Day: May 26, 2022

Sermons

Meditation for Ascension Day

“God is gone up with a merry noise”

There is something truly celebratory and delightful about Ascension Day. It signals a kind of participatory delight in the movements of God. The Ascension marks the culmination of the Resurrection in the homecoming of the Son to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to human redemption. His homecoming to the right hand of the Father celebrates our homecoming, the idea that we have a home, a place with God. “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world an, and go to the Father,” Jesus says. The meaning of that coming and going is captured in the Ascension of Christ and belongs to the promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit sent by Jesus and sent by the Father in Jesus’ name. Such is the dynamic of spiritual life.

And there is the wonderful sense of a participatory pleasure and joy expressed by the Psalmist (Ps. 47.5). “God is gone up with a merry noise,/ the Lord with the sound of the trumpet.” It is such a strong affirmation of the divine life which is the ground of all life. Not God has gone up but God is gone up! There is no life apart from the essential life of God. And as we have seen, the Resurrection is cosmic in scope and never lets us forget the Passion in all of its witness to the follies of sin and evil. Ascension bids us rejoice in God, in the motions of the Son’s homecoming to the Father which signals our home with God, our life in the life which does not end.

Ascension reminds us of an important feature of Christian spirituality partly in its Anglican expression. Our liturgy, shaped by a number of different traditions but in this case by Calvin, is very much the liturgy of the Ascension, the liturgy of the sursum corda, the lifting up of all things in prayer to the God who has descended and ascended and has gathered all things back to him from whom all things do come. Prayer is about our hearts in ascension. As Augustine wonderfully puts it, we ascend in the ascension of our hearts, ascendimus ascensiones in cordis. But he adds “et cantamus canticum graduum,” we sing a song of ascent, of degrees, of steps up to the wonder of God, the God who ever is.

In prayer and praise we participate in the life of God. Ascension is the strong reminder of the radical nature of prayer. In prayer we participate in the return of all things to the Father through the Son in the Spirit.

This teaching is marvellously expressed in the very building of Christ Church. It embodies the whole motion of prayer, the motion of the ascension. In the lifting up of our hearts, all things are lifted up to God and by God. Such is prayer in its deepest sense.

“God is gone up with a merry noise”

Fr. David Curry
Meditation for Ascension Day, 2022

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 May

Go and do thou likewise

The setting of the story of the Good Samaritan read in the last Chapels for Grades 11 and 12 this week is intriguing and significant for thinking and doing. It speaks to the challenges and conflicts of our confused and fragmented world. How to act? According to what set of protocols? Whose rules and why? What is it that is right to do? Why does that vary so much from jurisdiction to jurisdiction?

The setting of the parable is one of conflict and self-serving justification. “A certain lawyer” undertakes to tempt Jesus, to put him to the test in order to catch him out. He does so by raising the question about “what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” In other words, what is the good? Jesus asks in return a most important question. “What is written in the law? How readest thou?” Ethics is not just about rules. It is about the understanding of what binds us to one another and in what way. Jesus’ question draws out of the lawyer a marvelous summary of the essential ethical teaching that informs the Judeo-Christian and Islamic understanding and which has its strong counterparts in other religions and philosophies, what C.S. Lewis in the Abolition of Man called “the Tao,” referencing ancient Chinese philosophy. Here it joins together the love of God with the whole of our being in Deuteronomy with the love of neighbour in Leviticus.

Jesus applauds the lawyer’s answer as being right; “this do and thou shalt live.” But he, “willing to justify himself” asks “And who is my neighbour?” That is the setting for the powerful and moving parable of the Good Samaritan, as it has come to be known, which draws upon a host of passages from the Hebrew Scriptures about the stranger, the foreigner, the proverbial other as neighbour. The love of God and the love of neighbour, meaning one another, are inseparable. To do the one is to do the other and vice versa. Here is the ethic of care and compassion concentrated in a picture for us to read and in reading to follow.

But how? Only by that love moving in us, a love which is greater than our human loves which are incomplete and imperfect. In the Christian understanding, the love of God and the love of man meet in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, the mediator of the new covenant of love. The Resurrection has been all about the essential life of God revealed through both the Passion and the Resurrection. Here we see the dynamic of divine life at work in us when we allow what we read to move in us.

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Prayers and liturgy

The Ascension Day

Paolo Veronese, Ascension of ChristThe collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20

Artwork: Paolo Veronese, Ascension of Christ, c. 1585. Oil on canvas, Pinacoteca Capitolina, Rome.

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