2025 Jun 1 SUN: ASCENSION OF THE LORD S (Seventh Sunday of Easter)
Acts 1: 1-11/ Ps 47: 2-3. 6-7. 8-9 (6)/ Heb 9: 24-28; 10: 19-23/ Lk 24: 46-53

As I mentioned last week, I am intending to concentrate through the 15th of June on God the Holy Spirit. 

And we have another help today in the passage from the letter to the Hebrews. He is asking us to imagine the heavenly sanctuary itself, which of course is beyond imagining. I know it exists. It is the proper place for the blessed Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We are to picture God the Son returning to that heavenly sanctuary with His own blood offered in sacrifice for the salvation of all of us. And we are called to understand the difference between offering sacrifices over and over, as opposed to the one great sacrifice which is effective for all of us for all time.

And we understand that once the Son of God has returned to that heavenly sanctuary, He does send power from on high, and this is God the Holy Spirit. I mentioned last week that I think of the Holy Spirit in terms of what you and I experience as we get to know one another and seek to live together according to the love of God. We know that we can put two people together and they can feel very isolated from one another. They can also feel hostile to each other, but the Holy Spirit is in our midst and that Spirit allows us to become friends, to appreciate and love one another.

We understand that the Holy Spirit comes to form the body of Christ here and now in our earthly existence. Today we have also been given two accounts of Jesus' ascension, one from the end of Luke, the other from the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. And we understand that we are in fact to be the body of Christ here and now following the Apostles. And of course next week we celebrate that strange and beautiful event in which there's a mighty wind and tongues of flame and the ability to communicate across barriers.

This is what we seek to receive and to exercise. This is the gift won for us through the death and resurrection of Jesus in his breaking of the power of evil, in his giving us an invincible power, the power of love.