Ascension Day Year C 2025

One of my favorite hymns is Hail thee, festival day! It is fun, a little silly, so complicated it doesn’t work very well for congregational singing, and it just makes me smile. It has a repeating refrain, but then the verses go back and forth between two entirely different tunes and rhythms. On top of that, the text is an older English translation of the Latin salve festa dies, so singing it makes me feel posh. If you have sung Hail thee, festival day!, you most likely did so on Easter. But there are three different versions of Hail thee, festival day! in our hymnal: one for Easter, one for Pentecost, and one for Ascension Day. Before I went to seminary, I had only sung it on Easter, not knowing about the other versions, so imagine my delight when I arrived to chapel on Ascension Day, which, due to its place in the calendar 40 days after Easter (and 10 days before Pentecost), always places it on a Thursday, to begin with the familiar strains of Ralph Vaughan Williams echoing through the chapel. All three versions of Hail thee, festival day! have different lyrics (and different numbers of verses) with the exception of the declaration at the beginning of the hymn: Hail thee, festival day! / blest day that art hallowed forever.

Because of the 40-day period between Easter Day and Ascension Day, its Thursday location means that most Episcopalians don’t get a chance to celebrate this Principal Feast. Principal Feasts are the most important days in the church year. There are only seven of them, three of which always are on Sundays anyway - Easter Day, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. All Saints Day is always transferred to the following Sunday . Christmas Day seems so obvious to take over a Sunday that it feels almost silly to point it out, and the Epiphany links so well to Christmas that it feels natural too. Which leaves Ascension Day all on its lonesome.

Which is why this year, we’re giving Ascension Day its due. As you hear today, there are great Ascension Day hymns, not just Hail thee, festival day!, which we are taking the opportunity to sing. We speak of the ascension every week in the Nicene Creed when we say, “he ascended into heaven / and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”

For Ascension Day, we get two different tellings of the same story. Luke and Acts are written by the same author, so we get the story in two settings, but written by the same person. Both are dedicated to the same Theophilus, and Acts begins by referring back to what the author wrote “in the first book”. If you look in a commentary on the entire New Testament, Luke and Acts are addressed one right after the other, pushing the Gospel of John later. It is stated  as a fact at the beginning of my favorite New Testament commentary’s analysis on Acts that Luke-Acts constitutes one book in two volumes.

Most sermons I’ve heard on the ascension focus on the account from Acts and the words of the angels in Acts: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up to heaven?” Which seems like a ridiculous question. I wonder if Peter’s response is omitted from the text, where I imagine him saying something like, “Did you not see that? A man, who was crucified and then resurrected, was just assumed into heaven. Where else should we be looking?!”

But, the angels’ question makes sense since Acts begins with an urging to go into the world. That’s what the entirety of Acts is about! And the most common take on that text is to ask congregations the same question: why do you stand looking up to heaven? And continues by encouraging us to go into the world and make disciples of all nations. The reading from Acts would pair better with the end of the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus instructs the disciples to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

The disciples in the Gospel of Luke have a different response to Jesus’ ascension. “They worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” (24:52-53) Some ancient manuscripts end the Gospel of Luke with amen, which can translate to “let it be so”. So this appears to be an example of Luke using the actions of the disciples to instruct his readers with a positive example of what we ought to do.

Upon first glance, it could seem like Luke is contradicting himself. He just got done talking about the disciples being constantly in the temple in his Gospel, but our next encounter with those same disciples in Acts is cautioning against spending all of our time looking up to heaven. But Luke wouldn’t have seen it that way. Luke and Acts, although with the same author, had two different purposes. Rather than having to choose “either/or” this is instead a “both/and”. The precipitating event - Jesus’ ascension - is the same in each account, but what it precipitates is different.

By reading these two accounts together, we receive two invitations: to praise God, and to be God’s hands in the world. The disciples are placed in two different situations for the ascension, which require two different responses. The linchpin of the story, the part that is the same in both, is the ascension of Jesus. These different situations surrounding Jesus’ ascension give us ways in which we can respond to Jesus’ new situation in relation to us and to the world.

For, if we spend all of our time in prayer, we can forget that prayer is only part of what we are called to do. It can close us off to the transformative power of prayer in our lives to bring us closer and closer to the people God knows we can be. In the words of Pope Francis, “You pray for the hungry, then you feed them. That’s how prayer works.” Prayer is an action in more ways than one.

But conversely, if we spend all of our time in actions, we can forget from where our deeds of care stem, and our works can become about us, not about God. Or, we can burn out from relying on ourselves, forgetting to return to God as our source of strength and renewal.

Luke calls us today to both. To be continually in the temple blessing God and to go into the world, refraining from spending all of our time looking up to heaven. And the center of either one of those actions, to our rest and to our activity, to our joy and to our awe, is our crucified, risen, and ascended Lord. “Hail thee, festival day! / blest day that art hallowed forever, / day when the Christ ascends, / high in the heavens to reign.” Let it be so. Amen.