Rev’d Peter Balabanski
Ascension – Acts 1 1-11, Ps 97, Eph 1 15-23, Lk 24 44-53
Our prayer of the day for Ascension is quite startling and wonderful. Let’s turn back to it again – it’s just before the Bible readings. O God, you withdraw from our sight that you may be known by our love: help us to enter the cloud where you are hidden, and to surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ.
O God, you withdraw from our sight. We’ve reminded ourselves of that just now by putting out the great Easter candle. We lit it on Easter morning to be a sign among us of Jesus resurrected. And we’ve lit it at every one of our gatherings throughout the season of Easter. But today, after we read in the Gospel about Jesus taken up from among his disciples – taken out of our sight, we put that candle out. Like the physical presence of Jesus was taken from the first disciples, our sign of his presence among us – the light on the Easter candle – was taken from our sight.
Our prayer of the day gives us a reason for this. It’s so that [God / Jesus] may be known by our love. Now, you and I are the ones who have to make God’s love known. Jesus did it; he made people know God’s love for them. He loved people that no-one loved; he forgave people what no-one would forgive them, he healed people that no-one could heal. And now our prayer of the day says that’s our job. We are called to be God’s messengers of this love. Putting out the Easter candle says the job is now ours. You and I are to be the Christ-light for this world to see.
An older priest I knew used to describe Jesus’ Ascension as his moving from the here and now to the everywhere and always. And that means us. We’re everywhere. Jesus wasn’t everywhere at once during his ministry on Earth. But we – his Church – we are everywhere at once. We are called to make God’s love known everywhere and always. But where do we start? Our remarkable prayer of the day has more to say about that too. Help us to enter the cloud where you are hidden, and to surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ.
Enter the cloud where you are hidden!? We saw a cloud take Jesus up out of their sight in this morning’s reading from Acts. If you remember the Exodus story, you’ll remember how God went in front of the people in a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. They couldn’t see God; only a cloud or a fire. But they were led by God’s presence in that cloud and in that fire, and they followed God’s leading. Enter the cloud where you are hidden. What might that mean for us? God is invisible to us. Jesus is invisible to us. And we’re meant to make them known?!
There’s an old story about a child in a kindergarten busily painting a huge picture. The teacher asks What are you painting? The child says God. The teacher says But no-one knows what God looks like! The child replies They will when I’ve finished.
Enter the cloud where you are hidden. Our prayer of the day challenges us to enter the mystery of how we are to get on with helping people know what God is like: how we are to get on with helping people experience God’s love. We prayed not only that we might enter the cloud where Christ is now hidden, but that we might also surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ.
This prayer seems inspired by The Cloude of Unknowyng, an anonymous English work of Christian mysticism written in the late 1300’s. It’s a guide to contemplative prayer. Its basic message is stop making up theories about God, and just be brave enough to enter the place of unknowing. And there, begin to glimpse God’s nature.
So, surrender all our certainty!? Heavens! We’re people of the modernist era. With our fixation on evidence-based certainty, we’re deeply challenged by this part of the prayer. We’re the ones most shocked by our crazy world where grotesque influencers and political fools seek to get ahead by replacing scientific certainties with their empty wishful thinking so they can amass power and wealth. Maybe they are the reason we find this bit of the prayer so challenging. But those influencers and political fools are empty counterfeits of what this prayer is on about; deceivers.
We are called to surrender all our certainty to God; not to liars. To Christ who we can trust, because we know what he’s like. Instead of the greedy lies of influencers and fools, we celebrate Jesus for his self-emptying love. We can safely surrender all our certainty to him. We can trust him. With him, we can let go safely.
Even so, the most challenging words of this prayer are kept for last; surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ. I avoid the word darkness wherever I can in church because of its unconscious associations for some people with racism. So I’ve struggled with that word in this prayer. But deep in the night, I was given the Easter association with it; a vision of a seed planted in soil – there to die, but in doing so, bearing much fruit. John 12.23-26
This prayer challenges me; challenges us all to risk burying the precious seed of our certainties in the rich, dark soil of faith; to trust God will help us bear the Spirit’s fruits of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self-control because they’re how people meet Jesus. So we can pray this prayer with hope, not fear. Or to return to today’s other metaphor, when we put out the Easter candle today, we surrendered the certainty of that light before us, hoping that very light might shine in us and from us. And that’s what we’ll see next Sunday at Pentecost.
Let’s pray the prayer again. O God, you withdraw from our sight that you may be known by our love: help us to enter the cloud where you are hidden, and to surrender all our certainty to the darkness of faith in Jesus Christ. Amen.