Ascension Sunday 2025; 1 June
Jack Hardaway
HIGHER AND HIGHER
Your love, lifted me higher
Than I’ve ever, been lifted before
So keep it up
Quench my desire
And I’ll be at your side
Forever more
Now once I was downhearted
Disappointment was my closest friend
But then you came and it soon departed
And you know he never
Showed his face again
You know your love
Keep on lifting me
Higher.
I said your love keep on lifting me
Higher and higher.
This past Thursday was Ascension Day, forty days after Easter.
Jesus Ascends and the disciples head back to Jerusalem with great joy blessing God constantly in the Temple.
And Luke’s Gospel ends there, on that note of joy and blessing.
All last week I kept listening to the golden oldie song by Jackie Wilson, “Higher and Higher.”
I listened to some of the other versions, by Howard Huntsberry, Rita Cooledge, the Dells.
But I always came back to Jackie Wilson, singing of the love that keeps on lifting us up.
The Ascension is a love song.
The joining together of humanity and the divine in sweet communion.
Love lifts Jesus up and carries our humanness into the heart of God.
The love that lifts up higher and higher when all else crushes us down, diminishing the humanity that blazes with God’s image and God’s joy.
It is a particular and peculiar ending: joy in the aftermath of horrible things.
Joy. Blessing. Love. Ascension.
Finding joy in one another, finding joy in the beloved.
That is how the Gospel ends, great joy and blessing God.
It is a consummation and a homecoming.
What comes next?
Is great joy a choice? Or is it a gift?
Or both?
Saying yes to the gift?
Yes to the beloved?
Conversion for some is a falling in love.
God steals our heart.
And there is a lightness to things after that, a levity. In the midst of ups and downs there is the love song of the beloved always being sung, the song that we can’t get out of our head.
The Ascension is that kind of love song.
Lifting up our humanity, defeating all that would diminish and crush.
This life that we know is not being abandoned, it is being lifted up into communion with the Holy.
Our lives matter.
Being human matters.
All that mess and randomness and hope and disappointment matters.
We are lifted up in the ascension of Jesus.
All that diminishes humanity, that dismisses, that belittles and disparages is exposed as a lie as Jesus ascends.
The love song carries us, and that joy is there in all the mess.
Not a silly happiness, but a lightness that can choose love when the world falls apart.
The love song that we can’t get out of our head.
The love that keeps lifting us, higher and higher.
Can you hear it?