Ascension Day 2023
Happy Ascension Day, Beloveds!
Today is our parish feast day – which always falls 40 days after Easter Day, which means it falls on a weekday. But since the church finds strength in flexibility, we are able to move our observation of today’s feast to Sunday – which we will!
So on Sunday at 10:30am, we will celebrate baptisms (one of the recommendations of the prayer book to do on a parish feast day!), and at 6pm we will offer a marvelous Choral Evensong by our choir in honor of the day. I hope you will join us for both!
The celebration of Ascension Day is one of the earliest Christian Feasts to be observed, starting around 68 C.E. and the Scripture references the Ascension quite specifically:
- In John 20:17, he foretells the moment: Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”
- From Mark 16:19 — “After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God.”
- From Luke 24:50-51: When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven.
- From Acts 1:8-11: He was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as He was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.'
When I arrived here last year, I looked up some of the CCA history and found out that there’d been votes toward two different names of the parish when it was being born in the early 1960’s. Half the community wanted to be Christ Church and the other half wanted to be Church of the Ascension.
In the wisdom that our world could use a lot more of these days (!), the groups combined their wishes to find a compromise suitable for all. And that’s how we came to be Christ Church of the Ascension.
Perhaps there are some opportunities for us as a community to find even more ways to create a both/and in the world instead of an either/or so that all our needs can be met as a human family! What a legacy to celebrate.
Happy Ascension Day, dear ones. See you Sunday for our celebration!
Peace,
Mother Erika
The Rev. Canon Erika von Haaren
Interim Rector, Christ Church of the Ascension