St. Edward's Blog & News

Sermon given on Sunday, August 27, 2023
This morning we gather together with a sense of heaviness, of loss. Many of us are still in shock, still trying to process the sudden loss of our friend and our bishop, Rommie Starks. There are no magic theological words to clear up the grief, to make this all seem to make sense to us. We feel the bishop’s absence and lament the fact that we will no longer have his familiar, companionable presence among us.

Taken individually, each of these words marks a crucial aspect of our identity and calling as a parish. Taken together, they name what we exist to do: We are continuing a transformative tradition.

The earliest mention we have of bells in the Church comes in the sixth century, where they were used to summon communities and monasteries to services. In the eighth century, Pope Stephen II erected a belfry with three bells (campanae) at St. Peter’s Basilica. By this time, bells had come to be an integral part of a church’s furnishings, and exterior towers for the purpose of holding larger bells began to be constructed.

As I often complain this time of year, we have a tendency to treat the Ascension as something of an after-thought, a way to get Jesus off-stage after His Resurrection so that the Holy Ghost can take over at Pentecost. But the Ascension is far from an after-thought; rather, it is the consummation, the fulfillment, of all that Our Lord’s Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection were for.

If you were to ask many Christians what constitutes the hope of our calling, what the end is for which we were created, you might get some version of “to make it to Heaven” or “to get saved.” Neither of those answers would be wrong, of course. But what do we mean by them?