Isn’t the war in Ukraine terrible?
Which brings me neatly to Ascension Day. Happy Day after Ascension Day everybody! Yes, Jesus has gone up into space on a rocket propelled cloud and is well into inter-stellar space by now.
And to anyone who thinks I just bolted on the war in Ukraine as a feeble excuse pretending to talk about the news, I’ll remind you that it was Ascension Day in Ukraine too (except the heretical Orthodox sect who don’t celebrate it ’till June 2).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MzLa1yyLYCqoqTpGKtrV6IP_r0B2BSEB/view?usp=sharing
Platitude of the Day 
I love Ascension Day.
And marked with a corker, a contradiction striking even for the slot. And not an iota of awareness of it.
Part 1: Uncertainty and unprecitabilty are part and parcel of being human. We have to learn to live with them.
Part 2: Here’s what we Christians do when faced with uncertainty. We deny it. We stick our fingers in our ears and say,”Jesus is coming back,” over and over again.
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A presumably otherwise quite well-educated grown adult talking about the ‘Ascension’ as if it were a real event.
Zeus help us.
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I’ve heard contemporary clergy attempting re-interpretation of scriptural episodes from the BBOMS. in attempts to make them seem less fantastic. But so far… nothing on the Ascension; not even from the Bishop this morning. It remains that absurd Cape Canaveral image of Jesus the Jet Rocket. Pity the poor RCs, then, who have doubled the credibility jeopardy by embracing the Ascension of the Virgin Mary too – as if there was not enough bonkers weirdness in the BBOMS already without making up more.
Bishop North’s gratuitous inclusion of the suffering in Ukraine, simply to comply with the TFTD format, was disgraceful. Despite his shoe-horning of his spurious link, there was no real faith perspective on that terrible conflict. But he got to talk about Jesus the Jet Rocket, so job done.
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A man on the radio this morning was telling a story that sounded similar to the ending of the Harry Potter series, but not as exciting. Apparently in his story this bloke, who’d been boringly just wandering round some desert towns telling a few stories and hardly doing any real magic, is killed by the baddies but comes back to life. Instead of then winning the important battles and taking over, he just goes to meet a few of his old mates and then decides he really does want to die, so ascends to a sort of nirvana-like place leaving all his mates with nothing, except the hope he might come back in the future. He never does. Hopeless. I had to turn off after a couple of minutes as it was just terrible fiction. No one is surely going to buy his book if that’s the “big ending”.
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It is always pretty distasteful when speakers on TftD make gratuitous reference to other people’s suffering in order to make some obscure theological point.
It’s worth recalling what Jesus the Jet Rocket is alleged to be doing once he’s reached escape velocity. He’s sitting at the right hand of the IMF, and from there he is going to judge the living and the dead, separate the goodies (those who believe and trust in him) from the baddies, and send the latter for due punishment. No ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ here; in the words put into his mouth in ‘Matthew’, he’s not going to bring us peace, but a sword. So just watch it.
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