Sermon 17th May - Ascension + Creation

From Reverend David

Today, on the Sunday after Ascension Day, I'd like to do something I don't often do, and take a biblical text that's different from the passages we have just heard read.
 
It comes from the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 4 v10: "Christ ascended above all the heavens so that he might fill all things"
 
The three days leading up to Ascension are what are called, Rogation Days - from the Latin word "to ask" - where we pray for farmers and the fruitfulness of their work.
And I remember one magical year at Bedale when we did that through the old tradition of beating the bounds of the three parishes.
 
Apparently there was also a tradition of (for some reason) shoving choir boys through holes in hedges but we left that bit out.
 
But I remember as we walked and prayed, we were blessed by wonderful weather and saw hares and a deer, lapwings, skylarks and curlews.
 
All this seemed particularly appropriate when we were about to celebrate the ascension of Christ.
When as - Ephesians says - we worship the one who ascended so that he could fill all things.
 
What an extraordinary claim to make about 
a flesh and blood human being - that he fills all things.
Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth, 
was now the cosmic Christ - at the heart of all creation.
One thing this says to us is that the world has a dignity and value that it has often lacked in our materialistic, greedy, exploitative society.
 
Our ancestors used to think of the world as a sacred and mysterious place.  They believed that spirits lived in the trees and rocks and streams.  Creation was respected but it was also feared because it was so easy to anger the gods who might then wreak havoc in people's lives.
 
However, Christianity, along with Judaism and Islam, taught that there is only one  God - a God of faithfulness, justice and love, who is the creator of all that exists.
 
By doing so people were freed from the fear of the unpredictable and even malign spirits that they thought inhabited the world.
And by doing this the created world became a secular space 
- one that we could study and understand in scientific terms,
 
But it also seemed to become a place that we were free to exploit for our own benefit without any adverse consequences.  Although, we can now see how mistaken and damaging this view was.
 
So the ascension of Christ has something to teach us in a time of growing ecological awareness and crisis.
 
The ascension marks the moment when the appearances of the risen Christ came to an end, but when the first Christians said that he had "ascended into heaven" they didn't mean he had been taken away from them, leaving behind a purely material world.
 
Instead his presence expanded (so to speak) to fill all things.
Yes, he "went to heaven" but heaven was just a word they used to talk about the presence of God - so Christ had gone to be with God - who is at the heart of all things.
 
So we can now see that our world is indeed a sacred place, not because it contains fickle nature spirits
but because it contains and, is contained by, the risen and ascended Christ, it is filled with the Spirit of life and love.
 
The world - as good catholic theology has always taught - 
is a sacramental place - it is a meeting place with God.
Every bush is burning.
Every rainbow is a sign of God's promise.
Every bird and flower has so much to teach us if we will only consider them deeply.
 
Yes we can still study and understand it scientifically.
Yes we can still harness and utilise it for the good of humanity and of our fellow creatures.
 
But it has a dignity and value in its own right
because Christ is present in all things,
so it can become an object of wonder and contemplation.
 
We can even say that it is the Body of Christ.  
If the Body of Christ is wherever the Spirit of Christ dwells, then it is not only the bread of communion or the Church community.  If his Spirit dwells, often unrecognised, in all people, then we can speak of all humanity as the Body of Christ. And if, as St Paul says, he fills all things, then we can see the whole created world in the same way.
And that also means that to destroy it and to endanger the whole future of our planet, through our addiction to consumption 
and to indulgent lifestyles is a sacrilege, a sin against the creator.
 
We wonder how Christians in Nazi Germany could go to worship on Sunday and then go back to work in concentration camps or on the railways or the administration that serviced the holocaust.  
 
Well I sometimes wonder what future generations will make of the way people in our day carried on participating, either knowingly or unwittingly, in the destruction of creation.
 
The Ascension of Christ is a such a rich theme that we cannot do justice to it in the one week allotted to it in our church calendar.
 
But one thing that it does show do is to link our worship and service of Christ with our care for the natural world. 
 
We are used to thinking of our care for other people in that way - that what we do for the least of our brothers and sisters we do for Jesus.  Well the same is true of the created world because God made it, loves it and fills it with his presence.
 
So, to be faithful to the Christ who is at the heart of all things means acknowledging - as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it: that the world is charged with the grandeur of God,
and that - "There lives the dearest freshness, deep down things."
 
And Paul points us to the reason for this when he tells us that:
 
"Christ ascended above all the heavens so that he might fill all things".