Ascension Sunday 2026; 17 May
Acts 1:6-14; Ps. 68:1-10, 33-36
Jack Hardaway
LEAVING
We are always leaving each other.
Life has a lot of goodbyes and never seen again-s.
We leave ourselves sometimes.
We leave the life that we knew. Or it leaves us.
Dreams die.
We are always meeting each other as well.
We come to ourselves.
A new life begins.
Hellos and good byes.
And the time in between.
Jesus leaves again. He is a heart breaker.
The Ascension, the feast day was Thursday, forty days after Easter, forty days of teaching and preparation and being with the love of their lives, and then he is gone… again.
Forty, as you know is a symbolic number, it means the fullness of time, heavy with time, like it would never end.
There were summers like that for me as a young child, the long days, the sunlight and the heat stretching on forever, swimming, chasing salamanders and crawfish, playing in the woods, summer movies, and we never wanted it to end, it stretched on and on, but then inevitably it always ended… A certain quality of time, 40 days.
The fullness of time ran out of time and the disciples are left alone with each other once again.
The disciples are told to wait.
That is today, Ascension Sunday, a time of waiting, after good bye, before hello.
Ten days.
I imagine it was an anxious and hopeful grief, wondering what in the world is coming next, what is Jesus doing now? He just flew off. Can you believe it? Carrying our hearts away with him. First he breaks our hearts now he steals our hearts.
And this promise of the Holy Spirit and the vision of being witnesses that will restore the world, first restoring the community of Jews and Samaritans, and then the restoring the community of all humanity, rippling and radiating outward.
It is a busy going forth vision of the Spirit moving into the world through the witness of the apostles and restoring a broken and fractured humanity, gathering together the wild circus of humanity under one tent.
But first wait.
The gift of the Spirit in John’s Gospel brings a deep intimate relationship with Jesus and the community of believers, but in Acts the gift of the Spirit is something else, an active reaching out to the brokenness of the world. Ministry.
But first wait. After saying goodbye twice, “You say good bye but I say hello, hello, hello, I don’t know why you say good bye, but I say hello.”
Grief and hope.
Letting go and looking forward.
Loss and promise.
Life is full of leaving and arriving.
It just piles up sometimes, an accumulation of leaving.
Today we feel the weight of waiting. The weight of loss. And the weight of longing.
Today is about that. Waiting. Loss. And Longing.
Jesus ascends and we are grounded.
We are trained to hate waiting, we have grown entitled to the immediate.
Today is not that.
A life of waiting.
Life times of waiting.
All creation groaning in travail. Waiting.
Generations, waiting for the restoration of humanity, of human community in all its wild difference, the circus of humanity under the big top.
What a wild vision of what we are waiting for.
Wait and pray, and then…and then the storm blows in.
Hurry up and wait.
The circus is coming to town.