Ascension Day and the Reorganization of Space and Time


 (The Church of the Ascension in Israel)
Today is the day the Church recognizes the Ascension of Christ. For me this recognition has never felt more important nor more poignant. I use the word recognition intentionally as for many denominations this is not a day of celebration but of mourning, mourning the loss of physical presence of Jesus on this earth! Goodness knows we are grieving many physical losses and changes of location.
“Christianity was founded upon the loss of a body,” writes the Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau, “an impossible mourning.” And today during this pandemic we are doing something very similar: mourning physical losses like the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Moreover mourning the physical losses which for many of us represent Christ on earth, real presence. These may be family and friends or they may be pastors and church communities which are Body of Christ as well. 
Like the disciples witnessing the departure we tell ourselves He is not gone, gone from sight perhaps but there are new ways of welcoming Him in our midst...we hope. Like the disciples and others post Ascension we are in the process of reorganizing and reevaluating our assumptions especially about physicality and chronology. 
What remains in this liminal space of here and not yet is the Kingdom, an ultimate oneness! We are in the space, the thin one, of recognizing Christ’s presence in new and different ways; we are in the process of being the Church and awaiting His coming again in great glory. Our expectations of the how of it all, like those 2000 plus years ago, may need to be suspended in favor of faith. And hope.
Paul in his beautiful letter to the Ephesians offers us the perspective of hope needed then and now. “ We, who were the first to set ur hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.” We live in this “pledge of our inheritance.” We are now Christ’s physicality in the world. We are the hands and feet and hearts under heaven. Even while in the middle space created by the Ascension we live in it with hope and with each other. Even ascended Jesus continues to rule in our hearts and has as promised given us the Holy Spirit, a Spirit of wisdom to be the kingdom bearers even in this incredible new world. Liminal? Yes. Paradoxical? Yes.
He is ascended that we might become God’s missionaries. And His kingdom shall have no end. 

Ascension by Malcolm Guite
We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed .

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