Sermon for Ascension Day 21 May 2020: Daniel 7, 9-14; Acts 1, 1-11; Luke 24 44-end.
Leonard Doolan – ST PAUL’S ATHENS!
The UK television series ‘Little Britain’ is not everyone’s cup of tea. You may not even know it. In a series of comedy sketches, ranging from the tasteless through to bad taste (!), there is one recurring sketch with Andy and Lou. Andy is in a wheelchair, Lou is his carer. Whenever Lou goes off to speak to someone Andy is up and running about, or playing football or something energetic, but by the time Lou returns Andy is always back in his wheelchair. In one episode Lou turns away to chat to someone for a few moments – when he looks back to the wheelchair Andy is nowhere to be seen. The camera than pans upwards to discover Andy sitting on a branch way up in a tree. ‘How did you get up there?’ Lou asks naively. ‘I fell’ replies Andy. Watching it you will either find it hilariously funny, or hate it, but you will be left with one question in your mind. How can you fall upwards?
On a rather deeper level this question can be reoriented towards questions that challenge everything we assume as normal and invariable. Science has helped us in our fixed thinking about this. From the perspective of humanity everything on earth must move downwards – gravity dictates this, and gravity equally dictates our spiritual view. All the cosmos also has to be dragged downwards by the gravity created by the human perspective. All comes down to our level, nothing can be raised to God’s level. Man makes God in human image.
Immediately you will see the dilemma here. Philippians 2 rightly reminds us that God gave up everything of himself and entered into human life – kenosis – we call it, self emptying. This kenotic action of God results in a Jesus who lived, preached, performed miracles, suffered, and died on a cross.
St. John tells us that this is the Divine Word, the Logos, that has come among us and has become flesh. This divine action has been shared with us already in a vision of Daniel (Daniel 7), ‘As I watched in the night visions, I saw one like a human being coming with the clouds of heaven’. It’s a well known passage in Daniel – well known enough for Jesus himself to quote it, much to the shock of the religious authorities.
It ended – all this human playing field – with a death, a crucifixion. As the human race reflected on this we were drawn to think of what this man did for us by dying in such a way. He took away our sin, some say; he paid a price to pay for our purchase, some say; he was sacrificed to appease the anger that God had against us some say; and so the ideas go on in an endless hypothesis with no real conclusion that is finite, because what we all know is that this man’s death on the cross is a mystery, a mystery that touches each and every one of us deeply as we journey, little step by little step, into that mystery. He was on our level, you see, so we can think of what he has done but on our own human terms. We have all fallen – thanks to that Adam and Eve stuff – and of course, we have all fallen ‘downwards.’