Ascending thither not Copping Out

It’s now many years since the British celebrated Ascension Day like other Europeans. Have we lost touch with the ascension as good news?

I confess that I am unimpressed by the rock at the Mosque of the Ascension, the one Jesus’ foot cracked on takeoff. I am unmoved by depictions of holy feet topped by hairy ankles lifting off like a Saturn Five — “See the canny Scot return to his native Bannockburn.” Any depiction of this transition as a return to HQ, or the shedding of physicality, makes it less than good news. It blazes a trail all follow towards their destiny. It illuminates our present humanity.

Bishop Christopher Wordsworth put it like this in 1862:

He has raised our human nature in the clouds to God’s right hand;
There we sit in heavenly places, there with Him in glory stand:
Jesus reigns, adored by angels; man with God is on the throne;
Mighty Lord in Thine ascension we by faith behold our own.

Classical Christian theology calls Jesus eternally Incarnate. The Ascension is not the reversal of the Incarnation but a radical extension of it beyond time and place, into the depths of all human life as well as to its ultimate destiny.

If we understand this we can no longer think anything human alien from us or beneath us.


This matters because one easy response to stress-induced change is “stop the world, I want to get off.”

A popular Christian version takes the form of railing against the world as it actually is, often because of romantic attachment to some imagined age of faith in the past, served up with a dash of “here’s to us, who’s like us.” It might be a lot of fun to live in the twelfth century, or perhaps not. It is no part of our calling as a Christian. All ages are provisional, but this does not require us to be anything less than realistic about the one we’re called to live in.

The ascension frees Jesus from any particular age. Its result is not subtractive delocalisation but hyper localisation. This makes the gospel potentially good news for everybody and anybody, far more than a tribal identity. The Church becomes an expression of Christ’s universal servant kingship to others as they are rather than a club, or a vehicle for human imperialism. Christ's body reveals itself as what it is not by cutting others out, but by serving anybody on their own terms at their point of need, as in the parable of the good Samaritan. It is transferability makes Christianity fly. Its scope is infinite, and infinitely adaptable.

The big issue with settling for a smaller vision isn’t judgmentalism or discrimination or romanticised lock in to some imagined past, although these tendencies bring their own problems.

Club Christianity represents less than the stature of the fulness of Christ who fills all things. It speaks with the voice of Scribes and Pharisees, and not with authority. Its god is too small.

The mystery of the ascension invites us to radical deep engagement, the enfleshing of the Word in the world as it is, not a Gnostic cop-out. 

Christian Aid: A Bigger Splash

Everything in India is bigger. Driving through Hyderabad assaults the senses with its seemingly endless miles of heaving humanity in all its expressions, diversity and colour. How small it makes the field on which I play out most regular work seem. In 42 degree heat a small group of us hone a development plan for a school based on Jesus’ principle that the child is greatest in the Kingdom and only the best is good enough for the poor. 

This is no time for half measures or empty gestures. World citizens clever enough for the social and technical way we’re evolving but morally grounded enough to make it worth living in do not grow in trees. Each child gets one opportunity to grow and learn, and there are no dress rehearsals. Here, beyond gestures, for some of the poorest people int he world, We are trying to capture Jesus’ vision of life in all its fulness. Nothing less is worthy of our highest endeavours, even if it means being real but also radical about everything, including ourselves. 

But how?

The question brings me back a particular conversation with a City trader. He’s a good and decent man, who well understands the virtues of capitalism and has pursued them. He is no fool. He knows that our present system, worked by autopilot, has no long-term future. It has produced wealth, but also tremendous debt. It relies on half a billion partying in first class whilst everybody else lives a less enriched life. The arrival at the ball of another two billion aspirant middle class partygoers from Brazil, India, Russia, and China (to name but a few)has to change everything radically. It calls for a new kind of ingenuity. Finally the rape of the pant has consequences.

So what we need, he says, is beyond economics. 

Economics is often treated as a science but in fact it is no such thing. It manages inequalities according to a set of assumptions about worth that go beyond its own capacity to examine them. 

Economics draws its basic premises from choices we make about what we see as a good life. Questions about those bring the doctor and the priest in their long coats, running over the fields. 

What we need, my trader friend and I say, is beyond the secular principle — life pursued pragmatically, free from the imposition of particular religious dogma in its narrowest sense. It’s a precious hygiene factor in any free society, but does not exhaust the possibilities of being alive. Without is we cannot run a decent and humane society, and it has serious comment to offer on how the ship is running, but can have no idea of where the ship is going.

I wonder about a slogan I saw a few years ago, painted on the side of the South Karnataka State Legislature in Bangalore — “Government business is God’s business.” They don’t mean any particular god among the thousands India holds. But they do means what they say. Not only is the ultimate subject matter the stuff people engage with in community by faith, but these things that really count can only be pursued radically with courage and confidence. Pure pragmatists are only tinkering, and more is being demanded of us all than mere tinkering.

How is God calling us to do this? By grace through faith that is committed enough to

• be Real and open to what is — not to tart things up, because faith is beyond pretending
• be Positive about what might be — because what proceeds from faith is faith, and Anglicans above all should know that all you get from fear is paltry squabbling, however worthy and genteel
• Get Engaged — to get right out of its comfy seat and engage, remembering that because of the incarnation the only bass for true and fruitful engagement is equality
• be Honest — taking every thought captive to Christ because otherwise we are stuck in no more than a religious hall of mirrors

That’s enough down and dirty agenda for a lifetime, is it?

We have work to do. Over the next three days the newly honed school development plan needs to go back to its originators in the school, and we work with them to make it happen. 

The jeep calls at 11.00. 

But mummy, he hasn’t got anything on!

One way Bishops can respond to the government's consultation on gay marriage is sitting on our hands, staring out the window, going ho-hum, hoping that the whole thing will just go away.
Yesterday the archbishop of Wales showed a better way:

Dr Barry Morgan said the Church would not be able to ignore the new legislation on civil marriage proposed by the Government, despite the fact that the legislation would not allow gay couples to marry in church. He called on the Church to discuss how it would respond.He said, “If the legislation to allow civil marriage is passed, I cannot see how we as a church, will be able to ignore the legality of the status of such partnerships and we ought not to want to do so.“The question then as now is, will the church protect and support pastorally, faithful, stable, lifelong relationships of whatever kind in order to encourage human values such as love and fidelity and recognise the need in Christian people for some public religious support for these..."

What this discussion is uncovering for me, is the extent to which I am, at heart, an Evangelical who believes in Marriage. That’s not “Evangelical” in a Fundamentalist sense — I don't think fundamentalism is particularly good news to anyone, not even fundamentalists. 

I am Evangelical enough to believe that Christ is, in fact, risen and we are, actually, his body in the world, charged in Matthew 28 to be good news to the whole creation, by observing his commands. He didn't say “keep everything the same” let alone “suppress gays.” He did say “Love your neighbour as yourself” and “Judge not that ye be not judged.” He did say “take the beam out of your eye before you try and remove the mote from someone else's” and “Love as I have loved you.” 

Is there  anything unclear about any of that? I don't think so.

Therefore the highest duty of the Church is not to preserve institutions, but to be, simply and completely, good news. The gospel isn't “good news/bad news” or “good news as long as you buy it properly.” It isn’t even “what would Jesus do?” It’s “What is Jesus actually doing through the whole creation, and trying to do through us if only we got real?” 

Jesus referred marriage back to the way God actually made us. Marriage is a gift of God in creation that strengthens community and expresses divine love — that’s what’s meant by calling it “sacramental.” 

In fact a very small but significant proportion of every human population is gay. If some of these people want to build stable faithful relationships based on love, that has to be a good thing. Love is love wherever it is found. We know it by its fruits, not its origins. But the fruits reveal the origin. God is love and those who live in love live in God and God lives in them. This is the good news.

Thus the prime question Christians have to ask is not “is the idea of ay marriage right or wrong?” but, whatever we make of the theory of the matter, “how can we be good news to the real human beings involved?” 

Whatever the rights and wrongs of gay marriage it could be advancing the Church towards a rather healing Emperor's New Clothes moment.

Art h/t — http://kidsartists.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/emperors-new-clothes.html