The Ascension


The following is my editorial on behalf of the ministerial association for the local newspaper today. (As a personal note, this is my liturgical ordination anniversary. I was ordained on the Feast of the Ascension, which floats around on the regular calendar.)
-The Archer
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What piques the interest of various Christian communities in terms of the holidays they want to celebrate is always fascinating. Candy and bunnies for the celebration of Easter are available before Ash Wednesday even begins nowadays. Americans, likewise, cannot get enough of Christmas, as yuletide music and decorations begin making appearances at Halloween or even sooner. Christmas and Easter are simply holidays that are celebrated with great fanfare.

Most Christians in this country are usually shocked to find out that Christianity got along just fine for the first thousand years without Christmas being a major Church holiday. If you do not believe this, do a Google search sometime for artwork depicting Christmas or the Nativity scene. You will find very little Christian art from the 1st Millenium of Christianity that depicts the events associated with the birth of Jesus in the traditional Christmas story. The "Christ mass" existed, but the Feast of the Annunciation to Mary was the major holiday concerning the coming of Jesus that captured the celebratory hearts and minds of Christian liturgy and artwork for the first thousand years. Not until Saint Francis of Assisi largely invented the traditional "manger scene" around the year 1200 did Christmas really become a holiday of any central, cultural, or theological importance in the West.

Other important holidays of the Christian year languish away in obscurity or are forgotten completely. For instance, today is the 40th Day after Easter Sunday which commemorates the Ascension of Jesus into heaven after his earthly ministry, death, and resurrection. This holiday was, like the Annunciation, a relatively central holiday in the first millineum of Christianity. In the early centuries, Ascension Day was celebrated with a parade around town, symbolizing Jesus' journey to the Mount of Olives before his Ascension. Afterwards, there would be town fairs and grand feasting.

Ascension Day has sadly fallen into disuse in most churches today or has at least been pushed to the margins. Most churches that do recognize it will celebrate the day on the Sunday after Ascension Day, and then usually only as an afterthought. Ascension Day has been largely forgotten or glossed over for various reasons by many Christian communities, not the least of which being outright institutional embarrassment in some denominations. The idea of the Church celebrating a holiday commemorating Jesus ascending into the clouds is believed by some to be hard for many modern people in the scientific age to swallow. The bible does relate the story; and, thus, many denominations do not want to purge the day or the concept entirely.

This attitude begs the question of how the Ascension of Jesus is any less believable than the ideas of God becoming Incarnate or the very Resurrection itself. Our society still loves to annually put Jesus back in the manger scene at Christmas or drag him through the brutalities of Holy Week. And yet, somehow, the gift to us of the story of the Ascension embarrasses "modern" sensibilities. Before we look down our noses at the notion of the Ascension as some leftover vestige of the Dark Ages, perhaps we should allow Ascension Day to challenge our worldview. While most modern people no longer believe in heaven above and hell beneath us, perhaps Ascension Day reminds us that our modern and scientifically accurate one-dimensional universe has impoverished us for if God can not even ascend to something higher, how can the fragile hopes and dreams that we have for ourselves and our children ever possibly aspire to anything better or higher than the flat reality in which we dwell?

Comments

TLF+ said…
Beautiful thoughts and so awesome to have TWO Anglican blogs now laboring to lift the horizontal Plains heavenward.
5/13/2010 10:22 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts on the 'Connecticut 6'

For some weeks, I have had several friends (mostly non-Episcopalians surprisingly) wanting me to voice an opinion on this Connecticut 6 (sounds like a fleabag motel) business. If you are unfamiliar with this fiasco, for lack of a better term, let me describe it as best as I understand it. There is so much spin going on (from both sides I might add) that I have been having trouble discerning fact from fiction. As I understand the situation, the Rt. Rev. Andrew Smith is the Bishop of Connecticut. Well, at least he has a pointy hat, I do not think he is particularly acting like one. Likewise, as I understand, there are Six rectors of churches (at least they have collars, but likewise are not acting like it) that have applied for DEPO oversight (i.e. another Bishop to oversee them.) The best way I know how to describe the hoohah is as follows: The Feloniously Rev. Smith is trying to defrock the Superciliously Reverend Rectors. Darth Smith claims they have abandoned communion and has shadil...
Read more

My board gaming journey, pt. I

Image
     Something a bit different today than my normal reflections. I thought I would delve a little bit more into a topic that is not necessarily theological in nature. I am a real person, and not some ethereal doctor in an ivory tower who gets to smoke a pipe and contemplate the infinite mysteries all day. So, today, I thought I would delve into one of my personal hobbies: board gaming.      Now, do not tune me out because you hear "board gaming" and immediately default in your brain to your brother overturning a table with Monopoly money flying everywhere because the game has gone on for hours and overturning the table was the only option left other than murder. Most people, including myself at one time, thought of board games as those boring or frustrating games that seem stuck in 1952. You know the usual suspects: Clue!, Monopoly, Scrabble, Chess, maybe even more saccharine games like Life or Candy Land, i.e. those games that everyone owned at some p...
Read more

The History of the Football helmet

Image
NCAA.com put out an interesting editorial about the evolution of the football helmet that can be found here . This is in part due in my estimation to the current buzz (one might go so far as to describe it as hysteria) about concussions in contact sports, particularly football. I have always found this an interesting evolution. Long gone are the days of strapping on your leather helmet: In the 50's and 60's, the helmet evolved into, basically becoming a metal then hard plastic version of the leather helmet with the addition of a rudimentary face mask (which was really just a bar at first): Gradually, the helmet's face mask itself began to evolve: Combines with new space age style lightweight plastics and foams, the helmet mask ultimately became a type of full, goalie style face mask (This little number costs just under $1000 to purchase new): Ironically, being a military history major, the football helmet evolution followed the pattern of design that helmets worn...
Read more