Ascension Sunday, 2026. St Alban’s Church, North Harrow.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
Amen
The period between Ascension and Pentecost must have been a strange and unsettling time for the first disciples.
Their lives have become ones of constant change, and possibly even disappointment. Notions and expectations that they had held for years are everywhere being subverted and reversed.
The messiah that the prophets and tradition had said would come to sit of the throne of David forever and raise Israel up above the other nations had instead shown his messiahship in a very different way.
They have been forced to recalibrate their expectations, and completely reorientate their world view. Suddenly, so much of Jesus’ teaching is reinterpreted and now is more clearly understood in the light of the crucifixion and resurrection.
That is the glorification that Jesus talks about in the passage from John’s gospel – not the sort of glorification that we are used to from our leaders today, but a completely different sort of glorification. Jesus’ glorification is in his sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection – his willingness to die for the sins of all the world, and his triumphant resurrection that shows that sin and death have no power against God. That is true glorification, but it took time and other events to happen for the disciples to understand this. Change and growth needed to happen.
But even then the change doesn’t stop coming. If they assumed that Jesus was going to remain with them bodily on earth and help them establish the kingdom of God, then they are again disappointed. When they ask him when the kingdom will come, his response is that it is not for them to know what the timescale will be.
God’s plans proceed by God’s will, not our own, and we do not have the wisdom to understand the mind of God.
All Jesus leaves them with is the promise of the Holy Spirit as helper and advocate.
It would be completely understandable if the disciples had balked at this turn of event. Most people don’t like constant change. We find it unsettling – we like patterns and certainties. The past acquires a rosy tint to it, which is often out of all proportion to how good or pleasant the past really was.
We see a lot of this in society at the moment. The world we are living in is changing at an increasing pace. Old ways of doing things are no longer valued. People, places and customs are all changing faster than we feel comfortable with. The response to this is for many people to want to turn the clock back, or to turn to people who say that there are easy and quick solutions to life’s problems.
Jesus isn’t like that. He doesn’t offer easy solutions to life’s problems. He questions us, and invites us to question ourselves as to what we truly want, what truly matters to us. He warns us that the path is hard, but at the same time he reassures us that he will be there to walk it alongside us, helping us to carry this burden. He doesn’t deny the complexity, the pain and the brokenness of the world; instead he comes into it to walk alongside us.
The disciples knew all of this, and had walked alongside Jesus through this broken world, knowing that he would fix it, and yet now he is leaving them, and the world is just as broken as when he started, or so it feels.
But the disciples don’t despair. They don’t turn to charlatans and snake-oil salesmen who will promise them a quick fix. As Acts says, they remained in Jerusalem, constantly devoting themselves to prayer.
They had given their allegiance to Jesus, and they kept faith with him. Some of them had all too recent experience of having broken that faith to remind them that they shouldn’t doubt Jesus.
They are entering into a time of waiting for Jesus’ promises to be fulfilled. In their case, it was only a ten day wait before Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Spirit, but even after that they are still waiting. We are all still waiting for the fulfilment of the Kingdom, and as we do so, this world seems to become ever more broken.
Waiting, and keeping faith in the time of waiting is what we do as Christians.
It is what you are doing here at St Alban’s at the moment, as you wait for a new incumbent. It is hard to keep waiting, not knowing when the end will come. I know, because we were in a similar place years ago at Holy Trinity, waiting, with no one coming forward to serve. I know how demoralising it can feel, how abandoned.
But we must have faith with God, that God’s plans will come to fruition in the fullness of time. It is not for us to know the times and periods that the Father has set by his own authority.
It is for us to keep faith, and to pray, and to be open to the call of God ourselves. To discern, both as a church, and as individuals, what God is calling us to be – how will we find our fulfilment in God? Jesus called on his disciples to be witnesses to Him in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. And all of us here can be witnesses to the risen Christ in everything we do – in how we act in our day to day lives, in how we treat the people we meet in every interaction we have, in how we behave at work, in the decisions we take and the choices we make.
The church is that innumerable cloud of witnesses – it is a bottom up organisation, not a top down one. Jesus’ ascension is not an act of abdication, but one of liberation and empowerment. He is enabling his followers to become leaders; to step up into the roles that God has intended them for, and to act as his witnesses in Judea and Samaria and all the world.
The disciples stepped from all walks of life and followed Jesus with faith, not knowing where that path would lead them, but trusting in God’s enduring faithfulness to us, and responding to that faithfulness with their own faith.
We too are called to that path. We do not know the timing of God’s plans. Sometimes we are tempted to dry out ‘How long, O Lord, how long’ like the psalmist did, but like the psalmist, we too must trust in God’s faithfulness, and wait with prayer in faith that his will be done, and that the kingdom will come to its fruition through us and our faithful witness.
Amen