Ascension
‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven?’
Last Friday there was a report in the Guardian about a young woman named Florence Ayupo whose home was in Katine in Uganda. Florence lay on the bed in the treatment room where she had been taken after collapsing on the grass outside. Around her bed were nurses and orderlies. The reporter watched, she said, with the horror of a westerner used to ambulance sirens counting the seconds while nothing was done. No drip, no oxygen mask, no injections, nor resuscitation. There was nothing they could do and they knew it. The previous day, Florence was fit and healthy cooking for her husband and four children. Then in the early hours she went into labour. Her husband, Joseph, hurried on his bike to get the traditional birth attendant. Her baby daughter was delivered about three hours later, but it quickly became clear there was a problem. The nearest obstetrician, indeed, the nearest doctor of any kind, was in Soroti 20 miles away. With his wife bleeding heavily, Joseph hired a motorbike from a neighbour and took her to a local health centre, but they only had low grade nursing staff and they told Joseph that she had to go to the district hospital in Soroti. They set off again and promptly ran out of fuel. Nobody can afford a full tank here. So Joseph flagged down a car. They got a bit further, then that broke down too. Eventually a Land Rover stopped, but the driver, taking one look at Florence, said she needed urgent help. It would take half an hour to get to Soroti, and he could only take them a short distance to the health centre where the reporter found her. A centre supposed to have a doctor, but doesn’t because the doctor left for better pay elsewhere. It has an operating theatre but nobody qualified to do surgery and hardly any drugs let along a blood bank. Florence was carried inside; people gathered knowing that she was going to die. And she did leaving four young children and a new born baby to a very uncertain future.
Meanwhile, within our own country, parliament is in disarray over members expenses, and the Department of Health continues to talk about the ability of patients to choose where and when they wish to be treated and by whom; insisting that hospitals should aim to provide single sex accommodation within the next twelve months, luxuries that Florence – and hundreds of thousands like her across the world – could not begin to comprehend.
The contrast could not be greater – there seems to be a huge injustice.
At this point you might be forgiven for wondering where I am going – what on earth this has got to do with the Feast of the Ascension. Our worship this evening with its glorious mixture of words, music, incense, in the beauty of this building lifts our gaze heavenwards. And that is absolutely right – it is essential that we lift our senses, our gaze, beyond the here and now to glimpse the utter glory of God in our midst. But it is also equally important that we take to heart the words of the angels recalled in the Acts of the Apostles: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand staring into heaven?” – a question that punctures our ethereal gaze and invites us to look around and in turn ask ourselves – how on earth can we achieve what we pray for day by day – to create the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
Let me back track for a moment: the Feast of the Ascension is one of the great festivals of the church; it commemorates the culmination of Christ’s ministry on earth, the moment when he takes our full humanity and returns to his heavenly Father. At the Feast of the Incarnation, we celebrate that incredible moment in history when God steps into our world and reveals himself in full humanity - the divinity of God takes on our humanity; tonight we celebrate that moment when Jesus in his full humanity takes his place at the right hand of his Father in heaven – the human becomes divine – God shared our humanity so that we might share his divinity. And it is not just the beauty of our humanity that becomes divine, – it is also, and especially, the underbelly – God is in the dirt and the filth as well as in the beauty of all that is.
William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 1940s wrote:
"The ascension of Christ is his liberation from all restrictions of time and space. It does not represent his removal from earth, but his constant presence everywhere on earth."
Jesus embodied not just human goodness, but also divine glory – he was not just a man who was at one with his friends and followers, he was also at one with God.
Jesus had said to his disciples as John records it in his Gospel ‘if I do not go away, he (the Holy spirit) cannot come to you.’ Following his Ascension, he sends the Holy Spirit as he had promised – an event we will celebrate in a few days time at Pentecost. And this is the reason for rejoicing because his return to the Father binds forever heaven and earth, and through the power of the Holy Spirit, Jesus makes good his promise – that he will be with us always, even to the end of time. The dynamic now has changed and in the words of St. Teresa of Avila:
Christ has no body on earth but yours,
No hands but yours, no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion
For the world is to look out;
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about
Doing good;
And yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.
During the moments when the disciples experienced Jesus presence with them between the Resurrection and the Ascension something happened – he fed them, taught them, guided them and their eyes and minds were opened in an entirely new way. Their fear was transformed into an energy that would enable them to undertake their part in the Great Commission that Jesus had given them – to witness to Christ’s work of Salvation to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. As he disappeared from their sight for the last time, they were filled with hope and joy, trusting that in some mysterious way, all would be well.
Irenaeus, the great Christian teacher in the C2nd AD said “The glory of God is man fully alive.” And so it is; but Jesus also made it perfectly clear that the Divine Presence would equally be found in the starving and mutilated in the Darfur; the persecuted in Gaza; in the elderly person losing her memory, in the homeless youngster struggling with addiction; in the mother dying for want of basic medical treatment. Which brings me back to Florence. We are not men and women fully alive to God’s world if our society exercises its mind over the relative triviality choosing how and where we might like medical care when so many men, women and children across the world do not have even the basics. Perhaps we should learn to be grateful and content with what we have, and campaign for governments to spend more on international aid and less on their expenses. As we approach the altar tonight, God welcomes us as his own dearest children to sit with the Ascended Christ and eat and drink the bread of heaven and wine of eternal life; he feeds us, loves us, forgives and nurtures us so that we might then go out from here, nourished and energised ready to reach out to all those men, women and children in Chelveston, Barton Seagrave, Kettering – the towns and villages that make our communities - who long for that new vision which speaks of justice and compassion, love and hope. The disciples returned to Jerusalem from Bethany full of joy, continually praising God, probably unsure about how on earth they were going to achieve the commission that Christ had given them. But they brought their gaze down to earth, and got on with it, achieving great and wonderful things. Let us leave here tonight and get on with it, lets be Christ’s hands and feet, his eyes and passion working to proclaim God’s love, joy, compassion and hope for all his children, challenging injustice wherever and however it manifests itself, doing all that we can to fulfil the words of our Lords prayer: Thy Kingdom come; they will be done. Amen.
Canon Lesley McCormack, 21 May, 2009
