Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Sunday after Ascension Day
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Sunday after Ascension Day.
Author: CCW
Sermon for Sunday after Ascension Day
“It is finished.”
The sixth word of the Crucified in Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya’s ordering of the last words of Christ on the Cross is from St. John’s account of the Passion. John’s last word of Christ is the penultimate word in the sequence of the seven last words. “It is finished,” Jesus says, “and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.” It is a profound and moving moment.
“The end of all things is at hand,” Peter tells us in the Epistle for today while the Gospel speaks about the Comforter, “the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father,” who “shall testify of me,” Jesus says, even as we also are to bear witness in the face of hostility and persecution. What kind of ending is this?
“It is finished” signals the completion and ending of all that belongs to human redemption in terms of the overcoming of sin and evil through the perfect sacrifice of the Son to the Father. It expresses the meaning of the coming of Christ to “do the will of him who sent him.” What is that will? To redeem the whole of creation. All that goes forth from God returns to God. Such is the radical truth of creation even in the face of negation of God’s will by sin and death. There is no truth apart from the will of God.
Ascension Day marks the ending of the mission of the Incarnate Son in his going forth and his return. It is his homecoming but one which establishes our homeland. Here we have, as Hebrews famously puts it, “no continuing city” (Heb. 13.14). We have our true abiding in God. Christ’s return to the Father is the completion of the work of redemption accomplished in his body. His return is the exaltation of our humanity, as the Fathers’ note, as well as the restoration of the whole of creation to its truth in God. Christ’s Ascension then leads to his Session, to his being seated at the right hand of the Father. This is a powerful image, a way of representing God’s providential rule made manifest in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. They end or culminate, we might say, with the Ascension and the Session.
But the radical meaning of these Scriptural and Credal doctrines so easily escapes us. We forget that it happens in the body of our humanity which Christ assumes from Mary. It means that we in our humanity are given a vision of our place with God in Christ; in short, that as he is so shall we be also. What that means exactly is beyond our conceiving and imagination. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him.” Yet it is enough to say that as he is so shall we be also for it is about our being gathered to God, not God being collapsed into the confused agendas of our day. The Ascension testifies to the truth of creation and its redemption in Christ. As the great Ascension hymns emphasize, the risen and ascended Christ shows the marks of the Cross. They are the marks of divine love, the testimony of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.
May & June at a Glance
Sunday, May 28th, Pentecost
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 4th, Trinity Sunday
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 11th, St. Barnabas/ First Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Tuesday, June 13th
7:00pm Parish Council Meeting
Saturday, June 17th
9:00am Encaenia at KES
Sunday, June 18th, Second Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday, June 25th, Third Sunday after Trinity
8:00am Holy Communion
9:00am Reunion Service at KES
10:30am Holy Communion
Sunday After Ascension Day
The collect for today, Sunday After Ascension Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
O GOD the King of Glory, who hast exalted thine only Son Jesus Christ with great triumph unto thy kingdom in heaven: We beseech thee, leave us not comfortless; but send to us thine Holy Ghost to comfort us, and exalt us unto the same place whither our Saviour Christ is gone before; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 4:7-11
The Gospel: St. John 15:26-16:4a
Artwork: Sergei Vasilyevich Beklemishev (1870-1920), Last Supper, Museum of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow.
KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 18 May
The Lord heard her cry
In the Junior School Chapel and the Grade Ten Chapel this week we had the first part of the Parable of the Prodigal Son who, having wasted his inheritance, “came to himself” and remembers his father and the home which he had left to go into “a far country.” At Senior Chapel, we had the second installment of the story of Susanna and the Elders. At once powerful and disturbing, it, too, ends with a kind of awakening. Susanna’s cry to the Lord, we are told, was heard by the Lord. Just as she is being led off to be put to death on the strength of the false witness of the two wicked judges, Daniel is moved to protest, “I am innocent of the blood of this woman.” Pretty intense and quite telling. The judges accused her of what they themselves had intended. This story is part of the background to the Gospel story of the woman taken in adultery and to the problem of motives and hypocrisy. “Has no one condemned you,” Jesus said to the woman, “Neither do I, go and sin no more.” Here, however, Susanna is innocent.
But what was her cry? It is an insight into the nature of God who discerns what is secret, who is aware of all things, and thus knows that these men have borne false witness against her. The opening prayer of the liturgy of Holy Communion signals the same idea: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” This kind of ethical understanding belongs to the story, the idea that God sees all and everything, the idea of a principle of justice and truth that is greater than us and our evil.
We might be tempted to read the story through a feminist lens seeing it as essentially about the victimization of women by men. There is something to that approach, to be sure. After all, the beauty of Susanna is emphasized. The judges lust after her. In the trial, she is literally unveiled so that the wicked men “might feast upon her beauty.” One cannot ignore the “male gaze”, the way in which she is viewed as an object. It might also be said that a male, Daniel, is seen as coming to the rescue of the damsel in distress, as if Susanna is simply weak and helpless. But the story is more than this.
Dunstan, Archbishop
The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Dunstan (909-988), Archbishop of Canterbury, Restorer of Monastic Life (source):
Almighty God,
who didst raise up Dunstan
to be a true shepherd of the flock,
a restorer of monastic life
and a faithful counsellor to kings:
grant, we beseech thee, to all pastors
the like gifts of thy Holy Spirit
that they may be true servants of Christ and of all his people;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Lesson: Ecclesiasticus 44:1-7
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:42-47
Artwork: Saint Dunstan, stained glass, Norwich Cathedral. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.
The Ascension Day
The collect for today, The Ascension Day, being the fortieth day after Easter, sometimes called Holy Thursday, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
GRANT, we beseech thee, Almighty God, that like as we do believe thy only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continuously dwell, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen.
The Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
The Gospel: St. Mark 16:14-20
Artwork: Limbourg Brothers, The Ascension (from the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry), c. 1416. Illumination, Musée Condé, Chantilly.
2023 Lenten Meditations
Fr. David Curry has collected his three Lenten meditations (with footnotes) into a single pdf document. Click here to download “Lenten Meditations on the Book of Homilies”.
Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Rogation Sunday
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on Rogation Sunday.
Sermon for Rogation Sunday
“I thirst”
Our Eastertide reflections on the seven last words of Christ in the light of the Resurrection brings us to the fifth word in the Peruvian Jesuit Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoy’s ordering of the words of the Crucified on this the fifth Sunday after Easter commonly called Rogation Sunday. The conjunction is suggestive and intriguing.
It is the most physical of all the words of the Crucified, the one word which has an immediate relation to the body and its needs. Thirst is a property of the body in its finitude. Yet the idea of thirst also functions metaphorically in the Scriptures with respect to our relation to God and to one another and to the overarching themes of creation and redemption. This word complements paradoxically the theme of Rogation about the land and our lives as embodied beings. The Resurrection is cosmic in scope. It is not about a flight from the world or from the body.
This word testifies most strongly to the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ and thus to the dynamic of the interchange between the divine and the human natures in the person of Jesus Christ. Through the physical reality of the body, something profoundly theological and psychological in an older philosophical sense is opened out to us, the counter to the incomplete and partial agendas of the advocacy culture of our day. This thirst which is very much of the body is also very much of the spirit. As such it speaks about ourselves as not only “hearers” but “doers of the word,” about “think[ing] those things that be good” and “perform[ing] the same”. Such ideas have everything to do with our lives in the land where we are placed. And everything to do with the radical meaning of Christ’s overcoming the world. “In the world ye shall have tribulation;” Jesus says, “but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”
His thirst on the Cross is far greater than what we can imagine. Why? Because it embraces both the body and the soul in an intensity of suffering, the intensity of the Passion which reveals the greater intensity of divine love. This word gathers into itself a whole host of associations. It speaks to us about what we seek and what God, too, seeks for us. This thirst belongs to what Jesus says in these last verses of chapter sixteen of John’s Gospel. He speaks of the Father’s love for us, and our love of Christ as the one who has “come out from God.” He tells us that “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.” No words capture more fully the logic of the Incarnation and the Trinity than these. Everything comes forth from God in creation and returns to God in redemption revealed in the suffering humanity of the Crucified but as grounded in the life of the Trinity.
In this word, “I thirst,” Jesus speaks directly and personally to us both about the radical meaning of his Passion but also about the love of God for our humanity. It clarifies for us a number of scriptural references about water and the land, about our thirst for God and God’s thirst for us. As the Psalmist says, “like as the hart desireth the water-brooks,/ so longeth my soul after thee, O God./ My soul is athirst for God, yea even for the living God” (Ps. 42). God is the ultimate good and truth that we seek as spiritual creatures. Here imagery from the physical world is used to speak about the deepest yearnings of our souls. We are made for God.