scripture readings
textweek resources
• collect/opening prayer reflection for Ascension Day June 2
This is the week when the 40-day Easter Seasoners part company from the 50-day Easter Seasoners.
white is right
Ascension Day reflection
In the Southern Hemisphere this begins the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Keep the Alleluias going.
Keep the Easter/Paschal candle lit.
Keep using white.
Encourage consciousness of Easter being a season, not just a day – “attend” Easter is 50 days and invite your friends.
Love the picture. Ascension day always plays on my greatest fear. Will God leave and never come back? Is he already gone? Thats why I love todays prayer
Eternal and gracious God,
we believe your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ
to have ascended with triumph
into your kingdom in heaven;
may we also in heart and mind
ascend to where he is,
and with him continually dwell;
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God now and forever.
Amen.
Thanks, Omar. My sermon today picked up your point, trying to present a different model than the spatial one for heaven. Heaven, in the spatial model, is an other place; and if Jesus has gone to that other place – he is absent from this place. That does not IMO do justice to the texts where Jesus is present in word, sacrament, prayer, and community. So I worked around the idea of Jesus being in God’s future, bursting into our present in his death and resurrection, always there before us, whatever befalls us; giving us confidence and being our challenge…
Ascension Pentecost and Trinity are faves of mine — into the mystery. There are so many images of the Ascension online – I love the Dali one where he seems to be doing a back flip into the universe. Here is a poem by Denise Levertov:
Stretching Himself as if again,
through downpress of dust
upward, soil giving way
to the thread of white, that reaches
for daylight, to open as green
leaf that it is…
Can Ascension
not have been
arduous, almost,
as the return
from Sheol, and
back through the tomb
into breath?
Matter reanimate
now must relinquish
itself, its
human cells,
molecules, five
senses, linear
vision endured
as Man –
the sole
all-encompassing gaze.
Eye of Eternity.
relinquished, earth’s
broken Eden.
Expulsion,
liberation,
last
self-enjoined task
of Incarnation.
He again
Fathering Himself.
Seed-case
splitting.
He again
Mothering His birth:
torture and bliss.
Thanks, Ann. Here’s the Dali image you mention for those who don’t know it.