"Ascension"

by Revd Bruce Waldron - 28th May 2006 (Ascension Sunday)

In 1989, Brian Wren wrote the words

Not throned afar, remotely high, untouched, unmoved by human pains,
but daily, in the midst of life, our Saviour in the Godhead reigns.
In every insult, rift and war where colour, scorn or wealth divide,
Christ suffers still, yet loves the more, and lives where even hope has died.
Christ is alive and comes to bring to this and every age,
till earth and sky and ocean ring with joy, with justice, love and praise.

There is a huge difference between knowing someone and remembering someone.

I had been separated from my parents by a lot of miles and by long months of not seeing them. I'd joined the army, I'd moved to Melbourne, I'd changed from the 16 year old I was when I left home six years ago, but Mum and Dad were exactly the same.

I knew what they thought, what they believed, what they liked and didn't like.

So when they came to visit, I had all these images in my mind, I had them pegged.

And I was quite put out. Mum and Dad weren't the same. Dad had given up watching the boxing. He'd decided it was too brutal. That wasn't right. He brought me up to watch the boxing. He wasn't allowed to change.

His views on a few things had mellowed unbelievably. He wasn't anti Catholic any more. But he should have been. He always was. Something was wrong.

And worse still, he'd started barracking for Richmond. He always barracked for Collingwood. This just wasn't right. My world had shifted on its axis.

The final straw came when he told me he'd started watching soccer on the Tele. I nearly considered moving to England.

I had substituted my real father for a static image, constructed out of my adolescent memories. My image of Dad was far more my imagination of him than it was really him. It is always like that. The longer we are away from someone, the less like that person our imagination of them is likely to be.

A real, living person always surprises us, by thinking something we didn't expect them to think, by doing something unexpected. With a living experience you live with frustrations and surprises and joys and consternations. A living person is dynamic and reacts to what is happening, grows and changes and learns and responds differently with each moment.

Sometimes the church is like a person remembering, rather than a person living with a dynamic relationship. We have these sketchy glimpses of Jesus, woven out of the stories told by his followers fifty years after he'd died, and we think we know Jesus. But it is so easy for Jesus to look a lot more like our imagination than what he was actually like.

And so often in history, the church has looked and acted a lot more like the people and culture of the times than like the living, surprising, controversial, challenging figure of Jesus. And they haven't known it. We look back through history at the church and we can see it. But then, how will the church of the future look at us?

So when we read in the letter to the church at Ephesus, things like "God has put Jesus head over all things for the church which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all"… we could be forgiven for sometimes shaking our head and saying "Well, no, not really. The church just follows a memory, a sort of stylised image, and tries to be like it."

But that was never the expectation or belief of the early church. They knew that Jesus was alive. They knew that they were guided by Jesus spirit, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God. They used these terms interchangeably. They weren't mimicking a static, dead, memory that gradually they assimilated so that it looked like them and helped them feel comfortable. They were following a living Spirit.

I hope we are.

In his story of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke uses his story to warn the church not to settle for a static memory. In fact, in the words of Jesus, he orders them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for the promise from the father. Why?
Because if they head off on the road, taking with them a dead memory rather than being led by the living presence of Christ, they will, in the name of Jesus, misrepresent him at the most fundamental level. They'll recreate Jesus in their own image.

Jesus is not a dead memory, but a living Spirit.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote:
Remembered personality is a static, fixed thing.
Person is a living, dynamic being.

The Ascension is a way of Luke letting us know a number of important things.
All that Jesus is, is taken into the very heart of God.
His humanity, his kindness, his generosity towards outsiders, his care for the lost,
his suffering love are all present within the heart of God.

And then they are given back to the church in the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And then, another way of looking at this story.
There was a difference in this occasion of the Ascension, to all the other occasions over that long period of time after the resurrection. So often we read Jesus was with them and then he was hidden from their eyes. Something is occurring that goes beyond the normal things we can describe. But still, the focus is on this particular one, where he is, what he is doing. But with the ascension something different happens.

The one is gone. And the disciples aren't to stand there looking for him anymore.
The particular has ended. They have to let go.
Until they do, they cannot move on.

They are to become the body of Christ, as the letter to the Ephesian Church says.
The body of Christ is not a bunch of people remembering a hero. That is a profound misrepresentation.

The Body of Christ, is a living, breathing, dynamic, responding relationship; living out the mission and person of Christ.
That's why, at the beginning of Acts, the Greek reads literally,
"In the former book, O Theophilus, I wrote all that Jesus began to do and teach from the beginning."

The early church soon came to realize that it was now living out what Jesus was continuing to do and teach. They were the body of Christ now.
And that is our task as the Church.

When you become a part of the church, are you conscious of the holiness of what you belong to?

In the words of the letter to the church at Ephesus
Eph. 1. "God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all."

To be a part of the Christian Church is the most sacred privilege,
a holy trust from God, to live out the life of Christ.