Sermon for the Sunday after the Ascension
“He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father”
They are words from the Creed but as taken more or less directly from the Scriptures. The Ascension and the Session of Christ are among the creedal mysteries of the Christian faith. They are set before us on this day, The Sunday after the Ascension. Often overlooked and ignored, these two doctrines provide a necessary corrective to the religion of sentiment and emotion, on the one hand, and the religion of morality and self-righteousness, on the other hand. We are reminded in the strongest possible way that the meaning of our lives is to be found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between these two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love.
But these mysteries also instruct us about the meaning and understanding of spiritual life. Rather than the simple and false opposition of spirit and matter, for example, or spirit and logic, too, for that matter, the Ascension and the Session teach us that the spiritual embraces and perfects the material and physical world as well as the various forms of our reasoning. These two mysteries signal the radical meaning of human redemption which is about the gathering of all things to God. It is a kind of redire ad principia – a return to a principle – in which we find the true meaning of our lives.
In terms of the rich imagery of Eastertide, which has focused on Christ’s refrain “because I go the Father”, we learn that our comings and our goings find their place and have their meaning in the comings and goings of God. In the Ascension and the Session of Christ there is a kind of ending, a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, of triumph and joy. Christ enters into the Father’s glory and so into the eternal rest of God. “The end of all things is at hand”, says St. Paul, with a sense not of foreboding but of joy. The ending of all things is indeed celebrated in the Ascension and the Session of Christ. It is an ending in the sense of meaning and purpose. It is about the divine reason and purpose of our existence. From there we await a new beginning through the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love and knowledge of what has been accomplished by Christ Jesus for us. It always remains to be more fully realized in us.
