Ascension Day Sermon

1745 Thursday 14th May 2026

Ascension Day Eucharist, Portsmouth Cathedral

The Ascension Hope

Early in the morning on the 21st May 2020 the Canon Precentor and I climbed up the Round Tower at the end of Hotwalls, and, with the cathedral dome behind us, we sang Charles Wesley’s great Ascension him, Hail the Day that Sees Him Rise. I recorded it on my mobile phone. It felt like an act of defiance because, as you may remember, in May 2020 we were still in the first Covid lockdown and the cathedral was not open. What a strange, bleak time that was. Yet in that early morning with the sun rising above the cathedral I couldn’t help but feel uplifted. The bleak time would not go on for ever. There was hope in the bright sky and the rising sun. Above and beyond.

When we say in the creed that Jesus ascended into heaven we mean that he is now in some sense above and beyond us. But while that is true we are also invited by prayer and imagination to raise our hearts and minds to him.

In our first reading tonight St Paul writes: ‘I pray that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you…’ -  and then, being Paul, he can’t quite end the sentence but goes on expanding and expanding, ‘what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power…’ On and on he goes, pointing us to the ascended Christ who is now, ‘Head over all things, the fullness of him who fills all in all….’ In simpler words, We are here. He is beyond, ahead of us. He shows us where we are going. So raise our hearts and minds to him. We can live in hope because Jesus is hope fulfilled.

I sometimes think hope is one of the most difficult and troubling of the great abiding virtues, harder sometimes than faith or love. The problem is that our hopes are so often tied to specific outcomes. The job I want, the exam grade I need, the result of the medical test. My hope is that it will be this and not that.  And this is what it is like for us as we live in the now, when the future lies open before us and we do not know what is going to happen to fulfil or shatter our hopes. Our challenge is to live in suspense as creatively as we can without the concrete assurances or the certain outcomes that we would like. And yet to do so in hope.

Hope, because the ascension sets before us an image of completion, victory, majesty. ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well’. Julian of Norwich, in the 14th century, the first woman to write in the English language wrote those words during the plague of the Black Death that killed so many in her time. To live in hope does not mean being unrealistic or cultivating an other-worldly piety.

One of the great insights of C.S. Lewis Narnia stories is that they suggest that the real Narnia, where Aslan the Christ-like lion reigns, is both like the Narnia that the characters now inhabit, and yet, more so. They need to look farther up and farther in. Farther up is farther in. In the Ascension Christ leaves his disciples. And yet, farther up and farther in, by doing so he becomes even closer to them than he was on earth. To live in hope is to trust that promise even when things on earth are bleak.

And things are often bleak. How are we to wait with hope in our hearts? Because that is what the disciples of Jesus were told to do. To wait, to pray, to hope, even though in an obvious sense things were not going to get any better. The preaching of the Good News of Jesus began with rejection and persecution as the Acts of the Apostles makes clear. Yet the disciples were made bold by the Holy Spirit, sent by the ascended Christ. The Spirit was for them the guarantee of God’s presence, the first instalment of heaven, enough for today, enough to get them through.

When we sang the Ascensiontide hymn in the darkness of the Covid crisis that is what we were enacting. It is what happens when we still try to pray, even when we feel empty and bereft, when we go on coming to church even though we may feel we have lost our faith.

It was the poet T.S Eliot who told us, who reminded us, that ‘the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting’.

So: Lift up your hearts. We lift them to the Lord. Come Holy Spirit fill the hearts of your people and kindle in us the fire of your love. 

Angela Tilby, Canon of Honour Emeritus