Teaching ‘Ascension’

You’ve just heard about an event the modern church seems to ignore – the Ascension. Perhaps that’s why I bring it up every year because I think it is important.

And yet the events described actually seem quite low key. Jesus spends time teaching the disciples, explaining what has happened and preparing them for the future and then he leaves. You have to sympathise with the early Christians because this was a period when they are overwhelmed with unexplainable happenings. The ascension was just one more to add to jaw-dropping moments like the resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit.

And yet despite having to do some major re-shuffling of previously-held beliefs, by the next week when Pentecost happens Peter is able to explain these events in a few sentences. He says; “This Jesus, God raised up.  And every one of us here is a witness to it. Then, raised to the heights at the right hand of God and receiving the promise of the Holy Spirit from the Father, he poured out the Spirit he had just received.”

There, right from the beginning was one of the basic understandings of the Ascension – Jesus went up to heaven to sit on the throne at the right hand of God. In other words, Jesus took the most honoured place in the court after God. Continue reading Sunday 21st May Eastertide/Ascension →

Readings

Acts 17:22-31

Our Reading from Acts is Paul’s speech at the Areopagus.

William Barclay highlights some of the main points of Paul’s sermon beginning with Paul stressing that, in contrast to images in precious metal and stone, God is not made, but the maker.  People like to worship what they have made but the true God has guided history. Furthermore, humanity has an instinctive longing for God and, as Christians, we believe the way to meet with God is to be inspired by Jesus Christ.  The proof of the pre-eminence of Christ is the resurrection.^[1]

John 14: 15-21

Today’s reading is the part of Jesus’ farewell discourse that promises the disciples will not be left on their own when Jesus has gone because God will send ‘The Spirit of Truth’ or the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit.

We are also informed that the Paraclete is not a separate presence to Jesus but the same presence.

Furthermore, this presence is not about Jesus’ presence being experienced by a few selected mystics or ascetical elite but a promise that Christ will be encountered by all Christians.^[2]

Sermon

In my younger years I quite often met people, or read about people, who said that God had called them to do something or go somewhere.  Usually, these things were exciting and often in some exotic location.  That  always registered strongly in the cynical part of my brain.  I have also met people who were disappointed that they had not done something because they had not had the call to do so.

So how do we know when the Spirit of Truth that John’s Gospel promises abides with us, calls us, or even just nudges us in a particular direction.

I have plunged, tumbled, or stumbled into most of the major changes in my life and it is only in hindsight that I can say that the Divine Spirit was in the move.  Often other people have been involved.   One I will never forget was a discussion with the convenor of the committee that finds positions for new ministers.  I desperately wanted to stay in Christchurch, and he was determined that I was going elsewhere.  At one point I flippantly said, ‘Well it’s up to the Holy Spirit.’  To which he equally flippantly replied, ‘Yes that me!’.

I learned so much, met so many interesting and fabulous people and made special friends as minister of St Stephens in Hamilton that I am convinced that he was right.  However, neither of us believed so at the time.

It is certainly true that God moves in mysterious ways and I was one of the few teenagers in my circle of friends who didn’t attend church or belong to a church youth group.  Furthermore, I also saw the small group of Baptist young people who mostly kept to themselves as reasonably weird. Continue reading Sunday 14th May 2023 →

Easter 5A 2023 -7th May

We’re still working through the season of Easter. After the first few weeks of fizz and celebration, the lectionary is taking us into times of doubt and questioning. That’s probably exactly where the first followers of the Way were in the days and weeks after the Easter happenings. If we think our lives were turned upside down by earthquake, mass murder in our city and pandemic,  however do you imagine they felt? Their leader was dead. No he wasn’t. Some of the first group of followers had seen him. Some hadn’t. Some found themselves fronting up to the scholars and teachers they’d been used to listening to, and arguing with them in public. Some of the women were finding themselves in an entirely new way of being part of a community – they were finding public voices. And these upheavals went on and on.

Today’s reading from Acts was about the first martyrdom. Stephen a Jew killed by fellow Jews, not by foreign rulers. There was uproar in the synagogues. The psalm for today is a good one for people at the end of their endurance. And overall, the readings are still engaging in the challenges of finding a new way of being, a new community, a new faith.

In these times we’re in danger of ‘information overload’! We get more and more opinions and more and more theories about what’s happening, and more and more questions:  what should we do next, who’s right, who’s wrong. And in the age of social media there’s less and less substance, and more and more hype and headlining. And, unfortunately, rather more sloppy research and lack of thought before rushing into print or on line. Continue reading Sunday 7th May -Starting Points →