KAUWHAU at TE POU HERENGA WAKA O TE WHAKAPONO
(SOUTH NAPIER)
SUNDAY AFTER ASCENSION (May 28th)
2017
Readings:
Acts 1: 6-14
Psalm 68: 1-10, 32-35
1 Peter
4: 12-14, 5: 6-11
John 17: 1-11
If you live in a
busy world not ruled by church dates and festivals, by the lectionary, then
like me you probably missed Ascension Day last week. Since my, for want of a
better word, departure from liturgical ivory towers, many events in the church
calendar have passed me by. But I always had a theology that said I was
privileged to say liturgies, pray and praise and lament on behalf of others too
busy or too disinterested or too remote to do so. That was my job in Christ. Now
I’m one of the others, and that’s okay, too, however annoying it might have
been!
But I love the
symbolism of the Ascension even if I missed the day.
We have no idea
what happened, in factual terms, between Good Friday and Ascension Day. The
scriptures break into mystical poetic language, language of mythology. This is
not the language of lies, as many would suggest in our post-Enlightenment,
so-called rationalist age, but language of love and poetry and mysticism and
mystery. The scripture writers had only words, and words were not enough.
What they knew
was that what happened between Good Friday and Ascension Day was worth living and
dying for, however imperfect we might be. What happened between Good Friday and
Ascension Day is what has inspired Christians, like the 28 or so martyred in Egypt yesterday, choosing to live and die for Jesus.
Nor was what
happened between Good Friday and Ascension Day some abstract intellectual
indulgence to be thrown away in the twenty-first century. What happened between Good Friday and
Ascension Day was not something to be sneered at because we think we’re smarter
than first century Christians. I see that happening in countless circles of
Christianity in the world, and particularly in Tikanga Pākehā circles of New
Zealand, today. To adopt that attitude is to become a clanging gong, a
meaningless sound, a beacon of emptiness in the cacophony of a dying
earth. To adopt that intellectualist
attitude is to become a slave to meaninglessness and to empty the pews of
faith.
As an aside I was
told when I went to the cathedral that of course the resurrection was true. I
got that, until the speaker went on to explain that the resurrection happens
every spring, when daffodils reappear, or when the cherry blossoms bloom, or
when a baby is born after a family has experienced bereavement, or someone gets
over a crisis. Wonderful though those matters are, they are not the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the cold tomb of Joseph, nor the liberation through space and time of
all that Jesus was and is that Ascension last Thursday and Pentecost next Sunday symbolize.
Because the
Ascension, whatever happened (and I tend to have a more Doctor Who image of
Jesus fading into time and space zones beyond our access, rather than his
sandals hanging from the clouds as he heads skyward, but whatever) – whatever happened
it was
- beyond human words, and
- the release of the man Jesus back into the eternities from which he had stepped nine months before his birth at Bethlehem.
So words are not
enough.
The readings we
have, beneath the veneer of actuality – (the
word we gave in broadcasting to the sound effects we put behind a voice to make
it sound as though the interview were happening somewhere “real”!) – the readings we have are the readings of love.
Love for the risen ascended Lord who gives strength even in the darkest deepest
times of trial.
Even in the times
of trial when we can no longer feel Christ-touch or see Christ-love and light,
that touch and love and light is there, holding us. Even sometimes when we feel
we are sliding in a vortex of despair, or being crushed by the weight of
sorrow. Even when, as one hymn writer put it, “when human hearts are breaking under
sorrow’s iron rod, there we find that self-same aching, deep within the heart
of God.”
Even when
assassins gun down a busload of Christian pilgrims, men women and children, in
Egypt, as happened yesterday, or hatred murders young concert- goers in a
British city, there God is, and there the resurrection-life wrought in Jesus
is, and the resurrection life begins. Even when the leader of the free world seems
to be leading the world into a spiral of meaninglessness, there God is, and the
promise of resurrection and the new heavens and new earth that are foreshadowed
in the Ascension, these do not fade away.
Resurrection is
not the blooming of the rata or the kowhai or the pohutakawa, however wonderful
they might be, for they are merely magnificent cycles of the Creator’s gift of nature, granted to us as
a taonga to preserve. Resurrection is not
the return of deciduous leaves that will eventually come after this
winter. It is the bursting out of death
of the one who conquers all death.
The Ascension,
inseparable from the Resurrection, is not some conjuring trick or a week narrative
ploy by a naïve first century writer. The Ascension is an “Amen” to the
Resurrection, as Jesus of Nazareth is released from the limitations of space
and time.
Next week we will
celebrate Pentecost: that too is an amen, for in the coming of the Wairua Tapu
we receive our assurance, receive the ability to live the beginnings of
resurrection life, wherever and whenever we are. In the coming of the Spirit we
are empowered to know the risen-ascended Lord in our hearts (as our Pentecostal
friends , at their best, remind us!). In Ascension and Pentecost we are
empowered to journey on our way to God and God-filled eternities.
Ascension: beyond words, but in the words our scriptures
give us we glimpse by faith and by poetry the inexplicable, liberating Jesus through space and
time, so that all who live and die live and die in his unending, undefeatable
love and light.
Amen.
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