ascension

Risen, Not Restored – Sermon Preached on 17th May 2026 (Sunday After Ascension)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne, Holy Cross, Seend, and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Acts 1.6-14, John 17. 1-11

“Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?” 

The upper portion of Graham Sutherland's enormous tapestry at Coventry Cathedral, photographed looking upward. Christ sits enthroned at the centre within a pointed mandorla outlined in gold, wearing a pale white robe. His face is angular and gaunt in Sutherland's distinctive modernist style, with dark features rendered in bold, almost sketched lines. Both hands are raised, the right in a gesture of blessing. The background is a striking vivid green, woven in broad, uneven brushstroke-like bands. Flanking Christ on either side, set within smaller rectangular panels, are two of the four living creatures representing the evangelists — stylised, energetic figures with wings and haloes, depicted in earthy tones against darker backgrounds. Fine vertical lines from the tapestry's warp threads are visible across the surface, emphasising the monumental textile's handwoven character.
The upper parts of Graham Sutherland’s great east wall tapestry in Coventry Cathedral © Gerry Lynch, 2 August 2018.

You don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next, do you? You’ve been listening to Jesus’ teachings for years, but you still haven’t worked out what He is actually about because you’re too busy trying to fit Him into your half-baked notions about God.

No, no – not you. It’s the apostles I’m talking about, and them asking Jesus at the Ascension if He was going to restore Israel’s power.

They’ve been through it all with Him – the incidents with the crowds and the Pharisees, His horrific death, then the bewildering joy of finding Him raised to life again afterwards; they’ve been eating meals with Him and going off into wild places and onto boats with Him for literally years — and they still don’t really know what Jesus is about. They think He’s going to bring the good old days back, except better; that He’s going to seize political power, and make Jerusalem the capital of an independent Jewish state again, and make it so fair and just that foreigners will flock from all directions to see this godly state in action. And, of course, they assume that when Jesus becomes king, they’re going to be powerful people in this new state. In other words, the world is going to be a better place – and they’ll be living on easy street while it happens.

But perhaps they needed to be paying more attention to Jesus’ nature when He returned to them after the Resurrection, because He wasn’t restored to His old life. Instead, Jesus has mysterious physical characteristics in the Resurrection accounts: He can eat, and Thomas can poke His finger right into His wounds; but at the same time, He can appear in the middle of locked rooms and remain unrecognised until He breaks bread. Jesus has entered some sort of new life.

And from our perspective, we do know what happened next. We know Jesus didn’t bring the glory days back. Instead, through that tiny group of followers who remained with Him at His Ascension, He built a kingdom that is more enduring and more important than any earthly kingdom. But there was much pain and struggle on the way.

That theme of pain and struggle leading to the new kingdom is also a strong one in today’s Gospel reading. Sharing a Last Supper with His very closest friends on the night before He died, Jesus prayed that our heavenly Father would glorify Him.

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

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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.” 

A large oil painting set against a darkened basketball arena filled with a blurred crowd of spectators. At the centre, the silhouette of a basketball player rises in mid-dunk, one arm stretched high toward a golden basketball hoop and backboard. Within the player's outlined form, painted in meticulous Renaissance style, is the dead Christ from Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross: pale-skinned, crowned with thorns, eyes closed, head tilted back, loincloth draped at the waist. His limp body follows the athlete's upward trajectory, so that crucifixion and slam-dunk occupy exactly the same gesture. Fragments of van der Weyden's red-robed mourning figures and gilded background are visible within the silhouette. Brass nails punctuate the outline, pinning the Christ figure to the athlete's form. At the lower right, outstretched hands reach toward the ascending figure.
Titus Kaphar, Ascension (2016). Circulates around the properties of the 21c Museum Hotels Group.

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.

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The Feast of Waiting Patiently: (Ascension Thursday, 29th May 2025)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot

Readings – Acts 1. 1-11; Luke 24. 44-53

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

A surreal painting depicts a nude human figure floating inside a transparent sphere, with arms and legs outstretched. The figure hovers above a glowing, honeycomb-like surface radiating yellow light. In the background, a dramatic, fiery red and black sky contrasts with a serene blue and white scene at the top, where a partially visible figure in white appears to be looking down. The overall composition evokes a sense of cosmic or spiritual transcendence.
The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali (1958). In a private collection.

Poor old Jesus. Even after all that the apostles had seen and experienced, even after all that happened and didn’t happen in Jerusalem, even after the encounters when He appeared to them on the lake and stood among them even though the doors were locked, the apostles really didn’t know what He was about.

“Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom” they ask Him. They’re still expecting that at some point, probably very soon, Jesus is going to seize power and put them, of course into top jobs. They still want Jesus’ to give them a kingdom that is of this world. Instead Jesus’ kingdom is something that can only be shared in in its fullness in a state that is higher than the one in which we live, when we are in the nearer presence of the Father. It is a state to which it seems that even Christ Himself must ascend to participate in fully, and to do so must withdraw from them. This kingdom is much greater than any state we or the apostles could imagine for ourselves on this Earth. For most of us, in this life, we can only detect little flashes of this kingdom for brief and wondrous moments.

Christ, truly God as well as truly human, knows what this kingdom really is, and how much greater it is than the kingdoms of the world. So, you can almost hear the exasperation when He answers the apostles’ question, “It is not for you to know.” Authority over everything belongs to the Father. The apostles wish to seize that authority, to rule over the Earth, and they think they’ll be much better than the world’s existing rulers and not corrupt or cruel or incompetent. No, not them! God knows what is actually best for them, however. The job of the apostles at this point is something very different—to wait for the Holy Spirit; to wait for God who is love to flow and blow and make His move.

Life often seems to be a waiting game – waiting for the train, waiting for exam results, or medical results, waiting for the money to clear into your account or, worst of all, for the contracts to be exchanged. The worst waiting comes when you don’t exactly know what you’re waiting for, when it feels like you’re going nowhere and being left behind. We can see why the apostles are getting a little impatient to find out what they’re supposed to do next.

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Higher State of Consciousness: Sermon Preached at St Mary’s, Devizes on Ascension Day, 13 May 2021

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A surreal painting depicts a nude human figure floating inside a transparent sphere, with arms and legs outstretched. The figure hovers above a glowing, honeycomb-like surface radiating yellow light. In the background, a dramatic, fiery red and black sky contrasts with a serene blue and white scene at the top, where a partially visible figure in white appears to be looking down. The overall composition evokes a sense of cosmic or spiritual transcendence.

“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’”

Readings – Acts 1:1-11; Luke 24:44-53.

May I speak in the name of God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

In the summer between my A-Levels and the start of university, that magical time of life when one is at last able to get into nightclubs, that time when drinking second-rate beer out of a plastic beaker at two in the morning seems the most wonderful thing on earth, the big dance track in all the clubs was called “Higher State of Consciousness”. The electronically distorted words “Higher State of Consciousness”, were continually repeated over a pumping bassline, while a sort of Morse-code rhythm screeched over the top at excessive pitch. I think whenever I heard it I was, to be honest, mostly in a fairly low state of consciousness or at least a rather inebriated one.

The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali
The Ascension of Christ by Salvador Dali

The reason I’m bringing this up – because I’m sure you’re wondering – is that sometimes people spend a lot of time getting themselves into a tizzy about what happened physically at the Ascension and why that proves that those who disagree with them aren’t real Christians but in fact brain-dead fundamentalists, godless heretics, or some other insult. But the concept of ascension, in popular conception as well as in Christianity, relates more to state than it does to physical place. Heaven is not somewhere above the sky or beyond the Moon’s orbit; but it is somewhere other than here, and higher than here.

Our two readings tonight comprised the only original narrative accounts of the Ascension, both of which are by the same author. The first brings the Gospel of St Luke to a conclusion, the other begins the Acts of the Apostles. The chronology is difficult to reconcile between them; the geography doesn’t feel entirely consistent; the dialogue doesn’t quite match. Especially given that these accounts were written by the same author, it certainly doesn’t seem like St Luke was that worried about what we might think of as accuracy in courtroom witness statement sense.

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