I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 17, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 1:6-14, an account of the Ascension of Jesus.
I don’t think that this is a particularly unique or exceptional thing, but I don’t like endings all that much. When I come across something good, I don’t ever want it to end. As a kid I used to stay up late into the night covertly reading books long past bedtime—just one more chapter!—and then I’d get to the end of the book and feel that distinct pang of sadness when the page goes blank.
I didn’t ever want to finish the story. I just wanted it to go on and on and on.
But stories are good training for us, I suppose, because life is the same way. All of us, on one level or another, have had some endings that leave us a bit achy inside—the end of a relationship; or of a season in one place; or, of course, the big endings that death brings into our lives.
We learn to live, somehow, with these finalities, but we never really get over them. There tends to be an empty space within us where that thing or place or person used to be. And the question, as we go, is not so much how to prevent having any of that empty space. No, the necessary question is: how to keep growing around this emptiness? How do we bless the blank page at the end of the story? How do we carry on, carrying all these endings in the hollow spaces carved out within us?
You would think that, in Christian life, we would be really good at talking about this sort of thing. That maybe we would’ve come up with a way to make it all easier, less painful. No such luck. We struggle with endings in church just like all people do.
Think about it: our favorite church celebrations and feasts all tend to emphasize hellos, not goodbyes. We love to celebrate arrivals and appearances and manifestations—Advent and Christmas and Easter Day and, next week, Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit will rush in with all her fiery gifts.
Departures and farewells—not so much. Those are mostly for funerals, for Good Friday, and for one more feast…one that doesn’t get much traction in the Church these days. Do you know what that feast might be? It just happened this past Thursday: the Feast of the Ascension.
This is, in our time, probably among the most overlooked of the Church’s principal feast days. Now, the fact that it’s always on a Thursday, exactly 40 days after Easter, is probably part of that. But I also think it’s because of what the Ascension commemorates: the ending of Jesus’ physical presence in this world. It’s not Good Friday-tragic, but it’s still an ending. It is a feast dedicated to saying goodbye. And we don’t much care for goodbyes.
And maybe our lectionary editors knew we’d try to skip over it on Thursday, so they snuck the story back into our first reading this morning, too. All right, then—we’ll take it on. Let’s see what this particular goodbye has to teach us.
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According to Acts, Jesus appears this last time among his disciples, and he gives them some parting instructions and promises, and then just like that, as the author describes, “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”
These disciples will not see Jesus in the flesh ever again. Imagine the very last time you saw the person you loved most in the world. Perhaps that is something of what they felt this Ascension day and why they remembered it.
Jesus leaves a space behind that they are not yet sure what to do with. And as they stand there, staring up at the clouds, perhaps feeling like they have arrived at the end of the very best story they’ve ever known, with that blank-page pang and that hollowness in the pit of their stomachs. The question is, now what? How will they carry on with this Jesus-shaped empty space in their lives? Who are they now that he is gone from their sight?
But what is so beautiful, so worthy of celebration in this story is what the disciples do NOT do next. Unlike after the crucifixion, they do not scatter. They do not each retreat into their own private, bitter grief. And they do not try to fill up that empty space with distractions or anger or denial or dissipation. They don’t even splinter off into factions competing with each other for influence—which, knowing some of the other stories of these guys, you might have thought they would!
But no—they go back to Jerusalem, and they gather with the women, and they pray. They pray into this ending. They pray into the blank page of this new, unwritten part of the story. They stick together in community and they begin to form a new life around the shape of Jesus’ absence. They somehow accept the goodbye and the empty space, and they trust that God will provide whatever they need to carry on.
And next week, at Pentecost, we will discover exactly what God does provide to them. And it will be something!
The point for today, though, my friends, is that we—the ones who continue to gather in the wake of Jesus’ departure—are still in the process of forming that new life. We are still learning how to pray into our endings, how to build a community that can bless what we cannot hold onto and love the things that leave. We are still learning how to tend to the empty spaces within ourselves wrought by all our goodbyes, rather than trying to fill them up with easy answers and petty idols.
This is not happy-go-lucky spiritual platitude stuff. This is sacred soul work. This is the feast-days-we’d-rather-skip-over stuff. It is also, I would offer, the difference between a faith that merely placates and a faith that liberates.
Because as much as we are afraid of endings, it’s also true that sometimes we need them. Sometimes we need to let go. And it’s definitely the case that the wider world needs some endings, and it needs a people—a Church—that is unafraid of letting things go. A people who can speak of all that ought to pass from our midst so that God can do something new in us and in this world. The Church, in every age, is called to pray into those endings with clarity and courage.
For example, maybe we need to pray into an ending for the poisonous nostalgia for some imagined past that was never as pure or perfect as some people think it was.
And maybe we need to pray into an ending for tired old structures that prop up all those powers antithetical to God’s kingdom.
And maybe we need pray into an ending for small imaginations and big egos and conditional compassion and hesitant mercy.
Maybe we need to pray into an ending for judgment masquerading as moral clarity and into an ending for violence masquerading as justice and into an ending for hard-heartedness masquerading as tough love.
Maybe we need to pray into the ending of all those things.
Because THAT is what the disciples did after the Ascension—they learned how to embrace the power and the necessity of goodbye. They took the absence of Jesus’ body as the call to BE his body now—to stand where he stood—to face down the powers of death and despair as he once did, and to say: he may be up there, but we are still here! And we are just getting started!
This is the lesson of the Ascension: blessed, blessed are the ones who can pray into life’s endings and say to the blank page and the hollow heart and the uncertain future: Thy Kingdom Come, Lord, Thy Spirit Come, Thy Truth and Goodness Come and goodbye to everything else!!
Easier said than done, perhaps. That’s why we need one other here, in community, just like those first disciples did.
But I think—I know—I believe–that if we can keep at it together; if we can pray into all our endings together; if we can keep up what began on that first Ascension Day rather than skip past it; we will continue to discover all that we were meant to become once Jesus disappeared from view: loss-carriers, hope-seekers, truth-tellers, care-givers, prayer-offerers, peace-makers, song-singers, dance-dancers, Lord-proclaimers, Son-followers, Spirit-bearers, ever beloved children of our Father in heaven.
In other words, the Church.
In other words, a people who no longer stare up at the clouds but who get to work, here and now, to be the visible presence of our invisible God. To take up the blank page at the end of Jesus’ earthly story and continue the next chapter ourselves. Just one more chapter!
For that is what the Ascension calls to be: the ones who can see beyond the last page. The ones who will see the story through all the way to our ultimate end: abiding forever in God.
And although I tend to hate an ending, I have to say: I love the sound of that one.
By Another Road 