Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on Ascension Day 2026

Tucked under the Cotswolds is Gloucestershire, where I used to work. A county that was once wool country, the engine that drove prosperity in the high Middle Ages. There you will find a scatter of villages with names like Meysey Hampton, and Ampney Crucis and farms where sheep can safely graze. The profits of the wool trade built fine houses and even better churches. If you have a taste for English gothic, fine fonts and a clerestory, Gloucestershire is a little glimpse of heaven. Naming any one of them as the ‘best’ church when there are so many would be controversial and this is a polite county where it is not done to raise your voice, so let’s just say that St Mary’s, Fairford, is a church worth seeing.

It was rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century by a very wealthy wool merchant, called John Tame. The reason for the rebuilding was that Tame had got hold of some stained glass and he wanted a church to show it off. Think of that, he started with the windows, not the walls. This is a sermon, not a history lesson, so I will spare you the details, but believe me the glass is good, the glazier worked for King Henry VII and what you see in Fairford is the best collection of medieval glass in all England.

The images are wonderful—a supple blue snake gives Eve an apple, God sits in a burning bush and watches Moses struggling to take his shoes off. A dead Christ is handed down gently from the cross, and then disciples stare skywards as Christ’s feet disappear into a cloud at the Ascension. It is the story of scripture. Here are scenes you can know and name if you know your bible. It is, very deliberately, a history of faith stretching back into the Old Testament. In the nave the history lesson takes in wicked kings and Christian saints. A long story and a clever one, the images chime and rhyme, set off echoes and weave a tale. In Fairford church, you sit within it, you discover your place. This is a good story, a strong story in which you and I belong.

But then, as you turn to go, you see the great west window… and the world tilts and the history lesson ends. For there is the day of judgement, Christ seated on the clouds in glory, Michael the archangel weighing souls in a balance. The blessed climb golden steps to glory, but the damned are hurried and harassed off by demons. These are grotesque beasts and they have flails and pitchforks. The window is a shock, an affront, in good and decent Gloucestershire, not the way they do things round there. There are screams, there is nakedness and cruelty and mischief. And, in the midst of hell, a blue devil with a moustache and a manicured beard pushes a sorry looking man down to torment, in a wheelbarrow.

History has come to an end in this window. The story breaks down. In other windows it is all about our lives and the words we have for what we are doing now, for tomorrow and for the day after, for hope and for faith. But this Last Judgement is about endings and finality and a very different way of thinking.

You see, we know how to talk about the life of faith. We know how to talk about prayer, and hope and even love. We tell stories, we paint pictures in our minds, we have a star to steer by. We can talk about living the life of faith. Ask us about death and the hereafter, though and we begin to struggle. That looks like another story altogether and the words do not come and the images are not helpful. It is either the fires of hell or sitting in nightshirts amongst the clouds. The imagination fails. We struggle.

And that makes Ascension tricky. Go to Fairford and, at the Ascension, Jesus takes off like a rocket, and the disciples see the soles of his feet disappear into cumulonimbus. What words would they have for that? The here and the hereafter seem so very far apart. What words are there? What is it that we should believe today?

Well, listen again to our reading. Jesus is teaching the disciples and the thing he teaches them is that there is a story, there was always a story:

He said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.

That is what Luke’s gospel wants us to know, that there is a story with a beginning, and an end, and a meaning. And that story—the one about Moses and prophets, the one told in scripture—still works even now; even at Ascension. Stay here, he says, stay in Jerusalem, stick with life as it is and with the story you know. Then he took them to Bethany, blessed them and was carried up to heaven.

When Luke tells us about the Ascension, he tells us that the story is not done. The same Christ that the disciples knew, saying the same things that he had always said is carried into heaven. Or, as St John puts it, the one who came from the Father, returns to the Father. The here and the hereafter are not at odds, humanity and divinity are not polar opposites. In Christ, who goes to the Father, the here and hereafter meet. It is all one story. We do know the life that is to come, we do know that Christ who lived amongst us lives still.

One story. Do you remember the beginning of Luke’s gospel? Zechariah, a priest in the Temple, hears he will be the father of John the Baptist. But he doubts that, and he is struck dumb for his hesitation. So, coming out of the Temple that day he could not speak, could not do what the priest should do. He could not give a blessing. Now, at the very end of the gospel we finally and splendidly get that blessing, from Christ himself, who is all in all. The story comes good. The meaning was not lost. The beginning and the ending rhyme. 

That is the great truth of this extraordinary feast day. At the Ascension, heaven is joined to earth, humanity is joined to divinity, the here and the hereafter are one. There is one prevailing narrative that holds our lives and deaths, our beginnings and our endings in one scheme of meaning. We live and we will live and glory is not beyond our imagining.