Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, One God! Amen.
Christ has ascended! From Earth, to Heaven.
Let us remember, and believe, as we say every Sunday, and every service
Christ, “who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father; from thence he shall come with glory, to judge the living and the dead ;whose kingdom shall have no end.”
Christ came as a servant, but never ceased being Lord of Lords and ascended as a King. Christ condescended to become man, but never ceased being God, and ascended to his rightful place at the right hand of God the Father. Christ descended into hell, but hell could not contain him, and heaven received him once again. He came into the kingdoms of men, and left us with the Kingdom of God.
Christ has ascended, and we shall follow in His steps, but the way shall not be easy. Anyone that reads the scriptures and believes in a Gospel of prosperity, believes in an easy path without pain or suffering, is reading a different Gospel, and holding to something other than the Truth. Two millennia can and does clearly show us that The Way, as it is and was so dutifully called, is not a path of peace and prosperity. Yes, we preach peace, we love those who may not love us, or those that may not even love themselves, but we will likely receive neither of these things from the world; for the world is at enmity with God.
Christ has ascended, and before doing so He gave us both a warning, and a command. He commanded us to “ Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you.” We have gone, and continue to go into the world, incarnating the Truth, bringing Christ to the world, and “ministering to one another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.” Christ also warned us of the world. The world will hate us. The world loves truth when it is revealed, but it does not love Truth when it is revealed about titselfs, and so the world hates us and has hated us because it has first hated Truth, that is Christ.
Look at the world around us. It seems at every turn, and around every corner there is something that stands against God. The scriptures tell us to “Be still and know that He is God,”yet the world is a cacophony of visual white noise, commercials, advertisements, pseudo pornographic imagery, and various things that not only pull us away from Him, but make it nearly impossible be still. The world pulls us forward into the worries of the future, and causes us to look at the past and regret what we have or have not done. The world has lost its presence in the present moment. Perhaps it is with great clairvoyance that Saint Isaac the Syrian penned the words, “ Silence Is the Mystery of the Age to Come.”
Father Seraphim Rose has shown how The world makes a mockery of the sacraments. Abortion makes a mockery of the Eucharist, incorporating the words “this is my body” into their act of selfish sacrific. Pornography, which pervades every corner of the internet, is the the devil’s iconography. We ignore our humanity in death by cremation. We destroy the sanctity of marriage by treating it as unimportant. Even this very month, a so called pride month celebrates, lauds, and elevates sexual immorality into a place of virtue, forgetting that it was pride that brought humanity into death; forgetting the pride is sin and folly. It is only humility that can change it, and change us all.
The world is against us, and though Christ has ascended, we are not alone. Christ tells us “when the ]Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me. 27 And you also will bear witness, because you have been with Me from the beginning.“ And so we look forward with expectation to the day of Pentecost, one week from today, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles like tongues of fire, establishing the Church upon the foundation of Christ’s honorable blood, that Christ may be revealed to us, and through Christ, the Father. The Holy Spirit, the perfecter of all things, works in us all to help us be perfect just as He is perfect; to become Christ and become one with Christ, so that no matter how dark this world may seem or become, that the light of Truth will light the way like a lamplight at our feet, providing a light for our paths as the psalms have sung.
The world hates us who are of Christ, and are in Christ, but we do not hate those who are in the world, and of it. Hatred is at enmity with God; at enmity with Truth.. We must love those who do not love us; Give to those who have taken from us; Speak love and truth even to those who have lied to us, and spoken spitefully and harmfully in every word and deed. We must show compassion to the indifferent, and empathy to the apathetic; be present to everyone, even those who are distant or distracted, for the present moment is the only moment in which we can encounter God. Put simply, we must walk the path that Christ has laid before us, that those who are blinded may then see it, and follow you in your own footsteps into the fullness of Truth. For, you see, you may be the only Christ that some may ever know.
The world will reject us. Let us remember the words of Saint Anthony the Great, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.” Indeed, we are not like the world, nor should we wish to be, but through the same persistence of water, dripping on a rock for an age, we can change the world around us one act of love and kindness at a time. See the early Church, and three centuries of martyrdom and peaceful persistence of faith, hope, and love, it won over the greatest empire in history from within. With that, let us remember the word’s of Saint Seraphim of Sarov, “Acquire a peaceful spirit, and around you thousands will be saved.” This, and all of this, is how we make disciples of the world, by first becoming disciples ourselves..
Christ has ascended! From Earth to Heaven! May we all be with him in the age to come, and unto ages of ages.
By the prayers of thy most pure Mother, the holy and God bearing fathers, all the Saints, and the martyrs, and the angels, have mercy on us and save us.
Amen.
