“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’”
Readings – Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53.
May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the summer between my A-Levels and the start of university, that magical time of life when one is at last able to get into nightclubs, that time when drinking second-rate beer out of a plastic beaker at two in the morning seems the most wonderful thing on earth, the big dance track in all the clubs was called “Higher State of Consciousness”. The electronically distorted words “Higher State of Consciousness”, were continually repeated over a pumping bassline, while a sort of Morse-code rhythm screeched over the top at excessive pitch. I think whenever I heard it I was, to be honest, mostly in a fairly low state of consciousness or at least a rather inebriated one.
The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali
The reason I’m bringing this up – because I’m sure you’re wondering – is that sometimes people spend a lot of time getting themselves into a tizzy about what happened physically at the Ascension and why that proves that those who disagree with them aren’t real Christians but in fact brain-dead fundamentalists, godless heretics, or some other insult. But the concept of ascension, in popular conception as well as in Christianity, relates more to state than it does to physical place. Heaven is not somewhere above the sky or beyond the Moon’s orbit; but it is somewhere other than here, and higher than here.
Our two readings tonight comprised the only original narrative accounts of the Ascension, both of which are by the same author. The first brings the Gospel of St Luke to a conclusion, the other begins the Acts of the Apostles. The chronology is difficult to reconcile between them; the geography doesn’t feel entirely consistent; the dialogue doesn’t quite match. Especially given that these accounts were written by the same author, it certainly doesn’t seem like St Luke was that worried about what we might think of as accuracy in courtroom witness statement sense.
Therefore, I won’t belabour any of the arguments about the physicality or realism of the Ascension, and certainly won’t be following the advice of one of my colleagues on Twitter that I take this opportunity to shatter the supposedly naïve cosmological and theological preconceptions of my parishioners. Instead, I want us to think about what it might mean, in the words of the Collect for the Day, to ascend in heart and mind into the heavens.
In the version of the story in Acts, that’s something the apostles didn’t grasp. Even after all they had witnessed in the previous weeks, they were still asking Jesus when he would restore the Kingdom to Israel. This doesn’t necessarily show them as power-crazed. They were steeped in Old Testament prophecy, with its promises of a reign of international harmony and honest government, of social justice for the poor, for widows, and for those of other nations living among the Hebrew people; a social order so just and harmonious that people from around the world would look to it as a model. Their view of the restored Kingdom of Israel very much resembled our view of what a truly Christian society would look like.
The problem back then, however, was exactly what it remains today; the process of trying to change the world for the better can end up changing us for the worse. Power corrupts; the apostles themselves weren’t immune from bickering over status. Institutions built on the noblest of values often descend into careerism, or disagreements supposedly over points of principle that are really about personality clashes, or glory-hunting, or personal enrichment. I can think of an institution that we’re all familiar with that at its worst reflects all this. It’s called, give me a moment… oh, yes, the Church of England. But we’ve seen it happen at every level, from politicians who start out as principled breaths of fresh air but end up being rather putrid, to the person who turns the local resident’s association or foodbank committee into their own personal version of Kim Jong Un’s politburo.
That should not stop us working to make the world a better place. We’ll never succeed in making it perfect; sometimes, it feels like we might not ever make it much better; but we know that if we stop trying, like Sisyphus with his boulder, things could get an awful lot worse. All this can be rather exhausting – and that’s why we need to keep our hearts and minds with our Lord and Saviour in His heavenly height, that’s why we need the Grace of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. We need to be able to ascend, at least every once in a while, and ideally many times a day, out of an imperfect world, to be fed by the eternity of justice and peace that Jesus Christ has already won for us.
Prayer and the gifts of the Holy Spirit are two ways of doing this; but another is poetry. A priest friend called Rupert Moreton wrote a poem at Ascension last year. We were chatting on Facebook the other day when I confessed to a mental block about tonight’s sermon, so he sent me his work, entitled simply “Ascension”. Let me finish by reading you it.
Now here’s the rub. The Lord has gone.
The more the resurrection’s spun,
the more the tale of death defeated
plants question that for Mark was moot.
Where is he now, this bag of bones?
The one whose side was Thomas-touched,
yet flinched from Mary’s tender cling,
who sat and ate beside the lake,
yet passed through walls, who walked beside
two grieving friends, yet wasn’t known
until he broke the bread and then
again was absent.Here’s the point
The touch convicts; the feeling burns.
And so the humdrum moment turns –
what isn’t is, what is is not.
And through this riddle we must plot
a way to find in straitened times
that absent presence truly rhymes.
Now to the only wise God our saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
