"Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise"

Beloved in Christ,

The modern world has shaped us with a largely unexamined bias against the supernatural and the inexplicable. Ironically, we take it on unquestioned faith that anything not rational or explainable is not possible or believable.

The ascension of Jesus into heaven, which we celebrate tomorrow, slams squarely into this bias. It’s a crazy thing to claim or imagine: After his physical resurrection from the dead, Jesus ascended in his full body into heaven, where he sits at the right hand of the creator. Its oddness, and that fact that the feast always falls in the middle of the week on a Thursday, means that most Christians don’t give it much thought, and when they do, are quick to pass over it.

But the Ascension, like the whole Christian faith, is good news precisely because it is crazy. It lies entirely outside our capacity to imagine. It reminds us the world is steeped in God’s mysterious presence, and sustained by God’s power which we can scarcely imagine. It establishes that in Jesus, heaven and earth have been decisively and permanently tethered together, and God’s promised future of perfect love and justice breaks in and pulls us forward toward it even now. The Ascension is another way our faith is always opening up new possibilities and new horizons of hope before us even as we journey through a hard and painful world. It reminds us that our hope is not grounded in our own ability, but in the unfathomable power of God’s love.

So rather than an embarrassed pushing aside of this part of our faith, we do well to boldly embrace its glorious and world-saving strangeness in our faith and proclamation.

My kids and I always blast the great Ascension Day hymn, “Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise” on the feast each year. I hope you will find some small way to rejoice in God’s almighty, irrational, unstoppable, and unimaginable power and love this feast day. Hail the day that sees him rise indeed.

Grace and Peace,

+CWL