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Sermon for Sunday after Ascension Day, 8:00am Holy Communion

“These things have I spoken unto you”

There is something quite wonderful and special about this Sunday juxtaposed between the going up of the Son to the Father in the Ascension of Christ and the coming down of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The Ascension marks the fortieth day of Easter and signals the culmination of the Resurrection, its fuller meaning, if you will. Pentecost is the fiftieth day after Easter and marks the birthday of the Christian Church.

The special joy of Easter and Eastertide reaches a kind of crescendo in the Ascension. All of the scripture passages, old and new, are full of a sense of joy and wonder. Why? Because the Ascension marks what the Fathers astutely call, “the exaltation of our humanity.” Through Christ’s death and resurrection we have a place, a home with God. It is signalled profoundly and beautifully in the Son’s homecoming to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world and our humanity. All the themes of Eastertide find their fullest meaning in the Ascension of Christ.

“I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus says, “that where I am there ye may be also.” The Ascension celebrates the return of the Son to the Father in which return our humanity realizes its end in God, on the one hand, and has its participation in the life of the Trinity through prayer now, on the other hand. The Ascension reveals the true movement of our liturgy. It is the liturgy of the sursum corda, the liturgy of the lifting up of our humanity to God and into God. “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.”

The Ascension is the necessary counter to the spirit of accommodationism so dominant in our church and culture, the idea that the Christian Gospel must accommodate itself to the fads and fancies of each and every passing age. To engage our world in all of its confusions is not the same thing as catering to every passing fad and fancy. The Ascension signals the real meaning of the engagement between God and Man. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts” as Augustine so memorably puts it. We ascend in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament. We are gathered into the divine life. It is the very opposite of supposing that the divine life is collapsed into our world and day; a perversion of the Incarnation.

Human experience and human aspiration are not the measure of God. The true orientation and direction of human lives is captured in the dynamic of the Ascension. At once a creedal doctrine constantly rehearsed in the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed in our regular liturgies, it has, perhaps, its fuller meaning in a wonderful phrase from the Athanasian Creed. Christ is God and Man “one, not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh,/but by the taking of manhood into God.”

The Ascension is about that taking of manhood into God. That we have a home, an end in God, counters much of the fearfulness and uncertainty in our world and day. It is not about easy answers or even assurances. By no means. But it is about a fundamental orientation and outlook. It is the outlook of prayer. It is about holy hands and holy hearts being lifted up to God. Therein lies our joy.

The paradox is that this fundamental orientation and outlook which is prayer contributes to the reordering of our lives in relation to the natural world, too. This is why Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation precede the Ascension. They show us how the whole world is gathered to God in Christ’s going to the Father. Nature, too, participates in the Son’s home coming to the Father.

“Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?” the Psalmist asks, only to answer, “even he that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; / and that hath not lift up his mind to vanity, nor sworn to deceive his neighbour.” The fuller truth of the Ascension concerns the moral dimension of our lives as well as the aspect of prayer. And all because we have a home with God. The Ascension is the strong reminder of our end with God, an end which conditions everything that we do. “Prayer,” Richard Hooker reminds us, “signals all the service that we ever do unto God.” The whole meaning of our lives is about our lives as lived to God for God and with God.

The Sunday after Ascension marks an ending – “the end of all things is at hand,” Peter tells us, somewhat alarmingly, it might seem, – and points to a new beginning in the promise of the sending of the Comforter, “whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth.” These endings and beginnings open us out to the communion of the Trinity and the forms of our participation in the life of God. It all happens through what things Jesus has spoken unto us. He prepares us for his going from us and for the coming to us of the Holy Spirit.

Such is the radical meaning of God’s grace. It is bestowed upon us so that we may be raised up into the life of God. We live in the power of his risen and ascended life now through prayer and service. We have our beginning in the divine life which is also our ending, our ending in the sense of purpose and truth, of direction and orientation.

The Ascension opens us out to our communion with God. At every Eucharist we are lifted up to the heavenly banquet of the Son’s love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Ghost. We are gathered into the communion of the Trinity through Word and Sacrament. We find our joy in the one who ascends to “my Father and your Father; and to my God and your God.” All through the words which he has spoken to us.

“These things have I spoken unto you”

Fr. David Curry
Sunday after Ascension Day
May 17th, 2015, 8:00am