Sermon for the Sunday after Ascension Day
“Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus,
the Author and Finisher of our faith” (Heb. 12.1,2)
These are words from The Epistle to the Hebrews which might be called the Epistle of the Ascension so conversant is it with the idea of the Ascension. Why the Ascension? Why the Session? Because the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, the fullness of its meaning. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is not to the world; it is to the world in God. Everything is gathered into the primacy of the spiritual relationship of the Son to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, the Ascension signifies the fuller meaning of prayer and paradise. Ultimately, the Session – Christ’s sitting at the right hand of the Father – signifies the Providential rule of God over the world. In some sense, these creedal doctrines remind us of the fundamental orientation, understanding, and perspective of the Christian faith.
They speak to the ethical dilemmas of our day. Mark Carney, now the Governor of the Bank of England warns that “capitalism is doomed if ethics vanish,” noting the breakdown of the social contract (Guardian, May 27th, 2014). Archbishop Desmond Tutu has condemned the Alberta Tar Sands project claiming that the connection between carbon emissions and climate change is obvious and catastrophic. Environmental assertions trump economic claims, it seems, yet this suggests, perhaps, a false dichotomy between the environment and the economic. There are the questions about science and technology and about the ethical and the spiritual that turn on how we understand our humanity and our world.
“The world is too much with late and soon,” the romantic poet Wordsworth notes, “getting and spending we lay waste our powers,/ nothing in nature is ours.” The consequence of knowledge as power which results in seeing the universe as a machine has become the even greater disease of technocratic culture which in turn affects our hearts. “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon;” the domination of nature through thoughtless knowledge leaves us dead and empty. And it affects our visions of paradise. Camille Paglia, commenting on Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, the anthem of the hippie counter-culture, points out the contradictions on display at Woodstock festival, “where the music was pitifully dependent on capitalist technology, and where the noble experiment in pure democracy was sometimes indistinguishable from squalid regression to the primal horde.” We have a way of turning paradise into far worse than a parking lot.
