Sunday after Ascension Day 2008

We inhabit in-between times. An election has taken place, and our city has chosen a new Mayor. The outgoing incumbent has said his farewells. The analysis of his failure has begun. The new Mayor has yet to receive the seals of office, and he will not do so until midnight. Today, popular authority has passed to him; actual power is rather harder to locate. So today absence and anticipation haunt London’s body politic.

It’s a scenario not entirely dissimilar to the one that confronts us liturgically. This Sunday is surely one of the strangest in the church’s year. For weeks now we have tuned our Alleluias, rejoicing in the resurrection of out Lord Jesus Christ. For weeks now we have heard the promise that the Holy Spirit will come as our guide and strength. Then on Thursday we celebrated the glorious Ascension with hymns of triumph. The Son has returned to the right hand of the Father.

So today we inhabit in-between times. Absence and anticipation haunts the body ecclesiastic. We can ask legitimately: where is God? Not enfleshed in the world, for the Son has ascended. Not burning in our hearts, for the Spirit has not yet come. Where is God?

Some would answer that question very quickly, surprised that, in its apparent faithlessness, it should even be put. Yet surely our tradition demands it. Our tradition’s history is not an unending demonstration of God’s omniscient power. ‘Leave us not comfortless’ we have prayed in the Collect. The implication is that today, we are comfortless. Despite the miracle of Easter God is somehow absent and we are somehow alone, just as we were when we waited with the blessed Virgin, with Mary of Magdala, and with the disciples in the dark of Easter Eve for the spark of resurrection life. We forget that at our peril, for we minister in a world in which divine absence often seems more plausible than divine presence.

Of course, it’s the job of the visiting preacher to seek to convince the congregation that this is not so; he should produce cogent arguments for God’s inexhaustible vitality; he should face down any counter-suggestion with irrefutable logic. I think it more honest instead to attempt to remain constant to the tradition, to the absence of God, to the experience of the Virgin and the disciples, to that which continues to be the experience of many. I offer in place of proofs a survival kit for times like this, times when God is distant, difficult to locate and difficult to discern.

The first hardly needs mentioning in these surroundings, for is the celebration of the sacraments, those tactile symbols, vehicles of God’s presence, that the Church has proclaimed in generation after generation. Today, in these in-between times, and in common with Christians of every age and in every place, we will still break bread and share wine together. The Eucharist we believe to be the gift of Christ to his Church, commended and instituted as a means of his being with us. In these in-between time we can still take broken fragments in our hands; we can still raise the chalice to our lips. Perhaps we will not see God coming with power today, but perhaps we will trace his fingerprints, the marks of where he has been; perhaps we will touch and taste the things that he has left behind. These are the iron rations of a desert people, whose guiding star has been obscured by the treacherous mist. They are for us the mantle of Elijah, bearing divine presence and heavenly authority across the years and equipping us to minister in Christ’s name.

The second is prayer. By this I do not mean petitions offered up in expectation of early reward. I mean prayer as Michael Mayne understands it when he writes of it as ‘…a disciplined taking of time to remind ourselves of who we are and whose we are, in which the one necessary element is stillness’. I mean the prayer commended by Peter to his readers, prayer that is watchful and sober, expectant and anticipatory. I mean the prayer that we may imagine to have been the Virgin’s as she awaited the unfolding of the angel’s promises to her.

The third is this gathering, the people round about us, the worshipping community. Of course human company is a good thing in itself, and of course human relationships are vital to human flourishing, but for Christians there is a particular and unique importance to our being together. It is that we believe that God becomes incarnate as one of us and that he thus shares and makes holy the life the life of human beings. If we believe, as I think we must, that God cannot change, then this incarnation cannot have been a phase God went through, a phase that, after Easter, he thought better of. God cannot be like a rebellious teenager shrugging off one fashion and adopting another. The incarnation must still be true; it must be happening today. Jesus Christ must be in our midst as surely as he was in the disciples’ midst when he promised them the Spirit’s gift. His Ascension means that the nature of the incarnation changed, but the Son of God who was present with his Father ‘before the foundation of the world’ is still in that world today, and still calling us to follow him.

So today let us pray for our new Mayor and his colleagues and for an end to these in-between times. Let us commit ourselves afresh to sacrament, prayer and common worship: to doing, praying and being. For my guess is that if we can remain faithful to these then despite our apparent distance and estrangement from the divine we will find ourselves stumbling over St Augustine’s great discovery and the most profound truth of our existence, that ‘God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves’. Amen.

The Sunday after Ascension Day,
4 May 2008,
St Mary's Bourne Street