God is Gone Up

Courtesy of c28.com

I am fast learning, as a priest, that some of these festival days are hard things to preach at - and to not say the same thing a year later!

Anyway, brothers and sisters, it is the Feast of the Ascension, or as we like to call it in these parts, the Feast of the Ascension. Last year I considered how it must have been for the disciples with their new "Jesus shaped hole", and as I approached my own first incumbency, wondered how it might have been for twelve ordinary folk and their supporters taking on their first incumbency for the whole planet.

This year, I have been thinking about that utterance from the Cross - "it is finished", or "it is accomplished". They are significant words, much pondered and the essence of which is the fluff in so many prayer cushions! I think though, without the Ascension, this statement would have meant the darkest of things, and not the most salvific. 

So much of faith and church life alludes to journeying. Each act of worship has a beginning, a middle and an end (even the most 'spontaneous' acts). Even our meetings are framed by a route of journey. Time passes, and one thing leads to the next thing - and if we forget that in the sparkling moments of our faith's story, we miss a great deal of the point - I believe. 

Imagine Bethlehem and the birth. Great - a baby, new parents, gifts, heavenly creatures and the odd ungulate. Imagine the stable without the Christ's ministry and you simply have a Christmas Card scene, or at least a scene long ago forgotten because it would have fast become the account delivered by perceived beardy-weirdies. Jesus' ministry - full of miracle and teaching. Imagine that ministry without the Passion and death of Jesus. It would have been a notable ministry of an itinerant healer-preacher. No more no less. The crucifixion was a tragedy, a heinous crime - but without the Resurrection it would simply have been the slaying of a local religious hero, an early William Wallace moment. It may have even reached a history book, maybe. The Resurrection turned that murder into the atoning sacrifice, the crime into the most significant gift known to humankind. 

Without the Ascension, the only thing accomplished would have been the darker intentions of jealous pharisees and weak Romans. No more, no less. 

So, this is in many ways the final piece in the Jesus Jigsaw - the last piece that locks all the others into place. All that was done would have remained undone and incomplete had it not been for this super-natural and mysterious moment when the entire process set into place at the point of the Annuniciation was consummated and completed. 

Annunciation to Ascension - the greatest journey in the world, and we make it every year!

Christmas in the Real

The essence of a sermon preached recently

The Christmas that we have come to know and love in Britain at least, is wrapped in imagery and notions that are wonderful for marketting and evocation, but less pinned to the facts. We see the usual Christmas Card images of little domed houses to represent a tiny peaceful Bethlehem (and the carol tell us so too). We see the 'magazine rack' manger in art and in the wonderful nativity plays that are unfolding all around us at the moment. We see the noble shepherds huddled around their hillside while their sheep gambol around the place. Cow sheds, silence and stillness are ever-present qualities in all the things that we see and sing about. A moment of attention to the real world of first-century Palestine will reveal all these images to be flawed, and to my mind, unhelpful.

The picture is at the checkpoint to enter Bethlehem from Jersualem - a forbidding and unsafe feeling place as one passes through the gates. The Bethlehem that I have visited and heard about is a busy place, a place of bustle and life. I am given to understand that it always was. The place is on a hillside so the warm air carried with it the fragrance of sweet smelling plants mixed with a very light tinge of effluent in places. Shepherds had a poor reputation, reegarded in  their day as borderline criminals - marginalised, excluded. The cow shed never existed - the Baby and his family were in a maze of caves in the hillside used as stables and storehouses. Mangers are hollowed out stone slabs, and if anyone has ever kept a pet, will know how saliva-washed sticky and snotty they can get.  I am sure that the Manger in our carols was no exception. The Holy family were refugees in an occupied territory, perhaps accustomed to checkpoints themselves. The Holy mother was herself a child of fourteen. How many labels and judgements would the Holy Family attract in enlightened 21st Century Britain today, I wonder?

It do not mean to decimate Christmas - quite the oppsite. I want to celebrate the place of the Birth of the Messiah in the same way that The Father did, and by seeing the world for what it is - real and flawed. God chose the real world of a messed up first-century Palestine as the place where he would cause his Incarnation. There were likely pretty verdant pastures with all the qualities of present-day Christmas imagary that God could have used - but he didn't. He chose messed up, messy, flawed, imperfect, stinky, snotty reality to breathe life into his only Son. 

This is a matter of complete hope for me, and should be for all of us. As we make our way through our lives, day by day, mistake upon error, mis-judgement alongside poor timing - we can take considerable comfort that that was the precise environment that God chose to come among us. It tells me, at least, that Our Lord understands his children only too well, and that in knowing us as we are in the good and the less good of living as human beings, accepts us as we hope all parents do (or should). Christmas did happen in the real, happens in the real every year, and all that will take place between us and God in the future will be placed into the context that we find ourselves in - not a picture perfect representation of where we think we should be.