Ad Clerum Ascensiontide 2009 

Dear Colleagues, 

I am very sorry to have missed the recent Training Day in the Cathedral. I had to have a short pit-stop in hospital to readjust medication. I’m glad that Christopher Jones and Melvyn Bragg were suitably edifying in their different ways. All is now settled. By the way, I am in between cataract operations, which is making sight considerably easier than it has been. 

The main news at Bishopsgrove is that I have appointed Karen Schmidt as Bishop’s Chaplain. She takes over from Bruce Carpenter, who has done sterling work on a two-day-a-week basis since last September. I want to pay tribute to the generous way in which he has helped here, including his care for the family and household in recent months. Karen has just finished four years as Vicar at Purbrook, before which she served as NSM Curate at Lee-on-the-Solent. Her experience as a solicitor is already proving invaluable. She will see me out, see Bishopsgrove and the Bishop’s Staff through the inter-regnum, and then see my successor in. Karen starts properly on Monday 7^th June, and will usually be here on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. 

Ascension is perhaps the most neglected festival of the Christian year. Of course we sing lots of hymns and songs to Christ in glory, but the day itself is a necessary focus for a key doctrine. In background, it is part of the influence played by St Luke on the outworking of the Liturgical Year and the Calendar. It is to him that we owe the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Birth of John the Baptist, the Circumcision, and the Presentation in the Temple, as well as St Stephen, and the Conversion of St Paul, recounted no fewer than three times in the Acts of the Apostles. But more significant than all of these is the narrative of Christ’s Ascension, at the end of his gospel and at the beginning of the Acts, which is followed in turn by the first Christian Pentecost. Luke’s historical focus throughout both his Gospel and Acts produces all this rich fruit. 

But what is the point of the Ascension? We have the dramatic scene – often portrayed in Christian art – of Jesus going up into heaven in clouds. It is a real winner for the religious imagination. The fundamental truth is more complex, and may be summarized in the question, ‘what does Christ do now?’ Being ‘at the right hand of the Father’ is a biblical image of favour and strength, but it can appear somewhat static. Christ ascended is the Christ who brings his humanity back to the Father, and both pleads our cause and pours out his teaching and his blessing through the Holy Spirit. In that sequence, we can see the germs of the doctrine of the Trinity, which was being worked out in the fourth century, the very time when Ascension and Pentecost came to be celebrated. It is one of the reasons why, for example, the First Sunday after Pentecost came to be identified as Trinity Sunday in the later Middle Ages in Northern Europe.  

Not everyone, of course, wants to know all these biblical and historical details. But the sequence is crucial: a summing up of all that Jesus said and did, hinted at in the final words of John’s Gospel, who has no narrative of the Ascension but yet refers to Jesus’ own ‘ascent’ when telling Mary Magdalene, ‘Apostle of the Resurrection’, not to cling to him. But it is more than a summary of past events – it is an outpouring of present realities, a continuous action of love, mercy, judgement, forgiveness, and renewal. ‘Harbinger of human race’, to quote from Charles Wesley’s ‘Hail the day that sees him rise’, is not a bad image to describe what all this means. 

That all may well seem a far cry from the current furore about M.P.’s expenses. The media pundits keep telling us that they can’t recall a greater negative reaction to politicians like this one. While scapegoats can be convenient, there is no doubt that much is wrong with the system, built on a tacit assumption that when pay is not regarded as adequate, it is all right to add in from elsewhere. But there has been a creeping change of culture, exacerbated by the current economic crisis, as we all know. We’re all much more concerned about how money in the public realm is found – and spent. 

We are living through a particularly anxious and cynical time, part of the culture which Christopher Jones was expounding, both for its strengths and its weaknesses, at the Training Day. Faith needs to be applied. Sometimes that means being stripped of peripheral things, in order to be deepened and strengthened, as our capacity to trust ourselves and our institutions is tested. We may get a bit paranoid about the latest cheque, but God remains God – for whom and to whom Christ took our humanity, sins and all.  

With every Blessing 

+ Kenneth