Rogation Sunday Sermon

May 10, 2026 | Fr. Glenn M. Spencer

“For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father…”

One example of deification is eternal life. God has no beginning and no end. The way the Bible speaks of this divine attribute is by calling it “eternal life.” Eternal life is perfectly natural for God, but it is not natural for humanity. However, we believe that Christians, by grace, share eternal life with God. This is an example of what we are calling deification.

We are exploring the means or the instrument of grace that effects deification, which is what the Church calls “participation.” So we are studying what the Church means by deification, and we also want to understanding participation. We have a God given destiny to grow more and more into the likeness of Jesus Christ which is deification and the way we will fulfill that destiny is by means of participation.

There are two types of participation. The first instantiation of participation is the existence of creation. All creation “lives and moves and has its being” by participation in the Creator who is source of all being. Moses asked God who he should tell the children of Israel had sent him:

“And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” Exodus 3:14

The first instantiation of participation is the fact that everything that exist, exist by participation in God. No creature created itself and no creature can sustain its own existence for even an instance much less may it do so eternally. Only the Creator, only God, “with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning…” is self-subsistent.

The second instantiation of participation is the result of our baptism into Jesus Christ, by which we were grafted into Christ the Vine, planted together in Jesus, buried with him and raised with him. A branch, the cutting from a wild olive tree, is grafted into a cultured olive tree, and the grafted-in-cutting feeds upon the life-giving sap of the cultured olive tree.

So we, in a manner of speaking, feed upon Christ’s human and divine natures by being grafted into Christ which is accomplished in our baptism. With our baptism, we are on the road to our destiny. Feeding upon the life-giving substance of Christ, God’s Olive Tree: we are deified, we are being deified, we shall be deified and take on the likeness of Jesus himself as time rolls on.

Now there are those who say that participation is always like the relation of the shadow to the cathedral and many of those folk will take that to its logical extension and say that, in fact, all of creation is nothing but shadows. And that includes us. So let's say you turn around to see the cathedral behind you, and say you look beyond the cathedral to the village and you look beyond the village to see beautiful, green mountains far away — there are those who will say, what you see, all these created things, are just shadows. Only God is real. Furthermore, if you permit yourself to really delight in the cathedral, or if you are smitten and fall in love with a girl from the village, or if you contemplate the beauty of the greenness of the green mountains too much, you are beguiled, bewitched by shadows.

Salvation for such people lies only in being set free of the illusion that the creation has any worth in and of itself. The only way to be free is to look past creation to its Source which is the God who is God. (No heresy is 100% heresy; it always contains a mix of truth and falsehood.) Now that point-of-view, just to be clear, is incorrect to the core. Jesus said:

“For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father…” John 16:27-32

When the Word of the Father, the Logos, “came forth from the Father” he did not descend from heaven to earth in a thunderous beam of light, but rather the Logos descended from heaven to earth entering into the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary and through her flesh, God became flesh of our flesh. His “coming forth from the Father” is what we call the Annunciation which we celebrate on March 25, nine months before the nativity of Jesus.

What the Annunciation declares is a fundamental reality of life, which is that creation, and specifically created humanity, far from being worthless is assumable, that is we are fashioned for union with the God who is God.

And furthermore by actually uniting created humanity to his divine life God has perfected humanity’s own natural worth. God has raised us up to share in the eternal life of God, which, as I have said, is part of our deification because eternal life is a quality of God’s divinity.

But how do we know that the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ, body and all, is worthy of sharing in the eternal life of the God who is God? We know that reality because of the Feast of the Ascension, which feast we will celebrate this Thursday at 12:15 at this Altar. We know that to be reality because when Jesus left his disciples to return to his Father, he returned as the son of Mary, the Mother of God. He did not slough off his human nature as though he were scrapping mud from feet, but he entered his Father’s presence robed in flesh, the fruit of Mary’s womb. Because human nature, body and all, has been assumed into the life of God, we human beings, each and all, have a way into the life of God.

Furthermore it is misguided to think that one has to be careful not to give too much love and reverence to created things because if you do you are taking love and reverence away from God. Listen to me, if you think you love your wife or husband or children, or this beautiful world too much — remember this: Jesus loves them way more than you do.

And it is just as misguided to think that I can actually look beyond created things, belittling and devaluing creation in order to get straight to creation’s Source. Creation is good and we encounter goodness not merely by looking beyond creation to its Source, but we also experience goodness as we encounter creation in all its smeared and smudged concretions, in its remarkable, irreducible, sensual, messy uniqueness and especially so as we encounter God’s creature man. Furthermore, St. Paul argues that at the very least, entirely apart from special revelation, the creation reveals the power and glory of the God who is God:

“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made…”
Romans 1:20

In fact, he insists that the children of God can truly love of the Father only by going through the creation. Not only is that true intellectually, but it is true for participation because participation requires a means of grace which is a material, external sacramental sign that has the power to effect what it signifies. The truly great material Sacrament of Sacraments, the uber-Sacrament, is the created humanity of our Lord Jesus, the humanity he received from his Mother Mary, the humanity that makes our participation in the life of God possible. This is reality: our human nature, material body and all, that once hung upon the Cross is not a shadow of the real — but this very day the irreducible uniqueness of our humanity participates in the interior life of God the blessed Trinity. Human nature, body and all, has been assumed into the life of God, taken up into the life of the God who is God, without annihilating Jesus’ human nature. And we know that to be true because when he ascended to his Father, he ascended in his true human nature, perfected — yes — but still true human nature. Grace perfects human nature, grace does not annihilate nature. I want to make one last point about the estimation of creation and in particular the estimation of our human nature. Most of this sermon has been aimed at the dismissal of creation based on the fact that it is creation and not God. That is the way of the gnostic.

I was raised in a church that had an extraordinarily low view of humanity, because of their belief in what they called total depravity, that one came to see sin as a constituent, an essential part, of our nature; so much so that they often referred to human nature as sin nature. In fact sin was practically regarded as a faculty of our nature. John Calvin summed up that point-of-view in a passage where he comments on the nature of infants:

“(The infant’s) whole nature is a seed of sin… (which is) only hateful and abhorrent to God.”

From that point-of-view it is absurd to suggest that human beings could participate in the divine nature. Salvation according to this perspective is entirely transactional. Salvation is a legal fiction in which Jesus has taken the place of the sinner, but no change occurs in the sinner. There is nothing like participation in the divine life, no deification, only forgiveness that is based on God not reckoning the sin to the sinner. Nothing really changes in the Christian and actual sin continues to be unavoidable even for the man who is “in Christ” just as much as it is unavoidable for non-Christians.

Now once again let me say, just to be clear, that is not true, that is out of touch with reality. We are wounded by sin and the wound is a wound unto death unless we can find a way to heal and then to participate in the life of God, but sin itself is not an elemental part of human nature. And for those who are “in Christ,” baptized into Christ and infused with heavenly virtues — those children of God most certainly do not have to sin, in fact St. Paul says that we have been set free from sin and death. “Grace perfects nature without annihilating nature,” which means that our participation in the life of God washes, cleans, and heals the wounds of the Fall, and beyond that, participation in the divine nature perfects our cleansed & healed humanity.

What Paul said is true: we are “more than conquerers” of sin through Christ — but the conquest of sin is not perfecting our nature. Sin is unnatural. The conquest of sin is the elimination of the unnatural so that nature may be perfected. Grace does not make us something other, either more or less, than human beings. It enables us to achieve God’s finality for our life as his own children. 

“He has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature.” II Peter 1:4