Nearer Than Our Own Souls: another sermon for Ascensiontide

Last Thursday was Ascension Day. I preached about the disciples gazing up into the sky that had swallowed Jesus up. There is absence in the cracks of that story, hints of bewilderment, even loss. Maybe faith often feels like that, I suggested, being left on our own, wondering if it was all as real as we had supposed, longing, waiting for what we don’t quite know, and yet we do know - waiting for what God may do.

But as I also said, there is a great deal more to be said about the Ascension. And it begins with what St Luke says about the disciples at the very end of his gospel. “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and they were continually in the temple blessing God.” So far from being paralysed by this crisis of Jesus being taken from them, so far from it being another crucifixion and another loss, there is joy. They worship him, this Jesus who has gone, this Son of Man whom human eye can no longer see. They are learning that where sight fails, faith comes into its own. They bless the one whose final act, on saying farewell, was to bless them.

I spoke about the imagery of the story, Luke’s picture-language of up and down, Jesus being released from his earth-bound existence into the heavenly realms of the skies above. The New Testament writer to the Ephesians helps us catch the sense of this way of speaking. His theme is how the Ascension leads to the bestowing of gifts upon the people who are left behind, like a Roman triumph where the victor rides through his city scattering gold and silver and precious stones to the crowds who acclaim him. He writes: “he who descended is the same one who ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things”.

This is a profoundly important insight. For it’s precisely as Jesus disappears, as he is lost to our sight, that he becomes the universal presence he is to the eye of faith, the one who fills all things. Out of emptiness and absence have come fulness and presence. Out of searching and loss have flowed discovery and joy. “O that I knew where I might find him!” laments the lonely sufferer in the Book of Job. But now the veil is drawn back. It is Christ’s day of enthronement when his kingship is declared to all creation. He is Lord of all. His glory and his love suffuse all things, all life, all people. He walks among us as our contemporary, our king, our friend. His presence is everywhere, like the air we breathe. He fills all things. We do not see him, and only faith can tell us he is there. But we believe, and therefore we worship, and our hearts are full of joy.

The poets come to our help as we struggle to make sense of these things. Here is a well-known poem by George MacDonald that charts the movement of the human heart from the sense of bewilderment and loss that I conjectured the disciples must have felt when they realised that Jesus had gone, to the discovery that he was among them all the while, closer to them than they could ever know. It’s called “Lost and Found”.

I missed him when the sun began to bend;
I found him not when I had lost his rim;
With many tears I went in search of him,
Climbing high mountains which did still ascend,
And gave me echoes when I called my friend;
Through cities vast and charnel-houses grim,
And high cathedrals where the light was dim,
Through books and arts and works without an end,
But found him not--the friend whom I had lost.
And yet I found him--as I found the lark,
A sound in fields I heard but could not mark;
I found him nearest when I missed him most;
I found him in my heart, a life in frost,
A light I knew not till my soul was dark.

This seems to me to be the kind of faith we should cultivate in these days after the Ascension. Perhaps preachers like me can fall into the trap of talking about faith as something heroic that will banish doubt, win the world for Christ, make sense of suffering and rise above the sheer ordinariness of human life. But as I grow old, I realise that the practice of religion in our common days is very much a matter of reaching out in our perplexity, fostering a deeper awareness, being attentive to what is around us, glimpsing meanings, feeling after God so that we may find him and know him and love him with quietened spirits and a heartfelt love. Isn’t this simply what it means to be a human being? “The unexamined life is not worth living” said Socrates. But to reflect on who and what we are, become attuned to the One who lives and moves and has his being around and within us – isn’t this to become more human, more the people God intends us to be? And yet I found him acclaims the poet – and you hear his voice catch with astonishment and joy. I found him – because he was there all along, nearer to me than my own soul. When I began to live the examined life, he was there!

The church is here to help us on this lifelong journey. The disciples were told to wait for the time when they would be “clothed with power from on high” says St Luke. This promised coming upon them of the Holy Spirit meant many things, but one of them was the conviction of knowing what God was calling them to do and to be in the world after the resurrection. So we ask ourselves, on this Sunday before Whitsun, how can we be good and credible witnesses to faith in Jesus Christ in our own day? One answer is: simply to practise our faith with genuineness and integrity, understanding its ebbs and its flows, its tides of absence and of presence, cultivating stability amid the changes and chances of this fleeting world.

And when the moment comes, being ready to speak about it with anyone who asks a reason for the hope that is within us. Our lived experience of faith is the best evidence for thoughtful Christianity that I know. Pray that the Spirit may give us all the confidence to live it and testify to it in these times when in matters of faith, there is so much hunger in the land.

Henshaw Church, Sunday of the Ascension 2018

The Parting of Friends: a sermon on Ascension Day

How our hearts go out to those disciples, gazing at the empty sky into which Jesus has disappeared! One moment he is here among them, their Lord, their beloved, their friend. The next he is gone, taken from their sight says St Luke, and it is not only the sky that is empty but the whole world too. When Jesus had told them in the upper room that he must go away, their hearts were already heavy. Now the day for farewells has come when, in the picture language of ascension, he is taken up from them, and the cloud closes behind him like a door, and he is gone. It is a real parting of friends.

That’s not all there is to Ascension Day, of course. I’ll say more on Sunday. For now let’s stay with the image of the Christ who takes his leave of us and disappears. Because the gospels want us to learn the most important lesson of religion we can ever grasp: how to know, how to love, how to follow a God we cannot see, who comes to us as one unknown, who if he is among us at all is elusive and mysterious. St John tells of the disciple who was not with the others when the risen Lord appeared to them. Thomas has to discover what it means to be one of those who have not seen yet believe. St Luke’s way is to tell a story of ascension. The message is the same. How do we go on believing when there is nothing to see and no one to hear or touch?

The absence of God is a powerful and disturbing experience. I think we feel it collectively in a society that has largely lost its hold on public faith and has lost confidence in the church to put us back in touch with it. Last month I listened to a sociologist speak about the collapse of religious belonging and how people are finding new paths of spirituality and mindfulness to fill the void Christianity once occupied. And even for us who are a kind of remnant of belief in a secular age, faith is perhaps more difficult and challenging today than it once was. We look back across history and wonder nostalgically where the confident belief of earlier times could have gone, where the sunny uplands of religion vanished to.

Well, faith is not less faithful because it is more tentative. On the contrary: it’s precisely this absence of God, religion’s “melancholy long withdrawing roar” as Matthew Arnold put it, that allows faith to be faith rather than habit, custom, culture or just beautiful feelings. That’s why Ascension Day is important. For the story places us alongside the disciples staring wonderingly at an empty sky. It asks us, now that he has gone, what does it mean to believe that God is still with us, that the risen Christ is among us? How can being Christian today be not only a plausible life choice but the most important decision we can ever make in our lifetimes?

When I was a young parish priest 35 years ago, I used to get despondent at people’s lack of curiosity about God. Why didn’t parishioners “feel after God and find him” as St Paul says, for surely nothing matters more than to be a seeker after truth? What I had to learn was that to most people, especially those “just about managing” or not managing at all, getting through the day was enough to contend with. If I asked where they thought God was in daily life, I got answers like, “Why does he conceal himself so much? Why does he keep us guessing? Why won’t he show himself when there are so many suffering people who cry out to him?” They weren’t hostile to religion, mostly; they wanted the church to be there to celebrate the festivals and mark the great events of their lives at birth, marriage and death. But it did seem to them that God was far off, not a fact of everyday life let alone the ultimate reality we must reckon with. “Truly you are a God who hides himself!” said Isaiah.

One Ascension Day I felt it for myself, brutally. On that glowing morning, a church member I knew well, Joan, was killed in a car crash on the A1. We were shocked to learn about it as we came out of the eucharist. It felt as though God had taken leave of us, mocked his own bread and wine with which he had nourished us minutes before. What do you make of a God who isn’t there when your world breaks apart? I started reading the twentieth century Welsh poet-priest R. S. Thomas. He helped me to see that absence can be as overwhelming as presence, and as religious in its quality, charged as it is with memories and possibilities, and longings that aren’t afraid to hope against hope. He has a poem “The Absence” that I always associate with the Ascension.

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter
from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.

I love that tough poem because it asks me to be honest about my faith. To me it fits the mood of this day when the story looks up and down and backwards and forwards all at the same time. It pictures the world as a room someone has just left, that slight rustling of the curtains, the scent of a friend hanging in the air. But it’s also a threshold waiting for someone to be welcomed across, expected, looked out for but yet to arrive. I picture the disciples staring up and wondering about Jesus coming and going, and how faith would be different when their Lord was no longer with them. It must have felt as though they were about to take another big step of faith – as indeed they did when they went back to the city to wait for Pentecost, for what God would do next.

Perhaps this is where many of us are on the journey of faith – wondering where God is when the world needs him so much. Yet on Ascension Day of all days, we want to trust that despite the heartache and confusion, the fears and burdens our world is carrying in these times, his purposes are wise and good. We want to say with Mother Julian whose feast it was on Monday, “All shall be well”. We want to pay attention so as not to miss the signs of what God may yet do. To be aware of his comings and goings, to stand with people for whom his absence is the hard and painful fact of life, can help make us more aware, more compassionate, more responsive.

And more open to the sunbursts of hope and joy with which God surprises us. I like to think that on that bitter-sweet farewell day, the disciples were amazed that far from carrying heavy hearts back to Jerusalem, they left the mountain of the ascension with hopes high and a radiant sense of blessing for what they had seen and heard, and for all that was yet to be.

Beltingham Church, Ascension Day 2018
Acts 1.4-11, Luke 24.44-end