Sermon for Rogation Sunday

admin | 22 May 2022

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

Rogation Sunday concentrates wonderfully for us the radical meaning of Christ’s Resurrection. It signals our freedom not from the world but in the world through our being grounded in the mutual love of the Father and the Son. “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father,” Jesus says, capturing in a phrase the essential life of God himself, the life which overcomes all sin and evil, all that opposes the truth of God. Far from being a gnostic flight from the world as if it were evil, it signals the redemption of the world. The Resurrection gives us a way to face the difficult things of our troubled world, a world of tribulations and oppressions, of sufferings and sorrows, a world of fears and hatreds, of divisions and animosities.

These are words, as the disciples seem to begin to grasp, albeit yet in a glass darkly, spoken “plainly” and “no parable”. Jesus in response makes it equally clear that there are and there always will be tribulations in the world. “You shall be scattered every man to his own,” and in reference to his passion, you “shall leave me alone.” Such is the meaning of our betrayals of God; the meaning of our sin is seen in his desolation on the Cross in the terrifying aloneness of his suffering. “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” Nothing captures more fully the meaning of sin, the sense of abandonment because of our having forsaken God. “And yet,” as Jesus says, “I am not alone,” the little conjunction, “yet” highlights his being with the Father and the Father with him. Such is the dynamic of God’s goodness and truth which is by definition greater than the follies of sin and evil. The Resurrection never lets us forget the Passion.

The words of the Cross begin and end with the address of the Son to the Father: “Father, forgive them”; “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.” Everything is gathered back to the Father in love. This is the radical meaning of his going forth and return to the Father. This is the victory of love over hatred and fear, over sin and evil. The Resurrection brings out the radical meaning of creation and our lives in the world, a world which is more than tribulation and oppression because it is God’s world. Thus, James bids us “be doers of the word, and not hearers only” because that is the radical truth of our knowing even as we are known in Christ. The Resurrection opens out to us “the perfect law of liberty,” which is our freedom in Christ, a freedom from sin and death. That freedom is grace, the grace that allows us to face the world and ourselves without fear. It gives us the courage to act and engage the world of nature and human affairs.

And it is peace, a peace that is found within in spite of the troubles of the world without. Here Jesus reminds us of what he said earlier to the disciples: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid” (Jn. 14.27). This is the radical teaching which redeems our humanity and our world.

The world is a cosmos, an ordered whole, but one which we have sadly disordered through sin and presumption, treating the world and ourselves as mere stuff to be manipulated and used. We have forgotten that we ourselves are inescapably part of that world and we have forgotten that the world is God’s world. It means, as Bruno Latour suggests, eschewing the false dichotomy between the local and the global to reclaim the terrestrial, nature as organic and living process, as life. For in our climate fears we react and retreat to a romanticized ‘local’ which is only for the few to the exclusion of others just as the global elites imagine a ‘global world’ only for themselves; too bad, so sad for the rest. Rogation recalls us to our places in a world for all.

The poet Thomas Traherne reminds us of the radical truth of the Resurrection. It is cosmic in scope because it is reordered and returned to God through Christ.

You never [he says] enjoy the world aright…. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world. Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels: till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.

Rogation Sunday reminds us of the radical meaning of prayer. “Prayer,” as Richard Hooker wonderfully teaches, “signifies all the service that ever we do unto God”. Prayer is about our fundamental orientation to God and to our being with God. It is not just about seeking his will; it signals the profound idea of our being with God in his will for us through prayer. “The whole of our life says Our Father,” as Origen of Alexandria says. All prayer, as former Archbishop Rowan Williams suggests, is about “letting Jesus pray in us.” Prayer, in other words, belongs to our incorporation into the life of God in Christ. It means learning to love the world “aright”, as Traherne says, as well as one another and even ourselves by loving the world and one another in God. Such is the dance of essential life in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. To glimpse this and to let it move in our hearts is our freedom and peace, the counter to our fears and judgements.