Today the church celebrates one of our calendar-contingent feast days: The Feast of the Ascension.

Or, in German, Himmelfahrt (which is much more fun to say).

In Norwegian it’s Himmelfartsdag (even more fun to say).

But, I digress…

The Feast of the Ascension follows the Biblical pattern of 40, and finds itself a square 40 days after Easter. That Biblical pattern of 40 is meant to be a touchstone for those who pay attention.

40 days and 40 nights of the floating ark.
40 years of wandering for Israel.
40 days of temptation in the desert for Jesus.

This is not coincidence, Beloved, but rather a repeating tracer by Biblical writers to say, in a concise way, that 40 is “when you’re at your wit’s end” and you can’t take anymore.

When it comes to the Ascension, though, it’s flipped. The Biblical account notes that Jesus appeared to the disciples, and a few random folx, for 40 days and then exited stage left. It’s kind of like the Divine has “had enough.”

Why?

Because if Jesus had stuck around, the disciples never would have. We love to get attached to things and then depend on them for the hard lifting, right?

If Jesus had stuck around, the church would never learn to lean on one another (I mean…they’re still struggling to do that 2000 years later, right?).

Just like birds are kicking the chicks out of the nest in these May days, saying, “You’re made for this!” the Ascension is a way to explain that Jesus isn’t showing up in the same way anymore.

So you, Beloved, have to.

In fact: you’re made for this.

-art by Bagong Kussudiardja (Indonesian, 1928–2004), Ascension, 1983

Today the church honors 17th Century hymn writer and “Luther of the Slavs,” Juraj Tranovsky.

Tranovsky is heralded as the creator of Slovak hymnody. He studied at Wittenburg in 1607, and became a wandering educator, taking posts throughout Bohemia and Moravia.

Tranovsky was ordained in 1616, but soon toleration for Lutheranism in Bohemia came to an end, and he was imprisoned in 1624. The next year a plague came upon the world, and the following famine killed three of his children and caused the scattering of half of his congregation.

He was eventually called to a church in Liptov, Slovakia, and served there until his death in 1636 after a long illness. He was 46 years old.

He was a lover of poetry and a composer of many hymns, composing them in both Czech and Latin. His hymnal, the Cithara Sanctorum (Lyre of the Saints) appeared in 1636, and is the basis of Slovak Lutheran Hymnody to this day.

It is often forgotten that the Slovak tradition within Lutheranism continues even today, and has offered a great wealth of hymns, doctrinal distillations, and translations of important documents to the Lutheran movement throughout the ages.

We still sing, in the ELCA, one of his hymns to this day, ELW 602, “Your Heart, O God, is Grieved.”

With this lingering pandemic, and in the shadow of the killings in Uvalde and Buffalo and the massacres still happening, the words of the first stanza speak something to me today.

“O God, Father in heaven, have mercy upon us. Your heart, O God, is grieved, we know, by every evil, every woe; upon your cross your forsaken Son our death is laid, and peace is won.”

-historical notes from Pfatteicher’s “New Book of Festivals & Commemorations”