The message is loud and clear: there is no summer vacation when it comes to grafting new members into the Body of Christ.

It is the lifelong unlearning of existential scorekeeping—modeled after our God who delights not in ticking off the boxes of how we each have erred—and good friends, each of us has erred magnificently at some point despite our best attempts—but in recalling us to God’s nature from the beginning steeped in yada—the intimacy of knowing and loving our God; our God who knows us, and loves us anyways.

God takes up another approach to restore creation’s blessing and chooses one people to reveal what was and remains intended for all people. See, God calls Israel into being to bring the message of salvation to the rest of the world. God blesses Israel in order that Israel would become a blessing, and by Israel’s blessing, the whole world would be blessed and restored to its original goodness …

One of the twelve leans against the wall and rolls between his fingers a Cadbury egg’s foil wrapper left in the pocket of his suit pants. And in this room stuffy with humans and fear, grief and ambivalence, he searches the week’s events for meaning …

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.

Unfortunately, the first apostles get very little ink in scripture . . . very little portrayal in our iconography, and very little focus theologically in our academies. The first apostles were mothers.

Whether we want Jesus to note where we are located at any given moment is another thing altogether; it reminds me of when we might have called our parents on a Saturday night, trying to hush down the background noises while we were on the phone, the noise indicating that we were at the place we were specifically told not to go.

Jesus learns of all this carrying on, and he seeks out the man he gave sight. Note this reversal: Jesus seeking … Jesus pursuing … Jesus making appeal, rather than the other way around.

This simple act of invitation is revolutionary to say this to another person, to stay with me. There is space for you here. Sit at my table, be part of our lives. This is not small. That is straight up resistance to what is out there. It is healing. That is the beginning of resurrection. So they invite Jesus in and Jesus stays, and as this stranger to them sits at the table, something happens.