The Rev. Brandon C. Ashcraft
Trinity Church in the City of Boston
Acts 1:6-14
The Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day (May 17, 2026)
Rethinking Heaven
“Joyful” is not a word I would normally use to describe a conversation about death. Yet two weeks ago, I was walking past the room where an Adult Forum was underway entitled, “Death, Dying and Other Conversations We Don’t Want to Have.” I couldn’t hear anything that was being said, though, because all I could hear was laughter. Perhaps the hysterics could be explained by the comedic genius of the presenters, my colleagues Kit Lonergan and Paige Fisher! But I’ve come to the conclusion that a room full of joyful Christians, laughing as they talk about death, isn’t really all that strange. After all, we are Easter people, emboldened to confront the truth of our mortality by the hopeful promise of resurrection. At the heart of this Easter season is the audacious Christian claim that Jesus Christ has conquered death forever. That God’s love is stronger than death.
And it’s not simply that life continues unchanged when we die. The Church proclaims something more hopeful than that, which is that in death, life is changed, not ended.1 This language recalls the Proper Preface for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist at a service for the dead in the Book of Common Prayer (p.382): “For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended; and when our mortal body lies in death, there is prepared for us a dwelling place eternal in the heavens.” That our departure from this life gives way to new life. And yet, anyone who has grieved knows how difficult it can be to believe this. The pain of losing a loved-one is so profound, their absence so immense, it becomes hard to imagine how they could still be present to us. But today, we heard a story that invites us to see more clearly how absence is not always the same thing as loss. For in his ascension to the Father’s right hand, Jesus goes away from his disciples, only to come closer to them.
Jesus makes his departure forty days after his resurrection, which is why this past Thursday, on the fortieth day of Easter,2The reference to 40 days does not appear in the passage appointed for this day, but a few verses before today’s passage begins, it reads: “After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” (Acts 1:3, NRSVUE) the Church marked the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ and continues that celebration today.3Ascension Day is one of the seven principal feasts of the Church Year. The proper name of the following Sunday’s commemoration is “The Seventh Sunday of Easter: The Sunday after Ascension Day,” and the liturgy nods to the Ascension, primarily in the Collect of the Day, the Proper Preface for the Eucharist, and in the case of Trinity’s celebration, in the hymns and Communion anthem. As we heard in today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus is “lifted up” before the disciples, while “a cloud [takes] him out of their sight.”4Acts 1:9 (NRSVUE) And there they stand: staring upward into the sky. Trying to comprehend what they have just witnessed. Trying to understand what it means to lose Jesus again.
Because surely, given the option, they would have chosen to keep the risen Jesus exactly as they had come to know him. The Risen Jesus who walked alongside them on the road to Emmaus, who broke open the scriptures and gathered them around a dinner table.5Luke 24:13-35 The Risen Jesus who appeared to them on the beach while they were fishing and invited them to share a fish breakfast.6John 21:1-14 And yet, the strange mystery at the heart of the Ascension is that Jesus’ departure is necessary, because a new chapter in the story is beginning. Indeed, Jesus’ ascension is so important, so essential to the Christian faith, that we confess it each Sunday in the words of the Nicene Creed. Each week, we proclaim that the God who humbled himself to take on our human nature has also exalted our human nature to the right hand of God. Christ descended to bring God to humanity and ascended to bring humanity to God. The mystery we encounter in the Ascension is not that Jesus leaves us. The mystery is that Jesus, who we can no longer see, is not really gone from us at all.
But to the stunned disciples standing beneath that cloud, this mystery was impossible to grasp. It’s no surprise that men in white robes have to draw the disciples’ gaze back down to the earth. In that moment, they cannot yet see where the story is going, or how it will end. And perhaps that’s why today is such a fitting Sunday to bless our graduating high school seniors and their parents. Because like those disciples, they also stand before a future they cannot fully see. A future filled with possibility, but also uncertainty. Again and again, this life of faith calls us to keep moving forward without seeing the whole picture. To step into an unknown future, and to trust God’s promises, before we know where the road will lead.
As the disciples stare upward, watching Jesus disappear, it would be easy for us to assume that a great distance now exists between them. That because Jesus has ascended into heaven, he must now be far away. But the Ascension challenges that very assumption, inviting us to reconsider what we think we know about heaven. We tend to think about heaven in terms of its location, and the one thing we often presume about heaven is that, wherever it is, it’s a long way from earth. Perhaps even the opposite of earth. And artists throughout the centuries have only reinforced this idea. Almost every artistic depiction of the Ascension shows Jesus going “up” to heaven, including the stained-glass window in our south transept.7These three windows, made by the Eugène Oudinot studio of Paris, depict scenes of the Resurrection, the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, and the day of Pentecost. And of course, this imagery comes directly from the language of scripture itself. But over time, we’ve come to interpret that upward movement too narrowly. As though heaven were simply a distant place, somewhere beyond the clouds. So the Ascension then becomes an event that creates distance between Jesus and his followers; distance between Jesus and us.
But scripture points to a very different reality, describing heaven and earth not as distant from each other, but as deeply connected. The biblical story ends not with souls escaping earth for heaven, but with “the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,” as heaven and earth are finally joined together.8Revelation 21:2 (NRSVUE) Heaven and earth, thanks be to God, are not two distant places separated by an enormous chasm. Heaven and earth are two dimensions of God’s good creation: distinct, and yet mysteriously intertwined. In his earthly ministry, Jesus walked among particular people, in particular places, at particular moments in time. But through his ascension, Christ’s presence is no longer limited in that way. And if heaven and earth are destined to be joined together, then the Ascension becomes not a cause for sadness, but for joy. In the Ascension, Jesus goes away, only to come closer. 9Inspiration for the commentary about the relationship between heaven and earth is taken from N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
None of this is easy to believe. It’s hard to trust the presence of a God we cannot see. It’s hard enough to believe in heaven, much less a heaven mysteriously intertwined with earth! All of this is difficult to believe in a world that trains us to be suspicious of anything we cannot prove. We would much rather see the whole picture before we step into the unknown. And in that way, we are no different from our ancestors in the faith. For the disciples, too, had to step forward without seeing the whole picture. And yet, in the end, they brought their gaze back down to earth. They returned to that upper room to pray and entrusted themselves to a future they could not yet see. And we too, in this life of faith, are called to trust what we cannot see. To embrace the story of a God who has transformed forever the way we understand absence, death, and heaven itself. Because Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead, we can indeed be so bold as to laugh in the face of death. And because he has ascended to the Father’s right hand, we can trust that heaven and earth are never far apart. Amen.