Sermon by Marjorie Brown for Ascension Day - Thursday, May 21st 2009

Today is Father’s Day in Germany, because of the celebration of Jesus going back to his Father. We do set the bar rather high for parenting – in this country we are used to associating Mothering Sunday with both Mother Church and the Virgin Mary, but to compare fathers with God himself is an even taller order.

And yet, despite the reservations we may have about a sexist approach that compares fathers rather than mothers to God, there is a deep wisdom about this link. Because Ascension Day really is a celebration of the love between God the Father and God the Son, a love that encircles and draws in the whole human race.

Ascension Day is not an easy festival to grasp. At first sight it seems to be all about letting go and saying goodbye - a rather melancholy and wistful day. This stems from a very literal reading of the gospel story as a sequence of discrete events: Jesus died, Jesus rose, Jesus appeared, Jesus left.

But it would be better to think of the sequence of events as the theological unfolding of a single event: Jesus risen, ascended, gloried. Although we pick them apart in order to make separate liturgical celebrations and think about the different emphases, that is not, I imagine, how the disciples experienced these events.

Think about the chronology for a minute. Our readings today are from Luke's gospel and from the Book of Acts, also by the same evangelist. Yet the timescales in the two versions are completely different.

In Luke's gospel everything happens on Easter Sunday. Jesus meets the two disciples on the road to Emmaus in the evening, reveals himself to them, and then disappears. They run seven miles back to Jerusalem and encounter Jesus again there. When he has finished talking to the gathered disciples, he leads them out to the nearby village of Bethany and there withdraws from sight.

But in the next volume, in the first chapter of Acts, it is explicitly stated that Jesus kept appearing for forty days after his resurrection, the traditional timeframe which we are observing tonight. He then returned to heaven from the Mount of Olives, which is near but not identical with Bethany.

Matthew, Mark and John's gospels, by contrast, are never read on Ascension Day because they have no specific account of Jesus' withdrawal. Mark ends with the women fleeing the empty tomb in terror, Matthew with the great commission to make disciples of all nations, and John follows the resurrection appearances with a statement that the world couldn't contain all the books that could be written about Jesus' actions.

I rather like this confusion. It leaves us with many possibilities. But the possibility it closes off is the one of reading the story too literally - you know, the visual image of Jesus' feet disappearing into a cloud, as if he were taking off in a rocket to return to outer space after accomplishing his earth mission successfully.

This picture is all too often reinforced by the way we present the Ascension to children. The other day I found a suggestion on the internet for an assembly: spell the word Christmas backwards, it said, and get the children to work out from this the idea that Jesus came from heaven at Christmas and returned to heaven at the Ascension.

But that misses the point completely, and takes us back to the space visitor nonsense. Jesus rose from the dead on the first day of the week, the eighth day of creation: God did something NEW in the resurrection of Christ. He is the forerunner of the resurrection that will be the endpoint of the created universe. And when he returned to the heart of his Father, he took something with him: his humanity, crucified, risen and glorified.

The Ascension isn't the incarnation in reverse: it is the culmination of the work of Christ. Jesus isn't a lonely spaceman or secret agent: he is the one in whom the whole of creation is renewed and perfected. The point of the Ascension is not that he left us but that he takes us with him. A human being is now in the heart of God, and where he is, there we are too.

Let's do the utterly impossible and try for a moment to look at it from God's point of view. We see a Son, obedient unto death, raised in glory, coming home with the fruits of his victory, so that all creation can be glorified with him. There is no parting here. It is rather a joyful homecoming, a unifying of Creator and creation.

The late great Methodist writer Neville Ward in his classic book on the rosary, Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, says this:

The meaning of the ascension is that the Christian Church believes that Jesus is one with the glory of God and that his presence in its corporate and individual life is God's presence. To live by this faith must mean to find life bathed in the light of an increasing hopefulness and joy. There cannot be anything better than the presence of God, now that Jesus has shown us what he is like… We think of Jesus and God together now, to be trusted and loved, as indeed life is to be trusted and loved because it is God's love expressed in time.

Jesus risen, ascended, glorified pours out upon his Church the presence of God, the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is also a part of this one great new action of God, in which Jesus is raised, we are raised with him, and God's own life is shared with us without stint or limit.

The ascension of Christ is the breaking of all barriers that separate God from human beings. It is the recognition that our origin and our destiny are in the very heart of God, where we are called to be one with Christ.

There is no goodbye. The presence of Christ is intensified, not withdrawn. Jesus is now available to everyone, all the time, not just to the people who could see and touch him. It was natural for people in the first century to picture a going UP because height is a useful metaphor for something that is better - we raise our sights, we lift up our eyes, we stand tall, even if we no longer believe in a universe where God is physically above us. But of course there is no physical upness about the ascension, despite the picture language in the Bible. Bishop Tom Wright says that it is more useful to think of heaven as all around but invisible, just behind a curtain if you like. The ascension of Jesus means that God is always accessible - no need for Temple or sacrifice, because our great high priest is right there in the centre of God's being, uniting the human and divine.

There was a bad old custom, now largely ended, of snuffing out the Paschal candle on Ascension Day, as if the light of the risen Christ had been extinguished. But it burns on throughout this Easter season, as we unravel the great truths of Christ's resurrection and ascension and the sending of the Spirit. On Pentecost Sunday the candle will still be burning as we recall how the flames of God's presence set the disciples alight with the love of God. The light of Christ continues to shine, and within it we share his glory.