by CCW | 12 May 2013 15:41
The Ascension and the Session of Christ are two scriptural and creedal teachings. They are at once forgotten and assumed, I think, with respect to Christian thinking and faith. And yet, they speak profoundly to the confusions and complexities of contemporary culture. They point us to an understanding of the objective reality of God and to a larger view of our humanity. They recall us to who we are in the sight of God.
As such these doctrines or teachings provide a strong counter to our fatalisms, ancient and modern and to our existential despair. Either the world is too much with us or we are too much with ourselves.
The great religions of the world offer the profound insight, in one way or another, that our humanity is radically incomplete without God. For Christians that insight is captured in what we might call the comings and goings of God signaled in the story of Christ. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are important moments in that story; the story of God, we might say, in which we find our story.
The image is strong and wonderful. Christ ascends and sits on the right hand of the Father. What does it mean? It speaks at once of the transcendence of God – God as utterly beyond, as almighty and all knowing – and of the immanence of God, God as having engaged our humanity in the intimacy of Christ, God as being with us. Both these theological concepts – transcendence and immanence – are comprehended in the Christian idea of God as Trinity signaled in the revealed names of God as Father, Son and Holy Ghost, names which are largely made known to us by Jesus. It is especially in the story and in the season of Christ’s Death and Resurrection that Jesus teaches us about the Father, about himself as the Son and certainly about the Holy Ghost or Spirit. It is in this understanding that God is God and that God is also with us.
What is being opened out to us is the mystery of God and how that mystery speaks to us and to the human condition. Who are we? Turds that talk? Computers with meat? Or immortal souls with bodies? The insight of the Fathers is that the Ascension is “the exaltation of our humanity.” We have an end with God. “The end of all things is at hand,” Peter says in this morning’s epistle reading, an end which is not simply doom and gloom but a sense of purpose and direction, a sense of the truth of our being as being with God. That changes everything. It actually gives us a freedom in the world, a freedom, too, from the tyranny of ourselves. It allows us to see ourselves with God in Christ. We have a place with God.
In the facebook culture of our day, we are desperate to be seen by others, it seems, as if you don’t exist unless your image is constantly out there in the digital world. We know, too, of course how deadly and destructive that can be both in terms of narcissism and exploitation and abuse. What these doctrines provide us is something more and something greater. A way to see ourselves in Christ and to see Christ in one another. We have a place with God!
The image of Christ ascending and sitting on the right hand of the Father is about our place with God. The Ascension is the homecoming of the Son to the Father, having accomplished the mission of redemption. The theme of homecoming is powerful. It connects with the story of Odysseus in his quest to get home after the Trojan War, a journey which is about learning through suffering who he truly is in the order of the cosmos, learning what that order is and learning to honour the principles, the Gods, as it were, of the ordered world. There is, too, the great Roman story of Aeneas fleeing burning Troy and embarking on a great journey to found Rome, the home of the Latin culture which shapes so much of the story of western Christendom. The idea of home is a powerful image, an image of security and belonging, of trust and identity. It is taken up in the witness of the Scriptures to Christ as well.
The image of sitting on the right hand of the Father is an image of power and order, God’s power and order over all things. Christ’s Ascension and Session is about his triumph over sin and death, his victory over all the evils of the world, past, present and future. And his homecoming reveals our home, our home with God. “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am there you may be also,” Jesus says, reminding us to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither rust nor moth doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through and steal; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” Heaven is where Christ is. Our hearts are to be with Christ. In the lifting up of our hearts and voices in prayer, we are with Jesus in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. As this Sunday makes clear, Christ’s Ascension and Session are the conditions of the coming of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, at Pentecost, the Spirit of God who keeps us with God.
All these doctrines remind us of who we are in the sight of God. That is, I think, everything. We are not just our actions. We are more than our doings. Being reminded of who we are in the sight of God challenges us to act out of that reality rather than simply out of ourselves in our follies and ambitions. We are too preoccupied with the world and with ourselves. It is the wisdom of the poets. “The world is too much with us, late and soon,/ getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” as Wordsworth puts it. Even more, there is the poetic insight of Gerard Manley Hopkins who challenges our existential preoccupations with ourselves as if we are only and simply our actions, as if “what I do is me”.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
We find our place in God’s eye in Christ.
We are to see ourselves in Christ and to see Christ in one another. Such are the great gifts of grace captured in these doctrines. These teachings are the living words of salvation, if we will let them live in us. To see the world and ourselves in Christ. This is grace and salvation; our joy and delight. They save us from ourselves and from the world.
In our secular culture, today is Mother’s Day. We give thanks to God for our mothers for everyone of us is born of woman. We honour our derivations but we also celebrate the vocation of motherhood, the care of mothers, and the care of Mother Church, too, we might say. That vocation and care also belongs to the Christian story in the figure of Mary, the Mother of God who “holds high motherhood/ Towards all our ghostly good/ and plays in grace her part/ About man’s beating heart.”
We place our mothers who have cared for us in the care of Christ, the one who sits at the right hand of the Father.
Fr. David Curry
Sunday after Ascension Day
May 12th, 2013
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2013/05/12/sermon-for-the-sunday-after-ascencion-day/
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