Higher Things? – Sermon Preached on 14th May 2026 (Ascension)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot (Benefice Service)

Acts 1.1–11, Ephesians 1. 15-23, Luke 24.44

 “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” 

Higher things. What do we mean when we say, “she was the sort of person who often had her mind set on higher things”? If I said that meant someone who spent her life seeking to do good, serving others, creating and sharing beauty, and contemplating the deepest truths of human nature and the universe we live in – well, I don’t think many of you would disagree with me.

This isn’t necessarily a specifically Christian thing or even a religious one. We all know people of other faiths or no faith whose lives are obviously devoted to goodness, and service, and more profound thought than those of most people. Buddhism calls people to the Four Sublime States of loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity; Islam calls people to akhlaq: the practice of virtue, morality, and good character within oneself and in one’s treatment of others. The early Christians themselves drew much of their understanding of the good life from the pagan Greek philosophers whose writings did so much to form the Greek-speaking, multi-cultural societies in which they lived. The highest goods in Christianity have always resonated with all sorts of people; the Faith would not have been capable of spreading if that were not so.

If there is a specifically Christian list of higher things, it is perhaps in the humbler virtues. Now, I can’t set every reading from St Paul in one service, but there is a list we didn’t hear tonight from Paul’s letter to the Colossians about the virtues we should surround ourselves with if we have been raised with Christ: compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, mutual forbearance, forgiveness, and love. Higher and more humble at the same time – that’s a good eight-word summary of the sort of lives Christians should seek to live.

And, of course, some Christians struggle with the idea of an actual heaven; can’t quite get their heads round the idea that we’re actually going to ascend to some higher state of being, but still want to form their lives on the pattern of Jesus Christ, or perhaps are just called to worship for reasons they can’t themselves understand. As the Collect puts it, “that as we believe your only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens, so we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him continually dwell.” That is a prayer for this life, not necessarily the next: to live life as best we can with our hearts and minds risen and dwelling with Christ.

But St Paul writes in tonight’s Epistle reading that he prays that the people he is writing to “may know what is the hope to which he has called you” – and that is to follow Christ to the higher state of existence to which He Himself rose on that first Ascension Day.

Why do I think that’s a credible hope? Well, to explore that, let’s look briefly at the lower things.

We all know what lower things are, don’t we: sitting on your sofa in your pyjamas into the early afternoon, nursing a hangover, shovelling junk food into your mouth as you watch the soaps, or a football match you don’t even care about. Well, maybe – to be fair, there’s a time and a place for having that sort of lazy day. More seriously, we can behave in a low way in our treatment of others – sneakily taking advantage of them or exploiting them – or we can be low in our use of language, of our bodies, and in many other ways nobody would dispute.

But there are more mundane and subtle ways of being drawn into a low life. A distracted society that does everything it can to lock you into the things of the here and now – to treat you as nothing more than a consumer, seeking to pass through life maximising your pleasures and minimising your discomforts. A science and social science that tells you that you are basically a biological robot, governed by your genes and your hormones and the electrical signals passing through your brain; that what you experience as free will is merely an illusion covering up that you are governed by impulse. An obsession with politics that lies to us about the power we actually hold so we keep clicking on their stupid links at a time when even the people in power seem overwhelmed by the problems we face.

But these things too shall pass. Paul tells us that Jesus is now “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion”. The things that really matter to us, that make us glad to be alive – beauty, goodness, love – can’t be bought, even though seeking them can cost us all our earthly treasure. The people who inspire us aren’t those who grasp the most from their lives – who amass most money and power, who have the most exciting experiences on the way – but those whose lives matter, by bringing joy and peace and liberation to others, even if they have little power and touch only a few lives. Who lives the more admirable life – the hedge-fund billionaire who maximises returns at any human cost; the rock star or movie star who lives an exciting life devoted to pleasure; or the learning disabled child who dies young after touching those around them with joy and love in their brief span on this Earth? These are hints that we are indeed made for more than this world.

There are others. The cosmological constant – the rate at which empty space pushes itself apart – is set to a value fine-tuned to something like one part in 10¹²⁰ (one with a hundred and twenty noughts after it!); tweak it that much upward and the universe would have flown apart before galaxies could form, the tiniest bit downward and it would have collapsed back in on itself before stars could ignite. And that’s only one of the fundamental physical constants that would make the existence of matter impossible if it were even a tiny fraction of a percentage point different. Even the simplest known living organism, the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, contains molecular machinery of bewildering intricacy whose origin is utterly mysterious; the genetic code itself, which translates chemistry into the symbolic information of DNA, has no known precursor. And the survival of the fittest can’t explain why grown men will weep at Fauré’s Requiem or why the human race has poured out so much of itself and its wealth on the making of things whose only purpose is to be beautiful.

None of this proves Christianity to be true. But it does show that if your reason for being sceptical of the idea of heaven is that modern science has rendered the idea of an afterlife improbable, then remember that modern science has rendered the idea of your life on this Earth improbable.

Christians do not merely believe in transcendence in the abstract; we believe transcendence has been made flesh in a human life, death, resurrection – and ascension. You have been raised with Christ in your baptism. You will tonight be united with Him in the Eucharist. You are called, as you go out from here this evening, to make Him afresh the head of your life. Where the head leads, the Body follows. Hold your head high and this evening decide anew to live such a life so that where He has gone, you may also ascend at the end of your earthly pilgrimage.

Now to God the Father who reigns in heaven, to God the Son who leads us to heaven, to God the Holy Spirit who fills us with the love and peace of heaven, be all glory and majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.