The First Sunday After Christmas Day
Listen to the Sermon for December 28, 2014
Read the Sermon for December 28, 2014
Tag: Incarnation
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“Hail the Day That Sees Him Rise” – Feast of the Ascension
Almighty God, your blessed Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, ascended far above all heavens, that he might fill all things. Mercifully give us faith to perceive that, according to his promise, he abides with his Church on earth, even to the end of the world; through the same your Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Today is the Feast of the Ascension. The Ascension (Luke 24:44-53 / Acts 1:1-11) is probably not the best known of the feast days in the Church’s calendar, but it is one that takes on increasing depth and importance the more you think about it and experience it. In this feast, we are drawn into an event that has cosmic significance.
The Ascension is not about gravity, or the physical location of heaven, or any of that. It is about God. In fact, even though it comes toward the end of the season of Easter, the Ascension is most closely related in meaning to Christmas. At Christmas we celebrate the Incarnation, God becoming flesh and living among us.
What was begun at Christmas is brought full circle and proclaimed again in a different way at the Ascension. In the Incarnation, what it means to be God became fully a part of what it means to be a human being. In Jesus, the human and the divine become united in the person and life of one man. In the Ascension, this human being became fully a part of who God is.
It was not the spirit of Jesus, or the essence of Jesus, or the divine nature of Jesus, or the invisible part of Jesus, or the idea of Jesus, or anything like that, that ascended to the Father. It was the resurrected body of Jesus: a body that the disciples had touched, a body that ate and drank with them, a real, physical, but gloriously restored body-bearing the marks of nails and a spear. This humanity has become a living, participating part of Divinity.
The Ascension tells us that it is a good and holy thing to be a human. It is so good and holy a thing that God became human. The fullness of God now includes what it means to be a human being.
So we are able to approach God with confidence and with joy. Because we are not only dealing with the Creator of the universe and the Sovereign of all time and of eternity; we are also drawing near to the One who lived our life, has shared our fate, who knows us, and cares about us.
St. John Chrysostom expressed it in this way: “Through the mystery of the Ascension we, who seemed unworthy of God's earth, are taken up into heaven…Our very nature, against which Cherubim guarded the gates of Paradise, is enthroned today high above all Cherubim.”
Charles Wesley's Hymn for Ascension Day is also quite a beautiful expression of the meaning and implications of the Ascension.
Amen.
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What kind of heart is receptive and spacious enough for Emmanuel?
Childrens' Advocate Marian Wright Edelman passed along a story told to her by The Rev. William Sloan Coffin when he was Pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City.
It was Christmas Eve and the pews at New York City's Riverside Church were packed. The Christmas pageant was underway and had come to the point at which the innkeeper was to turn away Mary and Joseph with the resounding line, "There's no room at the inn!"
The innkeeper was played by Tim, an earnest youth of the congregation who had Down Syndrome. Only one line to remember: "There's no room at the inn!" He had practiced it again and again with his parents and the pageant director and seemed to have mastered it.
So Tim stood at the altar, bathrobe costume firmly belted over his broad stomach, as Mary and Joseph made their way down the center aisle. They approached him, said their lines as rehearsed, and waited for his reply. Tim's parents, the pageant director, and the whole congregation almost leaned forward as if willing him to remember his line.
"There's no room at the inn!" Tim boomed out, just as rehearsed. But then, as Mary and Joseph turned on cue to travel further, Tim suddenly yelled "Wait!" They turned back, startled, and looked at him in surprise.
"You can stay at my house!" he called.
Such childlike generosity and hospitality are qualities of the heart that is receptive enough and spacious enough for Emmanuel. The One whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain is graciously pleased to come under our roof and dwell with us. May our hearts prepare for him and may he dwell in us as we celebrate his Holy Incarnation.
O holy Child of Bethlehem,
Descend to us, we pray;
Cast out our sin and enter in,
Be born to us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
The great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us,
Our Lord Emmanuel. -
Word Made Flesh – The Toughest and Tenderest Love
It is a happy coincidence that the commemoration of St. Ambrose, the fourth century Bishop of Milan, occurs during the Advent season on December 7. I say that because one of the chief contributions of Bishop Ambrose was his defense of Athanasian (orthodox) Christianity against Arianism. Athanasians affirm that the Logos or Word (John 1:1) is fully God in the same sense that the Father is, while Arians affirm that the Logos is a creature, the first being created by the Father. So it is appropriate that his feast day occurs during the season in which we are preparing for the coming of the Messiah because Bishop Ambrose helps us better understand what kind of Messiah we are talking about.
Ambrose may have written the Athanasian Creed (BCP p. 864), the first creed in which the equality of the three persons of the Trinity is explicitly stated. Whether he wrote it or not, it is consistent with his theology:
And the Catholic Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty co-eternal.
The Messiah who came as a little child and died on a cross as a man is not just a messenger. He is Emmanuel, God With Us in the flesh. That was as incomprehensible a Mystery in the first and fourth centuries as it is today – the Word that was in the beginning, the Word that was with God, the Word that was God, “became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son; full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). The proof of it is a matter of faith. This Word Made Flesh, Jesus, the Messiah, matters so much to us because he is the ultimate expression of God’s eternal love for us.
His entire life demonstrates to us that God’s love does not shrink in the face of tragedy, injustice, exploitation, and alienation. Love Divine embraces everything that happens to human beings from birth to death. God With Us heals brokenness, overcomes oppression, and reconciles estrangement. There is no love in the universe that is tougher or more tender!
A meditation attributed to Bishop Ambrose beautifully expresses what God’s love means to us in these words: “Lord Jesus Christ, you are for me medicine when I am sick; you are my strength when I need help; you are life itself when I fear death; you are the way when I long for heaven; you are light when all is dark; you are my food when I need nourishment.”
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Reflections on Ascension Day
I'm in a highly theological mood today as I meditate on the significance of the Ascension of our Savior Jesus Christ.
It occurs to me that the Nativity and the Ascension are bookends. The bodily ascension of Jesus Christ, God Incarnate, completes what was begun in his Nativity. God became as we are so that we might become as God is. An Orthodox hymn says, "Today has God come down to earth, and man gone
up to heaven."The Incarnation, in its fullness, is God's supreme act of deliverance, which restores us to communion with God. But more is happening here than fixing something that was broken. Humanity is also advanced to a new level. There is a new creation!
In Jesus Christ, fully human and fully divine, we are able to see the possibilities of human nature and the implications of personhood, lived in the image and likeness of God. We are not only saved from our sins, we are saved for that
life – eternal life, the life God lives.Medieval theologians made a distinction between the image and likeness of God. The former referred to a natural, innate resemblance to God and the latter referred to the moral attributes that were lost in the fall. In the Incarnation, those moral attributes are realized in the first perfect human, Jesus Christ. His earthly ministry is the beginning of a new creation and we are the beneficiaries. "For as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ" (I Cor. 15:22).
The saving work of the Incarnate One, including his being taken bodily into the heavenly realm, is more than a reversal of the fall and restoration of our original state of innocence. Joined to him in Baptism, we live his life as new creatures through whom God's will may be done "on earth as it is in heaven."
Thou hast raised our human nature on the clouds to God's right hand:
there we sit in heavenly places, there with thee in glory stand.
Jesus reigns, adored by angels; Man with God is on the throne;
mighty Lord, in thine ascension we by faith behold our own.Christopher Wordsworth (1807-1884)
P.S. You may have difficulty accepting the Ascension as an historical
event. It does sound far-fetched in light of scientific knowledge.
However, recent advances in scientific knowledge have caused us to think of
matter and energy in different terms. For example, new science tells us that our bodies are made up of the
dust and ashes of stars that burned out billions of years ago. If that is the case, the Incarnation and all the mysteries associated with it may not seem so far-fetched after all.