by CCW | 25 May 2025 10:00
The comings and goings of God in the Scriptures reach their climax in the Ascension of Christ this Thursday, the fortieth day after Easter which marks the culmination of the Resurrection and Eastertide. Today, Easter 5 is also known as Rogation Sunday. It concentrates for us the meaning of these images of comings and goings. Theology consorts with images, especially the images of the Scriptures through which we are gathered into an understanding of our life as grounded in the dynamic of God’s life.
Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation that precede Ascension Day signal the larger dimensions of the Resurrection. It is at once cosmic and psychological: cosmic because it emphasizes the gathering of the whole of creation to God, and psychological because that gathering has very much to do with ourselves and our blessedness, coming to self-knowledge and awareness as both ‘hearers and doers of the word’ through which we glimpse a true image of ourselves, as the Epistle from James puts it. Otherwise we are deceivers of ourselves; beholding ourselves in a glass but then forgetting who we are. The whole purpose of the Resurrection is to make known who we are in the sight of God.
Christ’s Resurrection is not a flight from the world and our embodied being but their redemption. It makes visible what is hidden and present in the Passion just as the Nativity of Christ makes visible what is hidden yet present in the Annunciation. In each case there is the idea of our humanity as a microcosm of the world; we are a little world in which there is a recapitulation or gathering together of the elements of the world in us. This reminds us that we are intimately connected to everything in the created order. Thus Rogation Sunday and the days of Rogation emphasize our connection to nature, to the world, and to our place in the world, particularly our parishes as the places where we dwell as sojourners in the land, the land in which we abide with God, via ad patriam, the way to our home with God signalled in Christ’s homecoming. His return to the Father is the exaltation of our humanity, and signals the hope that where he is there we may be also, that as he is so shall be also, that we shall be as Christ. Rogation Sunday is very much about ourselves and the world in which we are placed but as gathered to God through the comings and goings of Christ. The spring of nature’s year is a parable for the spring of our souls to God.
The overcoming of the world that ends the Gospel reading from John is not the negation of nature in a denial of creation – a kind of gnosticism – but the overcoming of the opposition between the world and God which belongs to the Fall. That is the meaning of redemption and thus marks the restoration of the truth of our relation to God and creation; in short, to our end with and in God. Such ideas speak powerfully to the confusions and disorders of our contemporary world which exhibit a profound sense of disconnect, not only of ourselves from nature and from God but also from ourselves. Rogation Sunday teaches that prayer is the real antidote to the forms of our disconnect. Why? Because in prayer we are gathered into the very life of God himself.
The Collect makes clear that prayer is learning to “think those things that be good” and to “perform the same,” all in the knowledge of the mercies and goodness of God “from whom all good things do come.” Prayer grounds us in the relation of the Father and the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Christ’s words about coming forth from the Father and into the world and about leaving the world and going to the Father are grounded in God as love; in short, God as Trinity. Prayer is about asking the Father in the name of the Son, on the one hand, and in the knowledge of the mutual and indwelling love of the Trinity, on the other hand. The teaching of Christ pushes beyond parables to the meaning and understanding of parables and images that make known the infinite life of God. “For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.”
This is the real meaning of the overcoming of all that separates us from God, from the world, from one another, and from ourselves, regardless of the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations of our lives. In our world, no doubt, we are scattered and in disarray, yet the lessons of the Resurrection remind us of the gathering of all things to God. This is the radical meaning of prayer captured in the word, rogation.
Prayer in its most basic sense is about asking; rogation comes from the Latin rogo, rogare, but with a sense of its extension intellectually in terms of interrogation, asking with the desire to understand. This is interrogation in its positive sense not in the negative sense of forcing or torturing either nature or ourselves. All asking implies a recognition of our lack, our insufficiency, on the one hand, and our looking to the source and end of all good things, namely God, on the other hand. “In the world ye shall have tribulation,” Jesus tells us, an allusion not only to the vagaries of human experience but more tellingly to the concentration of all sin and evil, all tribulation and suffering in his Passion. ”But be of good cheer,” he immediately says. Why and how? Because “I have overcome the world.”
That overcoming is the radical meaning of the redemption of creation and ourselves. In a kind of cosmic consciousness, the meaning of creation and our humanity is found in the gathering of all things back to God. Natura naturans. Nature loves to live and in so doing participates in the life which God has given to all living things. Nature shares in the life-force of all living beings. For us analogously, as spiritual and intellectual beings, prayer is an activity of God moving in us that belongs to the truth of our being in the image of God, in the image of Christ, in the image of self-giving love of God as Trinity. Prayer, as Richard Hooker reminds us, “signifies all the service we do unto God.”
This is the counter to all our mistaken and limited views of prayer which are about our attempts to use God, the world, and one another for our own immediate interests which contribute to the various forms of our disconnect from God and nature, ourselves and one another. In a way it is all about the disorder of our desires. Our desires properly speaking belong to the purpose and task of prayer which is always about the gathering of all things to God including ourselves. Thus prayer, if I may build upon the insights of Robert Bellah’s Habits of the Heart (1985), counters the forms of utilitarian individualism which reduces everything to material self-interest and the forms of expressive individualism which reduces everything to psychological and social self-expression as if life is only about our pursuit of self-fulfillment. Both tendencies reflect the ethical vacuum of contemporary culture and to the modern disconnect from God and his creation. Neither can say what the good is, let alone seek to live it.
The real fulfillment or redemption of our humanity is found in God and in the life of prayer, meaning the Godward direction of our lives. There we find, as Jesus says, the fullness of joy, our good. Prayer participates in nothing less than God’s gathering of all things in creation and in human life to their source and end in himself. The dynamic of prayer is our comings and goings in the love of God made visible in Christ’s Death and Resurrection. To put it in other words, the redemption of creation and our humanity is found in the comings and goings of God to God and with God and in God. For us our participation in those motions of coming and going is simply and entirely prayer.
Prayer is the lifting up of our hearts and hands to God. “We ascend in the ascension of our hearts, and we sing a song of the degrees” or the ‘grades’ of our going up (ascendimus ascensiones in corde et cantamus canticum graduum), as Augustine so wonderfully puts it (Conf. 13. 9). This lifting up or ascension is the constant activity of prayer, of our lives as prayer, wherein all our joy, our good is found. It is nothing less than “the exaltation of our humanity” to its truth and end in God. We are lifted up and set in motion through the comings and goings of Christ in us, the comings and goings in which nature itself is gathered to God with us and in us.
Fr. David Curry
Rogation Sunday 2025
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/05/25/sermon-for-rogation-sunday-14/
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