Sermon 28th May Sunday after Ascension


There is a lovely story told about the Member of Parliament, Ian Paisley: Matthew Paris, one time conservative member (and now broadcaster and journalist), as a newly-elected MP went to take his place in the House of Commons and was surprised to find Ian Paisley sitting on the Government benches. Sitting next to the controversial Irishman he remarked,

'I didn't expect to find you sitting here on the government benches. I thought you'd be with the Opposition...'

Paisley gruffly replied (and I can't do an Ulster accent!)

'Never confuse being by your side with being on your side'.

Human relationships are complicated things, and never more complicated than when the people you supposed were predictable in every way, turn out doing something completely different, completely unexpected, or completely contrary to the whole nature of things. But, being 'by your side and not necessarily on your side' seems to be an important religious insight in human relationships between themselves, with God, and through Jesus.

The reverse of the suggestion is, perhaps, easier to swallow, God being on our side, but not necessarily by our side'. We can all identify with that kind of sentiment - the invisible God who cannot be visibly identified as walking with you through the journey of life, (for God is Spirit), yet whose work is unmistakably on the side of the just and the righteous.

Yes, we can all agree to that kind of sentiment. But what about an image which depicts God clearly and visibly by your side, in a tactile and immanent sense, yet who is clearly as ill at ease with your company and actions as was Ian Paisley with the then Conservative Government?

Now that's a very different kind of God - God who is not on your side. Now that is a little more difficult to cope with...

A date in the calendar of the Church brings this unusual dynamic to some kind of climax. This last week, on Thursday, which was Ascension Day, the Church marked the point in time at which the reports in the scriptures of the incidents surrounding the risen Christ began to come to a close.

(Whether this is strictly true is not clear, for in John's Gospel the ascension has a different meaning from the other Gospels. And there is also the matter of Paul's encounter with the risen Christ: Was that an encounter like the upper room and the Emmaus road, or was it an encounter with Holy Spirit? Again, its not entirely clear.) But the Church marks the point at which Jesus is no longer regularly reported as being with his followers in his state of resurrection with the ascension.

It's a wonderfully dramatic tale: They climb a mountain (echoes of the incident with Moses on Sinai), clouds surround, mystery.

And then.... he was gone!

They must have looked, but he was not going back down the mountain - he must have 'ascended' to heaven....

And then, a few days later, the sounds like 'rushing wind' and the 'tongues of flame' saw God return in Holy Spirit, to the world's rejoicing. This remarkable culmination of the Incarnation, the Word Becoming Flesh, took place over just 11 days - from ascension day to Pentecost. And the state of confusion centres around the issue of the God who is by one's side in Christ suddenly becoming the Spirit-God who is invisible, unpredictable, omnipresent and mysterious.

Until this moment, it was remarkably clear to those who worshipped God, where God was, and on whose side God was one. But now, once again, things were in turmoil.

In Psalm 46 we hear that if God is with his people, then nothing can disturb them - God is the source of the nation's might and if the nation is not mighty then it must have offended God in some unspeakable way. But when God is on your side the mountains shake and tremble before you. (It's worth knowing that in Jewish spirituality, the mountains are seen as witnesses to the activities of people. To make the mountains shake, you must be a pretty significant people!)

To know that God is on your side is to have a foundation for national confidence, for whatever calamity befalls you, God will always defeat that which opposes you.

But God was not only on your side, God was also by your side, for God was in your midst, at the heart of your Holy City.

This is a significant theme throughout the Old Testament, God is the defender of the impregnable Zion, City of God. The Temple is the place of God's dwelling and the primary place of pilgrimage and worship. The trouble with this Zion-centred religious outlook - the outlook of 'if God is on our side, who can defeat us?' - the trouble with this outlook is that when you are defeated there are some serious questions to ask of your God, and of your people.

If you are defeated in battle, the fact may just be that the opposing army has better equipment, better generals and perhaps better rations - To involve God in your defeat seems to be a kind of morality of the underdog. The moments in History when God is claimed to be 'by the side' of the chosen people have always, and without exception, ended in military and economic disaster, and it must be added, there has usually been a theological holiday as well - because the God whom you supposed was at your side was more likely to have been a God of your own imagination and desire. As such, this outlook raises the idea of Providence to an unsustainable height - it places into God's hands the things which we should be thinking and doing for ourselves. It is simply not a sustainable point of view, to hold that all the things which go wrong in the world will be miraculously vindicated and addressed by some beatific vision far into the future (where God's suddenly unveiled broad brushstrokes are revealed to gasps of popular applause). This is not how is it at all - it rains on the just and the unjust alike because they all sit under the cloud, not because God has it in for them!

All of this happens when the visible and tactile God walks by your side - the assumption is made (as was by Matthew Paris in the House of Commons) that, 'being by your side is the same as being on your side'.

Jesus knew all of this. Jesus knew that to remain walking by people's side - now, after the Resurrection, when all was becoming much clearer in the minds of his followers and opponents - that walking by people's side can open the door to human misunderstanding of God. Those who claim Christ as a talisman for a particular brand of righteousness become latter-day Zionists. Jesus knew to walk by one man's side was essentially not to walk by another man's side. The limitations of time and space dictated that Christ could never be by the side of all people and the whole of creation. What could be done?

What, in fact, did happen was a momentous re-discovery in the new religion which became Christianity: To be a follower of Christ was to be the follower of an Incarnate God. The impassable, unaffected by time and space, living in time and space. The Word incarnate. The opposite of what is possible! This called for a monumental shift in thinking:

To begin with, God lived in the Covenant-Box - the Ark. The fall of Jerusalem and the exile, coupled with the work of the prophets affirmed the folly of that kind of incarnation, for it was based on 'humans dragging God to earth'. Then, the paradox came. God `dragged earth to heaven` in the person of Jesus.

Some disciples had more or less worked this out towards the end of the resurrection appearances. Thomas clinched it when he said what we now know as he saw the marks in the hands and side of Jesus - 'My Lord and God!' he exclaimed. The monumental religious discovery articulated in that sentence was, `here in Jesus is that which was indistinguishable from God`, so much so, that one could call Jesus 'Lord'. But that wasn't enough. To grasp such an idea was just to do five impossible things before breakfast! There was more to come...

Following the resurrection appearances, Jesus knew that the dangers of the corrupting influence of a fallen creation which is shot through with both good and evil. Imagery of a cosmic battle with the devil who planted the seeds of evil having been defeated through the Cross are pictures which offer only partial help (such a picture doesn't explain for example how God was thwarted in the first place). Jesus knew that he could not continue to limit God by the world we inhabit, and he must re-assert the essential nature of God.

This was the massive re-discovery which ascension and Pentecost affirms....

By nature, God is Spirit.

A more profound understanding is impossible. The essential quality of God is that God is spirit. The essential God is not a God which stands alongside so that you can manipulate God into being on your side. No, God is spirit through and through, and this simple affirmation speaks clearly to more questions about religion than almost any other. It is probably one of the most helpful religious resources we can have, for we can base our religious life on its firm foundations.

The Ascension is not a `period` or an `idea` of the Church's invention to explain some irreconcilable data between the Resurrection and Pentecost. The Idea of Ascension is vital to the Christian understanding of the nature of God and how God can and does work in and through creation.

Compare, for example a stone with a human being. You may think that there is no real basis for comparison, and it is true that in terms of behaviour they are very different. Yet stones and people are made of essentially the same stuff - atoms and molecules, all from the dust of exploded stars aeons ago.

If God has a hope for creation, God must have a hope for both the stone and the person. the big difference between the stone and the person are the perimeters within which they can respond to the processes of creation. Stones take millions of years to change, for example, from granite to metamorphic rock, from silt to sandstone, from a dead tree to coal. Also, stones make no conscious decisions about themselves or their future. The activity of God on the stone is clearly limited.

Yet with a person things are very different. But they are different only because people are much more volatile in their behaviour than stones - a human can make conscious decisions with regard to their future, and can thwart the hopes of God much more readily. This broad latitude of possible behaviour not only distinguishes human behaviour from inanimate behaviour, but also clarifies the activity of God in creation. The stone cannot thwart Gods hopes and desires, the relationship is that of creator and created. But with people the relationship is much more complicated. If it were not so we could never make decisions about anything and we would be less than we are now - we would essentially be God's pets.

It seems that by God's deliberate self-limitation (humans have much more scope in their abilities and activities) and the affirmation that God is Spirit we can begin to create a more helpful understanding of whether God is either at or on our side. We can begin to affirm that we ourselves have been brought into the Fatherhood of God, and therefore the potential of Christ is in each of us; and that the Spirit is everywhere.

This is the kind of faith that can uphold the righteous. This is the kind of faith which is both world affirming and heavenly inspired. Love is a risky enterprise. Nobody knows this more than God. Therefore when a person suffers, God too suffers. Divine love is costly:

When a parent worries about a sick child; When a patient lies in pain through the night; When an old man fears becoming a burden to his family; When a homeless young man feels that no-body cares; When a wife feels that she is despised by her husband; When a baby cries for a mother; When a friend a is betrayed; When a prisoner is tortured; There, too, God is hurt.

It is the resurrected and ascended God who feels the pain of human conflict, and to claim that such a God is on anyone's side rather misses the whole point of God's great project in creation.

To think of the world as God's body may be helpful. The image, like all images of God must not be taken too literally for a human body is integrated in a way that God is not integrated in the world. But to imagine the world as God's body underpins the all-embracing nature of God's eternal characteristics - divine love in and through the risen and ascended Christ, proceeding from Holy Spirit for our salvation. Amen