Ascension

Today  - Ascension Day - the Queen continued her Diamond Jubilee tour.  She was in one of the places I know best and where I was married - Liverpool.  She was also, as it happens, in Albert Dock which is less expected.  This, by courtesy of the amphibious tourist bus/boat.  She may have loved it, she may have just done it.  The Queen's privilege is not to have to reveal such things!

Ascension Day.  Whenever the Queen leaves one of her palaces and attends to the ordinary places of her realms there seems just a little taste of Christmas about it.  We remember how the King of Glory left his throne for a manger, his home for an itinerant ministry, his worshippers for us wanderers.

Yet while the Queen visits us she never becomes a commoner.  When, following her gruelling tour dates, she retires to her palace she is the same Royal Personage that she was before she left.

On Ascension Day we record - we celebrate - that the Man from Nazareth ascended into the Godhead's glory as one of us. As Caroline Noel's poem describes what He did with His name Jesus:

Bore it up triumphant with its human light,

Through all ranks of creatures, to the central height;

To the throne of Godhead, to the Father's breast,

Filled it with the glory of that perfect rest.

Tides

Looking at the wreckage - physical, psychological, economic - from the great tsunami tide in Japan my memory triggered a strangely reminiscent picture that I saw in the Maritime Museum in Liverpool.  It is called 'Waiting for the Tide'

In Hoodless's painting all the big things - the river, the steamer, the famous waterfront buildings - are peripheral to a chugging tug and a pile of stuff that is just lying there, as on docksides things do.  Waiting.

While the tsunami leaves everything washed up and waiting - waiting to be found, waiting to rebuild, waiting to return - other tides are waited for.

This is why, in so much Biblical imagery, the overwhelming wall of water that has so devastated thousands of lives is, rather, a picture of blessing - he will come like a pent-up flood that the breath of Yahweh drives along.  The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins, declares Yahweh.

There is a flood that rescues as well as a flood that destroys.