Lift me up, turn my night into day, my sorrow into joy, my doubt into trust.

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Myra Carroll
5 years ago
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1 Sermon on Acts 1: 1-11 Belonging in the Spirit: The Ascension Lift me up, up to higher ground. It s a prayer for deliverance. Lift me up, turn my night into day, my sorrow into joy, my doubt into trust. Turn my lips to praise, and my hands to service, and my life to the glory of the divine love given and received. Lift me up to eternal life. Very reminiscent of the Psalms of course. I waited patiently for the Lord, says psalm 40, He turned and heard my cry. He lifted me up out of the pit, out of the mud and the mire. God is in the business of lifting up the lowly. Even his own Son who was made low for us. But those who hope in the Lord, Isaiah writes, they will be lifted up as on wings of the eagle, they will run and not grown weary, they will walk and not grow faint. Wonderful words of reassurance and grace. Of the promises of God and the hope of the eternal. God lifts us up by coming down. By inhabiting a flesh and blood life, just like ours. By being with people, eating with them, laughing with them, weeping with them, forgiving them, healing them. God makes himself low in order to draw us up to new life, a kind of life we can neither fully imagine nor articulate. So low in fact that Jesus life is given away to a criminal s death. That s the length to which God goes to save us, to take us to higher ground. 1

2 The crucified God as Jurgen Moltmann famously put it. Karl Barth wrote that in the Incarnation and crucifixion is the humiliation of God, and in the Resurrection is the exaltation of man. God comes low to lift us up to higher ground. Jesus takes our hand, rises to new life, and as we remember today, takes his place in the presence of God, so that we too will be lifted up to where he is, to abide in glory forever. Jesus is where we belong. There s something about places of belonging isn t there. Just outside a little medieval market village called Dunster in Somerset, England, is such a place in my family. It s a 120 acre farm on which relatives of my grandfather s lived and worked all their lives, and where my mother spent many of her formative summers helping to bring in the harvest. Indeed, Aunty Joan, as we kids affectionally call her, still lives in the old stone farmhouse at 95. It s reported to be the place where Mrs Alexander took her inspiration to write that most English of hymns, All Things Bright and Beautiful, and if you go there you can see why it s lush, green, there s a gently running stream at the foot of a magnificent mountain rising behind the farm. Idyllic. But it s the people that encourage the sense of belonging. The knowledge of lives lived faithfully and their connection to me. I ve probably only been there half a dozen times in my lifetime, yet I feel as much at home there as anywhere. Like I belong. Perhaps you also have a place like that in your experience? 2

3 A place of meaning and memory? Of people and connections and relationships which you carry with you even when you re not physically there? Of the promise that such knowledge holds in your life? The promise perhaps of being there again someday, of reuniting with old friends? Of embrace and hospitality and sharing. This is a sense not wholly unlike what the disciples must have felt as they realised, and then saw that Jesus was going away, ascending into heaven, I imagine. They had known God in the flesh, the place where God tabernacled (as John 1 has it), dwelt, among us. For them belonging was about the people too, the person. They had been gathered around Jesus. Jesus, a flesh and blood life, was the place they had known the presence of God in an astonishing, surprising, and animating way. They had failed him, left him, struggled to understand him, sought their own glory through him, and yet he loved them still. And now the place, the person, God in the flesh was going away. No longer with them as he had been. What now? Where to from here? We belong to you, Lord, and you are leaving? To whom now shall we turn? They need not have feared. The answer had been right in front of them all the time. A flesh and blood person illuminated with the wonder of God. 3

4 Lower your eyes, Jesus tells them in effect. Look around you, wait, and have faith. You will receive a gift, a promised gift of my Spirit, that will help you see me once more, in the flesh and blood of others. See me in them. In the cries of a world in need. In the lives of the broken hearted and the joyful, those who sorrow and those who rejoice. Look into the eyes of the lonely, and smile, and offer yourselves for their keeping, and you will see me, and you will be where I am, and you will be where you belong, and I will lift you up. We usually think of Jesus declaration to the disciples that, you will be my witnesses, as meaning they will bear Jesus out to the world in proclamation and teaching, and this is certainly true. But what if it could also mean that they will witness, they will see, by the Spirit s power, where Jesus is now at work in the world? When the local becomes global? They will look, and know that it s not in violence, or political power, or coercion of any form, or self promotion or interest that God is at work, but in the breaking of bread at the common table? In the love offered to neighbour and stranger? In the act of stooping down to lift someone up who has fallen, as God has lifted us up, to higher ground? Jesus Ascension bears this promise of and in the Spirit. Why do you stand here looking into the sky you church? Jesus will return. 4

5 He is in fact here still if you look faithfully enough. Present this very moment. And it is with him that you belong. So be where he is. And you will find rest for your souls, and healing for your wounds. God s promise is sure. In the end, Jesus will take you to higher ground. And even in death and beyond God will be with you, and you will be with God, forever. Amen. 5

Crying Out To God. Luke 18:7 And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?

Crying Out To God. Luke 18:7 And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? Crying Out To God Luke 18:7 And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? Romans 8:15 For none of you have received the spirit of bondage again