Tag: Ascension

(Asc)ending: A Sermon

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. 

…

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. 

Hello/Goodbye: A Sermon

I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 21, 2023 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Fort Wayne, IN. The lectionary texts cited are Acts 1:6-14 (an account of the Ascension of Jesus) and John 17:1-11.

I find it a fascinating feature of certain languages that the same word can be used for both hello and goodbye. In Italian, whether coming or going, people often simply say “ciao.” In Hawaiian, it is “aloha.” In the Czech Republic, where I did a study abroad year in college, they say “ahoj,” which honestly always made me feel a little bit like a pirate. When a word like this contains within itself more than one meaning, it is called polysemy. 

We have many polysemous words in English, too, of course, but we typically use different words to greet one another and then to take our leave. Although even for us, we might choose to say “good day” or “good evening” on both arrival and departure. 

In all of the instances when one word serves as both hello and a goodbye, our languages reveal something deeper than their simple function. When both meanings are held in the same word, there is an acknowledgment of the fluidity of time and space and our place within them; when hello and goodbye are the same, then every coming together acknowledges an inevitable parting of ways, and yet every parting of ways holds within it the hope of inevitable reunion. 

I like this very much, not only because it is linguistically nuanced, but because it feels true, it feels like a little reminder that whether, in this moment, we are moving closer or farther from one another, we are still connected. 

And if that is true, then it suggests that the narratives we so often tell of encounters and departures—of definitive hellos and devastating goodbyes—are all, in reality, held within a larger, more gentle and generous story wherein all the roads we travel are interconnected, where all of our hellos and goodbyes lead back to one another in the end. Which is, itself, a polysemous, complex realization. 

Because if hello and goodbye are never truly final, it’s a consolation when we feel the sting of loneliness and yet it’s also a caution when we would rather escape our histories or shrug off our responsibilities to right relationship, because the intertwining of all our hellos and goodbyes signifies that we are inextricably tied to one another and to the whole of the earth. It suggests that, as the poet Tennyson says, we are a part of all that we have met, and, thus, it is part of us. Hello, you are part of me. Goodbye, I am part of you. No matter where we go, we will never not be part of each other. And knowing this, we must decide how best to live.

I am thinking about hellos and goodbyes and polysemy this week because we have just celebrated the Feast of the Ascension this past Thursday and you can tell that its story is echoing into our lectionary readings this morning, and to tell the truth, this story has always felt like kind of a bummer to me in the midst of our Easter joy. 

Because viewed from one angle, the Ascension is a goodbye narrative. The risen Jesus, only recently reunited with his beloved friends and family, is carried up in a cloud, into the great Mystery where it is beyond our capacity to see him, and his disciples are left staring at the sky, yearning for one last glimpse of him. 

And from this perspective, especially for all of us who have grieved the loss of a beloved face, who have felt the hollowness of being the one left behind, the Ascension might feel a bit like a flat note in the jubilant melody of the season. 

We might say, You loved us enough to come back from death, Lord, so why must you go, now, to a place where we cannot see you? Why must we continue to let go of you? Why is it still the case, even after the Resurrection, that everyone and everything we love still says goodbye to us in the end? Why must we wait here alone, waiting for the unresolved promise of your peaceable kingdom?

And yes, Lord, I know you have promised us the Spirit as our Comforter and guide, but if I am brutally honest, Lord, there are days I would trade that unseen Spirit for just one glimpse of your face, for one moment of your actual hands holding mine, reassuring me that I am not alone on this journey, some proof that your leaving was not forever, that there will come a day when we can say hello and it will not also mean goodbye. I would give anything to know that there will be, one day, an end to endings. 

But depart he does, and wait we must. And so for now, like the disciples on the mountain, we must stand in this polysemous moment of the goodbye that searches for a hello, containing within itself both joy and grief, reunion and relinquishment, and we must continue to wonder why and how and when we will understand the necessity of loss. 

But then this week, as I was reflecting on all of this, something occurred to me: that the Ascension, like so many other stories in Scripture, is itself polysemous—it, too, means multiple things at once. And while it is indeed a farewell narrative from the perspective of us and the disciples on the mountain, I realized that from the vantage point of God the Father, from the vantage point of the Spirit aloft on the high wind, from vantage point of the innermost heart of the Trinity, the Ascension is a hello, a celebration, a homecoming. It is Jesus, the Son, in the fullness of his risen, reclaimed, redeemed human flesh, crossing back over the threshold of heaven saying to the Father, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again. 

And if we truly love him, how could we not want our Lord to finally be at home? How could we not feel some joy that even though we must say goodbye, it is because he needed to see his Father’s face once more? I can’t begrudge him that. I know I want to see my father’s face again someday, too.

And there’s also this: in the Ascension, when Jesus says goodbye to us and hello to eternity, he is, in truth, doing something entirely new, something that only he could do, fully human, fully divine, his polysemous body drawn up and out beyond the limits of the flesh, blurring the boundaries between heaven and earth, reigning as the Lord of both. 

He is not simply saying both hello and goodbye at the same time; he is breaking down the barriers between hello and goodbye; the barriers that separate us from God and one another. He is effecting his prayer that we might all be one, never parted. He is transfiguring all our beginnings and our endings, all of our greetings and our grief, all of our hope and our fear, into something bigger, something timeless, something that we cannot even imagine because we have not yet known a story that didn’t have an ending. 

By journeying to a realm where human flesh could never have otherwise gone, he is making a place for us, a place where we will be greeted and welcomed, and somehow, where we will never have to say goodbye.

And when he returns, bringing back the glory of heaven for our eyes to behold at last, it will be a new word that he speaks, neither hello nor goodbye, but some word no mind has yet conceived, that no lip has dared to speak, a word that contains all things within itself, a polysemous Word that resolves every question, dries every tear, mends every broken heart, a word that will make the earth tremble with its beauty and its power, a word that will hold more than we could ever say but that will say it all. A word that will initiate our own Ascension.

What will that word be? I do not know. But in essence, I think it will say, here I am, I have returned to you, and much have I seen, and long have I loved you, and how good it is to be in your embrace again. 

And now, no more hellos, no more goodbyes. Only this. Only us. All of us together. Always.