Sermon for Rogation Sunday, 2:00pm service of Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf
admin | 25 May 2014I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.
It is one of the profoundest statements in the Gospel. It captures in a phrase the whole of religion. It suggests something about God in himself and something about God for us. The mission of the Son – his going out and his returning to the Father – belongs to his essential identity. Everything finds its place within the relation of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Ghost. Everything finds its place in the life of God. That life is opened to view in the mission of the Son. We have only to enter it so as to live it. Such is the grace of God.
Here is the blessing. The blessing is to know that you are a child of God. The children of God know that there are hardships and sufferings, for they are not to be ignored, but even more they know the victory of Christ – “I have overcome the world,” the world within our hearts and the world around us.
The challenge of this “overcoming” is that we have to live it. We find the truth of ourselves in Christ. But we have to be incorporated into him so as to grow up into that life. We have to continue in the way of grace through prayer and praise, through the ordered life of worship and discipleship in the Church, through the growing up into a spiritual understanding of what the Gospel of the Resurrection proclaims.
The good news is that the realities of sin and death are overcome by the greater and truer reality of God’s saving grace in Jesus Christ. We have only to live it.
And there is the rub. Will we? Do we? And how and in what way? By the only way that there is. The way that Christ has given us in his body, the Church, the way of grace and glory in prayer and praise, in service and sacrifice. This is the way that belongs to the overcoming of the world – the overcoming of all the things in us and outside of us that threaten our souls, our very being, the very truth of ourselves as spiritual creatures who have an end and purpose with God.
Through the Holy Spirit, we are kept in the abiding love of the Son for the Father – kept in the mission of the Son – because everything has been gathered into that relationship. What this means for us is signified on this day – Rogation Sunday. Rogation means asking. It is the fundamental meaning of prayer. Prayer is asking. The further theme of Rogation Sunday is the land – the places where we find ourselves. We make our prayers in the land where we are placed. In so doing, our places become the places of grace – the places where the grace of God is made known and celebrated, regardless of the circumstances and events in our lives. “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
Tribulations there shall be. There is always suffering. But “there is one way only of being happy: not to be ignorant of suffering, and not to run away from it; but to accept the transfiguration it brings. Tristitia vestra vertetur in gaudium – ‘Your sorrow shall be turned into joy’” (Henri de Lubac). That transformation of sorrow into joy is the meaning of Christ’s overcoming of the world, the meaning, too, of all of the lessons of the Resurrection. Rogation Sunday reminds us of the cosmic dimension of the Resurrection. We are not defined by the world but find ourselves and the world in God. “You never love the world aright until you love it in God” (Thomas Traherne).
It means a kind of radical freedom, a freedom to God in and through our relationship with Christ. We have been given not just to see the promised land, but to enter into it. For where the Resurrection is proclaimed, as Paul suggests in in the lesson from Acts, there is the land of forgiveness and grace. Through Christ “forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.” There is just that sense of joy and salvation. We are freed to God and so to the love of one another in Christ.
Everything is gathered into his love for the Father. Such is prayer. Such is grace. Everything is captured in the phrase which captures the whole of religion.
I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world:
again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.
Fr. David Curry
AMD, Rogation Sunday
May 25h, 2014