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We’re The Rag-Tag Crew

30/5/2025

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A Reflection on the Gospel for Sunday, June 1st, 2025:
The Ascension of the Lord


Luke
24.46-53


Jesus said to the disciples, “Thus it is written, that the Christ is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.

“And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”

Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

It’s really wild to think about this initial crew who was chosen to actually be there with Christ as He walked the earth.

This little handful of humans who were chosen to be His inner circle as He travelled, broke bread and taught the truth of who He was and why He came.

It was a simple crew. Fishermen, frustrated at their own lack of success. Both rule breakers and law abiders, prone to getting into petty arguments about who will be first in the Kingdom and who will sit at Jesus’ right hand.

Here was Jesus, God in the flesh, sharing and entrusting the nucleus of the meaning of life and the entire universe with this simple, often-missing-the-point, utterly human group of people.

It’s so easy to think “What if I was there? What if I was one of those chosen?”

But we are here. We’re chosen now. We’re one of this crew.


That’s us, gathered around Christ this Ascension Sunday as He says to us:

You are witnesses to these things...

I am sending upon you what my father promised…

...you will be clothed from on high.


Here we are—2000+ years later—and now we’re the rag-tag group of followers who are trying to understand Christ’s words about who He is and why He came and what it means that He’ll come again.

We’re the ones still walking with Him. Still writing about Him. We’re reading blogs about Him. We’re gathering around the Eucharist to discover and rediscover Him and His Word.

And here we are—still bickering about who’s going to be first. And who’s right about what. We’re still really faulty and can be unreliable and we’re still making lots of unnecessary messes.


But--we’re the group blessed to know Him in this time and space in history.

We’re the group--now scattered all over the world—who, just a few weeks ago, excitedly gathered around our laptops, TVs and phones to watch the momentous announcement of Peter's 267th successor, Pope Leo XIV.

I’m struck today by the good news and the hope of it all.

This really imperfect group of humans listened and followed enough that we’re here all these years later, reading about and sifting through this gospel passage. They simply bore witness to what they saw and experienced in walking with the living Christ.

As we gather around Him this Sunday for this intimate moment of listening to His last words before He ascends into heaven, may we take heart in having been chosen to be here.

May we, in our utter simplicity, excitedly anticipate the coming of Pentecost as He promises—and may we simply have a willingness to bear witness to what we have seen and experienced in walking with the living Christ.




Catherine Burnham
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Waterfall

29/5/2025

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A Reflection on the Second Reading for Sunday, June 1st, 2025:
The Ascension of the Lord


Ephesians
1.17-23


Brothers and sisters: I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.

God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come.

And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the Church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

If St. Peter, the man of action, is king of the short version, then St. Paul, the poet of the Way, is prince of the long version. 

Peter, in Acts 10, manages to recount the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus, and the establishment of the Church in 167 words. Paul has been known to take 191 words to finish a sentence. A man after my own heart. 

I love him, and this prayer he penned for you and me. 

Looking at the language Paul wrote in, we actually have to go back to the verse before, verse 16, to pick up the main verb in this tremendous sentence. Cease. More particularly, ‘I don’t cease…’ 

Out of this flows a poem of a prayer, each phrase part of a waterfall of grace cascading down on us…
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Hearts open, hands cupped and ready to receive, we step into this falling river and our souls soaks up the phrase we need, as the prayer of Paul still presses into the heart of the Father.




Noreen Smith
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A Triumphant Season

28/5/2025

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A Reflection on the Psalm for Sunday, June 1st, 2025:
The Ascension of the Lord


Psalm 47

R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy. For the Lord, the Most High, is awesome, a great king over all the earth. 

R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet. Sing praises to God, sing praises; sing praises to our King, sing praises. 

R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.

For God is the king of all the earth; sing praises with a Psalm. God is king over the nations; God sits on his holy throne. 


R. God has gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound of a trumpet.
​

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

We’re still firmly entrenched in the Easter season. Pentecost, which closes out the liturgical season of Easter, will be next Sunday. So here we sit, the Scriptures filled with almost bracing positivity. The afterglow of the Resurrection stretching out through time to us today.

And it may feel false some days to still be shouting our Alleluias and praises. The world is, as it always is, experiencing challenges. People we love get sick and even die. Bills have to get paid. Wars, both physical and financial, steal our sense of certainty and joy. There are children dying of curable diseases and starving in the streets. The world fails to care. We fail to care. I fail to care.

All that brokenness makes me want to push Easter back to its rightful day and have it keep its place there. None of this extended joy seems fitting. Sure, I can take a break from all this misery for one day, but an entire season seems gratuitous, y’know? So let’s take down the banners. Toss the Easter lilies in the compost. Tone down the music. Get back to our sombre readings.

And yet, the Church is inviting us to stay in this posture of praise—to not get immediately drawn back down into our despair. There are lots of possible explanations for this dwelling on Easter, which by the way is longer than 4 weeks Advent, the 12 days of Christmas, and the 40 days of Lent. Between Easter and Pentecost, we spend 50 days celebrating Easter. 

Easter is the summit of the liturgical year—it celebrates the resurrection, the conquering of not just Christ’s own death, but the conquering of eternal death for the saved. And that’s something that truly cannot be contained, no matter how miserable I may feel. With the eyes of eternity, the solution to all the misery in the world isn’t more misery, it’s the transformative, saving power of Christ. 

The promise of Easter doesn’t belong as a memorial, it is working among us even over 2,000 years later. By making space for the Easter season, we are reminded that the salvation offered through Christ’s life, death, and resurrection isn’t a day, but stretching out through all of human history. There is no misery He cannot heal. There is no strife He cannot overcome. 

So, we make space for our praise. We dwell in this counter-cultural and unreal joy. We declare that hope to ourselves when we are at our most broken. Because both we and our world both still need salvation.

Just as we declared joy into the darkness of night at the Easter Vigil, so too can we sing the song of His praise into the darkness of all suffering today. Salvation is already here, moving among us. Alleluia!



Stéphanie Potter
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A Fresh Look

27/5/2025

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A Reflection on the First Reading for Sunday, June 1st, 2025:
The Ascension of the Lord


Acts
1:1-11

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the Apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.


While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Pause. Pray. Reflect.

I recently sat my husband down to make him watch the 1972 animated Dr. Seuss short "The Lorax." It was a staple of my childhood, but he had never seen it. In brief, The Lorax is the guardian of the forest, particularly the beautiful truffula trees. A greedy businessman comes to town and starts cutting all the trees down to turn them into products, heedless of the Lorax’s pleas. In the end, when all of the trees are felled, the narrator says:

“The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance... just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance... as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants. And I'll never forget the grim look on his face when he hoisted himself and took leave of this place, through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.”

In the animation, he does just that. He flies all the way up into the sky and is enveloped by the dark grey clouds.

And, re-watching this for the first time as an adult, I realized where my mental image of the Ascension came from. Well, aside from lifting by the seat of his pants.

But it’s true: I have always pictured Jesus saying his final commission and then with a solemn face just… flying up into a hole in the clouds. Maybe accompanied by an ascending woooop sound effect. And from that moment on, He’s somewhere else where we can’t go, and we’re down here, praying for Him to come back soon.

This is obviously an incorrect and immature understanding of both the mystery, and really the whole cosmology of the Ascension. In ascending to the Father, Jesus brings the human into the divine, opening heaven, and intimately (if somewhat invisibly) infusing life on earth with His life through the Spirit. 

So clearly adult Kate needs some new imagery to work with. So I turned to the earliest icons of the Ascension. Though all have their own spin, they all feature Mary standing front and centre in prayer, the Apostles (and St. Paul too, because these are not going for historical accuracy) looking up, or praying. Angels are present, both above and below.

These icons show the truth of this mystery. A human man enters into heaven. The two realms kiss, bringing us closer to our ultimate prayer of “Thy kingdom come... on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus ascends not to leave us, but to grow infinitely closer to us. He sends his angels among us, and, with Mary’s example, we are reminded that what’s above and what’s below are always united through prayer.

So here's my Seussian re-write...
“Then Jesus said “Children, my spirit will come. And I will be with you for the tough times to come.” Then He lifted himself off his glorious bum. And we’ll always adore the smile on His face when He went to His Father’s high holy place, through a break in the cloud, to shower us with grace.”




Kate Mosher
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