by CCW | 1 June 2025 10:00
It seems so dark and threatening, a complement perhaps to our current world of very real uncertainties and anxieties. This is the fearfulness of a culture that is no longer sure of itself and its future yet all the while clinging to the assumptions of the ideology of endless material and technological progress that belong to that uncertainty. There is at once all of the uber-hype of the techno-utopianism of AI, and all of the sense of foreboding and the fear of things falling apart, at the same time. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” as William Butler Yeats famously put it. That was in 1919.
Isn’t this really about ourselves? We have forgotten the centre and have willed ourselves to an endless emptiness. We can’t say what the Good is. This is an ethical dilemma. It is not exactly new. Plato saw the necessity of turning to philosophy and ethical thinking in the face of the self-destruction of the Greek city-states; such is his ‘Republic’ that examines justice as an ethical principle that belongs to the knowledge of the Good.. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ and Boethius’s ‘Consolation of Philosophy’ speak to the devastations of their world in the collapse of the Roman Empire, recalling us to the infinite goodness of God which alone transcends our divided loves and the divisions that result, culturally and individually. “Disdain to be discouraged” is Gregory the Great’s wonderful advice that, in some sense, derives from both. In short there is always the need to return to thought and prayer.
“Take with you words and return to the Lord,” Hosea the prophet tells us, pointing out the problem of putting our trust in the works of our own hands, the idols of our minds, and in defaulting to worldly matters of political expediency. Assyria, he tells us, will not save us. Nor is salvation to be found in the technologies of war in any given age. “Whoever is wise, let him understand these things.” At issue, is our lack of attention to the spiritual and intellectual principles which shape our understanding and guide our actions. Our idolatry of the practical and of the technocratic – the techno-utopianism that assumes that technology will save us – is really a kind of anti-intellectualism at once anti-life and ethically bankrupt. What is it that is right to do turns on the greater question of what is it that is good to be. “To be is to be understood,” Gadamer says about Heidegger, but that requires an understanding of ourselves in relation to God. We are known and loved in his knowing and loving of all things.
The Sunday After Ascension Day speaks to these necessities in the face of our uncertainties. It offers us a way of thinking about our world and about ourselves, about how we are understood by God. It recalls the dynamic of God’s redemption of our humanity and our world. The Ascension is the return of all things to their end in God, the “lift[ing] up our hearts” is the lifting up of the world to God, and so connects with the credal doctrine of the Session of Christ, his “sitting at the right hand of the Father.” It speaks to us about the homeland of the spirit, our home with God, not just by-and-by, later on, but here and now in prayer and praise. In short, we find our place with God because God has placed us with him through his Son. “I go to prepare a place for you,” Jesus tells us, words that speak to the blessed conjunction of his divinity with our humanity. We are partakers of his divinity only through his partaking of our humanity.
In the Ascension and the Session, the Son returns to the Father having accomplished all that belongs to the redemption of the world and to the redemption of our humanity. Everything is gathered back to God from whom all things come and in whom all things have their being always. This is the strongest possible affirmation of the spiritual nature of all reality. It embraces the physical and the material without being collapsed into them, on the one hand, and without negating their integrity, on the other hand.. We are recalled to the dynamic life of God as the absolute principle of our thinking and doing, the good whose will is our good but only by grace.
The return of all things to God in the Ascension and Session of Christ affirms the integrity of physical and material reality, of the empirical and experiential aspects of our world and our lives, precisely in their being gathered to God as the source and end in which they have their truth and being. God is the creative and redemptive principle of all things. Such is the joy of the Ascension and the Session of Christ. It affirms the primacy of the kingdom of heaven and our place in it. Grace and glory.
To know that we have an end with God in Christ’s overcoming of all that defaces the image of God in us means a very different way of thinking about the end of all things than what usually prevails in our practical preoccupations. Peter’s “the end of all things is at hand” is not doom and gloom but an awakening to a sense of purpose and fulfillment in which we participate now and always. It speaks to the primacy of our spiritual identity – to who we are and what we are called to be in sight of God.
Gerard Manley Hopkins captures this movingly in his poem ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ that explores the dynamic of justice and grace. We are more, he suggests, that just what we do, as if the idea of the self is simply “What I do is me: for that I came.”
“I say more,” he says, “the just man justices;” meaning does justice but doing justice is placed on a new foundation – grace. As such the self now “keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;/ Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is -/ Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” Lovely images, I think, that place us in the world as found in God, even in the face of the various kinds of disconnect from nature and one another that belong to our contemporary unease. As he says in another poem, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God” in spite of our misuse of it (‘God’s Grandeur’). Why? Because, “for all this, nature is never spent; / there lives the dearest freshness deep down things” even in the times of the twilight of cultures.
He points us to exactly what the Sunday After Ascension Day also points: the coming at Pentecost of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, who strengthens us in the face of desolation and persecution in our broken world. “Because,” as Hopkins puts it, “the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright/ wings.”
Somehow all the activities of our everyday lives are made worth something by being gathered into the eternal life of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. This Sunday reminds us of our end with God, meaning that our lives find their purpose and meaning in God. Augustine wonderfully says that “we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end.” We already participate in that sense of end as purpose and fulfillment. We do so in our lives of prayer and praise, in Word and Sacrament. And so we can say with comfort and confidence what Peter here has said.
Fr. David Curry
Sunday After Ascension 2025
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2025/06/01/sermon-for-the-sunday-after-ascension-day-6/
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