Picture if you can a castle.
It was the invitation Mike gave to us in
the Ascension Day service at St Luke’s on
Thursday evening.
Fortified, you cannot get in.
And at the front is the most enormous of
doors.
It is hardly ever open.
But at the bottom a tiny door, a small
door.
The Gospel story invites us to think big.
In the beginning was the Word and the Word
was with God and the Word was God.
And the Word became flesh and dwelled among
us and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only begotten son of the Father,
full of grace and truth.
And so it is this Word made Flesh in Jesus
lives a life of love, teaches a way of love and in love brings healing into a
hurting world. And he comes face to face
with the powers of darkness. They
unleash their worst. And he is
crucified, dead and buried.
But the powers of darkness do not have the
last word.
On the third day he rose again from the
dead.
Many saw and believed and received great
blessing. How much more blessed were
those who did not see and yet came to believe.
He met with the women, with Peter and the
disciples, with those two on the Road to Emmaus, with 500.
How they would have loved to have kept this
risen Christ to themselves for ever afterwards.
But there came the moment when those followers
of Jesus had to let him go.
He left them a promise … and a command.
They would not be alone.
They would have another comforter, an
unseen strerngth from God always to be alongside them. And in that strength they were to go into all
the world.
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit
has come upon you; and you will be my
witnesss in Jerusalem , in Judea and Samaria
When he had said this, as they were
watching, he was lifted up and a cloud took him … and this Jesus was taken up
into heaven.
To sit at the right hand of God in glory.
It rounds off the mission of Christ.
Think of heaven for a moment, Mike invited
us, as a citadel that mighty castle. And
Jesus has gone in through that small door.
But, suggested Mike, the message of
Ascension is that Jesus enters into heaven through that small door and then
opens up the large doors so that all the love, all the light, all the blessings
of God’s heaven can pour out on to the earth.
For 10 days from that day the disciples met
in prayer in that upper room in Jerusalem
And then came the moment.
It was one of the first harvests – the
feast of Pentecost. As Sue, Sue and Joan
and Ron are going to be travelling over
to the Holy Land one of the things they will
notice is that it’s time for the first of the harvests – the barley harvest.
When
the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And
suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it
filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire,
appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were
filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the
Spirit gave them ability.
There’s then a wonderful image.
From that closed room they rush down the
stairs and there are all manner of people come to the festival, from so many
different language groups –
It seemed as if they were from every nation
under heaven.
And
at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard
them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they
asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we
hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and
residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and
Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from
Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear
them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’
The wonder here is that out of the chaos of
a multiplicity of languages harmony comes.
And it is a wonderful harmony.
The tower of Babel
Now
the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from
the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar
The tragedy of the Tower of Babel
Build up into heaven ourselves.
To make a name for ourselves.
We have to protect ourselves.
And God laughs at the audacity of those who
seek to be like him.
he Lord came down to see the city and the
tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people,
and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they
will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come,
let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not
understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there
over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore
it was called Babel
Through the Old Testament is a strand that
runs from the promise to Abraham all the way through Isaiah to the coming of
Jesus – that God’s love will come to his people and through them for the good
of all people.
It’s as if Jesus has gone into the citadel
of heaven opened the great doors and all the love, all the light, all the
blessings of God flow down – and they bind people together so that the babel of
those different languages is no longer the division it once was.
And now 2000 years later between Ascension
and Pentecost – how easy it is for us in every generation to set about building
the tower. We think it will be for our
protection. But actually it brings
discord and destroys the harmony.
The message of Christ, the message we
prepare to celebrate at Pentecost is that Christ brings love into a world to
bind up the divisions and bring that oneness that amounts to a wonderful harmony.
As people understand.
Not inappropriate that in this week leading
up to Pentecost we should be marking Christian Aid week and seeking to collect
for Christian Aid. A coming together of
churches and a seeking to share resources in a world of need.
That is the task to be not part of the Babel
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