A Call to Live Out Our Faith

Ascension Day - May 29, 2025

Rev Sarah Colvin

You can find this week's readings here.

When we left church on Sunday, I asked people to look at page 15 in the Book of Common Prayer, and the list there shows us the seven principal Feast days of the church year.

Ascension Day is always celebrated 40 days after Easter (so always on a Thursday). Its celebration does not move. (Side note: we can, and do, move All Saints Day.) And although this feast is a cornerstone of the faith, other than those churches with Ascension in the name, people do not tend to celebrate it. Generally, I think people along the way quit celebrating and now it’s not really a thing. However, I think now is a crucial time to celebrate, more in a moment.

As we know, throughout Eastertide, we have Gospel readings with numerous post-resurrection sightings of Jesus. And then, there comes a time when there are not such sightings. This time corresponds to Jesus’ ascension. Ascending into the heavens fulfills many prophecies of sitting on the right hand of God. It fits in with prophets who were subsumed into heaven, like Elijah and Enoch, and by some interpretation Melchizadek. And although it clicks all these boxes, let’s focus less on its possible purpose to check boxes, and let’s more focus on what it signifies for us, how it affects us in this day and age.

In this chapter of the history of our nation (and world), it is most important that we recognize the risen Christ, that we recognize the Ascension and know that it is on us to enact the Love of God into the world. We do not have many Jesus sightings, but Jesus continues to be active through us after the Ascension. It is not just wanting to be on the “right side of history” but it is a call to be disciples, a call to live out our faith.

There is a meme going around (largely in response to the house passing the Big, Beautiful Bill):

I was hungry

You cut my food stamps

I was thirsty

You let my water pipes rust

I was a stranger

You deported me

You took me and put my child in a cage

I was sick

You denied my healthcare

I was in prison

So that your friend could make a profit

Whatever you do to the least of my people you do to me.

And with the country’s administration ripe with and emboldening Christian Nationalists, it is more important than ever in my lifetime that we set our sights on and recognize Jesus’s calling on us. (Now everyone cherry-picks verses of the Gospel, but Christian nationalism seems to have blind eye to most of what it means to follow Christ.)

In our faith journey, we often look for assurance and validation from those around us. The moment of Jesus’ ascension was witnessed by the disciples, who were both amazed and transformed by what they saw. The presence of these witnesses gives us confidence in the truth of the resurrection and ascension. It reminds us that we are not alone in our faith; we stand together as a community of believers, people who are to do for the least of these, united in the truth of Jesus’ life, death, and triumphant ascension.

And so, it is not the disappearance of Jesus per se, which is most important. Instead, it is his stepping back to create the space in which he now appears in the love and mercy and that we live out in witness to love’s triumph over death. This shares some similarity with a belief of mystical Judaism from around the 6th Century. Tzimtzum is the idea that God draws back, or limits God’s own omnipotence to create space within Godself for the world to exist. In other words, we could look at tzimtzum and the Ascension as being the way God always works, making space for us to reflect God’s glory. It creates free will. We could or would not do this if God did not make space. So, Jesus withdraws to make space for us to be the bearers of God in the world. At first glance it seems the risen Jesus no longer appears. BUT the risen Jesus still appears; he appears in us, he is visible in us, in our works of mercy and testimony to God’s love.

These Gospel verses invite us to reflect on the importance of being witnesses in our own lives, sharing the story of Jesus with others, and embracing our role in spreading the good news. It is always true that all choices we make to stand against evil are witness to our faith. At this point in our lives, maybe more than ever before in my lifetime, we have the opportunity to witness to our faith in Jesus. It cannot be clearer: Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection means that we too must bear Jesus’s love, we too are to care for the marginalized. We must keep looking for Jesus, keep following his ways. We need our Ascension eyes in order to follow whose we are—in order to follow Jesus. We may die in the process, but that is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if we didn’t follow Jesus.

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IMAGE ATTRIBUTION: Saget, Father George. Ascension, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56518 [retrieved June 10, 2025]. Original source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KeurMoussaAutel.jpg.