The Ascension and Our Divine Connection

Fr. Geoff Harvey delivers a powerful sermon on the significance of Christ's ascension, exploring the profound connection between humanity and the divine. He delves into the identity of Jesus and the challenges posed by modern-day "wolves" in society and the church. Fr. Geoff's message is one of hope, urging believers to remain steadfast in their faith.

Transcript

Christ is ascended. That's right, it's a different one, isn't it? Christ is ascended from earth to heaven. Yeah, well done. Very good. It's good news, good news for us. So I've got three simple points this morning. The first one is where, the second one is who, and the third one is wolves.

Alright, where. Thursday last week was the feast of the ascension. In the early church, it was the greatest feast of the year. It was bigger than Christmas, it was bigger than Pascha. Jesus has ascended to his throne in heaven. At the incarnation, Christ brought his divine nature to human nature. In the mystery of the ascension, Christ brings human nature to the divine Godhead.

It's hard to get this one across. I'm going to try using a simple illustration, a visual help today. Subdeacon's going to help me here. I've got three triangles here to try and get this through to you because it helped me. Sorry, I'll use my other microphone. So here I have three triangles. I'll put it onto this. I don't know if they can see it on the picture. Three triangles, but they're separate. There's God the Father, there's God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Now, what happened in the incarnation was that the Son, God the Son, came down to earth and he clothed himself in humanity, became a human being, and he walked amongst us on this earth. So he put on human flesh and human nature.

Okay, now when he went back to heaven, this is what I find helpful. He actually took that human nature back up to heaven, and it became a part of the Godhead. So now the Trinity has changed. The Godhead has changed because our human nature is there. Wow, it just shows you how important humanity, human beings, are to God in this wonderful creation, this vast universe that he's created. We are very, very special. Don't let anybody tell you anything different. And this is why we have to work hard to aspire to live lives which are pleasing to God because we have the privilege of having our human nature in the Godhead. Wow, I mean, it's amazing, don't you think? Do you think it's amazing? Few nods, that's great. It's incredible. Alright, okay, that's that. Thank you, I can take this back again.

That's what I call my triangle illustration. So God reigns, sorry, Jesus reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit in his glorified body. The angels are amazed that man should have such a high place in the Godhead. The ascension of Christ confirms the last stage in God's plan for mankind, total union with himself upon our departure from this world. When we come to the point in the liturgy where I say, "Let us lift up our hearts," I always lift up and I see Christ, the ascended Christ on his throne, and that helps me when things are going bad, not going the way I wanted. I think, well, God's still on his throne, Jesus is still on the throne, he's still sovereign, he's still in control, and that gives me encouragement to keep going. So that's all I want to say about where. Where is Jesus? He's on the throne in heaven. Hallelujah, Christ is ascended.

Well done. Next one is who. So we've got where, now who. In Matthew 16, Jesus asks the disciples, well, first of all, he said, "Who do men say that I am?" And they told him, some say John the Baptist, some say Elijah, some say one of the prophets. But Jesus then said this question, "Who do you say I am?" He wanted to know what they said he was. This is the question for us all, really. And Peter, St. Peter, responded, "You are the Christ, the living God," to which Jesus blessed Peter for his insight, indicating that his understanding was a revelation and not something that came from human reasoning. This question is possibly the most important question that we must answer during our lives if we're going to pass the final exam. If there's any students here, the final exam, who is Jesus? Who is he? This is the question. Jesus is Lord, he is Messiah, he is the Christ, he is the Son of God, he's God himself in human form, ascended into the Godhead with our human nature.

Amazing. All was well in the church after St. Peter had that confession of Christ as the Messiah until a man called Arius turned up, and he came along saying that Jesus was someone else. He wasn't what Peter confessed. He taught that the Son of God was created by the Father and that there was a time when the Son of God did not exist. And it was at this first ecumenical council that the heresy of Arianism was condemned. In our gospel today, we find in John's gospel, chapter 17, we find recorded a part of one of Christ's prayers, which is actually known as the high priestly prayer because it contains basic elements of a prayer which a priest offers to God when a sacrifice is about to be made, and in his case, it was himself. And today's gospel is always read on the seventh Sunday after Pascha, the day when we remember the fathers of the first ecumenical council, which took place in 325 AD. 325, oh, this year, 2025, 1700 years later, exactly this year, about this sort of time, they met 1700 years ago to sort out this first major problem in the early church, and they came up with the creed. Well, they came up with the first part of the creed, which we still say today. There's been more additions to it, but these were the people who created or got the creed started. There was a lot of argument, a lot of, in fact, St. Nicholas, you probably heard, St. Nicholas actually slapped Arius on the face and was banned from the council for a while until the Theotokos told them to bring him back in again. So it wasn't kind of sitting down having cups of tea and talking about it. It was full-on argument to sort out who is Jesus Christ. And in fact, all the councils, if you think about what the councils are all doing, they're all trying to work out who is Christ. And so this is why our church holds to the first seven, well, the seven councils, seven ecumenical councils, which gives us a good solid picture of who Jesus is.

This heresy is still around today. I'm sure you're aware of it. It's called Jehovah's Witnesses. They believe the same as Arius believed. If they come to your door and they want to talk to you about their faith, just politely decline and let them know that you're an Orthodox Christian, and they won't stay around too long. Alright, so that's who. Sorry, where, who, now wolves. Wolves, it seems a bit of a change from who and where, but here we go. Wolves. Acts 20:29, epistle today, "For I know this," said St. Paul, "that after my departure, savage wolves will come among you, not sparing the flock." Arius was a wolf. He could have torn the church to pieces, but fortunately, the church gathered together in that first ecumenical council and was able to protect the church. We need to heed St. Paul's warning. In the Old Testament, wolves are categorized along with lions as dangerous and as top predators. In the Bible, wolves are used to describe people who are cruel, fierce, and destructive. Jesus, in Matthew chapter 10, when he was talking to his disciples, told them that he was sending them out as sheep among wolves. Do you feel like that sometimes when you're out in the world as a Christian, a little sheep surrounded by wolves? I'm sure we do. He was, of course, talking about the coming persecution. Wolves are repeatedly mentioned in the holy scriptures as enemies of the flock, evil men, false teachers, false prophets. In Romans 16, St. Paul indicates that Satan stands behind these wolves, using them to achieve his purposes as he preys on innocent, God-fearing Christians. Compare Satan with Jesus. Jesus is the good shepherd protecting the sheep. Satan is the wolf who's trying to tear the flock apart.

And that's why in Jesus's high prayer, he prays that we would be one as his Father is one with the Father. St. Paul's description of these people as fierce wolves probably takes its inspiration from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, where he describes such people who come in sheep's clothing as ravenous wolves. So I want to, how do we protect the church from wolves? So I want to divide this into two things: how do we protect the church from wolves in the culture, and then how do we protect the church from wolves in the church? So first of all, the culture. I'd like to focus briefly on a particular specific breed of wolf that's around today and that's really active. They're called the new atheists, and I would call them old fools, actually, because they're all getting a bit old now, and the Bible says the fool says in his heart there is no God. In fact, somebody told me recently that they decided to become an atheist, and I said, "Shh, don't tell anybody, otherwise they'll all know that you're a fool." They took it well.

So how did this particular pack of wolves come into existence in the Christian West? Very briefly, Charles Darwin, who originally trained for the Anglican priesthood, wrote a book in 1859 entitled "The Origin of Species," which he claimed was scientific proof that we have evolved. Now, if you look at the modern scientific investigation, you'll see that there's so many holes in that theory that it doesn't have legs. Have I mixed my metaphors there? It's not something you should base your life on. How many people have heard of Friedrich Nietzsche? I think a few of you have, yes. Okay, if I asked you, he lived in the late 19th century, 1844 to 1900. If I asked you to tell me what one thing you might know about him, you'd probably say to me that he said, "God is dead." Remember, have you heard that, some of you? And you'd be right. In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche, who was the son of a Lutheran pastor, wrote the book "The Joyous Science." He was a philosopher. That book is sometimes known as "The Gay Science." It's quite interesting, isn't it? That's interesting. In that book, he wrote this. He said, "The greatest event of recent times, the fact that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God has become untenable, has already begun to cast its first shadows over Europe."

Okay, so you can see it developing here. It's got to the point now where when the European Union was formed a few years ago, they didn't even mention their Christian heritage in their constitution. It wasn't even mentioned. The Pope tried to get them to put it in, they refused. So that's how far we've come from Darwin and Nietzsche. Nietzsche actually wasn't rejoicing in the death of God. He was actually trying to point out that the death of Christianity inevitably leads to the death of Christian values, and I think you can see that in our own country and in Europe especially. He said the horizon is not bright and that there are dangers ahead. He was right. He was a prophet. Shortly after this, he had a complete mental breakdown in 1889, and he spent the rest of his life in the care of his family. He died in 1900.

Then we read these words of David Bentley Hart, who's a modern Orthodox philosopher who, over 100 years later after those two, wrote a book called "Atheist Delusions" in 2009, and he says this: "It's hard to suppress a feeling of morbid despair when the aspiring ape," okay, now he's thinking about evolution now, so we've all come from apes if you follow the evolution model, we're an aspiring ape, "when the aspiring ape ceases to think himself a fallen angel." See the contrast here? The Christian idea, we are part of the Godhead, we've fallen, we're struggling, but we're aiming to get right with God and the same as God. But if you come with an evolutionary model, you're an aspiring ape. "When the aspiring ape ceases to think himself a fallen angel, perhaps inevitably he resigns himself to being an ape and then becomes contented with his lot and ultimately even rejoices that the universe demands little more from him than an ape's contentment." And that reflects secular society today. They're happy to be apes doing whatever they want, whenever they want, with whatever they want, to whoever they want.

These so-called new atheists have taken what Darwin and Nietzsche wrote and have attempted to tear Western culture to pieces. They are wolves. So here's a little story of encouragement, though. When a young girl escaped from the Muslim Brotherhood many years ago in Somalia and escaped to Europe and gained asylum, her name was Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Anybody heard of her here? Yes, a few of you have, that's good. You need to know about this girl. I've read two of her books because I heard about her, I thought, man, I admire this girl's courage running away from a Muslim Brotherhood situation. I mean, that's the death penalty. And she became, I was hoping she became, you know, just an ordinary Western person. She went to university and she demonstrates she is highly intelligent. She's come from Somalia, she's highly intelligent, she can hold her an argument with the best minds in this world. It's extraordinary. And I was hoping and praying that she'd become a Christian, but she didn't. The wolves got her. She became one of the new atheists, and she worked with them for many, many years. But what I didn't realize until very recently was she was miserable. She was having mental problems, she didn't know what she was living for, she was really, really struggling. I didn't know that.

She came to prominence when she worked with a person called Van Gogh in Holland, and he and her produced a film which was criticizing Islam and warning the West of the dangers of Islam. And then one day he was on his bicycle and he got knocked off his bicycle and assassinated in the street by a radical Muslim, and they left a dagger in his chest with a note saying that Ali Hirsi, you're next. So she had to flee to America, and she's been working over there ever since then in some think tanks over there. And then only recently I heard that she'd become a Christian. I was so happy. And in the last few weeks, Corinne and Janet noticed there was a debate between her and the leader of the atheist wolf pack, Richard Dawkins. You probably heard of him. And I thought, I'm going to watch this. I want to see how this goes. So we sat down and we watched it, and she did very well as a young Christian. She's obviously studied the faith, and she was able to hold her ground with him. At the end, right at the end, he asked her a question. He said to her, "How can you believe all these things that are not true?" That was the question. I thought, how is she going to answer this one? This is going to be a full-on philosophical argument now. And her argument took me completely by surprise, and it was brilliant. She said to him, "I choose to believe it. I choose to believe it." He didn't have, he couldn't do anything with that. "I choose to believe it." And she said, then she went on to say, "It's made a tremendous difference to my life. I'm not having my mental health problems anymore. I found meaning and purpose in life," and so on and so on. What a wonderful thing. It's our prayer and our hope that those of you who have come to the Good Shepherd to learn about the Orthodox faith through the foundations course will come to the point where you are able to choose to believe. That's where we want to get you to, specifically to believe the creed begun by the fathers of the first ecumenical council as a protection, as our main protection from wolf packs like the new atheists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and others.

Recently, we had the opportunity to buy a Jehovah's Witness church, would you believe? It came up, we could afford it, it was a bit small, but they explained to me they thought this was great. Yeah, when we sell the church, the money is going to go to Africa so we can evangelize the Africans. I thought, there's no way I'm going to buy this church. I don't want to be responsible for sending wolves into Africa, so we didn't buy that church. It's part of the Orthodox practice to say the creed every day in our own devotions and, of course, on Sundays at the liturgy. I encourage everyone to learn it by heart because this is our main protection from the wolf packs in the culture today.

Lastly, small point, wolves in the parish. St. Paul said, "Also from among yourselves, men will rise up speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after themselves. Therefore, be alert." I know everyone's thinking, surely not at the Good Shepherd, but if it happened to Jesus with Judas, and if it happened to St. Paul with some of his disciples, why not for this unworthy priest, Father Geoff, and the rest of us? We have to be alert. Now, what's the protection for this? If you're new to the parish, you may not realize that nothing happens in the church without the blessing of the clergy. Nothing. And we, in turn, don't do anything without the blessing of the bishop. Someone might ask you to join a group or do something seemingly very spiritual with them. It might sound really nice, really spiritual, really good, really helpful. But your first question must be, do you have the blessing of the clergy, of the priests? If you discover there's no blessing, then you should avoid that activity or at least talk to the clergy about it. You have to be very careful in case it falls into the category of a wolf in sheep's clothing. Now, people doing these things may not be aware that this is the way it is in the parish. The Orthodox know this from their mother's milk, just about, but the rest of us coming in from the Western church don't really get this, and we need to take this on board and apply it. Where do we get the blessing from? Myself, Father Nicholas, Subdeacon Timothy, nowhere else. This is how we keep safe from wolves coming into the parish.

We, of course, need to teach our children about the dangers of wolves. Have you read the story to your children yet of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf who disguises himself as an old lady to trick her? The children are not too young to learn about wolves, and they're not too young to learn the creed either, to put that into their soul so that when they're faced by the wolf packs in the world, they're ready. May God protect us from all the wolves that attack the church today in the culture and inside the churches. Christ is ascended. Amen.