Sermon
Ascension Sunday
Sunday, May 17, 2026
A few years back, I can’t remember how many, I tuned in to a fascinating interview on CBC radio. Some of you might remember Sheila Rogers, a gifted journalist with CBC for years. She had an interview program and at the time she was interviewing writers, authors of books that had been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in literature. Well, the interview that I heard was just fascinating. The author’s name was Christopher Dewdney.
In the book, the author bravely tackled the idea of time—time and the place of time in our lives. Time present, time past, and time future. It was a wonderful conversation that moved me to head out that same day to the bookstores in downtown Stratford, where I lived at the time, in search of a copy. I found and I bought one and I wasted no time getting down to read. The book is titled Soul of the World: Unlocking the Secrets of Time. Blending science and poetry, the book takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the elusive dimension of time—that thing that we live with that at times we hate and at times gets the better of us.
The chapter about time present begins with a story, a personal experience from the author’s life, and I share that with you right now.
The night was cool, too cool to stay outside for very long. Yet a slight mildness in the air pledged warmer evenings to come. In the twilight, I could make out the long rectangle of my lawn and a dark strip of earth where winter flower beds ran along the east fence towards the silhouette of the garage with its peak roof. Two stubborn patches of snow glowed whitely at its foot. Then something stirred, breathlessly close. Something gathered and clotted in the darkness near the top of the fence. It fluttered with an inky soft movement made eerily precise by its silence.
A bird had alighted. I couldn’t see it at first. I searched along the top rail of the fence, and there it was. I met the full intensity of its eyes before I could name it. An owl, a small one, perched on the top of the fence post less than 12 feet from where I stood. We stared at each other, both motionless—me in spellbound astonishment, and the owl broadcasting its hooded, imperious, and unblinking eye.
I wanted to get closer. I think I even had the naive idea that the owl might hop on my arm if I offered it. But after I had taken a few cautious steps, it rose up as soundlessly as it had arrived, floating up into the stars above the neighbor’s house and disappearing into the night. How marvelous. This mysterious bird had blessed my yard. That night, for one moment in time, the owl and I were aware of each other. We met in an enchanted encounter that ended too quickly for me. Something ancient had bonded us. Blood and miracle and twilight had combined in a single charged alchemy, and I had briefly been in the presence of magnificence, of night’s own beak and talons, out of darkness, out of the endlessly random permutations of time and place.
A wonder had occurred. Time had stood still. The owl with its moon-dial face had brushed its wing over the flow of time. For those few seconds, I had been completely in the moment, oblivious of future and past, my senses alive to the night, the owl, and the beating of my own heart. The next day, I got out my old set of vinyl transfer letters and stuck the word “owl” in one-inch tall letters on the top of the fence post. I wanted to fix the place where the owl had landed, and I wanted to memorialize that special moment in time. I had experienced a present so spellbinding it was as if an invisible door had opened onto eternity.
This past Thursday, the 40th day after Easter, was the feast of the Ascension of our Lord. You and I and all Christian people are at the end of the Easter season celebrating Jesus’ resurrection. We have read and heard about those earliest disciples and followers of Jesus—followers of the Way. However brief, they are snapshots in time. Imperfect by 21st-century reckoning and standards, but snapshots nonetheless. There was Mary Magdalene, a woman full of grit and emotion at the graveside. We met doubting Thomas, a man oh so much like you and like me. In the upper room, we had seen two disciples, one named Cleopas, and the stranger walking the dusty road to Emmaus as the sun was setting. They and others we have met in the gospels are more than names on a page, albeit pages in scripture. Like ourselves—like you and me—they too lived and breathed and struggled and loved. And now, all dead and in the past.
These ten days between the Ascension and the great feast of Pentecost, the 50th day after Easter, is an “in-between” time. It’s hard to get a handle on in some ways. Are we still in Eastertide or are we out of it? Trapped as we are by the world and the assumptions and the values of the 21st century, we might sigh and say, “Well, Easter is passed. Been there, done that,” and quickly move on to the next thing. Moving forward, after all, is the mantra of our age. Aren’t we always moving on to what is next on the calendar? What is next on our agenda?
It is like the conversation I overheard while traveling the subway from my home in downtown Cabbagetown in Toronto to my parish office at St. Luke, East York. The door opened in the car. One person got on, recognized a friend, and said, “Oh, how are you? By the way, are you going to Italy this summer?” “Oh, no,” was the answer. “We did Italy last year. This year, we’re doing Portugal.”
There’s much to gain by making time these days to look back, to reflect on where we have been, and to dream about where we might go. To be truthful, we walk through the scriptures and we walk through the liturgy so often with blinkers on, with our vision focused on what comes next. We miss so much. Like the disciples in the two accounts of the Ascension in today’s readings from Acts and Luke, both attributed to the same writer, our vision is often fixed in the wrong direction.
Yes, there are unpredictable and wonderful moments when scripture and liturgy do come alive—moments when both are far more than words and action. These moments happen with the breath of the gospel. When the breath of the gospel suddenly embraces us, it makes sense, and its focus and the message become as real as the owl in the story I just read. They are moments as if an invisible door does open onto eternity.
Now, those moments can and do come for each of us individually. And when they do, they really are highly personal. They speak directly to our lives, to our concerns, to what’s going on in our lives, and of course, to this world where we live. Ultimately, they come, I believe, for the good and for the building up of the community. The message of the gospel is undoubtedly addressed primarily to a community. Jesus came to a particular community, the Jewish people. As we heard at the beginning of Mass here, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God.”
Now, there is a personal dimension, of course, to scripture and to liturgy because if liturgy and scripture are part of our lives, we bring who we are, what is happening in our lives—we bring everything to the reading of scripture and to the celebration of the liturgy. But both scripture and liturgy belong to the community of faith. Both scripture and liturgy feed us. Both help us to grow in the faith in community.
As I reflect on these in-between days, I am thankful for God who embraces and who loves me and who loves you—warts and all, foibles and all, mistakes and all, good things, bad things. God doesn’t sweep them aside and say, “I want your soul.” God wants you. He wants me, and he loves you and he loves me, who we are, warts and all. We believe in a God who accepts and affirms humanity and all of its constituent parts: bones and flesh and mind and spirit. That’s the God we believe in as Christians. We believe in a God who accepts and affirms this beautiful world with all the havoc that we humans have inflicted upon it. For a faith that calls and challenges us to share in the building up of God’s kingdom in the here and now is a faith that is alive and is true, and is fed by scripture and fed by liturgy as well.
This past week, I’ve been wondering, why am I a Catholic Christian? There are streams in Christianity; why did I find my home in Catholic Christianity? It’s because Catholic Christianity embraces me—the whole of me. God just doesn’t want me inside my soul somewhere to be saved. He wants me totally to be saved and renewed, and to be the person that he wants me to be. Only Catholic Christianity holds that vision out for us, and only Catholic Christianity can bring us to the fullness of that eventually.
So, on these in-between days, trying to make sense of them—are we still in Easter? Are we past Easter?—as we strain forward and look to the feast of Pentecost, remember that God is with us, speaking to us in scripture, speaking to us in liturgy all the time, and speaking to us in community. So, we are not just a disparate group of people gathered this morning. We are the church. We are the body of Christ in this place.
And you know, if we hold on to that, if we seize it and if we make it ours individually and ours as a community, God will do great things—great things in empowering us to share with him in building up his kingdom, in bringing justice to this world, and in restoring all of creation as God would will it to be.
So, in the days ahead before we reach the feast of Pentecost, spend some time thinking in these in-between days about where we’ve been, the people we’ve met as we’ve recounted the resurrection of Jesus and the Ascension, and looking forward to the feast of Pentecost. May God bless you in your thinking and wondering, and may he bless us all so that his community, the church, may indeed be built. Amen.
Father Ted Hales