Tag: endings

(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. 

This is How it Ends: An Easter Sermon

I preached this sermon on Easter Day, April 20, 2025 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is John 20:1-18, Mary’s encounter with the risen Jesus in a garden.

This is how it ends. THIS is how it ends. 

Take a look around you—at the morning light, at the flowers, and the flame that burns, refusing to be overtaken by darkness. Bathe in these rolling waves of alleluias, all of us here, together, finally, on the edge of a new day, standing in the risen light. If you take nothing else away from this moment, from this season, from this life, just hold on to the revelation all around you now: this is how it ends. 

Whatever else has ended, or is ending for you, or in this world, this is how it ultimately ends. Whatever you are afraid of, or angered by, or regretful of, take heart, because this is how it ends. Whatever grief you carry, whatever wrongs you can’t take back, whatever words you never got to say, this is how it ends. Whoever you have lost, whatever parts of yourself you have betrayed, whatever you are still trying to find, this is how it ends. Whatever seems to be falling down around us or fraying apart at the seams: remember, and believe, and taste and see, that this is how it actually ends. 

In this line of work, every day I hear and I feel, underneath all the words spoken and headlines blaring and the anxieties that pervade our church and our country and our time on this fragile earth, every day I hear the fear of endings. I hear that we are “in decline”, that we are losing ground, that we are coming apart, that everything we’ve loved and worked for is leaving us. 

I hear this across all spectrums of identity and ideology and outlook and circumstance. We have all been seized by this sense of an ending, a bad ending, and like Mary Magdalene we are, many days, stooped over by the weight of our tears.  Like her, we are wailing at the angels to give us back the things we love most, the things we cannot bear the ending of. 

But why are you weeping? Look around you, and see, and know again, or for the first time, the truth of Easter: this is how it ends. 

Whatever breaks, whatever dies, whatever unravels in us and around us—that is not the actual ending that God has in store for us. This is. Because our God is the God of Love and Life, our God is an Easter God, and we are Easter people, and on this clear and fragrant morning our Living, Loving Risen God emerges from the darkness, up among the flowers like a gardener, asking us to look, to look, and to see how the first green shoots of this new and deathless creation are rising right up all around us, right out of the wreckage of all those dreaded endings we fear.

So look! Stop your weeping and look!

Now, I love this moment of reunion between Mary Magdalene and Jesus; I find it one of the most poignant in all of Scripture. But I have also wondered sometimes if Mary felt like she got the brush off from Jesus. He’s in an awful hurry. 

Here she is, the only one who stuck around after the men left and went back home, here she is crying her heart out, suddenly reunited with her Lord and teacher and friend, and then through her blur of tears and joy and relief, Jesus is just like, “Girl, bye! I’ve got places to be. It’s Easter; I’ve got brunch plans. I love you, Mary, but kindly extricate yourself from my person.” 

Well, maybe he was a little more pastoral than that. But he doesn’t stick around long enough to explain or even to instruct. Because how can you really explain all of this. He simply needs her to look, to see, for that briefest, most crucial moment in human history: to see that, whatever has us bowed down in grief, this is how it ends. With you and I, and him, and everything alive, redeemed, renewed—and united with the One who made us. And on that day, oh what an Easter brunch it will be.

And this is important, especially now: that this glimpse, this Easter day that shows us how it all will end: this is meant for something far more than consolation. It is meant to EMBOLDEN us. It is meant to make us a little brave, a little feisty, because this ending means that we are free. We are free from despair. We are free from shame. We are free from death. We are free!

And Mary, well, she gets it. She understood the assignment. Because out of that garden she goes—she goes and she announces—she PROCLAIMS what she has seen. Oh yes, if you hadn’t noticed, the first APOSTOLIC PROCLAMATION of the risen Lord…the first human heralding of the new creation…is borne on a woman’s lips to the men hanging out at home. 

Because what has been cast down is being raised up and blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted; and blessed are the pure in heart for they, THEY shall see God; and blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!

And as Mary goes along proclaiming, mind you, the world still looks the way it always did. Caesar is still on his throne, and Pilate is in his judgment seat wondering what truth is, and the crowds who called for crucifixion still know not what they have done. And all around are all of those usual endings, endings, endings, and falling temples and crumbling nations. Oh yes, we’ve been here before. 

But Mary? Mary is emboldened now, because she stands at the center of a new world, she has seen, before anyone else, that this is how it ends. And when you know that this is how it ends, you can do anything that love requires, because there is nothing left to fear. 

Friends, Easter is the feast of fearlessness. It is the feast that invites us to not just cling to the hope of some good news someday, somehow, but to see it here, now, alive, in front of us and around us. It is the feast that asks us to stop wailing at angels, and to dry our tears and hike up our garments and chase after that good news. Proclaiming as we go this thing, this Person, this Risen One, this new world that we have glimpsed. 

And as we go, if we run into those petty tyrants of every age and the structures that prop them up, we will laugh, and we will stand in the streets and tell them: NO. You have no ultimate power. Because this is how it ends!

And if we see our beloved church changing through the years, we will cry out joyfully: it will be ok, because we are not limited by institutional realities, we are proclaimers of the Gospel of the Risen Lord, and this is how it ends!

And if we must say goodbye to each other along the way, as we certainly will in time, then we will say goodbye with tears and with tenderness but also with hope, because we know that this is how it ends. 

And frankly, even if society were to fracture all around us and we had to stand on the rubble of what has been built, even then, even then, like the generations before us, even then we will look for that green shoot rising up at the mouth of the empty tomb and we will point and say, LOOK. This is how it ends!  I have seen the Lord and this is how it ends!

Just like this. With love and truth and possibility, and resurrection, and a day that is not actually an ending at all, but a beginning. Look around you. This is the first glimpse of a new heaven and a new earth, with flowers, and a flame that will not be overtaken by darkness, and a torrent of unstoppable alleluias, and all of us together, finally, fully, always. 

So why are you weeping? This is how it ends.