The Need for Oxygen
Ascension : 12 May 2013
Father Hugh Bowron, 2013The world in which Jesus lived was small. What the gospels call cities we would call towns, and many of the incidents of his ministry take place in small hamlets. Even Jerusalem would be dwarfed by some South Island cities.
In fact most of his life was lived within a small envelope of land in the northern most region of the Galilee, considered by many of his Jewish contemporaries to be a backward area of rural rustics. The accent of Jesus would have immediately marked him out to the majority of Jews in the same way that a Southland accent does today.
So those have who written literary fantasies that imagine Jesus settling down to a less intense middle age in the company of a wife and children have consigned him to a rather limited life in which he would have connected with comparatively few people. Probably he would have been written off as a once interesting religious eccentric.
Since Holy Week I have been making it clear that the death and resurrection of Jesus are an essential aspect of his ministry, indeed the most crucial part. It made something happen in the world that tipped the balance in favour of the salvation of humankind. Even more than that it moved the drama of salvation away from that small geographical area that he had grown up in, and onto the world stage. What happened on Golgotha and in the 40 days of resurrection appearances universalised the results of his ministry. In fact apart from his mountain top appearance in Matthew, at which he gives the great commission to the disciples, we don’t hear about Galilee anymore. From then on the two agencies that communicate the good news are the Church, and the Holy Spirit, which drives and inspires the community of believers into wider and wider mission fields. We have been hearing lots about that in the Acts readings these past few weeks.
The Ascension of Jesus is part of that universalising momentum in the wider ministry of the risen Christ. But there is another dimension to it that I want to focus on this morning.
Graham Sansbury wrote this:
At Christ’s Ascension his presence is universal. Worship is now seen as more than a means of edification and help, for we come into a presence. In Christian worship a door is opened in heaven; the Church on earth is in touch with its living head, the ascended Lord; as the human body is refreshed and kept alive by air breathed in by the head, so the body of Christ on earth, with all its members, breathes another air, without which it would stagnate.
I have entitled this sermon, "The Need for Oxygen." We are part of a body, what Paul called the body of Christ. It is not just a loose associational religious club for those who like that sort of thing, but is rather an inter connected organism that is integrated into God’s continuing presence in the world. To ask where is God to be found in the world is to come to the answer he is more likely to be found in the Church than anywhere else.
But we are just a part of that body, with a small humble part to play in its developing life. The head of this body is in heaven, thanks to the Ascension, seated now at the right hand of the Father, from which place he directs the life of the Church, and sends down spiritual gifts to equip it. To ask where is heaven is to receive the answer it is wherever the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is, the space and place he locates himself so as to be present to his creation.
Graham Sansbury speaks of Christ breathing another air in heaven. This is a metaphor of that refreshment and replenishment that he draws in from that continual exchange of love and knowledge that goes on between the triune persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
It speaks too of the far wider horizons that Christ now lives in than he could ever have known in his circumscribed life in Galilee. More than just a bigger world, with a bigger picture in view, he in fact now has a universal vision in sight of many different worlds, and many overlapping fields of reality. The oxygen he breathes in is the life provided by continual contact with a richer and more varied field of vision. The boy from Galilee is now in touch with everything that is, and has become a cosmic personality thereby. If our communication ports are open to him then we too can live in a far bigger and richer world.
The New Zealand poet Denis Glover wrote a famous cycle of poems called "Sings Harry." In one sequence he imagines a young boy looking out across the ocean, his imagination and life horizons athirst for everything that lies across the horizon:
From a cliff top a boy
Felt that great motion,
And pupil to the horizon’s eye
Grew wide with vision,
Sings Harry in the wind-break.
But grew to own fences barbed,
Like the words of a quarrel;
And the sea never disturbed
Him fat as a barrel,
Sings Harry in the wind-break.
Who once would gather all Pacific
In a net as wide as his heart
Soon is content to watch the traffic
Or lake waves breaking short.
Life in the Church is supposed to be about living in a bigger world, even if we never get to travel far from where we started out. The Church is an international; inter connected body that informs, resources, and even corrects its different members, as part of that wider pattern of belonging. If we are open to our head, and to the wider Church community, then our lives can become richer in ways we never imagined.
Ann Griffiths lived all of her short life in a small part of Wales, never travelling far, and with only limited opportunities for education. She became caught up in the Wesleyan revival of the late 18th century that transformed the religious landscape of Wales. Her Christian existence was determined by her membership of a Calvinistic Methodist Church, not exactly the gateway to the resources of a wider Christian world. Yet the poems she wrote, which are hymns addressed to God, reveal her to be a mystic somehow in touch with the Church universal spanning time and space. Pivoting off the extraordinary vision of water flowing from the rebuilt Temple, which refreshes all the far off lands around it, that can be found at the end of the prophet Ezekiel, she wrote this:
O blessed hour of eternal rest from my labour,
in my lot,
in the midst of a sea of wonders
with never a sight of an end
or a shore,
abundant freedom of entrance, ever to continue, into the dwelling places
of the Three in One,
water to swim in,
not to be passed through
man as God
and God as man.
One commentator has noticed how similar her vision of participation in God is to the Eastern Roman theologian Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great brains and holy men of the Church of the 4th century. Somehow a fully alive Christian life in that small Church in that remote part of the Atlantic islands enabled her to develop a view of our Christian destiny with a remarkable affinity to one of the Church’s brightest and best who had lived over a thousand years before.
The oxygen circulating down and around from Christ the head of the body had certainly done its refreshing and inspiring work with her. Ann Griffiths almost without knowing it lived in a much wider world, like her risen, ascended Lord.
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