I fell off the reflection writing wagon. Initially, due to my travel and writing schedule. I’m trying to find the rhythm of writing now that the semester is over. Then, like many of my readers, I sat appalled with my hand over my mouth like Job, consumed with grief and rage at the slaughter of black shoppers and Latine/Latinx school children. While time marched on including, the calendar of the Church, her fasts and feasts and observances. Thus we come to the now past Feast of the Ascension, which readings stand in for the seventh Sunday of Eastertide in Years A and W of the Lectionary. 

The Ascension is a dramatic sign that the church is in our hands. The first apostles were called to be “witnesses” to the things they had seen. We are called to be witnesses to the sacred story we have received and believed even though we did not see with our own eyes. We, like the apostles are called to wait and while we wait, work and pray. We wait, work and, pray in the Spirit while waiting for a richer baptism in the Spirit and, one day to see Jesus with our eyes and watch the world set to rights. Yet, we are not called to lay back and wait for Jesus to sort us in our world out on the last day when the justice of God comes to every corner of the earth. We have been sent into this crucified and crucifying world to be witnesses of the love of God, a love that can only be expressed in just and liberating actions, healing actions, that shape the world in the image of God’s love. The Ascension is not to be an escape from the world but a demonstration of the power that remains with the church in the world.