Ascension Day and the Freedom of God
Today is Ascension Day.
Truth be told, even though I did a podcast about preaching on Ascension Day two weeks ago, I almost forgot that. In fact, if I hadn’t called my parents today and heard them mention the Ascension Day retired pastors’ luncheon they’d gone to earlier, I’m pretty sure I would have forgotten about it all together.
Ascension Day is one of the more overlooked holidays of the Christian calendar. It doesn’t fall on a Sunday; there are no disciplines of preparation ahead of time or rites of celebration on the day to usher it in. Fewer and fewer churches remember it, let alone hold Thursday services. It’s no wonder I, and so many others, forget about it.
Yet I think it’s worth retaining and remembering because Ascension Day reminds us that we cannot limit God. For while God came to us in the flesh in the person of Jesus, Jesus’ ascension reminds us that we can’t restrict God to any one place. Jesus’ ascension, then, isn’t about his leaving – his disciples, us, the world – but rather is about the simultaneous confession that 1) God has chosen to be located in our physical world so that God may be accessible to us, and 2) God refuses to be limited even to those important places.
No building, no people, no book, no religion, even, can limit God’s ability to be accessible to others.
On this day, the overlooked festival of the Church, I found Franciscan Monk Richard Rohr’s meditation on our inability to limit God most refreshing. I hope you do, too. His two injunctions to us this and every day: Keep God free; keep people free for God. Love it! Happy Ascension Day!
Notes: 1) If you are receiving this post by email, you may need to click here to watch this video.
2) This is another great video from the good folks at The Work of the People.
Thank you for this! It is so much easier to deal with forms than with mystery! We control forms. Mystery is not controllable! Yet God is, “always evermore than we ever understand” (ELW 525)Happy Ascension Day!
In the Apostles’ Creed we confess, “He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.” For me this clearly reflects Phil 2:9-11, one of the oldest Christians songs we know of. Could it be that our overlooking of celebrating the ascension reflects a situation where the Lordship of Christ is not clearly challenged and therefore that important to us?
In part of the community I live in there is a mixture of Christians and Muslims. it seems that celebrating ascension is very important for the churches in this mixed community.
The churches in the rest of the community where the Muslims have no influence did not celebrate ascension in any noteworthy way this year – as far as I could tell.
However, there may be other reasons why some churches celebrate ascension and others not in this community, so this is only sharing a thought.
Thank you for this video, especially. As I ponder “all be one”, this sheds new light.