7 Easter/the Sunday after the Acension

May 17, 2026

  Acts 1.6-14

+ At our Wednesday evening Eucharist, we celebrate the eve of the Ascension, as we always do at this time of the year.

 And as we celebrated, we discussed the fact that the Ascension feels kind of anticlimactic.

 It’s always one of the strangest feasts in the Christian calendar.

 It doesn’t have the emotional clarity of Easter.

 It doesn’t carry the tenderness of Christmas or the fire of Pentecost, which we celebrate next week.

  Instead, it gives us one of those strange in-between moments that scripture so often lingers on.

 Christ has risen.

 The tomb is empty.

 Hell itself has been harrowed and broken open.

 Death is defeated.

 And yet the Church is not quite born.

 The Spirit has not yet descended.

 That’s next Sunday.

 For the moment, Jesus is ascending, disappearing from the sight of the disciples and they are left standing there staring upward into the sky.

 Ascension is a story about waiting.

 And not graceful waiting, either.

 Not peaceful, contemplative, monastic waiting.

 This is anxious waiting.

 Uncertain waiting.

 The kind of waiting where you don’t know what comes next and you can’t go backward.

 The disciples still don’t understand what kind of kindom Jesus is bringing into the world.

 “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

 Even now, even after the resurrection and all they have encountered since then,  they are still imagining some sort of political restoration.

 Can we really blame them?

 Isn’t that what we’re hoping in and anxiously awaiting as well?

 Still, they  want certainty.

 They still want a timeline.

 They still want God to finally make things neat and tidy.

 And Jesus refuses to give them what they want, as Jesus does.

 “It is not for you to know the times or periods.”

 Which is one of the most frustrating sentences in all of scripture.

 Because human beings desperately want to know the times and periods.

 We want charts.

 We want explanations.

 We want. . . certainty.

 We want to know whether history bends upward or downward.

 We want reassurance that our losses actually mean something.

 We want guarantees that justice will come soon enough to actually matter.

 We want to know whether the world is healing or unraveling.

 We want to know whether democracy survives.

 We want to know whether the Church survives.

 We want to know whether our grief will ever loosen its grip on us.

 And Christ gives none of that.

 Instead, he gives them what?

 He gives them. . . .vocation.

 A calling

 “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses.”

 Not priests.

 Not deacons.

 Not bishops.

 Not business leaders or bankers or politicians.

 But witnesses.

 There is something profoundly humble about that word.

 A witness is simply someone who tells the truth about what they have seen.

 Nothing more.

 Nothing less.

 And what have these disciples seen?

 They have seen death and resurrection.

 They have seen betrayal and forgiveness.

 Empire and mercy colliding head-on.

 They have seen Jesus kneeling to wash feet.

 They have seen him touch lepers and eat with outcasts and forgive his executioners while hanging from a Roman cross.

 They have seen love refuse to become hatred even while suffering.

 That is what they are sent to bear witness to.

 Not domination.

 Not religious control.

 Not certainty.

 Witness.

 And then Jesus leaves them.

 He ascends.

 I’ve struggled a bit with this because emotionally it feels like a kind of abandonment.

 The disciples finally begin to understand him and now he is leaving.

 Again.

 But the Ascension isn’t about Christ escaping the world.

 It’s Christ filling all things.

 The early Church understood this deeply.

 Christ ascends not to become absent, but to become present even more.

 Everywhere.

 No longer confined to one body in one place in Galilee 2,000 years.

 But now present in bread broken and a cup given to all.

 Present in the poor.

 Present in the stranger.

 Present in the gathered community.

 Present in the grief-stricken.

 Present in the homeless

 Present in the wounded body of this world.

 And maybe that is why the angels interrupt the disciples while they are staring upward.

 “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

 In other words: stop looking up.

 Don’t spend your life gazing into abstractions while the living body of Christ waits to be loved right here in front of you.

 Because the Church has become very skilled at staring upward.

 At wringing its hands and lamenting, and leaving it right there.

 We stare upward into ideology.

 We stare into nostalgia and into the way we used to do things.

 Meanwhile Christ keeps appearing down here.

 In hospital rooms and exhausted caregivers.

 In refugees and lonely neighbors,

 In frightened children and broken people just trying to survive another week.

 In broken political and religious systems that seem to produce more and more injustice in this world.

 The Ascension calls the Church back down here, to earth.

 Not because heaven is unreal, but because heaven has already begun breaking into this wounded world.

 And then the author of the book of Acts gives us this beautiful final image.

 The disciples are gathered together in prayer with the women, and with Mary the mother of Jesus.

 Doing what?

 Waiting together.

 Christianity is not an individual heroic quest.

 The Church is born in community, in uncertainty, in shared prayer, in the shared meal of the Eucharist, in mutual dependence.

 Before Pentecost comes this fragile little gathering of frightened people simply remains together longing enough for God to do something new among them. 

And honestly, that probably is the hardest spiritual discipline of all.

 To remain.

 To stay with one another through confusion and disappointment and uncertainty.

 To keep praying when no answer has arrived yet.

 To keep loving the world when everything feels unbearable.

 To keep witnessing to resurrection even when death still appears to rule so much around us.

 The Church today lives in another in-between moment.

 Old certainties are collapsing.

 The old way of doing things don’t work like they used to.

Many people stand staring upward, hoping for escape, or for easy answers, or for some final restoration of a world that no longer exists.

 And there’s a lot of temptation right now to trade witness for control.

 To trade compassion for outrage.

 To trade the Gospel for fear.

But perhaps the calling remains the same as it was for those first followers.

 Not certainty.

 But witness.

 To witness to compassion in a cruel age.

 To mercy in a culture of humiliation.

 To human dignity in a world addicted to disposable people.

 To resurrection in the midst of grief and violence and despair.

 And maybe most importantly---- to wait together without giving up on one another.

 Because the Holy Spirit so often arrives right there—in that fragile gathered community that has almost lost hope but keeps gathering and praying anyway in the name of the risen and ascended Christ, who remains more present to us in this world than we can possibly ever imagine.

 Amen.