Christ Church

“God has gone up with a merry noise,/The Lord with the sound of the trumpet”

The creedal mysteries of the Ascension and the Session of Christ are clearly and unambiguously set before us today, the Sunday after the Ascension. We celebrate the Ascension and the Session of Jesus Christ to “[sit] on the right hand of the Father”. Often overlooked and passed over, these two doctrines provide a necessary corrective to the religion of sentiment and emotion, on the one hand, and the religion of morality and self-righteousness, on the other hand. We are reminded in the strongest possible way that the meaning of our lives is found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between those 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.

“The end of all things is at hand,” says Peter. That “ending of all things” is celebrated in the Ascension and the Sessionof Christ. It is an ending in the sense of mission accomplished, an ending that recalls Christ’s last word from John’s Passion: “It is finished”. Human redemption accomplished or ended is achieved through the sacrifice of Christ and in the gathering of all things into unity in God through that sacrifice.  From there we await a new beginning through the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love and knowledge of what has been done by Christ Jesus for us and which ever and always remains to be more fully realised in us. The Son goes to the Father having accomplished “the will of him who sent him.” He returns to glory and enters into glory. What does it signify for us? Simply the meaning of our lives in prayer and praise; our lives in faith, hope, and charity.

If the Resurrection is the fullest possible vindication of the true nature of our human individuality, soul and body, as it were, then the Ascension is the fullest possible vindication of the spiritual nature of all reality. This has enormous consequences for how we look upon every aspect of our lives. The Session of Christ signifies that all things – all forms of natural and human endeavour, all forms of social and political life, whether it be the family, the state, our schools, or our churches – ultimately have their ground in God and participate in one way or another in the work of redemption. In other words, they find their correction and their perfection, their fulfillment and meaning, in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. All authority and order belongs to God; all is gathered back to God.

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“And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up,
and a cloud received him out of their sight”

It is called the sursum corda – “Lift up your hearts.” It signals an essential feature of the liturgy. It is about the lifting up of our hearts in Christ. It is prayer: our seeking from God what God seeks for us. The Feast of the Ascension, so often overlooked and under appreciated, is the culmination of the Resurrection and its meaning for us in our lives of prayer and service. Luke, in Acts, gives us a profound image of the ‘event’, as it were, of the Ascension which complements Mark’s equally explicit account of his being “received up into heaven.”

Throughout Eastertide, as we have seen, Jesus has been preparing us for his twofold departure  from us, first, in his Passion and Death and, second, in his Resurrection and Ascension. These motions, we have suggested, signal the gathering of all things into unity in God from whom all things come; in short, the redemption and restoration of creation and of our humanity. It is not something static but shows the dynamic of God towards us and the direction of the motions of our hearts and minds towards God. The images of hearing and seeing are instructive about the classical faculties of human character. Both Luke and Mark call attention to what is spoken and heard and to what is seen and behold. Hearing and seeing are the two most spiritual and intellectual of the human senses that open us out to what is known and grasped in thought; essentially, we are spiritual creatures defined by the faculties of knowing and willing or loving.

“A cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. That cloud is the shekinah of God, an image of the overarching cloud of God’s glory that embraces the whole of creation within itself. It, too, is an image of the radical gathering of all things to God, namely the idea of the whole of creation as embraced in the dynamic of the life of God as Trinity. It is not about a flight from the world as if it were something evil in its materiality and being. Heaven, after all, is not a place, but rather, to use a Jewish expression, the place of all places, in short, God.

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“Whereunto shall we liken the kingdom of heaven?”

Nothing better reinforces the Rogation idea of the interrelationship of our humanity, the created order, and God than these readings for The Fruits of the Earth and the Labours of Men. They ground us in the logic of creation – good in each of its parts and very good in its unity as a whole. As the Gospel suggests, our relation to God’s creation provides a key analogy or metaphor for our spiritual lives. The kingdom of heaven is likened to “a grain of mustard seed” which when sown and grown “becomes greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches; so that the birds of the air may lodge under the shadow of it.”

This offers a different way of thinking about our relation to nature than what belongs to the Darwinian world of endless competition. It emphasizes instead a sense of co-operation and interdependence and one that mirrors the life of God as Trinity. Creation, in the Jewish and Christian understanding, insists on our connection to everything in the created order and our being made in the image of God. “In the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” The pronoun “him” refers to Adam – meaning our humanity generically speaking; the pronoun “them” to the fundamental distinction between male and female that belongs to the reality of our humanity within the distinctive order of all things created. Creation is really about a relation to the Creator through a world where each thing has a distinctive quality and is good in itself and good for us in the forms of its distinctive being. Creation in this sense is providential care for what is created and in its relation with every other thing in creation. Genesis teaches that God has “given every herb bearing seed” to Adam, our humanity, for food, for our good within the goodness of creation as a whole.

This analogy belongs to many such parables with which, as Mark puts it, Jesus “spake the word unto them, as they were able to hear it.” Through the visible things of creation we learn to think about the invisible things of God. It is a powerful way of thinking known as kataphatic theology which argues for a positive relationship between God and the world; thinking through images, through parables and likenesses.

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“I will therefore that men pray everywhere, lifting up holy hands”

Rogation Monday provides an extended commentary on the nature of prayer. The Eucharistic readings are complemented by the Office readings from Deuteronomy 7. 6-13 this morning and from Matthew 6. 5-18; and then in the evening from Deuteronomy 8 and Matthew 6.19-end; in short, a theology of the land as grounded in prayer, particularly the Lord’s Prayer which is given in both its Matthaean and Lucan forms.

The reading from Deuteronomy this morning emphasizes the theme of holiness through prayer in terms of God’s love for his people; in short, God’s mercy and goodness as distinct from our deserving. Paul in 1st Timothy expands on that sensibility in exhorting us to pray “for all” by way of “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks”, particularly “for kings and all that are in authority”; the condition for leading “a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” In the Christian understanding, that is explicitly grounded in Christ. “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all.” Prayer shares in that work of divine mediation. We are gathered to God in prayer which is nothing less than God’s gathering us to himself and to our life in him and with him. His work in us and our work in him.

This understanding impells the sense of the universality of prayer, “praying everywhere, lifting up holy hands”. Praying everywhere and for all. Luke gives us the shorter form of the Lord’s Prayer taught to us by Jesus not on the basis of “if you pray” but “when you pray” before going on to emphasize the necessity of prayer as importunity. Prayer makes demands of us towards the good of others in spite of what is convenient and easy for us. Thus prayer is more than our personal interest and goodwill; it is rather about the larger sense of God moving in us. “Ask, and it shall be given you” – Rogation reminds us about the essential aspect of prayer ias asking; “seek, and ye shall find” – desire  assumes a good that is to be sought and known; “knock, and it shall be opened unto you” – a reference to the theme of importunity and the necessity of asking and persevering in asking and seeking, not unlike the Canaanite woman or the blind man, Bartimaeus, on the roadside outside Jericho. Prayer is our life in and with God through seeking his will and purpose for the whole of our humanity in all of its diverse circumstances and needs. The very act of prayer as asking is equally about our learning what to pray for and in what kinds of ways.

That sense of prayer as learning is seen in the evening lesson from Deuteronomy and in the remaining verses of Matthew 6, the continuation of The Sermon on the Mount. In other words, we are taught about prayer as belonging to God’s will through Moses and the Law and then from Jesus himself in Matthew, once again, complementing the eucharistic Gospel from Luke. All of this extends to the Collect, Lesson and Gospel for the Fruits of the Earth and the Labours of Men provided for Rogationtide that recall us to our humanity as made in the image of God and placed in the world to act in the image of God’s domination or lordship of all creation. Our labours are understood in terms of the parable of the mustard seed. How much is made out of something so little and for the good of the whole created order! Prayer is our work, our work in and with God through Christ Jesus the mediator and the redeemer of the whole of creation. In the lifting up of hands and the lifting up of our hearts, all things are gathered to God by God and by God in us by prayer. Rogation and Ascension reveal the radical nature of prayer.

Fr. David Curry
Rogation Monday, 2026

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