It is possible to attend in person or on Zoom. Service is recorded and available on YouTube

Zoom Link from Fr Neil

Image: The Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Moscow School, 16th century, tempera on wood panel. Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art


Please join us in person at St George's on online (via the Zoom link above), at 7pm, 13thThursday May for our Ascension Day service. Lindsay Fulcher is preaching, Fr Neil is the Celebrant and Andrew Wells and the choir will provide the music:
Prelude: In Paradisum; Dubois
Introit: Hail the day that sees him rise
Offertory: Alleluya, sing to Jesus
Communion: Chorale-Prelude on ‘Vater unser’, BWV 636; Bach, Laudate Dominum; Taize
Recessional:Crown him with many crowns
Postlude:Chorale-Prelude on ‘Heut’ triumphiret Gottes Sohn’, BWV 630; Bach

Ascension Day
At the Ascension, we ‘celebrate’ Jesus' disappearance. At Easter we celebrated the appearances of the Risen Lord to the disciples. And now we celebrate that they ceased. Jesus withdraws and is seen no more. In fact, as Timothy Radcliffe OP notes, the whole long history of salvation throughout scripture has been of God's slow disappearance. At the beginning, God walks in 'the cool of the day' in the garden, just like one of us after a hard day at work. But God comes to Abraham and Sarah in fire and smoke in the night, and then as three mysterious strangers needing food. He wrestles with Jacob. By the time we get to Moses, we have only a voice from a burning bush, and unbearable visions on the mountain. Then with the establishment of the Kingdom of David, God is seen no more. He speaks through the voices of the prophets. Finally, he appears in an ordinary man who dies on a cross and shouts out, 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' At Ascension he disappears altogether.

But this is so that we may become more intimate. We lose God as over against us, a powerful stranger, the great big boss who runs the universe, so that we can discover him at the very heart of our existence. As Augustine famously said, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.
Fr James Heard