Rector's Reflection: Being Witnesses, Not Gawkers, May 31, 2025

Beloved Members of St. Martin’s,

This weekend we will observe the transferred Feast of the Ascension, which is officially celebrated this last Thursday—the 40 day after Resurrection Sunday. We will hear two separate versions of this departure of the Risen Christ to Heaven—one from the end of Luke’s gospel, and the other from the start of the Acts of the Apostles.

Biblical scholars believe that the same person who wrote the Gospel we call Luke also wrote the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. So it is interesting that this week, as we celebrate Jesus’s Ascension, we have as our gospel the closing verses of Luke and the opening verses of Acts—and that they both recount the same event. Luke’s gospel closes with Jesus opening the apostles’ minds to the meaning and fulfillment of the scriptures, his final blessing upon them, and, in the midst of that blessing, his ascension to heaven.

We first hear Acts begin with the same event—but with some different details. The one that jumps out at me is the two angels appearing after Jesus has ascended. They bring the apostles back to earth, so to speak, with a forthright question: “Why are you standing around, staring up at heaven?” Jesus promises the apostles the power of the Holy Spirit, and then he ascends into heaven, and that’s often where we get distracted. Right there with the apostles, we tend to focus on the image of Jesus flying up into heaven rather than think about what that leave-taking means. 

It’s a scene that has been depicted in art thousands of times over the centuries, by everyone from Donatello (the sculptor, not the teenage mutant ninja turtle) to Salvador Dali, in icons, and paintings, and reliefs and stained-glass windows. One of the weirdest ways to depict the scene shows only Christ’s feet dangling at the top edge of the scene, as if he were doing an Olympic high dive in the wrong direction. This was very common in the Middle Ages, and it actually is depicted in a sculpture in the ceiling at the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in the UK (see the photo above). Wheeee!

But in our version from Acts, even the angels who suddenly appear at the moment of Jesus’s departure remind us that focusing on looking upward is pointless, a hindrance to getting about the holy charge that Christ has placed upon us of witnessing to his truth in the world. It’s an awesome responsibility and an honor. It's a sign of how very much Jesus loves us that’s every bit as breathtaking as his laying down his life for us on the cross. Jesus loves us so much that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he commissions each and every one of his followers to carry on his holy work of redemption, reconciliation, and healing into the world: to carry him and bear his image within ourselves for the sake of the world. It’s so easy, I know, to look to heaven to solve all of our problems. But there is a reason why the author of Luke tells this story again in Acts, but with this different emphasis. The Gospels are about Jesus’s ministry on Earth. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles is about the apostles and disciples taking up their own ministry, which is the birth of the Church. Jesus’s ascension is NOT about Jesus abandoning us to go back to heaven. The story told in Acts is meant to build up our courage so that we may joyfully take up the mission he loves us enough to entrust to us: to take up our call not as observers but as disciples; to actively proclaim Jesus’s gospel of love and reconciliation in the world.

How can you live more deeply into your call to be a witness in the world?

In Christ,

Mother Leslie+