Sermon for Rogation Sunday
“The Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed
that I came out from God”
Rogation Sunday highlights the radical nature of prayer. It does so by way of attention to the threefold relationship of humanity, nature, and God. The word, rogation, derives from the Latin, rogo, rogare. It simply means to ask. Prayer in its most basic sense is about asking. To ask is like the desire to know. Wanting to know is really about asking to learn. It assumes, first, that we don’t know all and everything, and, second, that there are things to be learned, knowledge to be gained and appreciated, as it were, in short, loved. To ask for anything assumes that we lack something which we think is good and right to have. Our wanting acknowledges our lack.
But in asking there is the spiritual insight and acknowledgement that all and every good belongs to God, and that all knowledge and wisdom comes from God. Prayer in this sense is the honest awareness that nothing that we have or enjoy is simply of our own making and doing. It belongs to our relationship with God and with one another. Rogationtide brings out how our relationship with God and with one another is grounded – pardon the pun – in the land where we are placed. Rogationtide in the Christian understanding offers a theology of the land and of the meaning of human labour and life in prayer and in situ.
The Easter mystery of the Resurrection is not about a flight from nature into some vague and indeterminate fantasy of human imagination. It is the most radical affirmation of creation and of human individuality. It is found in the gathering of all things back to God from whom all things come. It signals the freedom of our lives as spiritual beings in the very places where we live. Where we live is where God is to be praised and honoured. What Rogation Sunday celebrates is the redemption of all things to God, especially, the things of the land, of nature. Here is a corrective to Earth Day, to all of the environmental concerns of our global world. How? By reminding us of our connection to creation and to the redemption of the world and our humanity, we are to be not just “hearers” but “doers of the word,” learning how to “think those things that be good” and to “perform the same,” as the Collect puts it, albeit only by God’s “holy inspiration” and “merciful guiding.”
