Sermon for Sunday After Ascension Day
admin | 5 June 2011“The end of all things is at hand.”
This might seem rather stern and threatening. The Gospel reading, too, talks about hard things, like persecution and death. But it also tells us about the coming of the Comforter. Somehow, the sense of “the end[ing] of all things” is not just frightening judgement but joy and mercy. Comforting, somehow.
We meet in the Ascension of Christ. I am struck by how relevant and powerful the fundamental creedal principles of the Christian Faith often are with respect to the issues of our post-Christian and post-secular culture. It shouldn’t be surprising, of course, because what we have before us is precisely a way of thinking that empowers and informs a way of living. That is the important insight of the ‘perennial philosophy’ expressed in one way or another in all of the great religions of the world.
In the Christian understanding, the doctrine of the Ascension is especially suggestive and important about our understanding of our humanity and our world. The Ascension signals the completion of the mission of Jesus Christ. He has come forth from the Father and has come into the world and now he leaves the world and returns to the Father. In those motions, we see the comings and goings of God in which there is both revelation and redemption. These comings and goings open out to us a spiritual and intellectual understanding of human life and of the world in which we find ourselves. Christ is not some will ‘o the wisp who comes and goes without reason or purpose.
The Ascension of Christ is about the divine purpose for our world and our humanity. Against the notion that the world is just there for us to manipulate and use, Christ’s death and resurrection remind us that our bodies and our world are for God; we belong to God despite our wayward ways of sin and folly. The Ascension is the further confirmation of that perspective and understanding. Christ returns home to the Father. He returns having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. “I go to prepare a place for you,” he says. In a way, his Ascension complements the last word on the Cross. “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.” His spirit has gathered into itself the whole world. It has been gathered into the life of the Trinity, the life of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. With the Ascension, we might say, “he’s got the whole world in his hands.”
Our lives find their meaning in that heavenly and divine fellowship. The world exists for God and we find the vocation of our humanity in giving praise to God. It is captured in a defining phrase in our liturgy: “lift up your hearts/ we lift them up unto the Lord.” The Ascension is immediately complemented in the Creed by the Session of Christ. He “sitteth on the right hand of the Father.” What is that about? Simply that it is God’s world and Christ rules. Everything is to be seen in that heavenly and divine perspective.
This frees us from the dark and impending sense of doom and despair that so often accompanies the prophets of the end of the world whether they are the street corner and TV evangelists or the crowd of extreme environmentalists. What is overlooked is the deeper Scriptural wisdom which today’s readings provide.
Peter tells us that “the end of all things is at hand” but exhorts us to prayer and charity and to be “good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” The whole emphasis is on giving praise and glory to God; not wringing our hands in anxiety and despair. That is, after all, a species of pride – a kind of preoccupation with ourselves that is not really about looking to God and seeing God’s will and purpose at work in our lives. In a way, such preoccupations are a denial of God, a denial, certainly, of what God has revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
John’s Gospel provides the fuller teaching. He talks about the coming of the Comforter, sent from the Father and sent by the Son; the Comforter who is “the Spirit of truth” and who will not only lead us into all truth but will bring to our remembrance all that Jesus has said to us. This is powerful and, dare I say, truly comforting. The Comforter or Paraclete is a term for the Holy Spirit. It refers to a characteristic or property of God the Holy Spirit. Comforting here means strengthening.
Ultimately, this teaching is about our being strengthened spiritually in what Jesus has said and done. We live in and from the teaching. We live in and from the spiritual fellowship of God himself. There can be nothing more freeing than such a perspective even in the face of hardships and uncertainties, even in the face of folly and nonsense, even in the face of sin and wickedness. This is the great counter to it all.
It is, however, not something that can be taken for granted. Our challenge is to will this understanding. We have to work constantly at the task of understanding what it means to say this is God’s world that exists for his will and purpose and not simply our world to do with it whatever we like. We have to work at the challenge of thinking what God’s redemption of the world means for our labours and life in that world. At the root of it lies this sense of living for God. That challenges and checks our technocratic hubris which assumes that we can do whatever we want to do simply because we have the power. This is our folly.
The Ascension and the Session of Christ recall us to the spiritual principles that govern our world and day as God’s world and people. Our lives are found in that “end of all things” which is nothing less than the life of God revealed in Jesus Christ as the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We have the promise of the Holy Comforter whom Jesus sends from the Father. We live in the accomplishment of God’s holy will and desire for the redemption of our broken and wounded humanity. But we have to will the divine purpose for us and for our world. It is what we do in prayer. “Lift up your hearts.”
“The end of all things is at hand.”
Fr. David Curry
Sunday after the Ascension, ‘11