Sermon Audio
May 1, 2016 Rogation Sunday
Whatever You Ask . . .
Ps 65, Ezek 34:25-31, St. James 1:22-27, St. John 16:23b-33
. . .
On a Saturday afternoon, a little girl asks her daddy if she may have a cookie before she lies down for her nap. By asking, she acknowledges her daddy’s authority over her, his greater experience and wisdom, his more complete knowledge -- of both little girls and cookies. The little girl has no idea how she blesses her father by asking him.
A scene from two thousand years earlier: The apostles are in the upper room with their Lord, and they are flummoxed. Jesus has told them: "A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me, because I go to the Father."
What can He mean? Their minds, anchored to this earth like the Rock of Gibraltar, cannot rise into the heavens and conceive of their Lord ascending into His Father’s presence and then returning to earth. How can He go to the Father and then return? How long will He be away? How will they cope with a world increasingly hostile to the gospel without its Author, their Lord?
But Jesus is God, and God does not explain Himself to men. Throughout His earthly ministry, He has countered questions with questions -- and with answers about spiritual matters the questioner had not even contemplated.
Now comes another cryptic reply to His perplexed apostles. His answer: They must ask.
The pagan poses questions only to men. Asking is a way of gaining information or getting help or currying favor. For the Christian, when the question is addressed to God, it is a way of showing the humility and trust of a small child.
We ask God because He knows all things and, by comparison, we know nothing at all, because He loves with a perfect love we cannot even imagine – a love that compels our trust.
To ask is to put on the humility our Lord modeled on His knees, to pray to the Father who – glorious to think! – gives a hearing to our petitions just as He heard those of His own Son. When we demand, we grab at gobs of glory for ourselves; when we ask we bestow bouquets of glory on God.
Asking is a matter of particular moment as we gather on this Fifth Sunday After Easter, which is, as the prayer book notes, “commonly called Rogation Sunday.” The three days following are called “rogation days,” a time of fasting and prayer leading up to Ascension Day.
Next, we celebrate our Lord’s ascension to His Father and our Father. His apostles would not see Him for “a little while . . . because I go to the Father.”
This matter of “rogation” bears investigation. It is, of course, an ancient rite.
The word comes from the Latin verb meaning “to ask.” Rogation days followed the reading of the passage from St. John’s gospel we read today, including this line: “Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you.”
Rogation, then, is simply about asking – asking the Father in the name of the Son. How many millions of times a day do Christians around the world send up petitions to God “in Jesus’ name” or, as we Anglicans are fond of saying, “for Christ’s sake”? We are simply following the instruction of our Lord. He commands us to ask.
We ask in His name as a confession of our own unworthiness, pleading “for Christ’s sake” because we cannot approach the throne of grace by our own merits. Christ, pure and holy, is our righteousness.
We have a great deal of company back through time as well as in space. By the sixth century, the period of rogation was considered an ancient custom. It was from that point forward, however, that it developed into an important part of the liturgical calendar and a key element in the dispersion of the faith across Northern Europe.
In times of calamity – and there was no shortage of calamity in the Middle Ages – missionary monks toppled pagan shrines and temples and replaced them with churches – and got away with it. Their argument was as simple and pure as a raindrop: Those false gods have no power to save.
This strategy proved so effective that faithful, courageous missionaries followed in the wake of plagues, introducing the gospel into places where the magic of pagan priests had failed.
In England, a Celtic church had already existed for centuries, but the Church of Rome sent missionaries to Kent in the year 597 after a plague and, according to legend, a small group of monks baptized 10,000 new believers.
Whatever the number, this event shaped the church in England for almost a thousand years.
This practice dealt a death blow to pagan rituals and beliefs. The indigenous peoples could not invest their trust in their idols. They needed a Savior.
Christianity began to develop on two tracks. Theologians gave their attention to eternity, to the affairs of the world to come. Missionaries applied the liturgy, sacraments and the cult of the saints to sickness and other afflictions of this life.
The earliest prayer books contained petitions for the sick and pleas for good health. We can hear the strains of them in our own Book of Common Prayer. In a few minutes we will ask God to preserve us in body as well as soul – “through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” We ask in His name.
And we will “humbly beseech” our Lord for comfort for all “who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity.”
If pagan spells and sacrifices had been tried and found wanting, something must replace them. Anointing of the sick as a way of asking God’s blessing of healing became the alternative. But the Christians offered even more.
Simultaneous with prayers for good health to this unseen God whom no idol could represent came hope – hope for spiritual health. In a time of widespread and recurring plagues, many would still die – but now they could depart this life in the certain hope of eternity with their Lord in a glorious new kingdom where there is no disease or suffering, where our Lord wipes away every tear.
Missionaries put paganism to rout by moving relics – often bones of the saints – to a church, often one built over a pagan shrine where the local people had made appeal to the bones of their own departed. A network of shrines with tombs containing bones of the saints dotted the western part of the Roman Empire as Christianity fanned out across Northern Europe at a clip outstripping even that of the plague.
The monks developed a Christian calendar with festivals that corresponded to the natives’ understanding of time, organized according to the seasons of seedtime and harvest. We see the genius of the medieval church in its appropriation of pagan feasts. Easter is one of them.
The primary reason Christianity exploded into the greatest religion on earth today with 2 billion adherents is that it is true. Another important reason is that its leaders of old baptized time.
The church poured a special emphasis into the part of the liturgical year between the winter and summer solstices.
Think of pagan peasants, abiding in the bleakness of winter -- the biting cold and gnawing hunger -- until the early summer brought warmth and abundant food.
Now imagine how they entered into Christ’s suffering in His eternal winter on the cross . . . and then reveled in His glorious radiance in the resurrection. They claimed a share in both the Lord’s anguish and His deliverance from death.
Rogation Sunday and the three days that follow give us an especially sharp picture of how the missionaries worked. A Roman god named Robigus was the personification of agricultural disease – and thus could prevent it.
The spring festival in his honor tracked an earlier Celtic tradition of dealing with evil spirits and involved offering sacrifices to the deity. The Christians supplanted it with rogation -- fasting and prayers to the God of heaven. They taught the pagans to ask the One who could answer. Asking became a tool of evangelism.
The priest, churchwarden and choir boys or, in some cases, the entire congregation, processed around the perimeter of the parish in a ceremony called “beating the bounds,” purifying the parish and asking God’s blessing on the fields. They recited the Litany as they walked, confessing their sins and admitting their need for mercy.
The three weeks following Rogation Sunday was one of three periods each year, with Advent and Lent, in which the church solemnized no marriages. All of the worshipers’ attention went to God in gratitude for His abundant grace for which they had asked.
Our Lord taught on asking – not for the first time – in the same paragraph as He informed the apostles He would return to His Father. Surely there is a connection between petition and ascension.
“Until now you have asked for nothing in My name,” He tells them. Have they not? Have they not tried to pry one explanation after another from Him? They are peppering Him even now with queries.
Even if they have not yet adopted the phrase “in Jesus’ name,” they have asked according to His instructions, notably in what we now call the Lord’s Prayer.
Yet Jesus says they have asked for nothing. They have asked, but what they have asked for is nothing. Like Adam and Eve, they seek knowledge of things too terrible for them to know when Christ has come to offer them God Himself.
They are pecking in the dirt like chickens in the yard when He is showing them an everlasting banquet spread out before them.
The Son reveals the Father; the Son will give the Father away to any who will ask. God’s free grace pours forth from a God who gives Himself freely.
The two are inseparable. We cannot receive grace without receiving God. All we need is the faith to grasp that God can be ours. That faith can move mountains.
A day is coming when they shall pray in His name but “I do not say to you that I shall pray the Father for you.” Will He abandon them? May it never be! “For the Father Himself loves you,” He says, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God.”
They will need no Mediator then; they will have the Father fully, the Father of Christ whom they love, in whose name they now ask.
He has come from the Father and will ascend to the Father. This world is not His home -- or theirs, or ours. Here is our epiphany. He has come so that He might return. He is speaking in plain language now, revealing His purpose to the ones He loves.
"Now we are sure that You know all things,” these apostles say, “and have no need that anyone should question You. By this we believe that You came forth from God."
His omniscience proves His deity. Does anyone dare question God Himself? They have asked and asked and never framed the right question: How can we know the Father? How can we have the Father? For if they have the Father they have no need of the many trifling worldly things that amuse them, and us. God is all in all.
Do you hear an echo of the Sermon on the Mount? Jesus told them then not to be anxious for food or drink or clothing or even life itself. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” -- and He will provide for your physical needs.
Making anything more important than God -- even the requirements of physical life -- is a violation of the first commandment. It is idolatry.
They will desert Him, scattering like startled rabbits, but He will not be alone, for the Father is with Him. Despite their defection, in Him they will have peace, the peace of knowing God. The tribulation of the world will not pass from them in this life -- but they must not fear.
For their Lord tells them, “I have overcome the world.”
He triumphed over the world because the things of the world held no allure for Him, even this transitory life on earth. He had come from the Father and would fulfill His heart’s desire by returning to the Father. The Father is all in all.
He had lived and died for the moment He would ascend – and open the way for those who love Him to follow. On high He makes petition for us, asking the Father to show us mercy. But before He ascended He told those He loves, ask and ye shall receive. But ask for the only thing of true value.
Our Lord has done His part, dying and rising again for us. He has given us a commission. His apostles have elaborated it. In our epistle lesson, we heard from St. James, the Lord’s half-brother.
Those missionary monks who followed the trail of the plague took his words to heart. They were doers of the word and not merely hearers.
There is one more thing to say about them. They chose to regard the pagan priests not as enemies but as victims. Yes, they battled them to stake their claim to the truth, but they did so not with malice but with mercy in their hearts.
“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this,” St. James says, “to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”
Those missionaries loved the people trapped without hope in the travails of this world without succumbing to the temptations of this world, temptations like hatred and vengeance.
The Christians of the Middle Ages operated on two tracks, one temporal and one eternal. Are we any different? We ask that we might have God for eternity and God’s provision to preserve us until we join Him in it.
Some ask boldly. A few years ago when I was working in overseas missions I visited a missionary named Dan in a Muslim country. He and his wife had been there for 15 years, raising their children in that land of spiritual darkness while offering to lead strangers into the light.
And Dan could count on one hand the converts who were the meager fruit of his labors. I asked if tedium and rejection and frustration had worn him down. “God’s doing a work here I can’t see,” Dan said. “One day a Paul will come along and reap the harvest.”
Meanwhile, day after day he asks God in Jesus’ name to use him to shine the light of the gospel in some tiny crack or crevice in the darkness. Like the little girl who wanted a cookie, he blesses his Father by asking Him.
And as for us, beloved . . . And as for us, if we are doers of the word, we will bundle the love of Christ and deliver it to the jails and shelters and unwed mothers homes, to our family members and neighbors. We will meet physical needs while teaching them to ask the right question: How can I have God?
So what is the connection between Jesus’ teaching on rogation – asking -- and His ascension? One connection, I think, is that He is the Man who taught men to ask in His name until we can ask the Father directly, and He is the Lord who ascended to put our petitions before the Father until we can do so ourselves.
Because He is Man He knows our temptations and trials and our need for those things only God can give. Because He is God He can cleanse us so that we may appear before the Father as though we had never sinned.
Blessed be the name of the Lord in whose name we ask. Amen.
Whatever You Ask . . .
Ps 65, Ezek 34:25-31, St. James 1:22-27, St. John 16:23b-33
. . .
On a Saturday afternoon, a little girl asks her daddy if she may have a cookie before she lies down for her nap. By asking, she acknowledges her daddy’s authority over her, his greater experience and wisdom, his more complete knowledge -- of both little girls and cookies. The little girl has no idea how she blesses her father by asking him.
A scene from two thousand years earlier: The apostles are in the upper room with their Lord, and they are flummoxed. Jesus has told them: "A little while, and you will not see Me; and again a little while, and you will see Me, because I go to the Father."
What can He mean? Their minds, anchored to this earth like the Rock of Gibraltar, cannot rise into the heavens and conceive of their Lord ascending into His Father’s presence and then returning to earth. How can He go to the Father and then return? How long will He be away? How will they cope with a world increasingly hostile to the gospel without its Author, their Lord?
But Jesus is God, and God does not explain Himself to men. Throughout His earthly ministry, He has countered questions with questions -- and with answers about spiritual matters the questioner had not even contemplated.
Now comes another cryptic reply to His perplexed apostles. His answer: They must ask.
The pagan poses questions only to men. Asking is a way of gaining information or getting help or currying favor. For the Christian, when the question is addressed to God, it is a way of showing the humility and trust of a small child.
We ask God because He knows all things and, by comparison, we know nothing at all, because He loves with a perfect love we cannot even imagine – a love that compels our trust.
To ask is to put on the humility our Lord modeled on His knees, to pray to the Father who – glorious to think! – gives a hearing to our petitions just as He heard those of His own Son. When we demand, we grab at gobs of glory for ourselves; when we ask we bestow bouquets of glory on God.
Asking is a matter of particular moment as we gather on this Fifth Sunday After Easter, which is, as the prayer book notes, “commonly called Rogation Sunday.” The three days following are called “rogation days,” a time of fasting and prayer leading up to Ascension Day.
Next, we celebrate our Lord’s ascension to His Father and our Father. His apostles would not see Him for “a little while . . . because I go to the Father.”
This matter of “rogation” bears investigation. It is, of course, an ancient rite.
The word comes from the Latin verb meaning “to ask.” Rogation days followed the reading of the passage from St. John’s gospel we read today, including this line: “Most assuredly, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in My name He will give you.”
Rogation, then, is simply about asking – asking the Father in the name of the Son. How many millions of times a day do Christians around the world send up petitions to God “in Jesus’ name” or, as we Anglicans are fond of saying, “for Christ’s sake”? We are simply following the instruction of our Lord. He commands us to ask.
We ask in His name as a confession of our own unworthiness, pleading “for Christ’s sake” because we cannot approach the throne of grace by our own merits. Christ, pure and holy, is our righteousness.
We have a great deal of company back through time as well as in space. By the sixth century, the period of rogation was considered an ancient custom. It was from that point forward, however, that it developed into an important part of the liturgical calendar and a key element in the dispersion of the faith across Northern Europe.
In times of calamity – and there was no shortage of calamity in the Middle Ages – missionary monks toppled pagan shrines and temples and replaced them with churches – and got away with it. Their argument was as simple and pure as a raindrop: Those false gods have no power to save.
This strategy proved so effective that faithful, courageous missionaries followed in the wake of plagues, introducing the gospel into places where the magic of pagan priests had failed.
In England, a Celtic church had already existed for centuries, but the Church of Rome sent missionaries to Kent in the year 597 after a plague and, according to legend, a small group of monks baptized 10,000 new believers.
Whatever the number, this event shaped the church in England for almost a thousand years.
This practice dealt a death blow to pagan rituals and beliefs. The indigenous peoples could not invest their trust in their idols. They needed a Savior.
Christianity began to develop on two tracks. Theologians gave their attention to eternity, to the affairs of the world to come. Missionaries applied the liturgy, sacraments and the cult of the saints to sickness and other afflictions of this life.
The earliest prayer books contained petitions for the sick and pleas for good health. We can hear the strains of them in our own Book of Common Prayer. In a few minutes we will ask God to preserve us in body as well as soul – “through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” We ask in His name.
And we will “humbly beseech” our Lord for comfort for all “who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness or any other adversity.”
If pagan spells and sacrifices had been tried and found wanting, something must replace them. Anointing of the sick as a way of asking God’s blessing of healing became the alternative. But the Christians offered even more.
Simultaneous with prayers for good health to this unseen God whom no idol could represent came hope – hope for spiritual health. In a time of widespread and recurring plagues, many would still die – but now they could depart this life in the certain hope of eternity with their Lord in a glorious new kingdom where there is no disease or suffering, where our Lord wipes away every tear.
Missionaries put paganism to rout by moving relics – often bones of the saints – to a church, often one built over a pagan shrine where the local people had made appeal to the bones of their own departed. A network of shrines with tombs containing bones of the saints dotted the western part of the Roman Empire as Christianity fanned out across Northern Europe at a clip outstripping even that of the plague.
The monks developed a Christian calendar with festivals that corresponded to the natives’ understanding of time, organized according to the seasons of seedtime and harvest. We see the genius of the medieval church in its appropriation of pagan feasts. Easter is one of them.
The primary reason Christianity exploded into the greatest religion on earth today with 2 billion adherents is that it is true. Another important reason is that its leaders of old baptized time.
The church poured a special emphasis into the part of the liturgical year between the winter and summer solstices.
Think of pagan peasants, abiding in the bleakness of winter -- the biting cold and gnawing hunger -- until the early summer brought warmth and abundant food.
Now imagine how they entered into Christ’s suffering in His eternal winter on the cross . . . and then reveled in His glorious radiance in the resurrection. They claimed a share in both the Lord’s anguish and His deliverance from death.
Rogation Sunday and the three days that follow give us an especially sharp picture of how the missionaries worked. A Roman god named Robigus was the personification of agricultural disease – and thus could prevent it.
The spring festival in his honor tracked an earlier Celtic tradition of dealing with evil spirits and involved offering sacrifices to the deity. The Christians supplanted it with rogation -- fasting and prayers to the God of heaven. They taught the pagans to ask the One who could answer. Asking became a tool of evangelism.
The priest, churchwarden and choir boys or, in some cases, the entire congregation, processed around the perimeter of the parish in a ceremony called “beating the bounds,” purifying the parish and asking God’s blessing on the fields. They recited the Litany as they walked, confessing their sins and admitting their need for mercy.
The three weeks following Rogation Sunday was one of three periods each year, with Advent and Lent, in which the church solemnized no marriages. All of the worshipers’ attention went to God in gratitude for His abundant grace for which they had asked.
Our Lord taught on asking – not for the first time – in the same paragraph as He informed the apostles He would return to His Father. Surely there is a connection between petition and ascension.
“Until now you have asked for nothing in My name,” He tells them. Have they not? Have they not tried to pry one explanation after another from Him? They are peppering Him even now with queries.
Even if they have not yet adopted the phrase “in Jesus’ name,” they have asked according to His instructions, notably in what we now call the Lord’s Prayer.
Yet Jesus says they have asked for nothing. They have asked, but what they have asked for is nothing. Like Adam and Eve, they seek knowledge of things too terrible for them to know when Christ has come to offer them God Himself.
They are pecking in the dirt like chickens in the yard when He is showing them an everlasting banquet spread out before them.
The Son reveals the Father; the Son will give the Father away to any who will ask. God’s free grace pours forth from a God who gives Himself freely.
The two are inseparable. We cannot receive grace without receiving God. All we need is the faith to grasp that God can be ours. That faith can move mountains.
A day is coming when they shall pray in His name but “I do not say to you that I shall pray the Father for you.” Will He abandon them? May it never be! “For the Father Himself loves you,” He says, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God.”
They will need no Mediator then; they will have the Father fully, the Father of Christ whom they love, in whose name they now ask.
He has come from the Father and will ascend to the Father. This world is not His home -- or theirs, or ours. Here is our epiphany. He has come so that He might return. He is speaking in plain language now, revealing His purpose to the ones He loves.
"Now we are sure that You know all things,” these apostles say, “and have no need that anyone should question You. By this we believe that You came forth from God."
His omniscience proves His deity. Does anyone dare question God Himself? They have asked and asked and never framed the right question: How can we know the Father? How can we have the Father? For if they have the Father they have no need of the many trifling worldly things that amuse them, and us. God is all in all.
Do you hear an echo of the Sermon on the Mount? Jesus told them then not to be anxious for food or drink or clothing or even life itself. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” -- and He will provide for your physical needs.
Making anything more important than God -- even the requirements of physical life -- is a violation of the first commandment. It is idolatry.
They will desert Him, scattering like startled rabbits, but He will not be alone, for the Father is with Him. Despite their defection, in Him they will have peace, the peace of knowing God. The tribulation of the world will not pass from them in this life -- but they must not fear.
For their Lord tells them, “I have overcome the world.”
He triumphed over the world because the things of the world held no allure for Him, even this transitory life on earth. He had come from the Father and would fulfill His heart’s desire by returning to the Father. The Father is all in all.
He had lived and died for the moment He would ascend – and open the way for those who love Him to follow. On high He makes petition for us, asking the Father to show us mercy. But before He ascended He told those He loves, ask and ye shall receive. But ask for the only thing of true value.
Our Lord has done His part, dying and rising again for us. He has given us a commission. His apostles have elaborated it. In our epistle lesson, we heard from St. James, the Lord’s half-brother.
Those missionary monks who followed the trail of the plague took his words to heart. They were doers of the word and not merely hearers.
There is one more thing to say about them. They chose to regard the pagan priests not as enemies but as victims. Yes, they battled them to stake their claim to the truth, but they did so not with malice but with mercy in their hearts.
“Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this,” St. James says, “to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.”
Those missionaries loved the people trapped without hope in the travails of this world without succumbing to the temptations of this world, temptations like hatred and vengeance.
The Christians of the Middle Ages operated on two tracks, one temporal and one eternal. Are we any different? We ask that we might have God for eternity and God’s provision to preserve us until we join Him in it.
Some ask boldly. A few years ago when I was working in overseas missions I visited a missionary named Dan in a Muslim country. He and his wife had been there for 15 years, raising their children in that land of spiritual darkness while offering to lead strangers into the light.
And Dan could count on one hand the converts who were the meager fruit of his labors. I asked if tedium and rejection and frustration had worn him down. “God’s doing a work here I can’t see,” Dan said. “One day a Paul will come along and reap the harvest.”
Meanwhile, day after day he asks God in Jesus’ name to use him to shine the light of the gospel in some tiny crack or crevice in the darkness. Like the little girl who wanted a cookie, he blesses his Father by asking Him.
And as for us, beloved . . . And as for us, if we are doers of the word, we will bundle the love of Christ and deliver it to the jails and shelters and unwed mothers homes, to our family members and neighbors. We will meet physical needs while teaching them to ask the right question: How can I have God?
So what is the connection between Jesus’ teaching on rogation – asking -- and His ascension? One connection, I think, is that He is the Man who taught men to ask in His name until we can ask the Father directly, and He is the Lord who ascended to put our petitions before the Father until we can do so ourselves.
Because He is Man He knows our temptations and trials and our need for those things only God can give. Because He is God He can cleanse us so that we may appear before the Father as though we had never sinned.
Blessed be the name of the Lord in whose name we ask. Amen.