So there they are - two figures robed in white, standing on top of the hill. We probably weren't ready for them. True, Luke has introduced angels at pivotal points in the first part of his story. There's the angel Gabriel at the annunciation; there are the two angels at the resurrection. But the Acts of the Apostles is part two of the story. The Ascension tells us that the time of Jesus has given way to the time of the Church. This is our story now - and we're not expecting angels.
Though on a hill not so far away we have the Angel of the North. Not clothed in white, but in rust; not offering a clear message from heaven, but reflecting the earthly ambiguity of contemporary times. "Men of Galilee, why stand looking up into the sky?"
It's a good question for a godless age that still wants to believe - or for a materialistic society that still wants to affirm spiritual values. "Why stand looking up into the sky?" A bit over a year ago, when the Angel first appeared at Gateshead, half the drivers on the A1 were looking up, instead of keeping their eyes on the road. As the traffic was reduced to a crawl, a 40 ton articulated lorry shunted a Metro driven by the proverbial little old lady. As she climbed out to inspect the damage, she saw the front bumper of the lorry caved in, but not a mark was to be found on her car. Well, that was the story: mythology of angels is quick in the making.
But there's more to angels than their protecting power. The two men in white on the Jerusalem hillside help the disciples to look backwards and forwards. The Ascension is not simply the dividing line between the age of Jesus and age of the Church: it's also the reason for our looking ahead to the age that is yet to come. "This Jesus who has been taken from you up to heaven will come in the same way as you have seen him go."
The Angel of the North is deliberately looking back - the construction speaks of the heavy engineering associated with the region; the rust-streaked steel plates remind us of ship-building on the rivers; and the site of course is a disused colliery. But the angel looks out over the busy A1 and the upgraded railway line that speak of rapid communications in a post-industrial age, and across to the green hills that remind us of the possibilities of re-creation of a derelict landscape.
If the Church is to be faithful to its ascended Master, we too need to find ways of bringing the axes of past and future together. We probably think we're all right so far as the past is concerned: when all is said and done most of our churches are a bit of living history. The pits are gone, but miners' banners are loving preserved in chapels and churches all over the region; and if it's hard to find a ship left that was built in local shipyards, I can certainly point you to a fine presbyterian communion table that boasts such a provenance. Churches have never quite given up on relics; and we still produce things from the back of safes and musky cupboards that remind us of the wealth of our heritage.
But this isn't the angels' vision of the past. The Church does not share the custodial role of a museum, but has a far more urgent task to ensure that the Gospel becomes a living reality in the world today. So, when we break the bread, we don't simply remember a meal Jesus once ate with his friends; rather, in the act of remembering, the self-giving love revealed that night at the supper table is experienced in the life of the gathered congregation. We affirm that Christ is really present. This has to be the way in which the Church looks back. It's through the Bible's record of the past, that we discover God's love active in the world today.
And when it's put like that, we may find that we're not as good at looking back as we perhaps thought we were. We're very deficient in our knowledge of scripture: we don't read the Bible enough, and we certainly don't read it with understanding. We speak about the Bible's authority without knowing what we mean by this. Writing in the URC publication, Stanley Russell has pointed out that one of the qualities the Reformers claimed for the Bible was "perspicuity", which he defines as "an inherent clarity when properly interpreted which meant that it was eminently suitable to guide God's people in their tasks on earth". For Luther and Calvin the Bible was clear. We have to say that, for whatever reason, it does not have that degree of clarity for us. When we've talked about nuclear weapons, when we've talked about third world debt, when we've talked about human sexuality, we've appealed to scripture - but rarely can we say that scripture has made it clear to us how we should live our earthly life.
To be faithful in our looking back we need first to be more familiar with the Bible. We need to know its stories. We need to be able to quote its words again. But we also need to regain that sense of perspicuity - that sense that it has a clear influence on our lives. I'm not sure how we do that: but the decision of our General Assembly to do more work on our understanding of authority (and not just in relation to the sexuality debate) was, I'm sure, a step in the right direction. Sometimes the prevalence of angels today (look at all the volumes on angels in the bookshops) suggests that anything goes in the world of religion. This isn't true for the Church. We need to be clear what the Gospel is all about before we make the confession "Christ has died. Christ has risen." And only then can we complete it: "Christ will come again."
So the angels also help us look to the future, to look out over the landscape of the new heavens and the new earth. "This Jesus who has been taken from you up to heaven will come in the same way as you have seen him go." If you already find the Ascension story difficult to deal with, that verse may seem very unhelpful. But stop to think a moment, and you may feel a sense of relief. It is difficult to talk about the mechanics of the Ascension ("as you have seen him go") but the point of it all is clear enough. The age of Jesus has come to an end. The gospel writers have written their last verses. But (to pick up the vision of another part of the New Testament) this is in order that he may be "head over all things to the Church which is his body", and in order that our age may have an open vision of the future which is centred "in him who is filling the universe in all its parts". I don't know how he ascended; so I don't know how he will return. I don't really know what these things mean. But I do know that as Christ is now the centre of our Christian life and experience, so in the fulness of time the whole universe will find its meaning and focus in him.
This is the big vision - and the angels help us to realise the vision as they challenge us to address both past and future. In much the same way, we also need to bring together the local and the universal - another ascensiontide theme. So long as God the Son inhabits a finite mortal body, there are limitations: like us, the Galilean Jesus cannot be in two places at once. It is as ascended Lord that he fills the heavens. The Gateshead angel certainly speaks of the local: its creator intended that it should act as some kind of regional focus. When the broadcaster Angela Tilby was in the region last year, doing a programme on the Angel, she reminded a group of people she spoke to that the letters to the seven churches in the Book of Revelation are addressed to the angels of those churches - not to church leaders or church councils. And she challenged her hearers to write their own letter to the Angel of the Churches of the North East.
No doubt some did - for we're always most comfortable dealing with what is local. And how angry we get when District Councils and Synods tell us what we should or shouldn't do in our own congregation: not because we think they have no right to, but because we feel that they don't share our local knowledge. What we forget of course is that they may have a wider vision that is also significant. The balancing of the two is delicate in any decision-making process; but the local and the universal must always be brought together.
Of course, it's always easier to speak about the local. When it comes to the universal, we find that words don't really stretch - which is why we have symbols. Perhaps that's what angels are for. And so far as the Angel of the North is concerned, if the steel structure and the site speak of the local, the angel itself speaks of that which is beyond, of that which cannot be spoken of. The angels were there at creation; their songs greeted Christ's birth. They're there in his story; and perhaps, unseen, they're there in ours.
Whatever its creator intended, this is an angel that surely says something about hope and new beginnings and being open to the future. Only it doesn't say these things in the language of the planners and economists: it doesn't speak the jargon of urban renewal and regeneration budgets. Instead, the traffic belting down the hill passes an unapologetically religious symbol. As at the time of the death of Diana, we're reminded that our secular workaday world, even if it doesn't know the forms and the language, is looking for some experience beyond itself. In the angel's wings are a hint of transcendence. We're taken beyond the local, into that universal human longing for those things which earth itself seems never to realise.
Why stand looking up into heaven? Christ who is ascended is no more there than here. His time is no less now than then. So, here and now, with all God's people, we worship him - whom even the angels bow down before.