Sermon for the Feast of the Ascension
“He ascended into heaven”
A creedal teaching, the Ascension of Christ is one of the most overlooked feasts in the life of the Christian Church. Its meaning, however, is quite radical. In a way, it brings to a kind of completion the radical meaning of Christ’s resurrection.
Death and resurrection constitute the fundamental pattern of Christian life but without the Ascension to say that is to say very little. What the Ascension reminds us is our home with God. The Ascension of Christ is about the homecoming of the Son to the Father which establishes our homeland of the spirit. The Fathers of the early Church grasped this point ever so strongly. The Ascension, as Leo the Great puts it, is “the exaltation of our humanity.” In Christ’s Ascension, the heaven of God becomes our homeland.
The Ascension marks the culmination of the Easter Season. It inaugurates a new spiritual outlook, but one which forever remains grounded in the pattern of death and resurrection. We have an end with God and that homeland of the spirit is something which we participate in now through prayer and praise and through the sacraments.
We ascend in the Ascension of Christ. Somehow we are caught up into that heavenly motion. How? Through prayer, the very thing that has brought us to the Ascension of Christ. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts,“ as Augustine remarks. The Ascension signals the purpose and meaning of Christ’s being with us. Nothing need stand between us and God except the barriers which we create ourselves. Prayer as the lifting up of our hearts places us in the divine will for our humanity and world. He has the whole world in his hands; never more so than at the Ascension when the Son returns to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world.
It is in prayer and praise that participate in that work of cosmic redemption and are gathered into the heavenly community. We ascend in the Ascension of Christ.
“He ascended into heaven”
Fr. David Curry
Ascension 2011
