16th May 2021
Parish Church of St James, Louth
Acts 1.15-17, 21-26; 1 John 5.9-13; John 17.6-19
+ May I speak in the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
What a lift it gives us all to have music back in our ears and working on our hearts! What a lift, too, to be able to welcome back some of the younger, most musically gifted members of our church family—and to welcome new voices and friends amongst them, too. Our worship will be so much richer for their performance, their presence, and their perspective.
And ‘lift’ is what our choristers sang for us first, in that beautiful hymn ‘Rejoice the Lord is King’: ‘Lift up your heart, lift up your voice: Rejoice again I say rejoice!’ This is a Sunday to feel a bit of uplift, and even the breeze blowing beneath our feet, because it’s the Sunday after Ascension day. This is the day our first reading briefly mentions, when ‘Jesus was taken up from us’, and which in our Gospel he is talking about when he says to God ‘but now I am coming to you’.
It completes the rising that began at Easter, the journey that Christ takes all the way down into our humanity at Christmas, all the way even deeper down into the worst experiences of our humanity through his crucifixion, suffering and death, and then all the way up – bearing all that we are with him – into the presence of God, the perfect, the divine.
Usually things that sink can’t also be things that soar, but Jesus’ motion of life and death defies that reality. In language we say both of hearts—my heart sank, my heart soared—and perhaps that gives us the key. This isn’t about physics as much as it is about love. The story of the Ascension is the story of yet another boundary broached. And as Jesus’ friends look wondering up towards the friend going again from them, angels appear again, as they did at the empty tomb, and promise that his absence is nothing but his future presence: they talk about Jesus’ coming again; Christ has spoken already also of his sending his Holy Spirit. And Jesus going from us is also the vast promise, because he is as much human as divine, that our whole selves have a permament place in the presence of God.
And what do Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel tell us? You’ll have noticed there are an awful lot of them and they aren’t perfect in their clarity! Jesus’ openness in prayer maybe tells us all something about how we can spill our hearts to God, freely and fully and not worrying about the words or the syntax we use. But those insistent urgent words, all on our behalf, also speak of his deep, deep love for those he is to leave. He wants to leave us protected, guarded, and with the great hope of being ‘sanctified’—made holy and one with God ‘that they may be one, as we are one’. It makes me think of something from Luke’s Gospel account of the Ascension that I hadn’t notice before this year. That Jesus’ last act is to bless his disciples, and ‘while he was blessing them, he withdrew from them’—still blessing, all the way to heaven.
Jesus’ words make it clear we are to stay where we are, not catch onto his helium balloon string as he ascends. Even if we do so ‘in the world but not of it’. But he speaks of sanctification in the truth, our holiness, our protection, and our unity with one another and with God all as realities we can live here.
In the epistle reading, this is so true too. We are told, now, that ‘you have eternal life’. Now, not then. Eternal life is not a bribe for the future, a horizon we are just looking towards. We are lifted up now, given it now, and called to live and walk in its light.
In a moment, after the Creed (the words of our belief) and the Peace (when we turn to one another in affirm our love and concord before we receive) I will start the Eucharistic prayer with the little dialogue between us. This is the bit that’s called the ‘sursum corda’, when I say ‘lift up your hearts’ and lift my hands to show you what I mean. Actually ‘sursum corda’ means literally the even more rousing: ’Up, hearts!’. ‘Up, hearts!’ is a reminder to us all to feel the joy we are called to, to live our risen life now. And the Eucharist is a gift of that happening, when earth touches heaven, when we feel closest to God in his promised presence with us in bread and wine.
Peter defines the call of an apostle, in our first reading from Acts, as that of being ‘witnesses to the Resurrection’. Justus and Matthias don’t seem to be called to be witnesses through some kind of elaborate assessment of merit and talent—which always reassures me, as I was chosen on St Matthias’ Day. But they have been asked to be the ones who do not deny, who have seen and believed, and now are asked to live to tell, the story that lifts our hearts: of death overcome, of heaven touching earth, of love and life victorious, of of a justice, of a mercy, of a love and a truth we can see, we can feel, we can live here and now, on earth as in heaven, world without end.