Sunday after Ascension Day, 2016 - HTW, 10am

‘It seems that only yesterday were we thinking about …. a, b and c …or whatever it is, and here we are already at x, y, and z … or whatever it is.’ How often do we say things like this! And I feel like saying it again this morning - as we celebrate the Ascension of Our Lord (already!). And Pentecost is just around the corner.

Perhaps time flies like this because we rush from one festival to another. I sometimes think that is a malaise of our times, often driven by commercialism. We all know the phenomenon of Easter eggs hitting the supermarket shelves the moment Christmas is over. Perhaps we don’t spend enough time in the moment. Perhaps we need to slow down a bit and take things in more deeply.

The trouble with that, however, is that some moments are not that easy to rest in. For me Ascension Day is one such moment. It tends to conjure up pictures of feet sticking out of a cloud painted somewhere high up in a church - all of which can unfortunately produce a giggle rather than any kind of serious response to miracle or divine intervention. So perhaps we should pause a moment and ask ourselves: What does Ascension Day mean? What is it really about? What does Ascension Day mean to you?

As we know, according to the accounts in the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus appeared to many of his disciples during the forty days after his resurrection. 40 days from Easter Sunday takes us to Thursday each year. For me then, years ago as a girl, Ascension Day meant a day off school. The same is true today for the school attached to the Zevenkerken monastery near Bruges, where some from this Parish have just spent a few days on retreat. All went very quiet in the monastery grounds from Wednesday evening as the pupils disappeared for a mid-term break.

Because Ascension Day is an ancient festival many traditions have grown up around it. According to Augustine of Hippo, one of the early church fathers, the Feast of Ascension originated with the Apostles. That certainly would make sense in terms of the Biblical account. John Chrysostom and Gregory of Nyssa, also ancient Fathers of the Church and contemporaries of Augustine, refer to it as being one of the oldest feasts practiced by the Church, possibly going as far back as AD 68. However, written evidence of the Church’s honouring of Ascension Day does not appear until Augustine’s own time of the fourth century AD. But since then it has been widely celebrated across the universal church.

One should not be surprised then to find many different traditional celebrations in churches around the world. Ascension Day can mean different things to different people. In some churches there is a ceremony of "the blessing of the first fruits," in which grapes and beans are blessed. It sounds like some kind of spring-harvest festival. Some churches - wait for it! - depict the Ascension of Christ by raising a statue of Jesus above the altar and lifting it through a special door in the roof. The mind boggles! Yet another tricky annual job for the church wardens, I suspect! Other churches have outdoor processions with torches and banners. In an old Ascension Day tradition from England, parishioners carried a banner bearing the symbol of a lion at the head of the procession, and a second banner bearing the symbol of a dragon at the rear. This represented the victory of Christ over the devil. Ascension Day can mean different things to different people.

In Bruges in Belgium, near that Zevenkerken monastery where he have been on retreat, Ascension Day is marked each year with a procession. The Vicar had arranged for us to go - and it was with much reserve in my heart that I tagged along. One does not say ‘No’ to the Vicar! But processions and carnivals are really not my thing. To make matters worse, this one was going to be parading a holy relic, housed in the city of Bruges since the thirteenth century, which purported to be Christ’s blood, collected from the Cross by Joseph of Arimethea as he laid Christ’s body in the tomb. This Joseph of Arimetha gets everywhere; not least to our own Glastonbury! For all my Roman Catholic upbringing by Belgian nuns, I was not confident of being able to produce any serious response to the procession, and rather feared a return of the giggles instead.

For something like an hour and a half a procession of no less than 1,700 wonderfully-costumed participants processed past, accompanied by countless animals (wonderful cart horses, sheep, an enormous ox such as I have never seen before, donkeys and asses, pigeons, hawks) and so on, with a variety of tableaux and little plays that told the story of salvation through Old and New Testament stories, together with a history of the relic and its arrival in Bruges. I was taken aback at how powerfully such live drama spoke to me, and would have done to people unable to read in medieval times.

The preparation that had evidently gone into this procession was astounding. The sheer logistics of assembling all the participants, let alone the animals too, on the outside of the city, ready for the three mile procession into the centre, must have been mind boggling - far worse than lifting a statue of Jesus up through the Church roof! I was very impressed and thought the procession’s designation as a UNESCO World Heritage event completely justified. So Ascension Day in Bruges apparently means an amazing day out!

But what really caught my eye were some words printed in the accompanying programme. These were given in several languages and the English was clearly a translation and not prepared by a native speaker! It read: Since 1970 there is permanently reflected and worked on the renewal of the scenes, subject to conservation of the original message. The procession has had a series of overall designers, with major overhauls in 1970 and 2000.

A further paragraph read: In the preparatory phase to the holy year 2000, there was detected a far-reaching obsolescence of the concept of the previous reformer of the procession. This concept dated from 1970. Meanwhile the social and cultural climate had changed so much that an adjustment urged. …. The public was no longer familiar with the biblical tradition; one was no longer acquainted with the stories and one didn’t thus understand the meaning. Also the vision on faith had changed. Suddenly I realised there was far more to this Ascension Day procession than a spectacle or a great day out on a public holiday. This procession was still about mission, just as had been the great processions of medieval times.

One of our readings this morning is set by the Lectionary as compulsory; it has to be heard at the principal Eucharist today. It is the reading from Acts in which we hear of Paul’s imprisonment with Silas, and the remarkable earthquake that opened the door, blew away their chains and set them free. The point of setting this passage, I think, is not to engender awe at spectacle or miraculous happening, marvellous though that is. Rather, as Pentecost approaches, it is to turn our minds towards mission; it is about the conversion of the jailer. Paul uses his heaven-sent opportunity not to escape, but to spread the word right where he is, so that the jailer might believe.

Ascension Day in the Diocese of Gloucester was marked by a day of prayer in the Cathedral, called for by our Bishop to begin the next phase of Journeying Together, the Diocesan vision process with which our PCC has pledged to engage. This process will unfold over the next few months and be launched in Advent. The Day was one of listening for what the Holy Spirit is saying to us. Over these next few days, between Ascension and Pentecost, we are asked to come together and to pray for God’s guidance as we seek his will for his Church in this place. Between May and July there will be a series of conversations held across the Diocese and in our parish in which we are asked to consider our dream for the Church in five years time, and what we could do to realise this vision.

The broader cultural issues that face us as we seek to ‘spread the word so that others might believe’ are similar to those that concerned the Procession designers in Bruges. As our Bishop says, it is important that we find ways of engaging with people of all ages and backgrounds in the wider community, many of whom may not identify themselves as Christians. That jailer did not identify himself as a Christian. We need to be listening to what God might be saying to us through those amongst whom we live and work who may hold a number of different perspectives from our own.

This phenomenon is not new: Paul faced it too on his travels. But it is challenging. Jesus knew that too, as he prayed for those first disciples: ‘Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I made your name known to them, and I will make it now, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.’

How are we going to make the name of Jesus known so that the world might believe? Food for thought, and for focussed prayer. Let us rest awhile in these days between Ascension and Pentecost, so that we might respond whole-heartedly to the prayer Jesus prays for us - his Disciples of today - remembering that he asks not only on our behalf, but also on behalf of those who will believe in Him through our word.