As a self supporting minister formerly operating in the knock-about world of daily work I am relieved that Thursday is not generally regarded as a Holy Day, a significant religious day of the week. It was on a Thursday, in the hurly-burly of the Jerusalem suburb, Bethany, Jesus took leave of his disciples. After he had blessed his disciples his resurrected body was carried up to heaven without even a hint of a goodbye to his disciples. Like the nursery rhyme - Jesus /Thursday’s child has......“far to go.” In the all consuming interests of our working and family lives Jesus absents himself from our earthly life on a Thursday. On that Thursday in particular – a significant event took place on an ordinary working day. “I could never get the hang of Thursdays,” said the character, Arthur Dent, from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. “Thursday! it’s too gruesome,” said Holly Golightly, in Breakfast in Tiffany’s.
Our life as human beings presents us with many occasions when we have to say good-bye, perhaps not all of them on a Thursday, and not all of them as we might have wished them to be if the ordering of our lives were in our power. Some of us over the years have had to say good-bye to loved ones, through death and bereavement, divorce and separation; some of us have had to say good bye to local church communities which we have come to know and love; some of us have had to say good-bye to ways of seeing ourselves. It was on Thursday my son married his beautiful bride; it was on a Thursday that I said goodbye to a way of life that had been my life blood for three decades and more. In the haste to get forms completed, a Plan B was not in place, a back- up church job was not offered, an offer of a living and a stipend not made. Legions of angels or the equivalent of the ecclesiastical cavalry did not come and rescue me from my depressed and miserable encampment (which rather surprised my working colleagues) to spread soothing Tinkerbelle dust around. There were no Superman tricks.
But for that, at least, I was pleased, thankful and relieved. Stipendiary ministry is not the refuge of the unemployed. I soon began to loathe conversations with friends who would say “What is God saying to me in this situation?” as if one could distinguish between a God who can arrange a new possibility from a God who could have arranged a redundancy? I too was irritated with employed friends who appeared not to care, the classic empty one-liner “you are in my prayers,” and then the brush off. Over the last few months I have come to realise that a self supporting ministry is not, at heart, only about how ministry is exercised in the daily patterns of daily working life, or on Sundays either within or outside local mission partnerships. It is a way of life. For whether one is employed or unemployed that vocational ministry of the self supporting minister is forever shaping one’s outlook and understanding of oneself and of the church. That thought, from a self supporting minister who was retiring from ministry, offered some practical and intellectual consolation and support.
And so like my recent experience of redundancy in my professional life (who ever heard of an unemployed cleric?), only too often for our taste and comfort, goodbyes are wrenched from us, often out of control, out of our power, occasions even of pain and bitterness. And so it is with the disappeared Christ. When Christ is absent we try to bring him back with all manners of minister-craft and pleading. We reach out to that cloud where he sits in glory. And while he sits “at the Father’s right hand in glory everlasting” earthquakes destroy our cities, volcanic ash hangs over Britain like an ill-omen disrupting travel journeys and causes economic chaos, famine reduces life to a scramble for survival, and debating politicians fight over every scrap of election territory. Where is God’s power in all this – in the unemployed masses, the hungry and homeless, the ravaged people of Haiti, the butchered people of Rwanda, the bereft people of Poland? It seems, apparently, life can go on apart from God, and we can go on, quite easily, without God. If Christ is ascended, if Christ is absent what are we doing in church, in our local mission partnerships? Why praise God when he has removed himself from the world?
I can imagine Heaven’s fanfare trumpets did blow on that first Ascension Thursday to welcome home the returning Christ in a cloud-like tent of meeting, to be reunited with his prodigal Father. But to make sense of that upward mystery perhaps it is easier for us earth-bound creatures to invert the story of the Ascension and ask “how is God who absented himself made present in our world? Perhaps the writer to the Ephesians gives us the hint of the answer. “He that descended is He who also ascended far above all heavens, that He might fill all things” Ephesians 4 v10.
But the word ascended implies that he also descended to the lowest level, down to the very earth. That means God is present where he cannot be present – in the depths of hell, the abyss of despair. God’s presence is not just in the sacred places of our churches and cathedrals where dedicated coal-black dressed silk stoled stipendiary ministers fuss over God’s train (which filled the temple, Isaiah 6 v1) and where they faithfully serve, but also where God is most absent: in the pit, in the mire, in the squalid mess of humanity outside the church where Christ was crucified in an unfenced and unadorned place, the place where self supporting minsters ply their renewing ministerial craft of hope without Geneva robes, candles and crucifixes, prayer and hymnbooks and polished brass vases full of Tesco’s two-bags-for-the-price-of-one, lilies. For in that place, that is where God’s glory is to be found (Isaiah 6 v3). In the meaningless struggle of existence, God has been present.
And it is in this world, “filled with his glory,” that he exalts the wretched of the earth. He lifts them from the depths to the heights, and he raises the poor and the unemployed, the destitute and the powerless from the dust. He champions the poor and rescues them from their misery. It is the proud who are abased and the humbled exalted, the rich who are impoverished and the poor enriched; the well fed who are sent empty away and the hungry filled with good things. That is our hope. There is no place however remote from which he is absent, neither is there a situation, however desperate, which he does not share with us. And he is there making transformation in his glorious world, not just on Thursdays but the remaining days of the week too.
St Leo, that great Italian Doctor of the Church, in one of the earliest Ascension sermons said that in the life of the church “what was visible in the person of our redeemer is now represented in the mysteries.” In every communion service we are lifted up to the heavenly places and sustained in love. Confined in a cell in Beirut a priest took “a bit of stale bread hoarded from a scanty meal.” “Once again” wrote Terry Anderson, journalist and hostage*, a sharer in that communion service, “Christ’s promise is fulfilled. The miracle is real.” Out of that and all such darkness, the way lies open to heaven; for the Lord has ascended that he might fill all things.
Revd Ray Anglesea
April 2010
*Terry Anderson was an American journalist taken hostage in Beirut in 1985 by Hezbollah Shiite Muslims in an attempt to drive U.S. military forces from Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War. The longest known held hostage, he spent 6 years and 9 months in captivity. Anderson was released on 4th December 1991. He was reported as saying he had forgiven his captors.
