05/14/2026
From Deacon Carter Hawley, thoughts on Ascension Day.
Every week, Christians around the world recite the Nicene Creed. We say it so often the words can blur into one another, familiar as breathing.
Jesus was born. He was crucified. He was killed and buried. He rose. He ascended into heaven.
Most of us can say something about born, crucified, died, and rose. The last thing we profess -- the Ascension -- we tend to move past quickly, as if it were a theological footnote.
It is not a footnote. It may be the missing piece that makes the whole story make sense.
Ascension Day falls Thursday, May 14th -- forty days after Easter, as described in the book of Acts. It is one of the oldest feasts in the Christian calendar, observed since at least the fourth century. Because of its significance, we transfer the celebration to Sunday, so the whole community can gather for it.
Here is what I think we miss when we move past it too quickly.
At Jesus’s birth, God enters our world, our flesh, our limitation, our grief. God learns what it is to be tired, to be hungry, to love particular people, to cry, to be abandoned, to die. These are expressly human traits. God, however powerful, doesn’t cry. Doesn’t know first hand what we live through as mere mortals. The incarnation is the movement of divinity toward humanity
The Ascension is the return journey.
When the risen, fully human Jesus ascends to God, he brings our humanity with him. Not as a memory. Not as a symbol. But as a permanent reality. The God who created the universe now knows, from the inside, what it is to be human. Not because God observed us from a distance, but because God was us -- and that humanity has now been carried all the way home.
Ascension is not Jesus leaving humanity behind.
It is humanity arriving somewhere it has never been.
There is something else the Ascension gives us that we rarely talk about.
When Jesus was present in a body, he was present in one place at a time. On the road to Emmaus, or in the upper room, or on the beach at dawn -- but not all three at once. His presence, as real and as transforming as it was, was constrained by the limits of a physical body in a particular location.
The Ascension removes those constraints.
The risen and ascended Christ is no longer limited to one body in one place. He is present everywhere. Present in all people. Present in you, whether you are in a cathedral or a hospital room or sitting with something you did not choose and cannot fix -- wondering, maybe, if any of this is real.
The disciples stood staring up at the sky after Jesus ascended, looking for him in the place where he used to be. And two figures in white had to gently redirect them.
Why are you standing here looking up toward heaven?
If you have never thought much about this feast, or if it has been a while since you have been inside a church and you find yourself curious -- about any of this, about what it might mean to walk back in -- we would be glad to have you with us on Sunday, May 17th.
You do not need to have everything figured out. The disciples certainly did not.
You just need to be willing to stop staring at the sky and look around at what is already here.
