Luke 24: 44-53 (links validated 5/4/22)

New Resources

Illustrated Resources from the Archives

  • Ascension (B)(2000)

    by Ignacio Castuera
    ("Eddie Marderosian was a very smart young man who kept up with current events, knew a lot about astronomy and otherwise liked to shock my class and disrupt my teaching. Out of the blue, no pun intended, he asked, 'I wonder how far has Jesus traveled since the ...")
  • Bearing Witness on the Sidewalk

    by Theresa Cho
    ("At different times in the year, I put out sidewalk chalk in front of the church so that passersby can take a moment out of their busy day—walking their kids to school, running to catch the bus to work, or on their morning jog—to pause and write or draw a prayer for their family, friends, and community. It is incredible to see children, parents, and people in suits squatting on the ground with chalk in hand, taking the time to write a prayer as people walk by them...")
  • The Departed

    by Ann Dieterle
    My primary image of an ‘ascension’ occurs in an episode of “The Simpsons.” The family is outside having a barbecue and is surprised by a flying saucer. One by one they are lifted via beam of light into the alien craft, until they get to Homer. The patriarch, having eaten one too many hamburgers, actually drags the beam of light and UFO down until the determined aliens employ a second beam.
  • Christ's Power, Our Power

    by Kathy Donley
    Denise Levertov was a fascinating American poet of the last century who often wrote about faith. One of her poems about Jesus’ Ascension is called Suspended. She imagines trying to hold on to God’s garment. She writes I had grasped God's garment in the void but my hand slipped on the rich silk of it. The 'everlasting arms' my sister liked to remember must have upheld my leaden weight from falling, even so, for though I claw at empty air and feel nothing, no embrace, I have not plummeted.
  • Jesus the Lord

    by Frank Fisher, Obl. OSB
    ("To Luke, the physician; the chronicler of the Great Physician. Greetings and many blessings to you, my brother in the faith. Tell all my sisters and brothers I, Peter, also send them greetings in the name of Jesus the Christ. You can't imagine my delight at hearing from you Luke...")
  • The Body of Christ on Earth

    by Sil Galvan
    In 1921, Lewis Lawes became the warden at Sing Sing Prison. No prison was tougher than Sing Sing during that time. But when Warden Lawes retired some 20 years later, that prison had become a humanitarian institution. Those who studied the system said credit for the change belonged to Lawes. But when he was asked about the transformation, he said: "I owe it all to my wonderful wife, Catherine, who is buried outside the prison walls." Catherine Lawes was a young mother with three small children when her husband became the warden. Everybody warned her from the beginning that she should never set foot inside the prison walls, but that didn't stop Catherine! When the first prison basketball game was held, she went ... walking into the gym with her three beautiful kids, and she sat in the stands with the inmates. Her attitude was: "My husband and I are going to take care of these men and I believe they will take care of me! I don't have to worry!"
  • Ascension (C)(2019)

    by Teri McDowell Ott
    At a recent conference of college chaplains, a colleague coyly asked, “OK, who’s your spiritual boyfriend or girlfriend?” I confessed that mine is Christian Wiman. The poet, who describes himself as someone who is both “confused and certain about the source of life and consciousness,” has come to mean a great deal to me. In the preface to his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Wiman writes that as he set out to answer the question of what he believes, he came to realize “that the real question—the real difficulty—is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being? What might it mean for your life—and your death—to acknowledge that insistent, persistent ghost?” In his essay “Love Bade Me Welcome,” Wiman writes about receiving his diagnosis of incurable cancer on his 39th birthday. He’d been married less than a year. The news eventually led Wiman and his wife back to church, an hour a week that he describes as both “excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open,” and “profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm.”...
  • A Third Way

    by Larry Patten
    ("In the holy fiction of the Bible, I'm grateful for the Acts-only arrival of 'two men in white robes'. Their question was relevant 2,000 years ago and today: 'Why do you stand looking toward heaven?' Which is to say, get going, get to work. Don't waste your time judging others, but embrace each day as a time to create heaven on earth...")
  • The Blessing

    by John Ewing Roberts
    ("The title poem of Shel Silverstein's book Falling Up, is all about a child who soars and whose world is turned upside down with a disturbing result: I tripped on my shoelace And I fell up - Up to the roof tops, Up over the town, Up past the tree tops, Up over the mountains..." and other quotes)
  • Everything That Rises Must Converge

    by Nancy Rockwell
    Everything That Rises Must Converge. Flannery O’Connor, writer of stories of grace and the Spirit, took Teihard’s rule as the title for a book of short stories, and for one story in particular, a tale in which a mother and her grown son, he a struggling college graduate with enlightened sensibilities and she a believing woman of old fashioned prejudices who wants to take a yoga class and asks him to accompany her on the trip because of her racial fears...
  • "Don't Get into Things!"

    Sermon Starter by Leonard Sweet
    ("Every day we live in these soon-to-be teenage years of the 21st century, we use skills that would befuddle previous generations. Driving computers masquerading as cars. Using microwave ovens. Functioning simultaneously in different time zones all across the world. Understanding how events in Pakistan tonight will give our world a different tomorrow...")
  • The Four Words that Tell What It Means to Be a Christian

    Sermon Starter by Leonard Sweet
    ("Every day we live in these soon-to-be teenage years of the 21st century, we use skills that would befuddle previous generations. Driving computers masquerading as cars. Using microwave ovens. Functioning simultaneously in different time zones all across the world. Understanding how events in Pakistan tonight will give our world a different tomorrow...")
  • Why We Are Blessed

    by Keith Wagner
    ("When Arundel Bell was a young student at St. Michael's School in Dallas, Texas, her teacher noticed her reading skills were lower than her peers. She had difficulty pronouncing words. Her teacher had her tested and she was diagnosed with dyslexia. She was discouraged with the news but since she was a high achiever she was determined to overcome her disability. With the help of tutors she was able to increase her reading skills and began to develop a love for reading..." and other illustrations)
  • How to Be a Disciple

    by Dallas Willard
    ("As Christ's apprentices, we are personally interacting with him as we do our job, and he is with us, as he promised, to teach us how to do it best. Few have illustrated this better than Kirby Puckett, for 13 years center fielder for the Minnesota Twins baseball team. He had a career batting average of .318, made the All-Star lineup ten years in a row, and won six Golden Gloves for defensive play...")
  • Above and Beyond

    by Lawrence Wood
    ("Carl VandeGiessen, in his horn-rimmed spectacles and red tennis shoes, remains vivid in my mind. Ten years ago he lost his wife, Ruth, after her long battle with Alzheimer's. Carl had sat at her bedside every day, even in the long years when she hadn't known him...")
  • Breaking the Grid

    by David Zersen
    The second example is from a newer window in the chancel of St. Martin in the Fields at Trafalgar Square in London. In the bombing of 1940, a stained glass window in the chancel wall was destroyed. It was a Victorian, multi-colored, realistic, biblical image that allowed one to “see” with the mind’s eye “exactly” how the original setting may have looked. When the bomb fell and the window was destroyed, 7000 people were packed in the cellar and many met their dead end. The new window would have to say something about new-beginnings, about the post-WWII world into which Jesus was sending his followers. Twenty-five artists submitted proposals and the one chosen was done by an Iranian woman, Shirazeh Houshiary. The window is now clear glass with leaded divisions indicating the shape of the cross, symbolizing Jesus, and a burst, a rounded space at the crossbeam encouraging the viewer to look through, if not beyond, the window! It is a “God shaped hole,” some have said, a challenge to one who asks about the meaning of the ascension in a secular world. The new window introduces light, wonder, contemplation, encouragement. The new window does not give the details of a realistic, Victorian setting, but rather it helps to grasp a new insight. Jesus, who left us, is encouraging us not to get lost in the details of past experiences. He wants to show us that he has broken the grid, the framework that locks in the rigidities of past misunderstandings, foibles and failures. We are invited to enter with him into a new and open wide world in which love and service will allow us to embrace brothers and sisters everywhere. We are not left behind so much as we are thrust forward into a new world in which “repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations.”...
  • The Future Promises Blessings

    by David Zersen
    On an episode with the master interviewer, Charlie Rose, Jim Lehrer of the PBS News Hour is asked to talk about his latest in a string of many novels he has written. This one details his fantasies as a boy growing up in Kansas where the Superchief train would come roaring by on its way from Chicago to San Francisco, never, of course, stopping in any of the small Kansas towns where Lehrer grew up...
  • Wait!

    by Samuel Zumwalt
    Marva Dawn wrote a book entitled A Royal Waste of Time. Dawn challenged many assumptions about using entertainment in worship as an evangelical tool. Rather Dawn proposed that worship should be '...a cascade into the ever-flowing surprises of encounters with the immensity of God's magnificence and sublimity and radiance'...

Other Resources from 2022

Other Resources from 2018 to 2020

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Other Resources from 2006 to 2012

Other Resources from 2001 to 2005

Other Resources from the Archives

Children's Resources and Dramas

Recursos en Español

Currently Unavailable

  • The Ascension of Jesus

    by Ronald Curley
  • Up!

    by Lane Denson
  • La Ascensión del Señor

    por Bp. Joseph Madera, M.Sp.S.
  • Ascension

    by Daniel Meynen
  • La Ascensión de Nuestro Señor

    por Heydi Tatiana Galarza Mendoza
  • Ascension

    by John Donohue, SJ
  • Ascension (B)(2021)

    by Tim Suttle
    In 1906 Sir Francis Galton was visiting a county fair along with the great hoards of unwashed, uneducated, and unrefined people. He encountered a diverse group of farmers, families, merchants, adults, kids, city-folk, and country-bumpkins of all shapes and sizes. There was a booth, where for 6-pence one could enter a contest to guess-the-weight of an ox they had tied up. Organizers would butcher the ox, weigh it, and award prizes to the closest guessers. Somewhere around 800 people entered guesses, which were tallied, and the winners awarded their prizes. Galton watched this happen, and since he was the world’s leading statistics-nerd he asked the organizers if he could have the slips of paper in order to run statistical analysis on the guesses. Galton was just sure that these unexceptional people wouldn’t have a clue, and in a way he was right. Nobody guessed the exact weight of the ox. What he found, however, was more interesting than one good guess: The mean (average guess) was: 1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the ox was: 1,198 pounds. No one person came very close, but the average of the entire group was off by less than a pound. The obvious conclusion was that the group taken as a whole was smarter than any one individual. Although this controverted Galton’s assumptions about humanity, he published his results anyway. Over the years this phenomenon has been tested time and again, and it always comes true. Ask a group of people to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar and no one person will get it right, but the group will come very close. With a big enough group, they’ll be spot on. This phenomenon is how Google became Google...