The Ascension Martini (His & Hers) | Holy Day Cocktails

Paul’s Recipe

• 2 oz Dry Gin
• .5 oz St. Germain
• .5 oz Lillet Blanc
• 2 dashes Orange Bitters
• Garnish with a Lemon Twist

Stir all ingredients with ice in a mixing glass. Strain into a martini glass. Garnish with lemon twist.

Amanda’s Recipe

• 4 oz Champagne
• .5 oz St. Germain
• Splash of Lemon Juice
• Garnish with a Raspberry

Add St Germain and Lemon Juice to a martini or coupe glass. Stir a little to combine. Then add champagne on top, plopping the raspberry in it.

* * * *

We are still in Easter, and yesterday was the Christian Holy Day celebrating the Ascension of Christ, a fascinating event whose theological implications continue to be explored (here’s a great book on it). It is complex, elusive, beautiful, and bright. So here are two cocktails in that same vein for you to enjoy!

I originally made my version, which has depth, character, and complexity. My wife wasn’t a huge fan so she made her own, which is bright, sweet, and fun. Hers is very delightful and playful while mine is a little more “serious”.

So pick your drink and let your glass rise as Christ himself did!

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Resurrection Punch | An Easter Cocktail

Recipe

• 2.5 oz Easter Honey Rum (or any Gold Rum)
• 1 oz Lemon Juice
• 1 oz Passion Fruit Syrup
• .5 oz Cinnamon Syrup
• .5 oz Apricot Liqueur
• .5 oz Velvet Falernum
• 1 dash Angostura Bitters
• Top with Sparkling Water or Champagne

Scale this punch recipe as needed. Combine ingredients (minus the sparkling) without ice and let chill. When ready to drink, pour over large ice in a bowl or crushed ice in a collins glass. Top with bubbles. If you can’t chill it ahead of time, shake everything (minus sparkling) with just enough ice to chill and not dilute. Strain into glass with crushed ice and top with bubbles. Add a straw and garnish with a cherry.

View other Holy Day cocktails.

* * * *

It’s Easter! And to remind us that this is a season and not just a day, I’m giving you your Easter cocktail a few days in. Easter is the height of joy and celebration in the Christian Calendar, where Christians are invited–nay, expected–to be as extra as possible, with laughter, singing, hope, and yes, good food and drink.

To that end, I give you this tiki rum punch for this glorious season. And it is a delight. You can have it solo or with friends. It is sweet, floral, fruity, vibrant, bubbly, and bright.

For the base, I use a heavy pour of our Easter Honey Rum. I also knew I wanted to use Passion Fruit Syrup to remind us how Easter is literally the “fruit” of Jesus’ “passion”.

Cinnamon, Falernum, and the Angostura give the drink character and backbone; they are spicy and dark ingredients made sweet and bright here. This makes me think of the fires of hell, now quenched and by Jesus’ overpowering light and life.

Apricot is also a more biblical choice than you may think. Many scholars agree that Eden’s Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was based on an Apricot tree, not an Apple tree. So this drink tries to capture how death came through one tree, but life through another.

Easter Honey Rum (Recipe)

Recipe

• 1 bottle of Gold Rum (or 12oz in a mason jar if you’re doing a half batch)
• 200g/7oz of Honeycomb, crushed (or half that for the smaller batch)

Crush the honeycomb and add to container with rum. Let sit in a cool, dark place, “buried” for three days (get it?). Put the rum through a coffee filter or cheese cloth into its permanent container. Enjoy the heck out of it. It’s like candy.

* * * *

It’s Easter! He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Easter is a season, not just a day, so your “official” Easter cocktail is coming in the next couple of days. But today, I’m posting the recipe for an ingredient for that cocktail: Easter Honey Rum.

You may have heard of “fat washing” liquors. It’s a fascinating process that yields interesting results. Using honeycomb is called “wax-washing” and after this, I am a huge fan.

The resulting rum is like a cocktail in a spirit. It has body and viscosity and a dominant floral sweetness that is still balanced. It’s almost like candy.

To me, this is a great Easter spirit. Bright, golden, sweet, yet strong. It is the old rum, but washed into something new and better.

Ascension: Our Glory & the Bible’s Hinge

Yesterday in the Christian Church Calendar was Ascension Day, where we celebrate Christ ascending into heaven after his resurrection and now sitting at “the right hand of God the Father.”

The Useless Ascension

“Ascension” doesn’t get a lot of attention nowadays in the Church. This, in spite of the fact that it’s an essential part of all the Church’s earliest doctrinal formulations. Additionally, the New Testament sees it as the primary proof of Jesus’ divinity and “lordship” and it’s the subject of the most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament: “The Lord says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.'”

Maybe we neglect this because the Ascension isn’t really a “doctrine”–it’s an “event” and a “declaration”; and we western Christians love our systematic “doctrines” that we can pick apart ad nauseam and/or figure out how to “apply it to our lives” so we can feel like “good Christians.”

But honestly, the Ascension isn’t “useful” to us in that way. There’s not much we can “do” with it.

Which is precisely why it’s so valuable. More than many other aspects of the Gospel and Christianity, the Ascension isn’t an “idea” to mull or unpack, but rather “news” to receive and let it act on us.

Ideas for Lent: Fasting, Prayer, & Generosity

Tomorrow, Lent begins. The Lent tradition began in the 3rd-century and is a 40-day season of meditation and repentance in anticipation of Easter celebration. Whether you are just beginning to explore Christianity, or have been a Christian for some time, Lent is a perfect season to allow God to shape your life in fresh ways.

Historically, Christians have used three broad categories of practices to engage in this season: fasting, prayer, and generosity.

These practices are external means and postures for shaping one’s soul and interior life. Fasting removes things to create space in your heart and life, prayer is a way to fill that interior space, and then generosity is giving out of the overflow we trust is there.

Below, you’ll find some brief words helping us think through these categories, followed by some ideas for how you can it in your life. Pick one, or pick several. The important thing is to try and do it consistently, and use times of frustration or skipping as a chance to meditate on your own limitations, and how God meets you in that.

This Easter just might be a lot like the first. [quote]

One of my church’s seminary interns, Tara (who did the Holy Tuesday video, by the way), wrote out this little reflection on our Slack channel and I thought it was a beautiful reminder during our social distanced Easter this year.

This is an unusual Holy Week–one that is perhaps not so far off from that first Easter. Anxious people huddled in their homes. Jesus mysteriously appearing not to crowds or synagogues or throngs of people–but to individuals like Mary, alone and grieving at the tomb, and to two disappointed disciples on the road to Emmaus, and to others in such small solitary groups. Jesus mysteriously appearing in their midst. Perhaps like us indeed this Easter.

Tara Ann Woodward

Ideas for Lent: Fasting, Prayer, & Generosity

Note: This was originally three separate posts that have been collated into one for future reference.

The Lent tradition began in the 3rd-century of the early church and is a 40-day season of preparation and repentance in anticipation of Jesus’ resurrection on Easter. Whether you are only beginning to explore the claims of Jesus, or have been a Christian for some time, Lent is a perfect season to allow God to shape your life around the cross and empty tomb of Christ in fresh ways.

Historically, Christians have used three broad categories of practices in this season: fasting, prayer, and generosity. If you’re like me, you forget to think about this until Lent has already started, so hopefully this helps us all.

If you think of these practices as external means and postures for shaping one’s soul and interior life, then fasting is a process of removing things to create a space, prayer is the way we fill those interior spaces, and then generosity is giving out of the overflow we trust is there.

To use another analogy, prayer is like the soul’s inhale, and love/generosity is its exhale; fasting or other ascetic practices are ways to increase our “lung capacity” or quicken our breath for a time from spiritual exertion in order to take in and give out more than we normally would.

Ascension: Our Glory & the Bible’s Hinge

Today in the Christian Church Calendar is Ascension Day, where we celebrate Christ ascending into heaven after his resurrection and now sitting at “the right hand of God the Father.”

The Useless Ascension

“Ascension” doesn’t get a lot of attention nowadays in the Church. This, in spite of the fact that it’s an essential part of all the Church’s earliest doctrinal formulations. Additionally, the New Testament sees it as the primary proof of Jesus’ divinity and “lordship” and it’s the subject of the most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament: “The Lord says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.'”

Maybe we neglect this because the Ascension isn’t really a “doctrine”–it’s an “event” and a “declaration”; and we western Christians love our systematic “doctrines” that we can pick apart ad nauseam and/or figure out how to “apply it to our lives” so we can feel like “good Christians.”

But honestly, the Ascension isn’t “useful” to us in that way. There’s not much we can “do” with it.

Which is precisely why it’s so valuable. More than many other aspects of the Gospel and Christianity, the Ascension isn’t an “idea” to mull or unpack, but rather “news” to receive and let it act on us.

Today in the Christian Church Calendar is Ascension Day, where we celebrate Christ ascending into heaven after his resurrection and now sitting at “the right hand of God the Father.”

The Useless Ascension

“Ascension” doesn’t get a lot of attention nowadays in the Church. This, in spite of the fact that it’s an essential part of all the Church’s earliest doctrinal formulations. Additionally, the New Testament sees it as the primary proof of Jesus’ divinity and “lordship” and it’s the subject of the most-quoted Old Testament verse in the New Testament: “The Lord says to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.'”

Maybe we neglect this because the Ascension isn’t really a “doctrine”–it’s an “event” and a “declaration”; and we western Christians love our systematic “doctrines” that we can pick apart ad nauseam and/or figure out how to “apply it to our lives” so we can feel like “good Christians.”

But honestly, the Ascension isn’t “useful” to us in that way. There’s not much we can “do” with it.

Which is precisely why it’s so valuable. More than many other aspects of the Gospel and Christianity, the Ascension isn’t an “idea” to mull or unpack, but rather “news” to receive and let it act on us.

Saturday | Meditation for Easter Week (2019)

From Liberti Church’s Lent & Easter Prayerbook

From an Easter sermon
Melito of Sardis, 2nd-century

But he rose from the dead
and mounted up to the heights of heaven.
When the Lord had clothed himself with humanity,
and had suffered for the sake of the sufferer,
and had been bound for the sake of the imprisoned,
and had been judged for the sake of the condemned,
and buried for the sake of the one who was buried,
he rose up from the dead,
and cried with a loud voice:

“Who is he that contends with me?
Let him stand in opposition to me.
I set the condemned man free.
I gave the dead man life;
I raised up the one who had been entombed.
Who is my opponent?”

“I,” he says, “am the Christ.
I am the one who destroyed death,
and triumphed over the enemy,
and trampled Hades underfoot,
and bound the strong one,
and carried off man
to the heights of heaven.”

“I”, he says, “am the Christ.”

~give time for silence, prayer, & meditation~

Friday | Prayer & Readings for Easter Week (2019)

Prayers & Readings from
Liberti Church’s Lent & Easter Prayerbook

Opening Prayer

My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
–from Psalm 121.2

~silence~

Scripture Reading

Luke 24.50-53 (msg)

Thursday | Prayer & Readings for Easter Week (2019)

Prayers & Readings from
Liberti Church’s Lent & Easter Prayerbook

Opening Prayer

My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
–from Psalm 121.2

~silence~

Scripture Reading

Luke 24.44-49 (msg)

Wednesday | Prayer & Readings for Easter Week (2019)

Prayers & Readings from
Liberti Church’s Lent & Easter Prayerbook

Opening Prayer

My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
–from Psalm 121.2

~silence~

Scripture Reading

Luke 24.36-43 (msg)

Tuesday | Prayer & Readings for Easter Week (2019)

Prayers & Readings from
Liberti Church’s Lent & Easter Prayerbook

Opening Prayer

My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
–from Psalm 121.2

~silence~

Scripture Reading

Luke 24.13-35 (msg)

Monday | Prayer & Readings for Easter Week (2019)

Prayers & Readings from
Liberti Church’s Lent & Easter Prayerbook

Opening Prayer

My help comes from the LORD,
who made heaven and earth.
–from Psalm 121.2

~silence~

Scripture Reading

Luke 24.1-12 (msg)

For Easter Sunday: “On the Ecclesiastical Ramifications of Worship” [a poem]

It’s uncontrollable!

And my person
is
barely even
knowable

But it is.

By joy
satisfaction
contentment
You.