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  | | 23.05.09 Living the Ascension - Jonathan Clark
LIVING THE ASCENSION
“Why are you looking up towards heaven?” – say the heavenly messengers to the disciples. “Why are you looking at a glory that is departing?” During this time in between Ascension and Pentecost, the analogy between the rebuke given to the disciples, and the default setting of Anglican Catholics, seems so painfully obvious that it feels almost indelicate to allude to it. The glory days – whichever ones you prefer – are so much more pleasant to dwell on than the future. Maybe for you it’s the tradition of Anglo-Catholic socialism – or the days when the liturgy was done really properly – or just the time before the movement was so divided over the ordination of women. There is a sort of pleasant melancholy in remarking how marvellous things once were, in the good old days. You can imagine the disciples wandering away after the Ascension, already starting to tell the stories of the past: remember when Jesus …? Good old Jesus, we’ll miss him, you know – and so on.
Then the angels, rather rudely, interrupt them. This is not a time for saying goodbye, despite appearances it’s not an ending. That is the message to the disciples for this waiting time between Ascension and Pentecost; it is the message to the church at all times and places: and if we are still part of god’s plan for the church, it is the message to us as well.
Ascension Day raises for us the question of where we put ourselves in relation to time – past, present and future. It raises the question for each of us as individuals: how do we relate our own experience of living in time, to what we believe about the salvation of God. Because though we now live in the light of Pentecost, living in the life of the Spirit, we are still waiting for the final fulfilment of God’s kingdom. In some ways God is as close to us as we are to ourselves – but in another way we are still waiting – waiting for the future in which all things will be completely transformed by God’s love. We are still in an in-between time; the beginning of salvation has been brought about in us, but not the end. We are on a journey through time towards eternity.
And as for us individually, so for the church. .Our calling is to live towards the future, looking for the fulfilment of our hope. It is ironic then that we are a body so often and so justly accused of living in the past. We have tended to be an institution which resists change, always sees the strength in what things used to be like, reluctantly moves forwards into new things just as they are becoming out of date for everyone else. I rather suspect that if we do ever finally arrive in God’s future, it will be backwards, dragged by our collars into the kingdom while still hankering after the past.
The church functions for many of us as a secure reminder that we are not adrift on a sea of change, that we have security in the love of God. And it rightly should do exactly that (as well as a lot of other things too). But when that security in God becomes security in the way we have known God in the past, a drift begins, towards seeing the past as the place where we met God, the past as the place where things were better, and the future as the dangerous place from which comes only the threat of detachment from our moorings. The love of God does not call us into insecurity, but into finding that security in the future, not the past. The future of God’s promise is the home that we have not yet lived in, but nevertheless our true home.
So we are called to wait for the future gift of God, to look forward expectantly. We wait in hope. But hope itself also needs a bit of explaining: it can be a very weak term, meaning ‘ the thing we know will never happen but it makes us feel better about the future’. Christian hope is perhaps most cruelly parodied in Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’, in which the saviour, Godot, never comes: but the thought that he might come paralyses the two main characters and prevents them from ever making any move of their own. Beckett portrays their hope as a way of avoiding responsibility, a mask to prevent them from facing the meaninglessness of their life, a non-existent drug that might, if it ever existed, take away the pain of living.
But Christian hope is not a passive thing; Christian waiting for God’s future action is not just sitting back and waiting for it all to be made right. Although we await our final homecoming, we are already part of the family of God, and we are invited into creating the future for which we wait. The past, then, is our resource, our tradition – it is where we are always setting out from . The future is the home towards which we are moving. The present is the creative place in which our pilgrimage takes place, the place in which we make ourselves and our world ready for God’s love.
Although we have security about our ultimate future in God’s love, that does not mean that everything that will happen has been pre-ordained. We are called by God to actively wait, to create our hope – we are both those who will receive the gift of God, and also those who have it to give. It’s not just a question of passively waiting for God to act, because God is already at work within us.
I hope it’s obvious to you already how those principles apply to the work and the mission of Affirming Catholicism. It is part of the Catholic tradition’s gift to the Church of England to have a love for the Tradition: to see it not merely as a quarry for interesting resources, still less as an encumbrance, but as one of the places in which we meet the Holy Spirit at work – the living, growing Tradition of faith.
Our calling is to witness in the Church to the positive, inclusive and joyful currents in the Catholic tradition of Christianity – and sadly, none of those are words instantly associated with the phrase ‘Anglo-Catholic’ at the present time. I was speaking to a bishop who should know what we’re about at the last General Synod, and asked him what Affirming Catholicism needed to do: his answer, off the cuff and not thought through, was perhaps all the more genuine – I paraphrase: don’t just talk about sex. His reaction illustrates the fact that we are not seen as being about the whole Catholic tradition, but as a fairly narrowly focussed campaigning group.
Our future, if it is to be part of God’s future for the church, needs to involve re-asserting all that we value, and offering the whole Tradition to the whole church. Our website claims that we value
• Regular prayer, study and worship to nurture personal growth and equip us to be Christ’s apostles in the world.
• Commitment to the social and ethical transformation of the world.
• A living catholic tradition to carry the gifts of the past into the future.
• Models of love, friendship and community for all seeking to follow the gospel, irrespective of ethnicity, gender, disability or sexual orientation.
• Diversity and freedom of conscience within the community of faith.
• Liturgy to inspire holiness and relate the greatness of God to people today.
It claims that we aim to
• Resource people to grow in the faith, in order to help them respond to contemporary society’s spiritual hunger and thirst for justice.
• Inform and influence debates in the Church by helping people to engage in the underlying theological issues.
That is a calling worth having, because it lies at the heart of a faith worth proclaiming. If we are just another society debating church politics, whatever our name may be, we are not affirming Catholicism. The success or failure of our causes in the church is not the point of our existence. Of course we care passionately that women’s gifts should be recognised and celebrated in all orders of ordained ministry: we do so because of our vision of what it means to live the Catholic faith in the church today. It is that vision which is our mainspring, our reason for existence, our reason for hope.
It’s not easy – Affirming Catholicism has been through some difficult times as an organisation, and I hope we’re coming through them with a better sense of purpose and direction. But difficult times are the test of hope, not the destruction of it. God is continually calling us forward. Living the Ascension is living in a hope which enables us to move forward, to experiment, to take risks. We can reach out in love to a broken world and look for the openings for healing and reconciliation, knowing that we are not just stepping out on our own, but we are journeying with God and in God towards God.
The Revd Jonathan Clark, SCP
Chair, Affirming Catholicism
Sermon preached at Southwark Cathedral 23rd May, 2009
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