This past week in the UK, the headlines in the papers and on the BBC have all been about the Westminster members of Parliament sometimes exorbitant claims for expenses! More important during the same week has been the amazing repairing of the Hubble telescope in orbit. 365 miles above earth the astronauts from Houston are repairing the Hubble telescope. The London Times had several articles about the progress - 'In a highly delicate operation, the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis captured the Hubble Space Telescope last night after an 832,000-mile chase through orbit. Silence descended on Nasa's mission control room in Houston, Texas, as Commander Scott Altman, a former US Navy fighter pilot, nudged Atlantis to a position 35ft below Hubble while his colleague, Megan McArthur, grasped the bus-sized telescope with the shuttle's robotic arm. The manoeuvre, which began 350 miles above Madagascar in the Indian Ocean and ended minutes later over Western Australia, was carried out as both craft streaked around the Earth at five miles per second. "Hubble has arrived on board Atlantis," Commander Altman reported to mission control over the radio.'

The Times also had this laconic statement - 'The thrill of space exploration is not so much to calibrate how much we know, but to illuminate how ignorant we remain.' Now, of course, this article is not about space exploration! - but that statement could be easily transferred to the domain of the Christian understanding of what we believe - theology, or the logic of what we know about God. And that is very little. But in the 4th and succeeding centuries the theologians (who were often archbishops and bishops) needed to come to an agreement about what Christianity was not. In one such statement in 325, for example, in the creed of Nicea, there is the statement that Jesus was 'of one substance' with the Father and that after the resurrection he ascended into heaven. These are really statements of 'ignorance' rather than dogmas of what we have proof of. They were intended to exclude what were perceived at the time to be radically unacceptable explanations of the relationship of Jesus to the Father. Unlike the progress of exploration into space we shall not succeed in unravelling the mysteries of the Creator and redeemer satisfactorily.

But that does not mean that we should simply treat credal statements as the last word that we can say about God and Jesus. Today those 5th century statements are totally opaque in a century of space exploration and the explosion of scientific accomplishments of the past two hundred years. What has happened, in all the churches during that time, is that we have taken shelter in these ancient, and important, theological statements as a refuge from the storms of new knowledge - looking for security, understandably perhaps, in literal ideas both of Scripture and in the early creeds. And, unfortunately, these literally accepted ideas have become part of our worship in a sort of 'taken for granted' way. But if we cannot clarify these obscure ideas, how are the good folk who are not Christians able to understand what motivates us as disciples of Jesus the Lord? Next Thursday is Ascension Day in the calendar of the mainline churches in the West. We could take a look of 'ignorance' at Ascension as an example!

Christian faith is about the Jesus in whom God as Father was revealed and who, after the crucifixion, was transformed out of death to be, what the author of the letter to the Hebrews called, 'the forerunner' in the new and final era of the new creation that God had brought about in Jesus. The account in Luke's Acts of the Apostles attempts to express this glorification of Jesus in the graphic representation of Jesus floating up into heaven. But from what we know about the first disciples' relationship with the risen Lord in the rest of the New Testament, their ideas of 'heaven' were, shall we say, more reasonable, even more sophisticated than Luke's strip cartoon! Heaven is here and now in our relationship with the divine - with God and with the risen Lord - they say. While we may all affirm those ideas, the image of the Lord 'ascending' remains a constant in many people's minds and eventually leads to rejection of faith in the living Lord altogether as being primitive nonsense. The letter to the Hebrews has a lot to say about heaven - and Jesus seated at the right hand of God in a spatial way - but one must concede that these, like Luke's accounts, are all in code. Being creatures of the here and now we cannot express our experience of the divine in anything other than material ways of speaking. Which brings us back to our 'ignorance'!

But while dogmatic religious statements represent, and remind us of, our ignorance, experience of the divine in faith do actually tie in with real life. We can be safe explorers of new ideas and understanding which help us to relate to God in ways which have more in common with our experience of love rather than with ancient ideas of how the world is. This is what is so extraordinary about the New Testament as a whole. Our problems have arisen when we have read it with the spectacles of the 5th or the 16th or the 19th century. We have always to remember that it is about the God who is love revealed in Jesus.

'Philip found Nathanael, and said to him, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Philip said to him, "Come and see." (John 1:45-46)

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you."(John 15:12-15)