So must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. -Jn 3:14-15

Exaltation, exaltation, exaltation. Exaltation, exaltation, exaltation.  Don’t worry, I am ok, I am just repeating the name of today’s feast so that we can recover its rightful place in history and our lives.  You see, as I was preparing for this sermon I looked up ‘exaltation’ in Google’s Oxford Dictionary and stumbled on the ‘N-gram’ for this word. Have you ever heard of an N-gram?  It is a graph showing the frequency of a word’s use over time. The N-gram for ‘exalt’ shows that for 400 years, this word was used 10x more than it is used in our modern period.  Specifically, its usage plummets just in the last 100 years, exactly when the Western world began to part ways with our Christian heritage.  So today my goal is to recover the Exaltation. Yes, I want to literally put the word back on the map by repeating ‘exaltation, exaltation, exaltation’ and boosting its N-gram. But more than literally recovering the word exaltation, I want to recover its significance and a worldview. I want us to reclaim a life of the upward view, an exalted life which lifts us up as we lift up gratitude and praise to our Lord.