Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Sunday after Ascension Day
admin | 12 May 2024Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Sunday after Ascension Day.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Sunday after Ascension Day.
Not quite a scriptural text per se but a scriptural digest of many passages in their interrelation. In a way, it is all about understanding the interplay of images. The text is creedal – from the Nicene Creed. The Creeds are themselves a distillation of the images of scripture that provide a critical interpretive principle for thinking the scriptures. This is especially important in relation to the doctrine of the Ascension. It is not about a flight from the world but the redemption of the world; in short, finding the meaning and purpose of our lives in God and the world in God.
There is the religion of Jesus in the heart, the religion of sentiment and feeling which remains very much with us in a host of contradictory forms, largely in terms of the dominance of the therapeutic culture. There is, too, the religion of Jesus the moral policeman, the religion of outward conformity to the shifting demands of social and political correctness, also very much with us in terms of the ideologies and concerns about social justice and identitarian politics. While there is something true in each of these, neither of them is the religion of the risen and ascended Christ who “sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty,” as the Apostles’ Creed puts it. But without the risen and ascended Christ, the religions of sentiment and moralism are altogether empty and destructive, the religions of empty hearts and whitened sepulchres. For that is really all about us and not about God and us with God.
This is what happens when we try to reduce God to where we are rather than to be lifted up to where he is, to speak in the language of the images of scripture. Our lives are to be found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between these two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love. These images about the comings and goings of God are the spiritual and eternal motions of God himself, on the one hand, and our circling around and into that mystery of eternal life, on the other hand. In other words, the metaphors point us to an understanding of God and to our relationship with God.
Tuesday, May 14th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Sunday, May 19th, Pentecost
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, May 26th, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 4th, First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 9th, Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Saturday, June 15th
11:00am Encaenia Service at King’s-Edgehill School
Sunday, June 16th, Third Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 23rd, Fourth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 30th, Fifth Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The collect for today, Sunday After Ascension Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a
Artwork: Henryk Siemiradzki (attrib.), The Last Supper, c. 1876. Oil on canvas, Private collection.
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Cyril (826-69) and Saint Methodius (c. 815-85), Apostles to the Slavs (source):
O Lord of all,
who gavest to thy servants Cyril and Methodius
the gift of tongues to proclaim the gospel to the Slavic people:
we pray that thy whole Church may be one as thou art one,
that all who confess thy name may honour one another,
and that from east and west all may acknowledge one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
and thee, the God and Father of all;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Epistle: Ephesians 3:1-7
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:15-20
St. Cyril and St. Methodius were brothers born in Thessalonica who went to Constantinople after being ordained priests. (Cyril was baptised Constantine and did not become known as Cyril until late in his life.) Around AD 863, Emperor Michael II and Patriarch Photius sent the brothers as missionaries to Moravia, where they translated into Slavonic the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. With his brother’s help, Cyril created an alphabet that later developed into Cyrillic, thus laying the foundation for Slavic literature.
The Resurrection culminates in the Ascension. It complements an essential insight common to a number of different intellectual and spiritual traditions about the priority of an eternal and everlasting principle that underlies all reality. “Never that which is shall die,” as a fragment from a lost play by Euripides puts it.
The Ascension is the exact opposite to some of our contemporary assumptions. It is emphatically not about a flight from the world. It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, as Jesus makes clear. And that, in turn, is our homecoming, the making known of the end and purpose of our humanity as found not in the world itself but the world in God. As Thomas Traherne cogently remarks, “You never learn to love the world aright until you learn to love it in God.” The Ascension is the gathering of all things back to God through the going forth and return of the Son to the Father. “We ascend,” as Augustine puts it, “in the ascension of our hearts.”
John Lukacs’ The Question of Scientific Knowledge in At the End of An Age quotes Ludwig Feuerbach, the German radical theologian who influenced Karl Marx: “The old world made spirit parent of matter. The new makes matter parent of spirit.” This is, Lukacs suggests, “as good a summation of the historical philosophy of materialism as any.” He goes on to show rather convincingly that “matter … is increasingly dependent on spirit … that the human mind … both precedes and defines the characteristics of matter.” In his view this is one of the important features of quantum physics. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation about knowing and thinking nature. Or as Neil Postman puts it about the forms of technological determinism, “there is no escaping ourselves.”
The reading from Psalm 47.5 about “God going up with a merry noise” locates the Ascension in the eternal and divine motions of God himself. It is, as the theologians of the Church in the Patristic period put it, “the exaltation of our humanity.” Prayer is really about the lifting up of heart and mind in the lifting up of all things to their end and source in God. It does not negate the physical and material world but signals its redemption in God. This way of looking at reality contrasts with our increasingly virtual world in flight from the real world and ourselves.
The Psalms, more often than not, strike the right tone of approach to our liturgical observances. In this case, the high note of rejoicing and delight that belongs to the Feast of the Ascension is nicely captured by the words of the psalmist. “God has gone up with a merry noise/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” (Psalm 47.5).
The Ascension of Christ, as Acts suggests, marks the fortieth day of Easter. It marks the end, in the sense of the completion, of the Easter season. One of the creedal mysteries of the Christian Faith, the Ascension is often overlooked, perhaps because it doesn’t fall on a Sunday, but on a Thursday. And yet, it provides some very important and powerful teaching about the priority of things spiritual into which is gathered all things material and physical. In other words, the world finds its meaning in God and not the other way around.
What is the Ascension about? It is the homecoming of the Son to the Father and thus it is our homecoming too. Jesus on Rogation Sunday just past told us: “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” There is the sense of ‘mission accomplished!’ And that mission concerns our good and the good of the world. In other words, the Ascension brings to a certain completion and fullness the redemption of the world and the redemption of our humanity. The Son returns to the Father, not in flight from the world, as if matter or the physical world were inherently evil, but having accomplished the redemption of the world.
“God’s going up with a merry noise” is the lovely and exaltant metaphor that opens us out to the reality of God’s eternal life into which we are gathered. It is literally about our lives spiritually that embraces the physical and natural world without collapsing the spiritual into it. The Ascension signals the radical meaning of the redemption of the world and our humanity.
This is where the Ascension speaks so profoundly to our present-day concerns, fears, and worries. The Ascension means that the world and our humanity have an end in God, an end in God in the sense that the meaning and purpose of the world and the meaning and the purpose of our human lives is found in our relation to God in Jesus Christ. Against the perversity and folly of thinking that the world is just there for us to manipulate, exploit, or destroy, the Ascension reminds us that the world is God’s world. It exists for his will and purpose. And so do we. Ascension is about the sense that we have an end and a place with God. “I go to prepare a place for you,” as Jesus says. It is the counter to all of the forms of material determinism, to the “dialectical materialism” of Marxism and of capitalist consumer culture which reduces everything to material production and consumption. It changes how we see things.
The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20
Artwork: Andrea Mantegna, Ascension of Christ (detail from Uffizi Triptych), c. 1460-64. Tempera on panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Rogation Sunday.
All our comings and goings find their meaning and truth in the comings and goings of God made visible in Christ, the Word and Son of the Father. Prayer is our life as ordered to God and with God. The pilgrimage of our souls is gathered into the pilgrimage of the life of God in the going forth and return of God in creation and redemption; this makes visible the eternal love of God in himself. Perhaps nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in today’s Gospel for Rogation Sunday.
Rogation means asking. Prayer, in its most fundamental sense, is asking. Asking for what? For this or that commodity or thing? For privilege and prestige, power and domination over others? No. Prayer is our participation in God’s own gathering of all things to himself. It is our seeking or desiring but seeking and desiring what? It is not our seeking and desiring this or that thing in the false infinity of things which never satisfies. It is our seeking and desiring what is the absolute good and our seeking and desiring to do what is right; ultimately the justice of God. That presupposes a world that is not random and arbitrary, chaotic and aimless; it presupposes the goodness of creation as God’s creation and our place within that world as ordered to God. Prayer is nothing less than that complete orientation of ourselves to the will and truth of God. In the Christian understanding, as shown to us in this Gospel, prayer is nothing less than our asking the Father in the name of the Son and in the Spirit of their mutual love. It is Trinitarian.
Richard Hooker notes that “prayer signifies all the service that ever we do unto God.” It is our seeking and desiring what God seeks and desires and as such, in God, as Peter Abelard’s great hymn, O Quanta Qualia, puts it, “wish and fulfillment can severed be ne’er, /Nor the thing prayed for come short of the prayer.” It is a commentary on what Jesus means when he tells us that “the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.” Prayer “testifies,” as Hooker says, “that we acknowledge him as our sovereign good.” But up to now, “hitherto,” as Jesus says, “have you asked nothing in my name.” Prayer in the Christian sense is about asking the Father in the name of the Son in the Spirit of their eternal love: “ask,” Jesus says, “and ye shall receive that your joy may be full.” Peace and joy flow out of the Resurrection of Christ which makes visible what is present in the Passion; the “vision of peace, that brings joy evermore.”