Ascension Day
“until the day in which he was taken up, he spoke of the things, pertaining to the kingdom…” Acts 1.3
Sometimes, when I’m surfing the net, which being interpreted for the Luddites means, spending two hours on the computer gathering fascinating information from around the world while in fact trying to find the time of the train from Waterloo to Esher...
...when I’m surfing the net, I think, all this is done with the two numbers 0 & 1; or more simply, with ‘off’ and ‘on’. There is an electric current, or there is not. The computer knows nothing of nuances; there are no middle positions; there is no New Labour.
The scourge of good theology has often been this cybernetic polarity; the simple either/or which is rarely illuminating, but can at least serve to point us towards the both/and; the media via for which Anglicanism is both famous and famously mocked.
At the Ascension of our Lord, the disciples fell into two opposing errors:
1 The Political Error
“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” (v.6)
Calvin comments scathingly on this enquiry from the disciples: “there are as many errors in this question as words.”
The disciples still thought, after these three years and all the events of Easter, and Christ’s teaching during the past 40 days about the kingdom, that he was to establish an earthly Utopia, with himself as King.
But as long as human nature is flawed - that is until the end of the cosmos - there will be the need for democracy.
Democracy is the political way in which we recognise the limits and weaknesses of all human institutions, whether in society or in the church. There can be no Theocracy. The Pope is but a man.
Frustrating and imperfect as they are, synods and councils are the safest way forward, for since Christ has ascended, there can be no heaven on earth. Humanity is not perfectible. Nature will always be ‘red in tooth and claw’.
2 The Pietist Error
“why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” (v.11)
There are those who are so disillusioned with the Big Bad World, and so daunted by its challenges, that they would rather stand gazing into heaven, hoping for a glimpse of the heavenly Jesus, hoping he will come back to establish an earthly kingdom.
They call people to devotion at the expense of action. They look to the ‘then’, and endure the ‘now’.
Or in our own tradition, sometimes like the early Gnostics, they make heaven so spiritual and earth so carnal, that it ceases to matter how they live here on earth - for only the spiritual counts.
Whichever way - excessive piety or careless indulgence - it is not the way of Christ. Since he has ascended, there is a better way.
It is the way of the Spirit. The way of the kingdom.
The disciples were sent to wait for the Holy Spirit. At Pentecost he is to give them heavenly power for earthly responsibility.
I was reading that little booklet today by Canon Donald Gray about Percy Dearmer (The British Museum Religion) - you can tell I have 101 unpalatable tasks to do when I’m reduced to reading tracts about Percy Dearmer.
And I was struck by the sentence about Dearmer: “At Oxford the art master’s son began to realise that there were social, political and religious implications behind his natural instinct to celebrate beauty.” (p.4) Dearmer struggled to follow the media via between these two errors over the following years.
He pursued God through the beauty of Anglo-Catholic liturgy, and at the same time he worked for social justice and to establish the kingdom of God on earth.
Christ, our warrior-king, the priest-victim, returns into his own kingdom. He ascends triumphant, leading captivity captive, commanding us to wait with bated breath for the gift of the Spirit, who will save us from error, lead us into all truth and enable us to live on earth as citizens of the eternal kingdom.
“until the day in which he was taken up, he spoke of the things, pertaining to the kingdom…” Acts 1.3
