. He turned the whole world down. He would rather have nothing at all than take it that way, than bow to the wrong god to get his hands on it. He came back down the mountain with empty hands, and he meant to keep them empty.

That refusal had a road in it, and the road ran downhill the whole way. A man who keeps his hands open in a world that grabs what it wants ends in only one place. They came for him in the dark and he did not lift a hand. They stripped him and he let them. They drove nails through his open hands and he kept them open, and he died with nothing in them at all, the way he had come down from the mountain. The empty hands he chose in the wilderness were the empty hands they nailed to the wood. He would rather die with empty hands than fill them by force. That is how far the “no” on the mountain went.

And then, at the very end of the same Gospel, in the reading we heard today, there is a second mountain. It comes after everything, after the grave, and the eleven are waiting on it because he told them to come. When he appears, some of them fall down and worship, and some of them, even now, even here, are not sure what they are looking at. He does not wait for them to be sure. He comes to them and tells them what has become of him. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. The whole world, the very thing the devil spread out on the first mountain and offered him for a price, is his after all, and it has come to him as a gift. He did not seize it. His Father has laid it in his open hands, all of it, free, because he would not have taken it any other way.

And standing there in the middle of the world he refused to steal, he tells them what it is for, and it begins with a name. Go, he says, and make disciples of every nation, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

That name is the answer to both mountains. The question that has hung over this whole story, what kind of God would rather die than grasp, what kind of God turns down the world sooner than seize it, is answered the only way it finally can be, by God telling us his name. And the name is three. He would not seize the world because closing his hand is something he has never done. Before there was a world to close it on, before there was anything at all, he was already giving himself away. 

He did not begin to love on the day he made us. There was no day he began. God was already love, and love must have someone to love, and so, with no beginning, there is the One who loves, the Father, and the One he loves with his whole heart, the Son, the Father's own self given away and never for a moment lost. The Son was not made, the way the world was made. He is eternally given, the way a father gives himself to his child, only with no beginning and no end.

And a love between two, if it is truly love, does not curl up and keep to itself. It opens. It makes room for a third. The love the Father pours into the Son and the Son pours back is so alive, so wholly God, that it is itself someone, a third who loves and is loved, as fully and forever God as the other two, and him we call the Holy Spirit. Three, and one God, because it is all one love, one life flowing among them without end. They are not one God taking turns behind three masks, for they are all of them at once, always, turned toward one another in love. Each one is the whole of God. The Father is the whole of God, pouring himself out. The Son is the whole of God, given and giving himself back. The Spirit is the whole of God, the love that runs between. And not one of them has ever, for a single instant, closed a hand.

He has shown himself like this before. There is an old word for it, theophany, which means a showing of God, the moment he steps out where he can be seen. The great one came at the river, the morning this story started, with the water still running off him. 

He stood in the Jordan, and the Spirit came down on him like a dove, and the Father's voice came out of heaven, this is my beloved Son. That was the first time the world saw all Three at once, the Son in the water, the Spirit upon him, the Father naming him from above. The Church in the East still calls that day the Theophany, the showing, because it was the morning God let himself be seen as what he is. And what was shown at the river is what is given on the mountain, the same Three, named again, by the Son this time, and poured out now on us.

It goes back further than the river. All Three were there at the beginning, in the words that were read here this morning. The Father speaks. The Word he speaks is the Son, and everything that is made is made through him. And the wind moving over the dark water is the Spirit, brooding over the new world the way a bird broods over its nest. The Three who made the world, who showed themselves at the river, are the Three named on the mountain.

On that same first page, when it came to making us, God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, speaking of himself as more than one. And he made us male and female, in the image of God. We say the Trinity is hard, and we suppose the trouble is the three being one. How can three be one? But the trouble may run the other way. The trouble may be the one being three. For we begin from ourselves, certain we know what we are. We are individuals, each of us separate and entire. 

We imagine we start as finished, single selves, who may then choose, or not, to bind ourselves to someone else. That is not what Scripture says we are. It says we came out of one. There was one man, and out of his own side God made the woman, and out of the two of them a child, and out of that child, in the long run, every face that has ever lived. Abraham was one man, and out of him came Isaac, and Jacob, and a whole people who carry the one man's name to this day. We are one that is always becoming many, and many who are never, in the end, truly apart. That is the shape we are cut to, and it is not the lonely self that later decides to love.

And if that is the image, what must the original be? Perhaps we have stood in front of God all along asking the wrong question, asking how three separate persons could be folded down into one, when the truth underneath us and underneath him runs the other way, that the One was never alone, was always pouring himself out, was always more than one. What we do slowly, down the years, parents giving way to children and children to children, he is forever and all at once. We find him hard to understand not because he is dark to us, but because we are still dark to ourselves. We think we are most ourselves when we are most alone and most our own. We are wrong. To be is to be given, and to give yourself away, and the God in whose image we are made was three before there was a world, because that is what love is when it has no beginning. We were never made to stand alone. We were made to be taken up into the one.

And that is what the water does. The name the psalm says fills the whole earth, the name that has been to the top of two mountains and down into a grave, comes down at last small enough to be said over the head of one baby who has done nothing and can do nothing, who cannot lift her own head. The priest pours the water and says the name, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, and she is taken into it before she knows the first thing about it. She did not earn it. She could not have seized it. It was given, the only way it is ever given, free, into open and empty hands, the very way the Son received the world from his Father. The river and the font are the same water. The Three who stood over him stand over her. She is not merely marked with the name now, she is taken up into the life it names, into the giving that has never stopped, given her place in the one, for the whole of a life that begins right here, learning to take God in and to give him away.

And this open-handed God, the God who would rather die than grasp, is the one we have fought over more bitterly than anything else on earth. We have damned each other over him, torn his Body in two over him, gone to our graves sure we had him right and our neighbor wrong. Of everything there is to seize and clutch, we have seized this, the one truth that is only ever a gift. Paul saw it begin in his own churches. When he had finished pleading with the Corinthians not to tear themselves apart, in the very letter we heard read this morning, he left them the only cure there is, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, the Three named over them in a single breath. 

Those same words are said over you at this rail. We are never nearer to losing this God than when we are surest we have caught him. 

He cannot be caught. He can only be received, the way the baby receives the name, the way your own open hands will take the bread in a few minutes, empty, asking for nothing.

And then he says the last thing, and the book stops. I am with you always, to the end of the age. He says it to the ones who worshiped him and were not sure of him, which is to say he says it to us. He has never once waited for our doubt to clear. He did not wait on the mountain, and he does not wait now. He came into this Gospel with a name an angel gave him before he was born, Emmanuel, which means God with us, and he leaves it making the same promise in his own voice. Whatever we cannot work out about him this morning, this much we keep. He is here. He is not leaving. He told us so himself, in the last words of the book.

I am with you always, to the end of the age.

"I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."

The Lord does not mean that the Spirit will bring later what he has withheld now. He means that what he has already given is more than the disciples can yet receive. A chapter earlier he has said it plainly: "I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father." Nothing is held in reserve. There will be no second gospel, no later word that revises the first, no fresh disclosure from the Spirit that improves upon the Son. The Spirit does not come to add to Christ. He comes to give Christ.

"He will take what is mine and declare it to you." The verb means to re-announce, to proclaim again. Christ is the one Word in whom the Father has said himself entirely, and the Paraclete makes him audible in each generation's own hour. The Nicene Creed confesses no Christ other than the one the apostles knew. It is the Son said again, by a Church learning how to say him without losing him. Every age receives, by the Spirit, the same Christ for its own time.

"He will guide you into all the truth." The word for guide keeps the word for way. The Spirit does not teach a syllabus. He walks the Church along Christ, who is the way, until what was once an article of belief has become the manner of a life. And the truth Christ has given asks more than understanding. It asks to be borne, and we are not yet strong enough to bear it.

God does not change. His communication is his own self. What he gives, he has always given, which is everything. We are the ones who change. We are slowly enlarged by the Spirit to bear what was already ours in Christ.

So the Church waits. Not for more, since there is no more to come. We wait for the day the same Creed begins to mean what we have always said. We wait to be opened wide enough to receive what has never been withheld.

In the closing lines of our first reading, we hear about the gathering of the early disciples. After the resurrection and ascension, they returned to Jerusalem. Specifically, they returned to the upper room, where Jesus had spoken to them at the Last Supper and where he had given the Communion of his Body and Blood. He had also appeared there after his resurrection, showing himself alive. 

That upper room was a holy place. They made it holier still by gathering for 10 days of prayer and dedication: 

“Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James…” along with the women who followed Jesus, along with Mary his mother, along with his relatives. That seems like a lot of people, but it really wasn’t. 

It was a small group. But they were the Church, then: expectant, hopeful, waiting in prayer, looking for the kingdom of God, longing for the moment of the Spirit’s descent. There was a lot they didn’t know. The apostles asked Jesus, “Is now the time that you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” 

He replied in his typical, frustrating way. It’s not for you to know. He directed their attention elsewhere. 

You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. 

When Jesus said this, he set the church’s trajectory for decades, centuries, millennia. The church then gathered in prayer, a small and uncertain group, enjoying the holiness of the upper room. But they did not stay there. The Church has moved ever outward. By the end of the first Christian generation, it had spread across the Mediterranean world, made inroads in Persia, reached India, and begun its journey into Africa and Western Europe. 

The Church has grown and shifted; it has changed appearance; it has struggled, suffered, retreated; it has triumphed. 2000 years is a long time. 

In each generation, the Church’s mission must be renewed. Things that were cast down must be raised up; things that have grown old must be made new; all things must be ushered toward the perfection and completion for which they were made.

That is as true at Emmanuel as anywhere else. Think of our history. One hundred forty-three years ago, there was a newly confident Episcopal congregation on this site. Its people had gathered for years in little rooms here and there in Champaign: in a school, in a shopfront. They eventually built a handsome wooden church on this site, filled it with an altar, pews, and beautiful glass. They named it Emmanuel. But that wasn’t the end. A generation later, they would raise the bricks and mortar that surround us today, partly because the congregation had grown. 

Then, a generation later, this church built the Mowry Building. Then, a generation later – some of you still remember these things – there were the rededications at the Jubilee and the Campaign for a New Generation. Renewal has taken place many times in this church’s history – each time, guided by God, inspired by prayer, following the example of those Christians in the upper room who prayed for the descent of God’s Spirit and then went out to a hurting world. 

Here we are, again, today. To use the words of Jesus, “The hour has come.” Something is happening in the world today. People are coming to faith; the tide of secularization has stilled. The hour has come! Our Lord said this when he was about to be glorified and finish the work he had come to do. He said it when he was handing his mission on to the disciples. He said it when he reminded them that he was their true life and salvation.

Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. 

And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence.

The hour has come – not for Emmanuel to rise again for its own sake, but for Emmanuel to serve the purposes of God afresh. 

Let us pray that Jesus Christ may be glorified in our midst. He has authority over “all people.” The hour has come for us to renew our life, to testify to his name, to bring the beauty of his Gospel to Champaign and beyond. 

As you know, we are launching today our Strategic Plan and Capital Campaign: Open Doors. It is meant to be a beginning, a start, a gathering of strength, and a first push toward a renewed mission. 

I won’t go over lots of details now because we’ll be talking about it at length after Mass, and Open Doors materials are waiting for you in the Great Hall; please pick up a packet.

But let me say a few simple things now about our mission, our vision, and our goals. 

They are ambitious. We want this church to grow significantly in the next 3 years and more after that. We want to share our worship and way of life in this area and beyond, not because we are full of ourselves, but because we proclaim Jesus Christ and we believe in the value of our Episcopal traditions. We want to build a community here that increases in strength, love, knowledge, and unity -- that has the confidence to offer leadership and service.  

I hope those ideas excite you. I hope we’re all a little daunted. It is a commitment to change; it means striving together for God’s kingdom; it means relying on each other and, especially, on God with whom all things are possible. 

After Christ’s resurrection, his disciples returned to the upper room. There, they remembered him; there, they prayed; there, they waited expectantly. By God’s grace, they received “power” to testify to the goodness of his name. They changed the world. 

We are their legacy; we share the same faith, the same life, the same Lord; we are one Body with those first disciples.

May the same Spirit that animated them and drove them out into the four corners of the earth come down upon us; that the hour may come and Christ may be glorified.

Last year, the Feast of the Ascension was one of the first weekday Masses I enjoyed here at Emmanuel. I believe Fr Fred celebrated; I remember that I preached. I asked the congregation and choir to remember something from our Gospel reading: the final image the disciples had of Jesus. Whatever we remember about the Ascension of Christ, we should always have in mind that image. Christ going into heaven with his hands lifted in blessing. That blessing and prayer remain for us. 

I’d like you to remember that still. But this year, indulge me in having some other thoughts about the Ascension, which relate to Christ’s presence and departure, his remaining with us and our rising with him.

Throughout the liturgy tonight, these themes recur in different ways. Our collect acknowledges that Christ has ascended “far above the heavens.” In it, we also prayed for “faith to perceive” that Christ “abides with his Church on earth.” Similarly, the reading from Acts narrates Christ’s ascension and hiddenness – “a cloud took him out of their sight” – while emphasizing his continued activity on earth, his teaching, and his sending of the Holy Spirit. So it goes through many biblical texts about the Ascension and many historic sermons. 

Christ is enthroned far above all things; Christ is also the Head of his body, the Church. Christ is at God’s right hand; Christ is everywhere, filling all things. Christ has withdrawn from the disciples; Christ is sending upon them what the Father has promised. 

Is he here? Is he not? 

In thinking about these things this week, my mind drifted in a silly way to the Clash’s classic song “Should I stay or Should I go” on the 1981 album Combat Rock. I’m not sure the voice of Christ dwells in the lyrics of Mick Jones. But here goes nothing:

Darling, you’ve got to let me know
Should I stay, or should I go?
If you say that you are mine
I'll be here till the end of time…

If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay, it will be double
So come on and let me know
Should I stay or should I go?

Silly, I know. But the contrast is interesting. Christ did not ask us whether he should stay or go; his abiding with us is not dependent on our consent (“If you say that you are mine”). He went, and he remains. 

If I go there will be trouble, well that’s been true in the history of the Church, but why don’t we just say “Here ends the lesson from the Clash.”

More seriously, I thought it might be helpful to talk through some of the ways that Christ is present here on earth, as well as what it meant for him to ascend into heaven. 

I’ll start with some basics. Christ is risen from the dead. We know this; we’ve been saying it for weeks. What do we really mean? 

First of all, we are saying that the incarnation of the Son of God did not end at the Cross. He did not beat a hasty retreat to heaven, leaving his human body destroyed and in the grave. No. God’s Son went down to death, went down into the depths and proclaimed his victory in the grave; he then was raised in the fullness of human perfection, flesh, bones, soul, rising and made immortal; he took that same nature to the right hand of God. The cross did not end the union between God and humanity. Death did not break it; nor did the resurrection or ascension. There was no abandonment of the body, only its transformation and exaltation.

A second part of what Ascension means: Christ has been raised in power. One of the fundamental aspects of the incarnation is that the Son of God went about among us in great humility: he ate, he drank, he grew tired, he could be beaten, he could be killed. None of that is true now. Jesus of Nazareth has gone from humility to glory; he was invested visibly with power beyond all others. Our modern church is sometimes uncomfortable with this language, and it has become the preserve of scary people online: “Ortho-bros,” “trad caths,” and the like. But the conviction that Christ is filled with power now is part of the origin of the Church. If he’s not the king of the angels, we shouldn’t be worshipping him. If he’s not reigning in heaven, let’s stop asking him to hear our prayers and intercede for us in the heavenly places. Still, the humility and the power go together. 

Well, that’s a little on the exaltation involved in the Ascension. How is Christ with us today? How do we have faith to perceive that he remains?

I could cheat a little here. There’s a position associated with some branches of Lutheranism that simply says, the Letter to the Ephesians tells us that Christ ascended into heaven and fills all things, so that’s all we need to say about that. “He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere,” like Roy Kent in Ted Lasso, all over the soccer field.

But, I think it’s nice to be more specific. 

By the Spirit, Christ is present throughout his body, the Church. When we minister to one another, it is like a single organism or person. We are members one of another; we need each other. Christ is our Head and perhaps there are some hands and feet here, some eyes, some ears. This is true as we serve one another and worship together. It’s also true in every interaction. Christ is so present in us by the Holy Spirit, that it is like the soul animating the body. My soul is no less present in these hands than in the eyes, the heart, the mind. And present in every action. 

So it is with Christ. When we clean the Great Hall together, when we eat, when we laugh, when we help, when we lament, when we argue, when we reconcile, it is as the Body of Christ. 

Christ remains with us, too, in his mysteries. I mean of course those central sacramental actions we all acknowledge: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, ordination, marriage, confession, holy unction. Christ is surely present in the baptismal waters, as we are united with him. Christ is surely present as we receive Communion. It is why we bow, genuflect, or kneel in holy silence -- to receive the Body and Blood of Christ. But Christ is present also in the Holy Cross, in the images we make of him, in those Scriptural figures where we suddenly see him. When we read the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, when we recall the parting of the Red Sea, when we remember Elijah’s ascension into heaven, and we see Christ in these stories – it is not just our imagination. It is Jesus showing himself to us through all of sacred history.

Let me name just one more way Christ is with us. That is as our companion in our labors. In Matthew 28, when he assures the disciples he is with them to the end of the age, it is as he gives them the command to go into all the world, to baptize and teach all nations. In the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples receive the Spirit as they follow his command to wait in Jerusalem to become empowered as his witnesses. In Luke 24, his presence is assured as he opens the disciples’ minds to understand the Scriptures and to proclaim forgiveness to all people – and as they worship him and go to the temple. 

His presence follows those who do his will, who share in his mission, who enter the same path of service he trod. Do you want to feel the presence of Christ? Follow his commands: preach, testify, pray, read and understand holy Scripture. You will find him there. 

In another sermon I might say something about how Christ is present in creation or in the stranger or in our sufferings or…many other things. Another time. Another year.

For now, let us give thanks, that Christ has risen from the dead, that he has ascended far above every power and authority, that he remains with us until the end of time, that he gives us this community in which to know and love him, that he has given us a Gospel to proclaim, a mission to fulfill.