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One of my most vivid early memories can be dated precisely to the twelfth of April 1961.  My grandmother had died the previous November, and we had been clearing her tiny terrace house in Haltwhistle. Getting on the train to travel home felt like being expelled from a childhood paradise. I’ll come back to that idea of Paradise as a place in a few moments.

 Once we were home, I took myself to bed significantly before the usual time for the ten-year-old me but I was very soon shaken awake by my mother.

“You must come down and watch the news! The Russians have sent a man into space!”

After that first manned space flight, Yuri Gagarin was widely quoted as saying that he been into space but that he hadn’t seen God or Heaven. He never said it – the comment was made by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and, many years after Gagarin’s early death, a friend revealed that, like so many people of his generation, Gagarin had been discreetly baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant and that he made sure that his daughter Yelena was baptized shortly before his space mission, in case he did not return safely. 

Khrushchev’s piece of atheistic propaganda was prompted by the once widespread belief that the universe had what Bishop John Robinson called “a three-decker structure” – earth in the middle, hell down below and heaven up above. There are striking images of the Ascension of Jesus Christ from past centuries inspired by that belief, including frescoes and paintings in which He has almost disappeared upwards into a cloud and only His feet can still be seen. 

Our reading from Acts might seem to suggest the kind of vertical take-off those paintings and frescoes depict, so how can we understand the Ascension now that we know, as Khrushchev put it, that heaven is not “up there”? A three-dimensional explanation won’t do but our understanding of dimensions suggests a way forward. We experience four dimensions because we ourselves and the world we inhabit clearly have three and we also know the passage of time, which is the fourth. It may help to think of heaven, of Paradise, of being in the full presence of God, not as being in a place but as experiencing dimensions of which, during our earthly lives, we are only intermittently aware; dimensions glimpsed, as it were from the corner of our eyes. 

Our Celtic pagan ancestors and their Christian successors had a sense of this, for they spoke of “thin places”, places where those extra dimensions can be glimpsed. Places can be geographical, they can be buildings such as our church and they can be acts of prayer and worship, including our Eucharist. The altar around which we shall presently gather is a “thin place”, a place where we draw near to the many dimensions of the divine and the divine draws near to us

I have several times been back to my childhood paradise as an adult and, on one occasion, I took a Russian friend and his family with me. A few years later, he returned the compliment by taking me to the beautiful lakeside village in Novgorod Province where his grandparents had lived. The church there was desecrated in Stalin’s time and has remained a ruin. My friend explained how, as a small boy, he played in the ruins and, looking up at the damaged fresco of Christ in majesty on the inside of what had been the main dome, had a sense of something mysterious and very important – a glimpse of those other dimensions. What he didn’t know then, because he was deemed too young to keep the secret, was that his parents had, like Gagarin’s parents, arranged for him to be baptized in a clandestine service. Clandestine because his father’s job depended on his being a member of the Communist Party.

One of the prayers that the Russian Orthodox Church uses on Ascension Day includes these profound words:

“In your Ascension, you exalted us and glorified us together with yourself.”

Those words pick up on the theme of glorification in today’s Gospel. What Jesus means by glorification isn’t obvious. He certainly didn’t mean the kind of self-aggrandisement that human beings sometimes indulge in – lots of gilded decoration in your office, a vast ballroom next to your house, a plan to build the world’s biggest triumphal arch – you know the kind of thing. We simply cannot glorify ourselves in the Biblical sense of the word. For glorification in the New Testament isn’t about bigging-up. When we say “Glory to God” we are not bigging God up – as if we could. The theologian Karl Barth helpfully defined that Biblical understanding of glorification as

"…to make either oneself or someone else appear such as he is; to show forth something in its essence…" 

When Jesus in today’s Gospel prays:

“I glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do.”

He means that his whole life, death and resurrection have been a showing forth of God’s nature. The Russian Orthodox prayer I quoted a moment ago needs to be understood in the light of that. 

“In your Ascension you exalted us and glorified us together with yourself.”

The Ascension glorifies us in the sense that it reveals our full human potential. We too can be drawn into close relationship with God. We too can be glorified in the sense of having our full human potential realized.

That possibility of closeness to God is one of the reasons why we are not celebrating “vertical take off” today – the Ascension is not about Jesus’ disappearance into a remote location. Rather it’s about three things:

Firstly His glorification – the making fully clear of who he is. In that sense it affirms and completes the good news of Easter, the good news of the Resurrection.

Secondly His closeness, God’s closeness to us. Closeness in the sense of availability, if we are receptive, and closeness in the sense of shared experience. The Ascension is about the taking of our humanity, including our sufferings and the death which awaits all of us, into the very heart of God. Because of the Ascension, God is, of God’s very essence, suffering, dying humanity glorified and brought to completion.  Not in some remote place but in dimensions very close to us and sometimes glimpsed, as that small Russian lad caught a sense of mystery and wonder while playing in a church desecrated and half demolished by a dictator. 

Thirdly about the possibility of our glorification, of the realisation of our full human potential for loving relationship, a process in the here and now, in the four dimensional world, a process which by opening our awareness of the dimensions of the Divine moves us towards the complete fulfilment of our potential. That’s what Charles Wesley was on to when he wrote:

“Changed from glory into glory

Till in heaven we take our place.

Till we cast our crowns before Thee,

Lost in wonder, love and praise.”

 “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 

          Acts 17:23b

In the ancient world most gods had names. For how else would one know who to thank or to curse for the good and bad things that happened to one? 

Luke, in that quote from Acts  is being canny in the tale he tells about the altar inscription to an unknown god. He is telling us that this anonymous god is obviously worthy to have an altar given to them  and that they must have done things that could not be attributed to any other named or known god. 

In the Christian Faith, our God is not named; God is simply God his being is his name. God’s name is not given. In the Hebrew tradition God does have a name ‘Yahweh’ but he is not called such nor is it ever written in full out of respect to the deity. Our Christian god is the god of the Hebrews but we simply know him as ‘God’. The name we associate with God is ‘Jesus’ for as St.John tells us:

‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’

and Jesus is the Word of God made flesh. As such we do not need a name for God because God has revealed himself to us as Jesus. In telling his hearers that he will make known to them the ‘unknown god’ Luke is opening the way for us to hear all about ‘Jesus' the only name we can associate with God.

Sometimes it is worth looking at different translations of the same piece of Scripture to see if they give a different perspective on a particular passage of phrase. In reading today’s gobbit from Acts, I was particularly struck by verse 27:

“²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him - though indeed he is not far from each one of us.”

The idea or process of ‘groping’ for God in the dark is I think very apt, and for me, a more descriptive translation that given in either the Jerusalem Bible or the New International Version of the Bible. In the Jerusalem Bible verse 27 is thus written:

“And he did this so that all nations might seek the deity and, by feeling their way towards him, succeed in finding him.”

and in the NIV:

“God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him.”

the New Revised Standard Version’s use of the word ‘grope’ rather than ‘feeling’ or ‘reach’ gives the verse an earthy, raw feeling. Feeling and reaching are, I think, rather passive in their meaning. Whereas groping for God implies something hard and physical. It is very active and requires a lot of effort to find God, rather than simply reaching out or gently feeling for him. 

Finding God, is not easy, despite, as St.Luke says; ‘he is not far from us at anytime’. God is always with us but we have to be active in discerning his presence. While pondering on this groping for God, I was reminded of the prayer-poem ‘Footsteps’ which ends with the line:

“When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”

I know that my own searching for God has often been like this. Feeling abandoned or not close to God only then to discover that God had not left my side but was in fact carrying me through those times of darkness and despair, of frustration and doubt. I suppose I like the idea of groping in the dark for God because it feels like that is what I have always done. I’ve looked for him and searched for him but not always found him, or so I thought. Yet, even when I wasn’t aware of his presence I have continued to have been bothered by him. In fact all my life, for a long as I can remember I have been ‘bothered’ by God. 

Even as a small child, I knew God existed for me because I was nudged and niggled by the through of him. I think I was six or seven  when I first began saying I wanted to be a priest, even though I wan’t sure what a priest actually was or did. I did my best to stop looking for God but still felt bothered by him in my teenage years and once I hit my 20’s the bothering became a real pain and I could no longer ignore him. And, to save another story the rest is history! 

In my bothering I groped my way forward and backwards trying to understand ‘God’ until I realised that I could never understand God or control him because God was a lot bigger than I was and far beyond my comprehension. The best I could do was to continually grope in the dark for God and to rejoice in those brief flashes of light and understanding that God would give me. 

The way I have come to ‘know’ more about God is through the person of Jesus, his son. In knowing Jesus I don’t have to grope about in the dark, I can follow his ways and read the stores about him by those who knew him or knew of him. Jesus, is my light in the darkness as I grope for God. 

God continues to ‘bother’ me to this day and I hope that will always be the case because it really is ‘an awfully big adventure’ as I continually try to understand this earthly life and my faith. 

I hope that the idea of groping about to find God will also encourage you in your journey of life as you too wrestle with faith, doubt and hope.

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

I think it very likely that when Jesus said that, he was deliberately echoing a phrase in the twenty-third Psalm, the one that begins:

“The Lord is my shepherd”

The phrase I think that he had in mind was this one:

“…my cup overflows.”

The Greek word that St John uses, which is translated into English as “abundantly” is itself an accurate translation of the Hebrew word in the Psalm. Both literally mean “brimming over” or “full to overflowing”.

For sheep, abundant life is fairly easy to achieve. Plentiful pasture during the day and a place safe from predators at night and during lambing time is all that they need. In Jesus’ time that meant a sheepfold and He describes in today’s Gospel how, in those days, sheepfolds had gates and gatekeepers. In the Highlands and Islands, where the winter climate is far more hostile, something more substantial is required. I remember that there was much quiet laughter in Shetland when a couple from the English Midlands, new to the islands and new to crofting, installed a polytunnel in anticipation of the lambing season. The first significant storm of that winter saw the polytunnel take off and depart in the general direction of Norway and it had to be replaced by a barn. There’s a useful metaphor there, of which more in a moment.

Sheep are easily made content, but for us humans, abundant life is more challenging, more complex and yet the Gospel promise is that it is to be found in relationship with Jesus Christ, the Good Shepherd.

If you spend any time on social media, you’re likely to come across someone claiming that they are “living their best life”. What that usually means is that they are doing exactly what they want to do, whether it’s sunning themselves on a distant beach, enjoying exotic food and drink in a restaurant or simple chillaxing in the garden.  There’s nothing wrong with any of those things but that’s not what is meant by having life abundantly. Young people are, I understand, beginning to grasp that. There’s a social media app that is increasingly popular with Generation Z. It’s called Be Real. If you subscribe to it you are prompted, once a day, to post an unedited photo either of yourself or your surroundings. You have only two minutes in which to do it, and you don’t know from day to day when that two-minute slot will occur. It sounds like an attempt, albeit it a somewhat clunky attempt, at a greater authenticity than other social media platforms encourage, an attempt to post and so acknowledge the significance of a slice of reality rather than a contrived image or a piece of self-advertisement.

I have no intention of signing up for Be Real, but hearing about it made me wonder what sort of things I would have had to post in the last week or so. As some of you know, we have recently moved. Any random two minutes during the last week might have caught me unpacking boxes, dusting and hoovering in our previous home to get ready for the decorator’s arrival or scratching my head because I couldn’t remember in which cupboard in our new kitchen I had put the chopping boards. Life has been busy and that has prompted some theological reflection on how all the busy-ness of life can be part of the abundant living that Jesus the Good Shepherd offers to those who follow Him.

The answer to that question is to be found in the Rule of St Benedict. Benedictine monks and nuns have a routine of formal prayer in church and also a routine of work. For them the work is also prayerful. Prayer pervades every aspect of their lives. That’s a recognition of something we so easily forget – that God is wherever we are, and that God in Christ is always inviting us to come closer. 

We are invited to work in partnership with God, and that’s an invitation to be Be Real in God. When the Psalmist says

“…my cup overflows”

that abundance is the result of a partnership between God’s generosity in creation and human work – cups overflow both because of the goodness of God’s creation and human work - planting, tending the vines, harvesting the grapes and making the wine. 

The Benedictine monks and nuns for whom work is also prayer live very structured lives. That may not be our calling, yet our commitment to regular worship, to this fellowship, to private prayer and to Bible reading can provide the structure we need, not the kind of flimsy structure that blows away in the first crisis like that polytunnel in Shetland but something more solid and reliable – the sheepfold of Christ the Good Shepherd who offers security and nourishment and encourages us to venture out and to share the possibility of abundant life in Him.

The two disciples experienced something when blethering with the stranger they met on the road to Emmaus. Not recognising the stranger as Jesus, they were surprised when he seemed to know nothing of the recent events in Jerusalem. Of how their beloved leader Jesus had been executed for preaching the Good News of God's love for his people, or how their hope for a different future had died with him on the cross. And, how angry and frustrated they were at the disappearance of his body from the tomb, three days after his death. 

The disciples' grief is plain for all to see and it is so great that it gets in the way of their recognising who the stranger really is. Yet, as many of us do, the disciples find it easy to pour out their grief and frustrations to the stranger. 

You may be able to think of times when this may have happened to you - when it was easier to talk to a casual acquaintance rather than someone close, about your inner feelings. This is probably why therapy works well for so often it is the detached, objective view that we seek to help u s make sense o f the muddles our lives sometimes lead us into. It is not so much that we are seeking answers to our questions or solutions to our problems from the other person but more that we need someone to listen to us, and to allow us to begin to unravel the muddle in our heads and find the answers from within ourselves.

This reflects what I think was happening for those two disciples walking with Jesus. What I think the disciples were doing - in talking to the stranger as they walked together they were trying to fathom out in their minds what had been going on in Jerusalem. What the stranger, whom we know to be Jesus does, is to listen and then to encourage them to think objectively about the situation.

Be open to the possibility of Jesus speaking to you in the most unlikely of people or situations for there is always something to learn from each others when we have the opportunity to engage in conversation without barriers.