Together on the Journey:
A Weekly Blog 

This coming Sunday is the feast of the Ascension, and it marks the official end of the Easter season. To mark the occasion, our very last white balloon made its way down from the sanctuary ceiling this week, the last hold out from the ones that we had released up there on Easter Sunday. I have no idea what on earth had been keeping it there that long, but it held strong, and made sure we remembered it was still Easter, long after all of the Easter candy was gone.

The feast of the Ascension marks Jesus’s last day on earth before he ‘withdraws’. One great church meme describes the feast of the Ascension as the day that Jesus started working from home. But however you look at it, this story marks an ending, which is also a beginning. It may have been the end of Jesus’s time on earth, but it was not the end of the story.

And those early disciples, the ones who watched Jesus ascend, may not have been so sure. Jesus had promised to send them the Holy Spirit, but when were they going to come? And how would they know when it arrived? The only thing they could do was wait and see, and I’m sure the longer they waited, the more their doubt grew that they were waiting for anything at all.

We often talk about the faithfulness of the disciples during Jesus’s life and the early life of the church, but I don’t think they get enough credit for remaining faithful during this period of waiting. Waiting is hard work. And even though Jesus had promised to send them the Holy Spirit, remaining faithful based on a promise alone says something about their faith in who Jesus was and who they were called to be. Waiting can be faith in action, especially if that action was to keep faithful in the liminal space of waiting.

And so this week, I invite you to think about a time in your life when you had to wait. Remember what that felt like and how hard it was. And then remember if there was someone who helped you through that time, who listened when you needed to talk, and who helped you pass the time. And then think about those first disciples, together in community, who did the same thing for one another to help each other through the waiting. Because together, we can get through until Pentecost. Amen.

– Jess