Be exalted, O God, above the heavens, and your glory over all the earth: Ascension Day

Acts 1.1-11 'As they were looking on, he was lifted up.'

Hebrews 9,24-28; 10.19-23 'Christ has entered into heaven itself'

Luke 24.46-53 'While he blessed them, he was carried up into heaven.'

 

My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready;

I will sing and give you praise.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,

and your glory over all the earth.

(Psalm 57.8,12)

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'Lift up your hearts' 'We lift them to the Lord'.

The great ‘Sumsum Corda’ – lift up your hearts is said at the beginning of the great Eucharistic Prayer of Consecration, when things of the earth, bread and wine are lifted up, elevated, and become the tokens of heaven.

A divine exchange takes place, all with the purpose of raising our hearts and minds into the heavenly places, into the ways of God.

This is a resurrection-ascension gift, as St Paul puts it: 'if then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.' (Colossians 3.1,2)

For the believer this is the elevation of baptism that follows the plunge into the waters as Christ descended to the depths to be raised by the Father.

This resurrection-ascension gift enables the movement of the heart, upwards to God; the movement we see on this Ascension Day, as Jesus Christ ascends into the heavens.

When we lift our hearts up to the Lord it is as if our hearts are caught in the slipstream and trajectory of the Ascension of the Lord.

We don’t just stand gawping up into heaven, as the angel said to the disciples (Acts 1.11); rather, our hearts become heaven shaped so that our lives on earth honour and serve the Risen and Ascended One.

The human heart is a wonderful and terrifying thing: a human heart can be open, broken, bleeding, warmed, as well as being lifted up.

At the beginning of Lent, in the great Collect for that season, we prayed that the Lord - who hates nothing that he has made - would 'create and make in us new and contrite hearts.'

That is a prayer for hearts of flesh, to replace our hearts of stone (cf Ezekiel 11.19; 36.26), so that our hearts are purified of sin as we seek forgiveness from God.

Mention of Lent takes us to a beautiful piece of symmetry.

The season of Lent lasts for 40 days to take us to Easter, and it is 40 days from Easter Day until the day of Ascension.

40 days before Easter, on Ash Wednesday, we were taken down, into the dust.

We were reminded of our humanity and mortality: 'dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.'

On Good Friday, Jesus is lifted up on the Cross and we recall his words, ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (John 12.32)

On Easter Day we rejoiced in the Resurrection of Christ - as this Paschal Candle bears witness - and, in the renewing the promises of our baptism, we proclaimed, 'I turn to Christ; I repent of my sin; I renounce evil'.

Now, 40 days after Easter, on Ascension Day, Christ ascends into the heavens, and, as the Collect for today puts it, ‘so may we in heart and mind may also ascend and with him continually dwell.’

The great mystery at the heart of the Christian religion is that Christ humbled himself to share in our humanity, so that we might be elevated to share his divinity.

God stooped down to raise us up.

This is known as theosis or divinisation, that is to say becoming more and more as God.

It is a magnificent statement of God's purpose in Jesus Christ.

The letter to the Philippians reminds us that:

[Christ Jesus] emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2.7-11)

God puts down and God raises up: as Mary sings, in her Magnificat, that song of praise of God's mighty acts, 'he hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek' (Luke 1.52)

Through the Holy Spirit, and in the Name of Jesus, God pushes vanity, pomposity and sin from their enthroned position in our lives and exalts that is Christlike and that magnifies the Father.

And he needs our hearts to be ready for that: as the psalm says:

8    My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready;

I will sing and give you praise.

10  I will give you thanks, O Lord, among the peoples;

I will sing praise to you among the nations.

11  For your loving-kindness is as high as the heavens,

and your faithfulness reaches to the clouds.

12  Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,

and your glory over all the earth. (Psalm 57.8,10,11,12)

In an increasingly disenchanted world - where we are told that the only reality is the material, things you can see, touch and analyse, that has had its heart and soul stripped out - all too often Christians have bought the seductive line that our faith is so heavenly that it is of no earthly use.

Let’s not fall for that counsel of despair and hopelessness!

The Ascension of the Lord tells us different: there is ultimate hope, meaning and purpose: God lives! Christ reigns! The Holy Spirit comes!

With hearts lifted up to the Lord, we Christians live in this earth, yet as citizens of heaven.

St Paul pitches it just right:

I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself. (Philippians 3.11, 20,21)

That is Ascension language: may it become our own.

My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready;

I will sing and give you praise.

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens,

and your glory over all the earth.