Today Jesus leaves his disciples and
returns to the father, they are left staring
up into heaven, then we are told that two men, clothed in white,
suddenly stood beside them, asking them why they are staring into the sky. “This
Jesus,” they say, “This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will
come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
And indeed God’s spirit will come to
them, but not yet and so they must wait in an unfamiliar place, , in a place in
between, bereft of Jesus presence until the coming of the Holy Spirit at
Pentecost.
The disciples like us today face a
situation of unknowing, they cannot go backward into the past, travelling the
dusty roads of Galilee and Judea with Jesus, just as we cannot ever fully
return to what was normal and comforting. For as we gather our thoughts on this
Ascension Day, either in virtual community or alone, we like the disciples do
not know what the future will bring, what we do know and what the disciples may have been dimly aware of is this! there is work to be done!
You maybe listening to this as part
of our Ascension Day Zoom Service, you may catch it on you tube or on facebook, you may be
reading it online, via email, or in the June newsletter. It doesn’t matter,
today, Ascension Day or whenever you see or read this, what does matter is what
I am asking of you ( yes you in person) now. And what I ask is this, that you have courage,
from this place of exile, weakness and
vulnerability, that you look into an unknown future and you let yourself and so
our church congregations here in Highland Perthshire, be aware that the spirit
of God is at work in our activities and thoughts, and that together we allow ourselves to be guided
and embolden by the Spirit into the new light, but always remembering that it
is the wounded Christ, the vulnerable baby in the cradle, the dying man on the
cross, who as God Incarnate stands at the centre of our faith. And also giving
thanks that during this time of crisis, isolation and deprivation, we have isis
been offered an extraordinary opportunity. To face ourselves as we really are, both
as individuals and a the church, and to learn to minister in a new and genuine way, that grows out of our
weakness and our vulnerability, in a way
that we could not comprehend even 2/3 months ago.
I know this is hard, but we are so like
the disciples, on that day of Ascension gazing forlornly randomly, wondering
what next. The reality of course is we
cannot know what lies ahead. Like the disciples we are journeying into an unknown future and
an unknown destination, what we do know is that the work of Jesus, that the work of the Kingdom, even
if we don’t know what the kingdom looks like,
waits to be done, and it waits for us to do it! Amen.
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