Sermon for Sunday after Ascension Day, 10:30am Holy Baptism and Communion
“These things have I spoken unto you”
There is something quite wonderful and special about this Sunday juxtaposed between the going up of the Son to the Father in the Ascension of Christ and the coming down of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The Ascension marks the fortieth day of Easter and signals the culmination of the Resurrection, its fuller meaning, if you will. Pentecost is the fiftieth day after Easter and marks the birthday of the Christian Church.
The special joy of Easter and Eastertide reaches a kind of crescendo in the Ascension. All of the scripture passages, old and new, are full of a sense of joy and wonder. Why? Because the Ascension marks what the Fathers astutely call, “the exaltation of our humanity.” Through Christ’s death and resurrection we have a place, a home with God. It is signalled profoundly and beautifully in the Son’s homecoming to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world and our humanity. All the themes of Eastertide find their fullest meaning in the Ascension of Christ.
“I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus says, “that where I am there ye may be also.” The Ascension celebrates the return of the Son to the Father in which return our humanity realizes its end in God, on the one hand, and has its participation in the life of the Trinity through prayer now, on the other hand. The Ascension reveals the true movement of our liturgy. It is the liturgy of the sursum corda, the liturgy of the lifting up of our humanity to God and into God. “Lift up your hearts. We lift them up unto the Lord.”
The Ascension is the necessary counter to the spirit of accommodationism so dominant in our church and culture, the idea that the Christian Gospel must accommodate itself to the fads and fancies of each and every passing age. To engage our world in all of its confusions is not the same thing as catering to every passing fad and fancy. The Ascension signals the real meaning of the engagement between God and Man. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts” as Augustine so memorably puts it. We ascend in prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament. We are gathered into the divine life. It is the very opposite of supposing that the divine life is collapsed into our world and day; such an idea would be a perversion of the Incarnation.
