We’re in transition. From tomorrow pubs and restaurants open inside as do museums and galleries and international travel is allowed. Many of us will be thinking further ahead than tomorrow. The simple routines we have followed for over a year are unravelling as a wider world invites us. Those weekly zoom calls to family and friends are to be transformed into physical encounters all of which is exciting and unsettling. When I went to see my son recently he shocked me by hugging me having taken a COVID test that morning and knowing I’d had my jabs and three weeks after them.
We’re in transition. At the Bentswood Community Partnership zoom meeting two weeks ago a major topic among participating residents and professionals was anxiety in families and how we counter it. There’s a system of Digital Champions I’m part of starting tomorrow morning at the hub in America Lane to counter digital exclusion. St Wilfrid’s has done well making services available online but we can all do more to help engage older people getting left out. I commend here the quiet ministry of Melvyn Walmsley who will read this sermon over the telephone to many church members this morning.
To live is to grow and to change. All of us have lived through a year of traumatic change. I lost two people to COVID I helped over the years through confession and spiritual direction. Many are on antidepressants. Loneliness has been accentuated by compulsory isolation. Pictures on the TV are sometimes unbearable. Teachers in India dying after being forced to supervise un socially distanced election polls remind me of anxious people I know working at Princess Royal hospital. We rightly salute those on the frontline of the National Health Service, cleaners as much as doctors and nurses.
The Feast of the Glorious Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ sets our transition from lockdown in a wider transitional context. God does not change but on account of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Our Lord we know he is not unaffected by human transition and trauma. As the letter to the Hebrews says ‘we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need’ (Hebrews 4:15-16).
The Jesus raised at Easter is the same Jesus killed through awful suffering upon the Cross. That’s why the Church adorns its Easter candle with nails. As the priest said on Easter Sunday touching the candle’s five studs: ‘By his holy and glorious wounds may Christ our Lord guard and keep us’. The Easter Candle is a triumphant witness, standing tall, that says God is above death. It is also a reminder that God is not above suffering. The God and Father of Jesus, expects nothing of us he’s not prepared to go through himself. This is the ground of hope we cling to as Christians.
On Ascension Feast we contemplate transition in its ‘out of this world’ Godward aspect. The liturgical year is one of our greatest teachers. We believe as Christians God made and loves all that is including each and everyone of us sitting in Church this morning:
God loves us so much he sent his Son down to be born as one of us – which is Christmas.
God loves us so much he allowed Jesus to suffer what human beings suffer, to live and die as one of us yet without sin – which is Lent
God loves us so much he wants us to know death isn’t the end of us in his sight – which is Easter
God loves us so much he brought Jesus up to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit down into any heart that will welcome him – which is Pentecost.
That’s Christianity in four lines – Christmas, Lent, Easter and Pentecost.
On Ascension Feast at the close of Eastertide we recall how God loves each and everyone of us and those gone before us on earth no less than ourselves. He loves each and everyone whose bones lie in the Churchyard. They were buried close to the Church because they believed when you live close to Jesus Christ and his followers your death brings you closer to him and his followers past into the glory above and beyond this world.
In this service we take, we bless, we break, we share bread to show forth God’s love for us and for all that is – especially recalling how Jesus was taken by God the Father on Good Friday and his body was broken on the Cross to show God’s love for us, love shared with the whole world ever since by the pouring out of the Holy Spirit.
At the eucharist we also see our lives taken by God. When we put the bread on the plate and the wine in the cup we think of ourselves placed there before God, our congregation, our town, our county, our nation, our world, its joys and sorrows, its strengths and all being placed on the altar of God which is the eucharist table to ascend to him.
In the eucharist we take, bless, break and share bread and wine.
In the eucharist we see Jesus taken, blessed, broken and shared.
In the eucharist our lives also ascend to God and are made a blessing to others. We offer ourselves in union with the ascended Christ so all that we are about, including transition out of lockdown, might be consecrated to God’s praise and service.
Blessed, praised and hallowed be our Lord Jesus Christ upon his throne in glory, in the most holy sacrament of the altar and in the hearts of all his faithful people now and ever and to the ages of ages. Amen.
