by CCW | 14 May 2026 20:00
It is called the sursum corda – “Lift up your hearts.” It signals an essential feature of the liturgy. It is about the lifting up of our hearts in Christ. It is prayer: our seeking from God what God seeks for us. The Feast of the Ascension, so often overlooked and under appreciated, is the culmination of the Resurrection and its meaning for us in our lives of prayer and service. Luke, in Acts, gives us a profound image of the ‘event’, as it were, of the Ascension which complements Mark’s equally explicit account of his being “received up into heaven.”
Throughout Eastertide, as we have seen, Jesus has been preparing us for his twofold departure from us, first, in his Passion and Death and, second, in his Resurrection and Ascension. These motions, we have suggested, signal the gathering of all things into unity in God from whom all things come; in short, the redemption and restoration of creation and of our humanity. It is not something static but shows the dynamic of God towards us and the direction of the motions of our hearts and minds towards God. The images of hearing and seeing are instructive about the classical faculties of human character. Both Luke and Mark call attention to what is spoken and heard and to what is seen and behold. Hearing and seeing are the two most spiritual and intellectual of the human senses that open us out to what is known and grasped in thought; essentially, we are spiritual creatures defined by the faculties of knowing and willing or loving.
“A cloud received him out of their sight,” Luke tells us in Acts. That cloud is the shekinah of God, an image of the overarching cloud of God’s glory that embraces the whole of creation within itself. It, too, is an image of the radical gathering of all things to God, namely the idea of the whole of creation as embraced in the dynamic of the life of God as Trinity. It is not about a flight from the world as if it were something evil in its materiality and being. Heaven, after all, is not a place, but rather, to use a Jewish expression, the place of all places, in short, God.
Christ’s Ascension is his homecoming to the Father. This picks up on the imagery of Rogation Sunday, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” This expresses rather nicely what becomes an important trope in Neoplatonic Philosophy reworked in Christian thought about the exitus and reditus of all things from God and back to God; a going forth and a return. It is, perhaps, more fully captured in another image, that of a kind of circling around and into the mystery of God who is all in all.
Such is, to use another metaphor, the lifting up of our hearts, which Augustine explains in a lovely phrase. Ascendimus ascensiones in corde. We ascend in the ascension of our hearts, that we may be where he is and that as he is so we may be also. It points to the radical meaning of our life in Christ, the gathering of all time and all places into the eternity of God. It is a profound way of speaking about how we are known in God’s eternal knowing and loving of us so wonderfully shown in the comings and goings of God in Christ.
Ascension in this sense is the very meaning of prayer. It is embodied symbolically in the very architecture of many of our churches such as here at Christ Church in the form of its ‘carpenter gothic’ structure. The building itself expresses the dynamic of prayer: the movement from the baptismal font through the nave and up and under the Rood Screen, the Cross, to the altar, and all within the visual and symbolic embrace of the Alpha and Omega beams of the Church. The building itself speaks to that movement; in short, to the beginning and the continuing of our lives with Christ through the twin sacraments (gemina sacramenta) of Baptism and Communion. The building itself signals the Ascension, the lifting up of our hearts and all things to God in whom all things find their truth and meaning.
Through the imagery of things spoken and seen, we learn and participate in the knowing and loving of God, of creation and of one another, and even ourselves. Ascension is in every sense the exaltation of our humanity, not its destruction but its perfection as found in the motions of prayer and praise.
Fr. David Curry
Ascension 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/05/14/sermon-for-the-feast-of-the-ascension-3/
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