Ascension thoughts from holiday

Malcolm Guite has written a helpful sonnet for Ascension Day this year: 

We saw his light break through the cloud of glory
Whilst we were rooted still in time and place
As earth became a part of Heaven’s story
And heaven opened to his human face.
We saw him go and yet we were not parted
He took us with him to the heart of things
The heart that broke for all the broken-hearted
Is whole and Heaven-centred now, and sings,
Sings in the strength that rises out of weakness,
Sings through the clouds that veil him from our sight,
Whilst we our selves become his clouds of witness
And sing the waning darkness into light,
His light in us, and ours in him concealed,
Which all creation waits to see revealed.

I bang on a lot about doing all the parts of the story of how God deals with his people through the Church year. We are not good at marking Ascension Day. But to go straight from the Easter season to Pentecost without standing at the foot of a mountain with the disciples and experiencing an amazing, confusing yet soon to be life changing theophany, is as horrific as missing out Good Friday before Easter. Imagine reading a long novel you’ve got out of the library and you discover the pages of a crucial chapter have been ripped out. The rest of the plot doesn’t make sense. 

Ascension Day invites us to look up. 

Have you ever tried to walk along a street in a busy city in rush hour? It’s a dangerous thing to do. Why? Because people don’t look where they are going because they are looking at a mobile phone as they walk along, so they are looking at vital stuff they need to know now. They aren’t aware of what’s around them at all, so they walk into the road not noticing the lights are on red, and they bump into people coming the other way. 

I was watching a programme for teenagers about improving your mental health, this being mental health awareness week. Three teenagers were invited to not use social media for three days and to hand over all their devices. They struggled initially, but after a time, they began to appreciate things around them, some even began to have conversations with their family! 

We are on holiday this week and before anyone says my writing this is work, it isn’t, writing is part of my daily spiritual discipline and I am marking this day by writing because I have no wish to go to a service today in a face covering. And I will not apart from to lead one because I can only wear one for a short while before struggling. Anyway... Part of our time this week is being used to explore our local area a bit more. I’m very blessed to live in such a beautiful part of the country. It’s good to look up and see amazing vistas. It’s good to look up and notice what we easily miss. On Tuesday, we did a little tour down the North Yorkshire coast starting at Saltburn and ending at Scarborough. A change of scene and a change of pace can be sources of healing. The theme for this mental health awareness week is connecting with nature. I love the sea and I miss living near it, so the occasional trip across the moors will be a regular treat.  I do my best sermon preparation while walking outside. It clears my head, and gives me space, especially at the moment when I’m doing most of my work from home in the same room day after day. To look up is healthy. 

It’s so easy to get bogged down with the worries of the world. I look at the situation today in Israel and Gaza and shudder that that part of the world is alight again with bombs and hatred going backwards and forwards. I see people anxious as Covid restrictions ease but now there is concern about a new Indian variant out there. I watch people facing hard stuff who need help who cannot find the help they urgently need because the resources aren’t there. I look at the church worrying about how to keep going with falling numbers and an ageing demographic with little energy to do any more. Maybe we need to look up more else we will get shuffle along the ground and eventually we will fall over. 

Luke has two versions of the Ascension. In Acts, the disciples stand staring at the sky, perplexed. An angel comes and tells them to stop staring. He points them to the hope of the parousia, and tells them to go back to Jerusalem and wait for the power from on high. His Gospel only has a few verses about Ascension. Jesus blesses the disciples, and as he blesses them, he is taken up into heaven. What’s the disciples reaction? Not sadness or panic he has gone, but they return home with great joy and they spend a lot of time in praise and worship in the Temple. 

My Anglican colleague, Ian Kitchen, has this helpful paragraph on his benefice Facebook page: 

“The disciples’ final image of the risen Jesus’ time on earth would have been one of receiving his blessing and during that blessing, of seeing him return to his Father in heaven.  What an amazing final picture that must have left in their minds. What a blessing after all their very human doubts, their failure to understand and their loss of hope and courage along the way. Jesus had never given up on them and had promised that they would not be left alone, but that he would send ‘what my Father promised’ – the ‘power from on high’ - his Holy Spirit to empower them for the mission that he had entrusted to them.  In the times that lay ahead of them, how the disciples must have needed to remember this moment of ‘great joy’ when Jesus blessed them and moved into the reality of heaven.”

After a rollercoaster of emotions, I sense those disciples finally realise who they’ve been with for the last few years and overwhelmed with being enfolded with a presence of the divine they now know they will never be alone. It takes looking up in order to be in the world. The problems are still there, but it’s almost like they are scooped up into a huge Christ offered eternal hug - even if for now it’s a socially distanced sideways one! 

I encourage us today to take time to look up. Where is God? Where’s your thin place? Can you even with a huge lost of problems, know there is a greater power about and can you as a result of that find that great joy those disciples found? 

Barbara Brown Taylor in Gospel Medicine writes that Ascension Day, one of the most forgotten feast days of the church year, is the day that eleven people, with nothing but a promise and a prayer, consented to become the church.

For while they still stood with their necks cranked up, gobsmacked, wondering what the heck was going on. They were given the message: stop looking up, better to look around instead, at each other, at the world, at the ordinary people in their lives, because that was where they were most likely to find Christ, not the way they used to know him, but the new way, not in his own body, but in their bodies, the risen, the ascended Lord who was no longer anywhere on earth so that he could be everywhere instead.