by CCW | 17 May 2026 10:00
The creedal mysteries of the Ascension and the Session of Christ are clearly and unambiguously set before us today, the Sunday after the Ascension. We celebrate the Ascension and the Session of Jesus Christ to “[sit] on the right hand of the Father”. Often overlooked and passed over, these two doctrines provide a necessary corrective to the religion of sentiment and emotion, on the one hand, and the religion of morality and self-righteousness, on the other hand. We are reminded in the strongest possible way that the meaning of our lives is found in the comings and goings of God, not God in our comings and goings. There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives: the one would make God subject to us; the other would place us with God in the revelation of his truth and love.
“The end of all things is at hand,” says Peter. That “ending of all things” is celebrated in the Ascension and the Sessionof Christ. It is an ending in the sense of mission accomplished, an ending that recalls Christ’s last word from John’s Passion: “It is finished”. Human redemption accomplished or ended is achieved through the sacrifice of Christ and in the gathering of all things into unity in God through that sacrifice. From there we await a new beginning through the Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love and knowledge of what has been done by Christ Jesus for us and which ever and always remains to be more fully realised in us. The Son goes to the Father having accomplished “the will of him who sent him.” He returns to glory and enters into glory. What does it signify for us? Simply the meaning of our lives in prayer and praise; our lives in faith, hope, and charity.
If the Resurrection is the fullest possible vindication of the true nature of our human individuality, soul and body, as it were, then the Ascension is the fullest possible vindication of the spiritual nature of all reality. This has enormous consequences for how we look upon every aspect of our lives. The Session of Christ signifies that all things – all forms of natural and human endeavour, all forms of social and political life, whether it be the family, the state, our schools, or our churches – ultimately have their ground in God and participate in one way or another in the work of redemption. In other words, they find their correction and their perfection, their fulfillment and meaning, in the homecoming of the Son to the Father. All authority and order belongs to God; all is gathered back to God.
Everything is to be gathered into the primacy of that spiritual relation, the relation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Ascension and the Session of Christ would remind us that our lives are to be lived to God and with God. A former moderator of the Presbyterian Church of Canada was being granted an honorary degree, way back in the late 70s at my baccalaureate graduation. He countered the current culture of thought in the contemporary world in a very robust way. Against the notion of Jesus as reduced to the sentimental and emotional, Jesus as “you are the cream in my coffee” kind of idea, he argued in an inimitable strong Scottish brogue that “the Creeds say and the Scriptures say, that Christ sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, a place much to be preferred”! Exactly.
Without that sensibility Christ cannot be in our hearts and our minds and cannot be the ordering principle of our lives morally, socially, politically, and, of course, theologically. To put it in another way, only if we honour Christ in his Ascension and Session can we possibly know him, love him and serve him in our lives with one another. And why? Because in these motions all things are gathered back to God including ourselves and are grounded in the will and purpose of God for our life and truth in him. Such is theology and such is prayer. And such is redemption and joy.
“We ascend”, St. Augustine says, “in the ascension of our hearts.” Christian life is about going to God and about our being with God through the mysteries of Christ coming and going with us; in short, in the going forth and return of the Son to the Father and in the sending of the Holy Spirit by the Father and the Son, the mysteries of the Ascension and Pentecost. Through these essential doctrinal images we live in the mysteries of God’s being with us; our life as grounded in God’s all-knowing and all-embracing love, come what may in the chaos and confusion of ourselves and our world. “These things have I told you, that, when the time shall come, ye may remember that I told you of them.” This is exactly what we shall hear too at Pentecost. Everything is gathered into the Word and Son of the Father through the Spirit.
That is the point so wonderfully captured in the gradual psalm for today, the psalm of our going up and entering into the spiritual wonder of the Gospel. “God has gone up with a merry noise,/the Lord with the sound of the trumpet” (Ps. 47.5), the psalmist says with a sense of exaltation. This celebrates Israel’s realization that there is a divine purpose and presence in their lives. To put it in another way, God is King. God is the ultimate author, the authority that underlies all order and authority. “Thou couldest have no power at all over me except it were given thee from above,” as Jesus says to Pilate in John’s Passion. His words highlight the perversity and betrayal of substituting the Caesars of the world for God. This is Israel’s betrayal – “We have no king but Caesar” – and ours in making idols of the human constructs of power. This betrays ourselves as made in the image of God; a betrayal of understanding and love, the very opposite of the Psalm. “For God is the King of all the earth:/ sing ye praises with understanding”(Ps. 47.7). To sing with understanding is the challenge and purpose of our lives in prayer and praise.
Three psalms complement the dynamic thrust of this morning’s gradual psalm. Psalms 93, 97, and 99, all begin with the title Dominus regnavit meaning “the Lord is King”. The Latin incipit, the opening words of each Psalm, was retained in the Prayer Book which uses Coverdale’s translation of the Psalms rather than opting for the King James’ Version. In each of these psalms, the images speak to today’s celebration: “The Lord is King, and hath put on glorious apparel, and girded himself with strength” (Ps. 93); “The Lord is King, the earth may be glad thereof:/ yea, the multitude of the isles may be glad thereof” (Ps. 97); and, finally, and with a sense of awe and wonder, “The Lord is King; let the peoples tremble;/ he sitteth upon the cherubin; let the earth be moved” (Ps. 99). In other words, the whole of creation and especially our humanity is gathered to God and moved to prayer and praise.
[The readings especially from Judges which we began this week in the Offices and end next week illustrate the question and need for authority as grounded in God. The Lord raised up judges to govern the people of Israel but there is the constant to and fro, the back and forth of our relation to authority and to the legitimacy of authority itself. “Whenever the Lord raised up Judges for them, the Lord was with the judge, and he saved them from the hand of their enemies all the days of the judge … but whenever the judge died, they turned back and behaved worse than their fathers, going after gods.” (Jg. 2. 18,19). There is a kind of instability of order summed up at the end of Judges in the telling phrase, that “in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Jg. 21.1). The real authority is God as the King of all creation.]
God goes with his people to Jerusalem “which is above”, “the place of all places,” as Jewish expression puts it, meaning God. In the Christian understanding this sense has its ultimate fulfillment in the return of all things to the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. His homecoming signals our homeland, the homeland of the spirit in which we participate now through prayer and praise, through Word and Sacrament. Our lives of service and sacrifice are grounded in the guiding life of the Spirit. God rules, not us. Perhaps we don’t want to hear this.
Yet the exultant note of joy in the psalm is the signal note for our lives. In the presence of God we find our joy and our peace and the means to continue in the struggle of our lives to God and with God. And we do so with joy and gladness and in the pursuit of the understanding. Christ’s Ascension and Session is about nothing less than the “exaltation of our humanity”, the opening out to us of the end-things which guide, direct, and measure our lives. Only so may we go up in joy and with a merry noise.
Fr. David Curry
Sunday after Ascension 2026 (reworked 06)
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/05/17/sermon-for-the-sunday-after-ascension-day-7/
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