reading scripture

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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Cow Parsley and Heaven: Sermon Preached on 2nd June 2024 (Second Sunday after Trinity)

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A head of a cow parsley plant, in flower.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – 2 Corinthians 4. 13-5. 1 ; John 3. 1-17

 “…we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.”

A sprig of cow parsley in full flower, close-up.
Cow parsley: in June, as common as muck, but a sign of life’s persistence; © Gerry Lynch, 24 July 2017.

Driving from Worton towards Seend the other day, I marvelled at the quantity of cow parsley in the hedges. The landscape is particularly thick with new growth when blossoming May gives way to bowery June. Yet I was struck by a rather sombre realisation. In just a few months, it will start to die back as we speed towards the dead, dark, weeks of December.

St Paul writes in this morning’s epistle reading that, “We are always being given up to death for Jesus’s sake.” Everything in this universe must eventually die. Not only living things, but, although we rarely think about it, the stars, and even the atomic particles which make up all matter, dead or alive. Their lifespan is almost beyond the human imagination, but is nonetheless finite. Indeed, science tells us that without the death of many stars over many billions of years, the complex elements which make up humans and all other living beings simply could not exist. Each of us too must eventually give way for new life. We are not meant to live forever, not in this universe, anyway—but as Christians, we have faith that Jesus Christ, the eternally living God, by dying opened the way to eternal life for us.

We human beings are indeed “clay jars”, as St Paul puts it: fragile creatures, with a limited lifespan, and far from perfect. Yet we are of such immense value that God gave Himself up to death for our sakes to give us the most valuable treasure possible, eternal life.

St Paul knew we were not meant to be perfect, any more than we are meant to live forever in our mortal bodies. Paul had once thought he was a particularly holy follower of God because he was so diligent in keeping all the rules which he found in Scripture. He forgot was that although God’s written word is indeed treasure, he was a clay jar. The vision of God he had on the road to Damascus was such a violent experience that it left him literally blind. Yet he considered it the most valuable experience of his life, one that taught this over-intense and rather self-certain man that it is a dangerous thing to be too sure you know God’s will.

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