Year: 2011

“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

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“In the world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer,
I have overcome the world”

Jesus’ words are strong and wonderful words. They capture an important feature of the Christian understanding, one which, perhaps, we have forgotten. The Resurrection changes how we look on the world and on our experiences in the world. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. The celebration of human redemption equally embraces the idea of the redemption of the world. That is really what is meant by the term ‘overcoming’.

Today is, or was, commonly called Rogation Sunday. Rogation is about asking. Prayer, in its most basic sense, is about asking. To ask for something recognizes that you don’t have something which you need or would like to have. The idea of asking is itself a kind of reality check on the human situation. It recognizes that we are incomplete. Asking means looking to another for what we do not have but want and need. The ultimate Other is God. Asking is a fundamental feature of prayer. And of the possibilities of education, of learning, too. The passionate desire (eros) to know means recognising that you do not know.

Asking is complemented by another fundamental feature of prayer, namely, praise. Prayer and praise are important features of Rogationtide. Prayer is to be understood in a much bigger and broader sense than what we might ordinarily think. Prayer is large in its scope. As Richard Hooker puts it, “prayer signifies all the service we ever do unto God.” In other words, prayer in its largest sense embraces the whole of our lives. Our lives are to be understood as lives of prayer and praise.

The liberating factor is that prayer and praise place us with God. Nothing need stand between us and God. Why not? Because of Christ’s death and resurrection. We are, you might say, freed to God. Prayer and praise are about that freedom.

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“What mean ye by this service?”

It was the Exodus text that framed our Holy Week reflections. But it extends, I think, into our Eastertide meditations, particularly today. What do we mean by this service of Morning Prayer, I wonder?

So much is set before us in the readings and the canticles, the hymns and the prayers. In the ten-second sound bite culture of our consumer world and day, it must seem to be altogether too much. So I want to try to help you understand a little bit of what we are doing in this service and to see if we can’t begin to appreciate what God is doing for us and with us in this service. It is really all about our life with God in the mercies of Jesus Christ.

St. James, in the epistle reading at Holy Communion for today, exhorts us to “receive with meekness the implanted word.” Meekness or humility is about our openness to God’s word. The psalmist notes that “blessed are all they that fear the Lord and walk in his ways” (Ps. 128, vs.1). Fear, of course, means holding God in awe and wonder because God is God, we might say, and far more than we can desire or imagine. In the Scriptural view of things, there is something wonderful about God making himself known to us, about God’s revealing his will and presence to us.  Our first lesson this morning from The Book of Exodus reminds us of both. At issue is whether we are open to his word and will and presence.

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“Nevertheless, I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away.”

There is a great fearfulness in our own age and culture. It goes beyond the ceaseless spectacle of a world of wars that is constantly before us in such things as the unrest in the Middle East or in the parade of natural catastrophes such as floods in Manitoba and fires in northern Alberta. It concerns the emptiness within the soul of a culture when it can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when it can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.

When we can no longer say what makes life worth living for, then there is certainly nothing worth dying for either. There is nothing to give your life to. There is only the emptiness within, a darkness inside, out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence, death and self-destruction that have become a regular feature of our world. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the meaninglessness of contemporary life. As the philosopher, Peter Kreeft, has noted, the fear for our culture is not the fear of death as it was for the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, nor is it the fear of Hell as it was for the mediaeval cultures – Christian, Jewish and Islamic; no, it is the fear of meaninglessness itself. There is no objective truth to which we should conform ourselves and hold ourselves accountable. This is our fearfulness, the fearfulness we have to confront and overcome.

We confront it in the Gospels. Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid”. Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear or on the road to Emmaus in flight from Jerusalem in fear.

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