When I meet with engaged couples in preparation for their wedding day, I often share Wendell Berry’s words about marriage from one of his beautiful essays. He says in marriage we must understand that we’re not just joining ourselves to another; “We can join one another only by joining the unknown…What you alone think it ought to be, it is not going to be. Where you alone think you want it to go, it is not going to go. It is going where the two of you—and marriage, time, life, history and the world—will take it. You do not know the road; you have committed your life to a way.”¹

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We pick up this Pentecost story not in Acts, with tongues of fire, but centuries earlier, at an inflection point during the Exodus.

In celebrating the final Sunday of Eastertide as Ascension Sunday, our attention is drawn to Christ’s leaving—as Luke tells us he was lifted into heaven on the mountaintop before the disciples and other followers in what must have been quite the scene.