Ascension Day: a reflection

Even in these times of ordeal, we must celebrate. All around us, people are lonely and afraid. They are suffering and dying. They are grieving, lost and sad. There isn’t a household in England that the virus hasn’t touched in some way. We could easily feel as forlorn as the disciples gazing at the sky Jesus has disappeared into. Like them, we could imagine he had abandoned us. 

Yet as it says in the funeral liturgy of the Orthodox churches, ‘even at the grave we sing ‘alleluia’. Forty days after Easter, it is still the season of resurrection. Christ is risen. In our troubles it’s all the more important to celebrate and allow this marvellous springtime to help us say ‘yes’ to life. For death is swallowed up in victory. 

And today, Ascension Day, we celebrate Jesus as Christ the King, our Sovereign enthroned in glory. It is as he has been proclaiming throughout his ministry, that God reigns. Ascension affirms that the exalted Christ ‘fills all things’, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, so that he may be in our midst and all around us, among us and within our deepest selves. Far from having left us orphaned and alone, he is Immanuel, God-with-us in time and eternity. And he invites us to embrace his reign and renew our citizenship of this glorious kingdom. Our hearts are full of joy.

Jesus’ ascension is of a piece with everything he has been to us in his incarnate life. In the New Testament his exaltation is spoken of in the imagery of the coronation of the kings of Israel. The Letter to the Hebrews quotes a chain of texts from the Psalms to show how the hopes and longings projected on to Israel’s human rulers are realised in Jesus who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ (Psalm 2); ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever’ (Psalm 45). 

But if we follow that imagery back to its source we find we are drawn to the duties of kingship as well as its privileges.  The king is to be God’s servant, loyal to the covenant. He is to be the agent of peace and justice, the guardian of the vulnerable and poor. In another psalm (82), God sits in a cosmic court with the heavenly beings gathered round him. Are they worthy to be called gods, he asks?  The test is simple. ‘Maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute; rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’  

But these lofty princes fail dismally and are condemned. ‘How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?’ ‘I said you are gods, nevertheless you shall die like mortals and fall like any prince.’  In high office they have forgotten who they are and why they have been raised up. They have forfeited the right to govern. They have ascended the hill of the Lord only to be toppled by the sin of pride.   

Not so the exalted Christ.  For he bears the imprint of the nails on his body, and takes us with him into God’s very heart. As we should have been singing today in the Ascension Day hymn:

See! the heaven its Lord receives
Yet he loves the world he leaves:
Though returning to his throne,
Still he calls mankind his own.  

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of him as our great high priest who even in his exaltation is not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters and to be with us. ‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect was tested as we are.’  That letter could not be more emphatic on this point that Jesus passes the test of what it means have ascended as the highest of the exalted ones, above all principalities and powers. High and lifted up as he is, nevertheless he is present to the lowliest of his family to deal gently with us, and especially with the needy whom he calls in St Matthew ‘the least of these my brothers and sisters’. 

So humility and service, not pomp and pageantry, describe the ascension of Jesus. For he is the same Lord who healed the sick and spoke kindly to the neglected, washed his disciples’ feet, felt the agony of Gethsemane and went out to die.  Any other messiah would not have been born in a stable with nowhere to lay his head, been executed between thieves, risen secretly behind the stone, or ascended on an obscure hilltop with only a handful of witnesses to tell of it.  

But this Messiah has taken the form of a servant, never more to lay it by. His ascension is as ‘kenotic’ as his incarnation and crucifixion: an act of humble self-emptying, for this is how he is not only in time but in eternity. There is one glory for the Lord who took the form of a slave: one abasement, one lowliness, one meekness, even in his exaltation and enthronement.  

Only this Messiah could still bear the marks of the nails as the risen Lord. Only this Messiah could be pictured as a Lamb upon a throne. Only this Messiah could be our great high priest who feels for humanity, intercedes on our behalf, and serves us by washing our feet. Only this Messiah could humbly come to us in bread and wine so that we might welcome him and exalt him in our hearts. 

We want to know in these times that God is not far away from any one of us. It’s the marvellous paradox of Ascension Day that while in one sense Jesus has ‘gone away’ as he said he must, yet he is closer to us than our own souls. He walks alongside us to lighten our burdens and share our joys. We can trust him to comfort us and help us, answer all our longings and make us whole again.

Ascension Day 2020
Ephesians 1.15-23, Acts 1.1-11, Luke 24.44-53

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

70 Years after the End of the War in Europe

‘Greater love has no-one than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ Those words we heard in today’s gospel are familiar to us from thousands of wartime graves and memorials from both world wars of the twentieth century. Our thoughts have been much occupied with the Great War for the past year. But 2015 marks the seventy years that have passed since the end of the war in Europe.  We must not forget that in the Far East the war did not end until August 1945 with the terrible bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  But here in Europe, on the 8 May seventy years ago, the bells rang out to announce the long awaited end of hostilities. We observed the silence here on Friday to remember the fallen, and yesterday the bells rang out at 1100 as they did in cathedrals across the country.

Today we can be thankful that since then our continent has been spared armed conflict on this scale.  We must not be complacent about this. The Balkans and Ukraine showed that war can erupt along forgotten fault-lines without warning.  Global terror poses new threats to peace and stability.  Our democracies must be vigilant in the face of far-right neo-fascist movements that reawaken old hatreds.  We must keep alive the vision of our common European home where our peoples are learning to live together as a community and heal past memories.  This vision ought forever to have laid to rest any thought that we could ever be at war again.  You cannot stand in the bombed-out ruins of Coventry Cathedral, or in the Frauenkirche in Dresden, or in the Marienkirche in our partner city of Lübeck where the shattered bells still lie where they fell during the allied bombing raids of 1942 without recognising this.  Each human life that was lost in the war on either side was unique and precious.  We do not forget that today.  Because of this attrition, our nations have invested in peace.  The memory of sacrifice demands it of us.  The work of reconciliation is how we best honour the fallen.  

What is a Christian take on today as we look back to the 8 May 1945? In our church, the same day is kept as the festival of one of our most remarkable saints.  Her name was Julian, and she lived in the fourteenth century.  She devoted her life to prayer walled up in a small cell attached to a church in Norwich. You can see a rare example of a surviving anchorite cell just up the road at the beautiful church of Chester-le-Street. Many people came to her for spiritual guidance.  She was famous for the visions she received, her ‘showings’. Julian wrote them down in her book Revelations of Divine Love, to this day one of the most treasured classics of English spiritual writing.  She said, you might almost think for VE Day: ‘He did not say, you shall not be troubled, you shall thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased; but he said, you shall not be overcome.’ It came out of the profound assurance that whatever life’s circumstances, whatever the trouble or difficulty or pain, whatever the hardships and sufferings, nevertheless God’s nature and God’s name is love.  So she wrote: ‘all shall be well; and all shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well.’

It is a promising saying for this day. On 8 May 1945, the message was that despite all that war had inflicted, people dared to look forward.  They dared to hope once more, dared to believe that all might ‘be well’.  After the pain, there was the prospect of healing; after the conflict, reconciliation; after the passion, resurrection; after death and destruction, life and love. No doubt it felt hard to say this out of the ashes of war. No doubt it was hard to say it in Julian’s time: the middle ages were a cruel and dangerous era for most ordinary people. There are times for all of us when it is still hard to say, and harder still to believe.  Yet Easter requires us to take this massive step of faith.  For the first dawning of Easter faith was a hoping against hope that God had indeed raised Jesus from the dead.  Easter faith dares to believe that God’s purposes of love can never be thwarted: all shall be well. 

This is our faith in this eucharist as we gather together on the first day of the week to give thanks once more that God raised Jesus from death and that he is alive forever in our midst and in the life of our world.  Thursday is Ascension Day when we acclaim that he is Lord of all things.  He fills heaven and earth with his presence, for as the psalm says of the Son of Man, ‘God has put all things under his feet’.  That means all nations and rulers, the world empires, every human family and institution, even, in the New Testament, the demonic powers of the air.  His reign gives us the strength to do his work on earth.  He is the Prince of Peace, so we make peace in his name.  He is the righteous Servant, so we establish justice in his name.  He is King of creation, so we care for the environment in his name.  He is King of kings, so we bring hope in his name.  And because this Lord of glory bears the wounds of the passion, we stand with all who suffer, in his name.

Our world is more broken than ever: the reign of the risen and exalted Christ is not realised yet.  That is to come in God’s time, be it soon, be it late. But the resurrection invites us into the movement of God’s eternal love for the world to play our part in embodying and living it in our own love for the world and our service of humanity. It is as clear as the day in this morning’s gospel: ‘this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’ The greater love of a friend for a friend, of a comrade for a comrade, of one human being for another is the love of the Saviour for his people, of an incarnate Son for those whose lives he comes into our world to share. The laying down of our lives for our friends delineates the cross-shaped character of our humanity as the Spirit of Jesus is re-making it in his own image. It is the self-emptying, self-giving sacrificial character of God himself. It is how love manifests itself in the myriad ways whose truth and beauty we see all around us when people are good, and merciful, just, and kind, that is to say, when they act out of their true God-given humanity and recognise, with Julian, that in all things, ‘love was his meaning’. 

We have just emerged from an election. Our freedoms to speak, debate and vote are central to VE Day, because the war was fought precisely to resist the tyranny that overwhelmed Europe in the 1930s. Now our politicians must turn their thoughts to building a society where people flourish, the common good is honoured, and all are treated with justice and compassion. Peace-making and the quest for a better world order, about which we have heard far too little in the campaign, require that the voice of the weak is heard, refugees are cared for, the despairing are given hope and the poor are not forgotten. But the lesson of the last war is that nationhood, like patriotism, is not enough. Our flourishing happens as we play our part in the family of nations to whom it falls to care for the world and for humanity. This was the vision that sustained those who fought and fell in the war, and the architects of the peace that followed seventy years ago.

Mother Julian gives us the inspiration to turn our hope into the prayer that all may be well because ‘love is his meaning’. She says: ‘See that I am God. See that I am in everything. See that I do everything. See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally. See that I lead everything on to the conclusion I ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it. How can anything be amiss?’. This is what we see with our own eyes at Golgotha in the greater love God shows us as he lays down his life for his friends. 

Durham Cathedral, 10 May 2015.  1 John 5.1-6, John 15.9-17