“The end of all things is at hand”
We have been living in apocalyptic times, it seems, times of certain uncertainties and of a kind of wariness and outright fear. Certainly, things as we have known them socially, economically, and politically have come to an end; things have changed and will have to change with respect to the global world. In what way remains unclear. We are, it seems, no longer “assured of certain certainties” and perhaps not so “impatient to assume the world”, as T.S. Eliot puts it in Preludes IV, written in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1911. That world would be shattered by the First World War and the Spanish Flu. How do we face this sense of the ending of all things?
Lady Juliet D’Orsey offers sage advice to the narrator and to us as readers in Timothy Findley’s classic novel, The Wars: “You have to clarify who you are by your response to when you lived”. That requires thoughtfulness and reflection, a kind of active waiting. Ascensiontide Sunday is very much about a sense of ending but with a kind of joyful expectancy. The ending of all things is not always negative and fearful. It is not static and inert. It is not death. It is both ending and beginning, a return to a principle in which we find life and meaning.
Ascensiontide helps us think about the end-times which is really about our end in God and with God. “I go”, Jesus says, “to prepare a place for you” that “where I am there you may be also”. These are wonderfully comforting words, used not only in Burial Service (BCP, p. 591 [1]) but also in the Supplication for the Dying (BCP, p. 588 [2]). The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and it signals our home, our end with God. It is our spiritual home that embraces and orders all that belongs to our daily lives. It clarifies who we are in the sight of God. Ascension marks the ending of the story of Christ incarnate, having come forth from the Father, and come into the world and now having left the world and returned to the Father. It marks an ending in the sense of completion and fulfillment of purpose, consummatum est for us and for him (Andrewes, Whitsunday Sermon, 1614). His return to the Father is our joy and exultation, “the exultation of our humanity”, as the Fathers of the Church constantly emphasise. We are given a vision of our end in God, a vision of the homeland of the Spirit.
Christ ascends and sits “on the right hand of the Father”, as the Creed puts it. He has run his course and all things are returned to God from whom all things come. But his homecoming comes with a promise about the sending of the Holy Spirit, “another comforter” (Jn. 14.16), Jesus tells us, “whom he will send unto [us] from the Father, even the Spirit of truth” (Jn. 15.26). So this time of ending is also a waiting upon a new beginning, the beginning of our actual incorporation into the life of God, our being made “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1.4), the nature of God. Such is Pentecost or Whitsunday. What has ended is the work of the Son here; what we await is the remembrance of the beginning of our incorporation into God’s life through the coming down of the Holy Spirit, “the very essential unity, love, and love-knot of the two persons, the Father and the Son, even of God with God” (Andrewes, Whitsunday Sermon, 1606).
Our Ascensiontide waiting is like the active waiting of Advent, a waiting expectantly for the fullness of grace coming towards us, an ending which is also a beginning. It is about our life as having its beginning and ending in God. Thus, Peter bids us “be ye therefore sober”, serious, and “watch unto prayer” but “above all things have fervent charity among [our]selves.” We await the coming of the Spirit of love, the love that holds us in the love of the Trinity.
These concepts challenge and counter all and every sense of worldly foreboding and uncertainty for no other reason than they ground us in the life of God. From Advent through to Trinity Sunday, we run through the Creed, as it were, almost in a linear fashion, but really it is about the gathering up of the essential moments in the life of Christ for us and with us. Ascensiontide marks the ending of his work here but with the promise of our abiding in the redemption of our humanity which he has accomplished for us through the coming down of the Holy Spirit. In every way, we are constantly being returned to God. These motions of God are the motions of divine love, the love of the Trinity, in which we live and move and have our being.
This clarifies who we are in God while in the midst of the uncertainties of the world, even in the face of opposition and persecution, of fear and death. The promise of the sending of another Comforter is about the real comfort and strength which alone comes from God. Not comfort food, not Linus’ ‘comfy’ blanket, not any of things which Andrewes calls our terrestrial or worldly little consolations (terrenas consolatiunculas). No. The greater consolation, the consolation of philosophy, we might say, recalling Boethius’s great work by that name, written in the face of his death and execution on trumped-up charges, is found in these divine motions. In short, in the Ascensiontide waiting, we find already our comfort. Our comfort lies in waiting upon the promise of Christ about “another comforter” who will “be with [us] forever” (Jn. 14.16). Such is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of truth and love.
This Ascensiontide waiting is our comfort even while we await the return to Church and to the sacraments. The holy mysteries are instituted and ordained by Christ “as pledges of his love, and for a continual remembrance of his death, to our great and endless comfort” (BCP, p. 89) and as the spiritually tangible forms of our being with him. But it is another comforter, the Holy Spirit, who also comforts and strengthens us and without whose presence we cannot be “partakers of the divine nature” sacramentally. We wait upon the Spirit. Ascensiontide teaches us to wait with joy and expectation; with joy in the consummatum est of the Son and his homecoming, with expectation in the remembrance of the coming of the Holy Spirit by whose coming we are united in love. Our end times are always about our end in God.
“The end of all things is at hand”
Fr. David Curry
Sunday After Ascension Day 2020
Posted not preached owing to the Covid-19 outbreak