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Pentecost 3
13/6/2021

1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
Mark 4:26-34

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Peter Blackwood

Some of the best told stories in the Scriptures are about David, the shepherd boy who became king and ancestor of Jesus. There are the heroic stories like David and Goliath, David and Johanthan, David the musician and some shameful ones like David and Bathsheba. The whole anthology of David stories begins with one of the most skilfully crafted bits of literature. It is all about David, and yet David just gets a walk on part at the end. It is all about David, but the centre stage is occupied by Samuel. It is even book ended by reference to Samuel’s itinerary. It starts, ‘Then Samuel went to Ramah’ (1 Samuel 15:34) and finishes, ‘Samuel then set out and went to Ramah’ (1 Samuel 16:13).

The political intrigue is wonderful. Samuel is instructed by the LORD to go to Bethlehem to anoint a king. Everyone is scared stiff. Samuel is scared of King Saul. The elders of Bethlehem are scared of Samuel. We would appreciate better why Samuel is so scary if we had read the story that immediately precedes this one. It concludes, ‘And Samuel hewed Agag (king of the Amalekites) in pieces before the LORD in Gilgal.’ (1 Samuel 15:33). It’s OK, don’t be scared, says the LORD, just take a heifer with you and pretend to be doing something religious. Who could suspect any political intrigue if you are worshiping? I mean, look at us. Is what we are doing here political? Well, actually it is. Not party political, but we are declaring loyalty beyond our different national and ethnic loyalties.

Anyway, back to the story where everyone seems to have been fooled by the heifer and the invitation to Jesse’s household to join in offering a sacrifice. Behind the smoke and cinders of the sacrifice the real drama takes place.

David’s anointing as king comes after a long line of misdirection. It is obvious that Samuel should consider Jesse’s eldest to be king, and failing him, the next, then the next, and so on. The LORD has even given Samuel a clue as to what he should be looking for, or rather, what he should not be looking for – “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

Interestingly, the storyteller reveals this human propensity to looking on the outside when the story focuses on the shepherd boy’s ruddy complexion and beautiful eyes. Michaelangelo also took a very human view when he released his statue of David from a lump of marble in Florence. Mind you, the story of Michaelangelo’s statue has some resonance with the anointing story because the lump of marble was a reject.

Sorry about all these side steps and diversions.  Life is full of side steps, misdirections and diversions that lead away from what is really important, away from what is life giving.

Samuel is to anoint a king chosen by the LORD. He must rely on the voice of the LORD to point in the right direction. He is to discern according to how God sees, not as humans see. The outward appearance will not do. God sees the heart or the core – that is what will reveal what a king should be.

God looked in the unexpected place for a king and found the shepherd from a family of one of the lesser tribes of Israel, a ruddy lad with beautiful eyes who had not been invited to the sacrifice.

Jesus looked in the unexpected places for the kingdom of God. He did not find metaphors for the Kingdom in palaces or temples, in mighty armies or libraries stacked with wisdom. He looked rather at a farmer scattering seed and waiting for the harvest. He looked at the tiniest of seeds and saw the tree and the birds that would nest in its branches.

All very interesting, but what are we to do? The story of David’s anointing reminds us of our humanity and how different our perspective on what is important from how God looks to the core. Well, as followers of Jesus there is the invitation to see differently – to attend to what Jesus made of the world and what is important. To look for signs of the Kingdom coming. Sure, we will continue to be fed misinformation and distractions, so the challenge will always be to look for God’s view and listen for God’s word. We are bombarded by news and commentary on all manner of local, national and world affairs. There is plenty of advice on how to deal with them, or, indeed, whether to deal with them. Anyone grappling with how to see what God sees has little difficulty with some of our disputed issues – should we be doing something about carbon emissions? Should we be dealing compassionately with a family incarcerated on Christmas Island? Even here we find professing Christians in leadership failing to come up with the same answers you and I see so plainly.

Paragraph 3 of The Basis of Union of the Uniting Church tells of our journey to God’s promised goal and concludes with this sentence: ‘On the way Christ feeds the Church with Word and Sacraments, and it has the gift of the Spirit in order that it may not lose the way.’

Our seeing and hearing and acting in God-like ways is possible by gifts that keep us on the way. The prophet Samuel went to Bethlehem to share in a religious ritual and performed an act, guided by the word of the LORD that impacted a nations future under the reign of God.

We gather for religious ritual, for worship, and impelled to act in ways that reveal something of God’s kingdom coming. Little acts are fine – like a farmer spreading little seeds.

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Pentecost 2
6/6/2021

1 Samuel 8:4-11, 16-20
Psalm 24
Mark 3:20-35

Sermon preached by Rev. Dr Rob Gallacher

The people of Israel want to be like other nations.   And the Lord says, “They have rejected me from being king over them”.    Accepting the Lord as your king makes you different from other people around you.

When Jesus began his ministry it was so different that people said, “He has gone out of his mind”.    His family went out to restrain him and the Scribes said the he was a servant of Satan.

As Christians we are called to be different from the world around us.   The issues have changed.    For one thing, some of you will be wanting to get rid of the monarch, whereas Israel was wanting to have one.    But there are more significant areas where affirming God   as sovereign might cause us to be different.     See if we can apply this sovereignty of God to just two sensitive areas this morning – the use of money and the care of the environment.

Of the few Sunday School lessons that I can remember, the one on gambling sticks with me.    The teacher made a short list of what was good about gambling, and then a long list about what was bad.    The point that made me think was that gambling is not a good way to distribute wealth.   Winner takes all leaves a lot of losers with nothing.   “Over the course of your lifetime”, said the teacher, “you will handle a large amount of money.   Consider well what you do with it.”    That led into the concept of stewardship.   What I have is not my own.    It is a gift entrusted to me with which to do good.    Being a Methodist, this was backed up by John Wesley’s sermon on money – Earn all you can, save all you can and give all you can.   Wesley himself said, “In the first year that I earned money, I received 30 pounds.  I lived on 28 and gave away 2.   The next year I earned 50 pounds.   I lived on 28 and gave away 22.   The third year …..  “and so on.

Some years ago I returned from a conference of Reformed Churches in Ghana.    The conference had been very strong on resisting the exploitation of the poor by the rich.    An incident drove this home.     We were in a taxi in the centre of Accra, when I mentioned that I would like to taste Ghanaian chocolate.     The driver pulled over and beckoned to a young lady who was carrying a large plate on her head stacked with chocolate bars.   I gave her the small amount asked for.   She reached up and retrieved a chocolate bar.   And on we went.    The chocolate was terrible.    I guess it had been on her head, in the tropical sun, for a very long time.     When I looked at the world through the eyes of that chocolate seller, in the context of the conference message, I asked myself, “What can I do?”    One thing was to increase my contributions to overseas aid.    It so happened that the small increase in my contribution, coincided with the Australian Government slashing millions from its foreign aid budget.

It is seldom easy to affirm the sovereignty of God, and to actually make a difference.   Consider our present situation.  We already live in a society based on selfishness and driven by consumption.   Yet our government want us to spend, spend, spend our way out of recession.     But I am not convinced about buying what I do not need and have nowhere to put.     Instead of being like everyone else and complaining about the rigours of lockdown, is there something positive that we can do to alleviate suffering?   A caring phone call here and there is not too difficult, but when it comes to people watching their businesses fall apart, or workers losing wages the only schemes I could come up with were deeply flawed.    Our Mark the Evangelist News has been encouraging us to donate to the Christian Hospital in Vellore, so we can do something about the dire situation in India, but what about here? All I can do is raise the question, “What does it mean here and now to affirm that God is sovereign, and how do we steward our resources to that end?”

I turn now to the care of the environment.   I want to affirm all the concern being expressed about global warming and climate change, but it’s not enough.  Our Christian faith should add a spiritual dimension to what is being said.   You only to have to listen to Greta Thunberg for a few minutes to see a clear pattern.     With emotion she will express fear about the world she will have to live in, and then she supports this with scientific data.   The formula of fear and figures must be heard, but there is more that needs to be said.    In Psalm 24 the Psalmist starts, “The earth is the Lord’s”.    That sets us on the pathway of sovereignty and stewardship.   The earth is the Lord’s, and our role, says Genesis 2:15 is to till it and to keep it.   It is this more spiritual attitude that is under-stated.   In 2019 the Assembly put out a “Vision Statement for a Just Australia”.    It says, “The Uniting Church believes the whole world is God’s good creation ….  It takes seriously our responsibility to care for the whole creation.”   Sovereignty and stewardship are implied.   But we can go still deeper.

Simon Winchester, near the end of his book called “Land” quotes from the indigenous chief, Sealth.    When he was asked to sell his land to the government of the United States he replied, “Buy or sell the land?   The idea is strange to us.   If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?   Every part of the earth is sacred to my people….”      The government went ahead anyway.   They carved the land up and sold it off in bits.   Sky scrapers were built on it, and as a final insult, they named the city after the chief – Seattle.

Much the same happened with the indigenous people in Australia.    In his book, “Changing Fortunes” our own David Radcliffe has documented how it happened in this very area, and how Batman and his associates had misgivings about the treaty they wrote, but went ahead anyway.  So we too have private ownership of little bits.   Caring for your own little patch can develop into an affinity with nature.   On a larger scale, that spiritual connection with God’s creation may develop into a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty and mystery of God’s life in nature.    Jan Morgan and Graeme Garrett, who teach at theological colleges here in Melbourne, have written “On the Edge”.    They have a discipline of standing still for half an hour each day, listening to the ocean.    “They have gone out of their minds”, some will say.   But what the ocean has told them over time is very moving.

At one point David Radcliffe (p 61) says: “As a society we still struggle with fundamental questions about our relationship with the natural environment.   Is it a finite, renewable resource to be stewarded wisely or something to be exploited in the immediate term with scant regard for any longer-term ecological consequences?”

It would help if people, especially the decision makers, could see the beauty of the earth and sense the hand of the creator who is behind it all.   We might even say who is through it all.   If we confess that the earth is the Lord’s our care for the environment becomes a sacred trust, an act of worship, a way of participating in the life of God.

A couple of weeks ago, in “With Love to the World,” a past president of the Uniting Church, James Haire, was commenting on a passage in Ephesians.   He said, “political and social norms and powers are useful secondary guides in life, but they cannot replace our prime allegiance to the ascended and ruling Christ …   We are called to live out our primary allegiance to Christ in our lives”.

The view that our money, our land and our environment are not our own, but gifts of which we are stewards will make us different from many.   Some will say we are out of our minds, and seek to make us like other nations, wanting us to turn away from the living God whom we acknowledge as Lord and sovereign of all the earth, and for whom we are stewards.

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Trinity Sunday
30/5/2021

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29
John 3:1-17

Our psalm, as we heard it this morning, began with a call to the ‘heavenly beings’ to ‘ascribe glory and strength’ to the God of Israel. There is an older translation, however, which runs like our call to worship this morning: ‘Ascribe to the Lord, you gods, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength.’ Either translation can be justified, in part because many biblical scholars believe that the psalm is probably borrowed from one of the neighbouring polytheistic religions and pressed into service for Israel its God.

This older translation perhaps jars with the sensitivities of believers today, for we’ve long held that there is only one God. We have understood that there has been a progression from a polytheism (the belief in many gods) to henotheism (the belief in only one god, among many options), to monotheism (the belief that there is only one god – not least because it is a nice neat philosophical idea. And so it seems odd now to speak again about ‘the gods’. Yet perhaps it’s time to take up once again talk of a pantheon – a field of many gods. The reason is, perhaps surprisingly, the rise of the current form of popular atheism.

The basic assertion of popular atheism is, of course, simply that ‘there is no God, God does not exist’. But what, in the first place, could we mean if we declare that ‘God does exist’ or that ‘God is’? Our the first problem here is the word ‘is’. We say ‘is’ about ourselves and other things in the world: that chair ‘is’; that man ‘is’, that tree ‘is’. These things ‘are’ or ‘exist’. ‘Isness’ is a characteristic or property of stuff lying around the place in the world. To say then that God ‘is’ – that God ‘exists’ – is to reduce God to being an object like a chair or a man or a tree, somehow also lying around the place in the world. Atheism observes that we can’t find God anywhere in the world, and concludes that God does not exist.

The logic is impeccable, on the assumption that God is a part of the world – that God ‘exists’. Perhaps surprisingly, however, faith also holds that God does not exist in this way. God is not a ‘part’ of the world, not even the biggest thing in the world. The doctrine of creation recognises that God and the world are related but also that they are different. There is, of course, much difference within the world but the difference between God and the world is a ‘different difference’ from every other difference and distinction we see around us. The difference between God’s ‘is-ness’ and our ‘is-ness’ is so great that it is most simply expressed by saying that God does not ‘exist’.

But see that this is said not at all to deny God but that we might give God right praise – that we might know at least what can’t be said about the God who matters.

If we were, as a matter of definition, to insist that God does ‘exist’, we would then have to say that there’s a very important sense in which we do not exist. None of this is to say that God or we don’t matter, but only that questions and assertions about God’s existence won’t get us anywhere very interesting. The existence of God is not a question which ought to exercise us too much one way or another,  because it is a question which is usually too confused to admit a sensible answer. From the point of view of Jewish and Christian faith, to say that God does not exist would simply be to say that, however God is, God is not like we are, which is simply the logic of a sensible doctrine of creation.

Of course, we wonder about the existence of God because many Christians (and other theists) do assume that God’s existence is central to belief – we assume that faith is faith that God exists, and that God exists as an explanation of ‘all that is’. Yet talk about God would do well to take the lead of the older translation of Psalm 29 with its many ‘gods’, and begin to speak again of a pantheon. For the question of the Scriptures is not whether God exists. Rather, the Scriptures are always interested in which god matters, and not whether there ‘is’ a God, or how many gods there are.

To make more sense of this, there’s one more thing to note about our use of the word ‘God’, which is that we use it in a double sense, sometimes to denote a kind of thing and sometimes as a name. This is a little like the words ‘mummy’ and ‘daddy’. A child knows that everyone has a ‘mummy’, but when he addresses his mother the word mummy is not a thing everyone has but the name of his mother. There are many mummies, but we only call one of them ‘Mummy’. It is much the same for the word ‘God’. In the Scriptures there are many entities which are called gods, but when we say ‘I believe in God’, we mean only one of them. The question is, which one of them?

The psalmist gives his answer: the one whose name is ‘Yahweh’ – which is translated as ‘the Lord’ (with the small capitals). In almost every line of the Psalm we heard this name repeated:

[you gods…],² Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name;
worship the Lord in holy splendour.
⁵ The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars…
⁷ The voice of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire.
⁸ The voice of the Lord shakes the wilderness…
⁹ The voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl…
¹⁰ The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits enthroned as king forever.
¹¹ May the Lord give strength to his people!
May the Lord bless his people with peace!

What the psalmist does here is have all the (other) gods turn their gaze towards ‘the Lord’, and ascribe to this one the sovereignty over all things, including the many lesser gods themselves. The poet’s concern is not oneness of God but the sovereignty of this particular [g]od over all the others.

This distinction between the gods is central to Old Testament theology. The divine names are a way of differentiating between the gods as different powers available to us to deliver the life we seek. In the Old Testament a god is something you call upon for security, health and prosperity, something you fear, or invoke against your fears. The only question is, which of the gods will deliver? It is the purpose of the gods – their function in human life – which is the important thing for re-casting our talk about belief and unbelief today.

To the extent that we today call upon powers to save us, we find ourselves in the theological space of the Scriptures, whether or not we call these powers ‘gods’. There are many such powers we seek to placate or to control and wield in modern life. We might name the economy as one, with its doctrines of the need for constant consumption and for constant increase in consumption. You don’t have to be a professor of economics to notice how large economic concerns loom for us as a society or the religious fervour with which it is served. We might name the nation as another power-cum-divinity with a powerful grip on us. The nation-state is a relatively recent invention in our history, but something like it has been with us for as long as we’ve drawn distinctions between tribes and clans. And we see the tragic consequences of our service to different national gods every night on our TV screens.

Other quasi-divinities lurking in our world, their divine characteristics unrecognised, include ‘tradition’, ‘the individual’, ‘youth’, ‘money’. Any one of these has the potential to take on demonic dimensions by which what is small and specific and precious is crushed by what is large and general. The poverty of popular atheism is not the paucity of its arguments about God but the absence in all that polemic of a viable economic political model or ethical framework which would make sense of us in our malaise and our tendency to worship worldly things as if they were heavenly. This fundamental confusion about ourselves and our world is central to the testimony of Scripture.

Our problem is not God or religion as such – at least as they are cast by our atheistic critics. Our problem is that we cannot save ourselves, without a lot of us being lost or crushed along the way, and that is scarcely being ‘saved’. Getting rid of religion is not going to solve the problem, for getting rid of our religious bent has been the work of God among his people at least since the call of Abraham, and it’s not been managed yet.

We need a better atheism than that which is trotted out every now and again as the solution to all our problems. This better atheism would be one like that of which Christians themselves were accused in the early days of the church in Rome – an atheism which does not deny the presence of the many god-like powers in our lives, but distinguishes between them in order to identify which is the one which speaks us – all of us – the best.

There is much more which must be said, but today it will have to be enough simply to suggest that, for the sake of the gospel, we might have to allow that the God we gather to worship on Sundays is in fact one among many gods in our lives, and yet this one actively seeks us out, that we might have peace and freedom. This the psalmist knows better than most of us. We are under the influence of the gods, and they are at best untrustworthy and, at worst, outright dangerous.

It is, then, to the God of Israel – the God and Father of Jesus Christ – that the poet calls the gods and all peoples to turn, that they might watch as this One – Yaweh, the Lord – sets his people from the powers which diminish us and takes from our hands those powers we exercise over others, and so blesses all people with peace (v11).

May God’s people, then, hear the poet’s call, and turn with the gods to the Holy One of Israel, that he may put us right.

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Pentecost
23/5/2021

Romans 8:22-27
Psalm 104
John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15

In a sentence
The Spirit of God makes heaven out of us

Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’

The text is not explicit about what the unbearable things are, and the neither do the commentaries seem to be very interested in the question. Yet this might be important for a church which finds much ‘unbearable’: decline in numbers, deteriorating and unmanageable buildings, a much-bruised reputation and increasingly complex governance responsibilities. No small part of our own thinking about a future off this site will be ‘What can we bear?’ What is the relationship between these unbearable things here and now, and the things Jesus considers his disciples will not be able to bear?

The unbearable things Jesus speaks of here come a little more into view when he refers to the work of the Spirit. The work of the Spirit here is to ‘convict’, to ‘prove the world wrong’ about sin, righteousness and judgement. This is not a Spirit who sits well with much contemporary interest in ‘spirituality’. This is a spikey Spirit that does not waft or flow or comfort but skewers us with the pointy end of sin, righteousness and judgement.

‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.’ They cannot bear them ‘now’ because the Spirit has not yet been given. The Spirit has not been given because Jesus has not yet been crucified. The unbearable thing, then, and our being able to bear it, have to do with the cross.

The death of Jesus must be a part of what will be unbearable for the disciples, yet the Spirit is no mere ‘comfort’ for this difficult experience, no soft cushion in a hard world. The Spirit will re-cast the cross, moving it from the world’s judgement on Jesus to God’s judgement on the world. The unbearability of the death of Jesus will become a new vision of righteousness.

But what then about those things we find unbearable here and now? What is the relationship between the unbearable thing Jesus would say, the way in which the Spirit makes that bearable, and our own unbearable things?

The Spirit makes bearable the unbearable things to which Jesus refers, most surprisingly, precisely by creating the unbearable church. The Spirit tells the truth about Jesus by doing Jesus again: now as the church – the unbearable church.

This is surely troubling.

When we condemn the church for its heresy or dogmatism or managerialism or incompetence or corporatism or wishy-washiness, or for its wealth or anxiety or triumphalism or self-interest or lack of faith, or whatever, we declare: surely this cannot bear the Word of God, be the presence of God, even be useful to God. Surely there is more of God somewhere else. This is part of the appeal of modern, popular nowhere-in-particular spirituality and its aversion to being ‘locked in’ to place or community or ritual: the spiritual cannot be found here.

But the gift of the Spirit – the gift of this particular Spirit – is the gift of the extraordinary ordinary. Here, now in the church – even this church! – the truth the Spirit brings is the possibility of ‘heaven’ – God’s kingdom come, here. This we declare not because what of we see but because of who chooses to name this place in that way – because of whose Body we are said to become, according to the will of God.

It matters not whether the same might be said of places other than the church. It matters for us only that this place – our place – is claimed by God as God’s own, embraced as if an Only-Begotten Child. This is a new vision of righteousness.

This is the gospel – that, even we as are, God wills to have us. The Spirit takes what is in a community such as ours and declares that even this can bear the grace of God.

It is not for nothing that the creed has us declare, ‘We believe in the church.’ To believe in Jesus is to believe in the church. To love Jesus is to love the crucified Jesus, to see in the world’s abandonment and judgement of him the truth of God. In the same way, to believe in the church is to love the church as it actually is.  This is not to baptise or endorse all that the church is in its externality; it is, instead, to declare, Where else would we expect the deep grace of God to be manifest except in such an unbearable place? It is here that our belief in Jesus, even our love of Jesus, becomes concrete and specific – in the particular, tangible community of which we are a part.

And out of this springs the imperative: love the church. Love the church not as an idea but as it is. Love your congregation; love not only the one you’re happy to sit next to, but the one who sits in front of you, or behind, or across the room. Love your church council. Love your presbytery. Love your Synod. Do this not because they are lovely, yet. Any of these can sometimes be quite unbearable, entirely unlovely.

Love, because it is the love which bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things which makes the beloved lovely. When this happens the unbearable is not made not merely bearable but a joy.

This matters for the process through which our congregation is presently passing – the long, drawn-out, expensive, laborious, frustrating, disappointing, dispiriting, unbearable process of trying to deal with these buildings in the context of the kind of church we are as a denomination. It also relates to the stage we are now entering – hopefully, the last few steps towards determining a future for the congregation. We can’t enter into this expecting that it will be easy, or that it will be obvious what to do, or that we will completely satisfy everyone.

But we could take our next steps in the love of which we have just spoken. We could, then, not so much work toward an outcome for a future for the congregation as love one another in that kind of direction. Then, what is ahead of us would not be something we ‘have’ to do – another unbearable thing in the life of the church. It would simply be the kind of thing we should always be doing – another work of love: thinking together, discussing, debating, planning, praying, and then looking to see what God can make of all that.

To believe in this God is to believe in the church which God’s Spirit creates – even ours, and out of ours. To believe in the church is not yet to see it, but to expect that it will come into view, and to act now in such a way that when it does appear, we will recognise ourselves in it – no longer unbearable but cause for joy on account of God’s work of grace.

Let us, then, begin and continue to live and love according to the wholly new righteousness we expect God to make out of us.

Re-worked from a sermon previously preached at MtE (2015)

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Easter 7
16/5/2021

Acts 1:1-11
Psalm 93
Luke 24:44-53

In a sentence
The Ascension of Jesus is a sign that Jesus continues his ministry for us, now in the very heart of God.

Most of you are old enough to recognise the phrase, ‘Beam me up, Scottie’, and many have likely made a connection between the biblical account of the Ascension of Jesus and the collective memory of the call of Star Trek’s Captain James Kirk from some alien planet up to his chief engineer Montgomery Scott in the orbiting Enterprise (‘collective memory’ because Kirk never actually said it quite like that).

Yet, it isn’t easy to make sense of where Jesus goes as he disappears into the clouds. Luke, of course, would answer, ‘heaven’, but we’ve long since abandoned the thought that heaven is up (I hope). For Luke, ‘up’ is a place; for us, it is only a direction. It would be easier for us today to hear that Jesus, after he finished talking to the disciples, simply ‘vanished’ from their sight (cf. Luke 24.31) in the way that Captain Kirk did, and to be told that he was now in heaven rather than to see him on his way there. Luke’s rather stark image of a body rising into the heavens is no doubt intended to help his first readers with the question of where the body of Jesus went, but it doesn’t much help us.

The Ascension as an event is not a dominant feature in the New Testament. It is a little like the Christmas stories, told quickly and without later references back to them in the rest of the New Testament. These are things which ‘must’ have happened and so are noted with an account or two, but otherwise not particularly important. That Jesus was born is essential; how it happened doesn’t matter. The gospel would still be the gospel without Christmas. So also for the Ascension: it matters that Jesus is in some way ‘elevated’ to ‘God’s right hand’; how that happened, or what it might have looked like, or even precisely when it occurred, is somewhat secondary.

This is to say that the doctrine that Jesus ‘sits at God’s right hand’ – another startlingly realistic image – can be held without Luke’s gracefully levitating Lord. We can believe that Jesus ‘sits at God’s right hand’ without believing that God has hands; so also can we believe that Jesus is ‘with’ God without visualising it in Luke’s terms. This conviction must take a specific form for its substance to be communicated, but the substance can remain much the same even if the form is changed. Luke’s image, implying as it does a view of Jesus’ feet dangling overhead, is simply the particular form in which the substance of Jesus’ relationship to God is expressed.

Of course, most weeks, we recite a creed which refers to the Ascension, and so we are put in a position of saying something the form of which – by itself – is difficult to defend. I hope that the distinction we’ve drawn between the form and the substance helps, so that we might be able to say that line – and every other line in the Creed – as a kind of code within which is carried the deeper confession.

But let’s note two other things about the credal statement, first to embrace it and then to qualify it somewhat. As the story of God in Christ unfolds in the Creed, we hear that Jesus was conceived, was born, did suffer, did die, was buried, did descend, and did rise. Then, shifting from the past tense to the present, we hear that Jesus now ‘is seated’ at the right hand of the Father. This is a continuing situation: Jesus is with God.

Note then how this relates to the doctrine of the Incarnation. To say that Jesus is God incarnate is to say that God comes into human being in the person of Jesus. Whether or not we believe it, this is the point of the doctrine. To say that Jesus ‘ascends’ to God is to say the complementary opposite: that human being comes into divine being. Where is God? In Jesus, among us. Where are we? In Jesus, in God. The Incarnation sees us as God’s context; the Ascension sees God as our context.

We see, then, that the Ascension doesn’t really ‘add’ anything to the Incarnation, and that the work of the Incarnation would not be incomplete without the Ascension. What we said about Jesus on Easter Day, we can also say about the Creed: it has no ‘parts’, but is rather a multitude of refracting surfaces through which, darkly, we see one thing.

Jesus is not, then, merely ‘elevated’ in the Ascension, or rewarded. Luke’s account affirms that the human Jesus who died a sinner’s death, discounted and discarded – this one is at the heart of God and continues there.

Ours is a time, then, marked by God’s embrace of God-forsakenness. In metaphorical language drawn from the royal court, one who died the death of sinners now ‘sits at God’s right hand’. Seated there, Jesus becomes, as it were, a reminder to God of his love for the world, the presence of the broken, godless world in Jesus himself, standing, praying in the heart of God. This ‘reminder’ is the purpose of Jesus’ prayer, which precedes and embraces our own. To place Jesus there is to place ourselves there.

To God, Jesus stands as the sign of broken creation; to the world, Jesus stands as the sign of God’s embrace of that broken creation: here God is, and remains.

This is the gospel: in all things, God with us, us with God. In every effort, the freedom to succeed or to fail. In every joy and sorrow, God filling and extending. As we are, we are found at the heart of God, our lives hidden with Christ in God – loved as we are, and in that love receiving the freedom of God’s children.

The gospel is that Jesus has gone before us in all things, and has already brought us into the heart of God. That being the case, fear has no place among us, nor envy or pride, nor greed or hatred. Such things have to do with incompleteness, with not yet being free. In such attitudes and behaviour, we act to secure what is already given us in Jesus. For the incarnate and ascended Jesus is himself complete and, by the grace of God, is our own completeness in God.

If Jesus is with God and prays for us, all things are already ours.

And we are released to do and to be as Jesus was: children of God, working and speaking and thinking in the God who gives us all things and frees us for a fullness of life, in love.

Let us, then, live out of that freedom.

Re-worked from a sermon previously preached at MtE (2014)