Good morning, today is Friday, May 22, 2020. My name is Keith and welcome to the Worship Daily from Green Acres Baptist Church in Athens, GA.

As we head into the weekend I want to help you think toward this coming Sunday. Yesterday, Thursday, was what has historically been called Ascension Day. But we, like many churches now, will celebrate this day on Ascension Sunday, this coming Sunday. The Ascension is a key piece of what we believe as a church and has a large impact on some of the underpinnings of our theology. I know most of us probably do not ever really think of the Ascension, and probably couldn’t really define it well if we had to right now. But, that is why we make use of some of these historic devotional tools, like a 50 day Eastertide season!

We are going to talk much more about this wonderful day on Sunday, but for today I wanted to get your minds heading in that direction by reading the account of Jesus’s ascension from Acts 1 and then playing an audio clip of Malcolm Guite reading a Sonnet he wrote for Ascension Day. As most of you know by now, Malcolm Guite’s poems have been very helpful for me devotionally, and it sounds like they have been impactful for many of you as well. So, this poem is taken from his book Sounding the Seasons.

Acts 1:6-11

Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

Malcom Guite says of this day, (original quote and Sonnet found here: https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/blog/)

In the mystery of the Ascension we reflect on the way in which, one sense Christ ‘leaves’ us and is taken away into Heaven, but in another sense he is given to us and to the world in a new and more universal way. He is no longer located only in one physical space to the exclusion of all others. He is in the Heaven which is at the heart of all things now and is universally accessible to all who call upon Him. And since His humanity is taken into Heaven, our humanity belongs there too, and is in a sense already there with him.”For you have died”, says St. Paul, “and your life is hidden with Christ in God”. In the Ascension Christ’s glory is at once revealed and concealed, and so is ours.  The sonnet form seemed to me one way to begin to tease these things out.

Ascension

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed .

Find this Sonnet and Malcolm Guite’s other work here: https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/a-sonnet-for-ascension-day-9/