ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, 16 May 2010

Readings: Acts 16.16-34; Revelation 22.12-14, 16-17, 20-end; John 17.20-end.

Thursday was Ascension Day. Jesus returns to his Father, misson accomplished. Ascension faith is a triumphant faith. Christ is all and in all. Can we in all honesty share such a faith? There are two ways of being a Christian. The first way is to find everything difficult all the time: Miracles, Virgin Birth, Resurrection? Ascension into heaven? We can spend a lifetime trying to puzzle these doctrines out, what they meant then, what they mean now. Poor old Christianity becomes an exam to be passed, instead of a life to be lived. That's not much of a triumph. Actually it's a delaying tactic. What we do is set up a barrier of knowledge between us and God, it buys us time, anything to avoid saying yes to the gift of eternal life. We scrabble around trying to find the key to a door which is already open. I prefer the easier way of being a Christian, I always do. The easier way is to see these blockbuster events in Our Lord's life, like the Ascension of Jesus into Heaven, not as an event to be understood and mastered, ticked off as something we believe in, but as an invitation - an invitation to return to God ourselves, an invitation to cover that distance which we have put between ourselves and God, an invitation to share in Christ's triumph and glory. The traditional way of representing that distance being covered is by showing people going up, going up ladders to heaven, Jesus going up to heaven, in defiance of the normal rules of physics, because this is an invitation to us to witness something beyond the grasp of our defensive, plodding brains: On Ascension Day we break free from the limitations of this life, out of time and space and self-centredness, to see an extraordinary sight, Jesus Christ, risen, ascended, glorified. Jesus 'was taken up, a cloud receiving him from out of their sight'. A cloud is the divine presence, the glory of God, that's what clouds mean in the Bible. So God takes Jesus back home. The Ascension shows us where home is: home is living in God's love, in this world and the next, praying that we too, as the Prayer Book collect puts it, may also in heart and mind thither ascend.

I can ramble on in this High Church way for ever, it's all so easily said, but you and I know that these elevated thoughts evaporate the moment we get to Oxford Street or wherever we're going, and far from ascending anywhere with Jesus, we are back on earth with a bump. With our complaining selves for company, worse luck. The message of the Ascension is that this does not matter as much as we think it does. Jesus is now everywhere at all times, closer to us than we ever dared to imagine, however absorbed we become in our own lives and work. When we say that Jesus ascended into heaven, and that he sits at God's right hand, we are describing what happens to us; that when we try to follow Jesus' way of living in this world, heaven is all  around us, and the Ascension, far from separating us from Jesus, actually brings him closer to us, and us closer to Him. God is not 'out there', playing hide and seek with us. That's all we have to remember today, God is not out there. Putting God out there is what I believe is called dualism, always thinking in terms of two separate people, God and me, me and you, them and us. That is why we live distraught and divided lives, and don't understand anything any more. God does not discriminate and divide. We do. The Gospels are not about them and us: them the lucky ones back then who saw Jesus ascend to his Father, and us the unlucky ones to whom nothing like that ever happens. The Gospels tell us about God coming to meet His people at all times, and they describes how we shall meet him, our movement towards God. At the Ascension, Jesus is not the only person on the move. 'Mighty Lord, in thine Ascension, we by faith behold our own.' The Ascension proclaims the end of this two faced dualistic way of looking at life. When Jesus died and was raised to eternal life, he went to heaven as Jesus, wounds and all, a complete person, not a sort of formless spirit, but as man. Death was not dissolution. He had the marks of His Passion, the wounds of love, on his hands, on his head. See he lifts his hands above; see he shows the prints of love. There is sacred humanity, one life, not two. Our bodies, our physical selves, this physical world participates in whatever God is doing. Our humanity is not an accident, nor a mistake, nor a burden. We are part of the mystery of God. At Ascensiontide we are called to accept this in our daily lives. If God is everywhere in Christ, then he is not out there, he is here, with you and me. We might not be able to close the distance between ourselves and God, but He can. The Ascension is two way traffic. It's not easy to take on board, but our yearning for God is the same as God's yearning for us.

I said that Ascension Day is mission accomplished for Jesus. It is mission accomplished for us as well. You might not think so, you might think you've made a hash of it and are barely on the first rung of the ladder to heaven. Not so. On the Sunday after Ascension, today, the Church chooses as the Gospel not another account of the Ascension, but a prayer, the prayer of Jesus to his father recorded by St John. "Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am..." Here is the Ascension again, not in upward ladder form, but in prayer form, Jesus united with His Father. This how we bridge the gap, this is how we ascend, through the prayer which does not discriminate, which explores oneness, which proclaims the return home to the Father, and the unity of the Father and the Son through the bond of their love. No longer those gruesome twosomes, me and God, them and us, believers and non-believers, and all the other games we play, that wasted energy; if we are saved from anything, we are saved from all that. Instead we are offered the gift of unity, an invitation to be at one with the Father again, and to live the divine life, our own lives transformed by his light, love and glory.