Second Sunday of Easter (Year 2, NL)

Throughout scripture, human bodies are not an obstacle to righteousness; they are its location.

What we see reminds us of what we miss, and vice versa.

This seems to be par for the course.

Is this passage more than a cautionary tale about the tendency to stuff a suitcase to the gills?

The final lesson in Discipleship 101: learning to fall

Will we be a people who wait for the promises of God with open hearts?

Go to Google Images and look at some depictions of the ascension. This makes clear how difficult a festival this is for contemporary believers to celebrate.

On Ascension Day, with the readings from Luke and Acts in danger of being embalmed by archaism, the reading from Ephesians is a gift.

As a young minister in my early 20s, I was often admonished by the senior ministers to keep a guarded distance from laypeople. To get too close, they would say, is to become too familiar with a resulting loss of one's ministerial authority. They thought authority was protected by distance and diminished by relationships.

As Jesus prepares to send the Twelve, his experience of failure seems to color his instructions.

When the Ascension coincides with Lailat al-Mi‘rāj, perhaps Christians and Muslims can spare a sidelong glance.

Painter Sawai Chinnawong saturates the outpouring of the Spirit with the colors Thai art traditionally associates with the holy.

In many ways, the Ascension story is too literal for our postmodern sensibilities. We know that the space station is circling the globe just above the clouds.

The preacher faces several challenges in these Ascension texts. How can we present Jesus’ departure from the earth as an occasion for not sorrow but celebration? How to translate the kingship and hierarchical language into imagery that speaks to a world no longer governed by kings and monarchs?

Feminist biblical scholars note a third challenge: How can we counter Luke-Acts' use of the Ascension to exert a degree of social control?

What is it those angels invite us to see on the earth from the Mount of Olives?