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Endings and Beginnings
Acts 1:1-11; Ephesians 1:15-23
May 17, 2015[i]
This week we honor our high
school graduates. It’s not coincidental
that we call the ceremony through which they will pass a “commencement.” This ceremony will mark the ending of their high
school career, but it also marks the beginning of life as an adult. They are able to vote, able to wage battle,
able to live on their own with the possible exception of writing the tuition
checks. Graduation is an ending and a
beginning.
Is it coincidental that we
honor our graduates on the Sunday that Christians mark as Ascension Sunday—a
day that in our understanding of the Gospel marks a cosmic ending and
beginning?
We don’t talk a lot about Ascension
in the United Methodist Church. Our
sisters and brothers in the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Episcopal, and Lutheran
Churches celebrated the Feast of the Ascension this past Thursday, the 40th
day of Eastertide. We Methodists tend to
mention it, if at all, on the Sunday following.
It isn’t that we have taken a pair of scissors and cut those words out
of our Bibles. I suspect that it we just
don’t quite know what to do with this story. Ascension doesn’t quite fit with our
understanding of the universe and the laws of physics. We hold on so tightly to our understanding of
the material laws of the universe that we fail to miss the deeper levels of
meaning.
Ascension also is difficult
because we tend to see it as a departure.
We hold on to those we love.
Ascension means that Jesus returned to His Father in Heaven. Regardless of how they take place, we don’t
like good byes. We try to hold on. I had the privilege of being present with
Mary Miller and her family when Mary drew her last breath. We all wanted to hold on to her—to keep her
with us—but we couldn’t.
In the same way, when Mary
Magdalene saw the Risen Christ in the Garden where He had been buried, she
reached out to embrace Him. She thought
she had lost him, but now she has found him and she doesn’t want to let Him go
ever again. But Jesus says to her,
Do not
hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my
brothers and say to them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my
God and your God.” (John 20:17).
It
almost seems as though the rest of the disciples felt the same way. They were staring into space, when two men in
white robes suddenly appeared and stood by them and asked,
why do
you stand looking up toward heaven? This
Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as
you saw him go into heaven. (Acts 1:11).
If they had really understood
who Jesus was, if they had listened to His words, if they had truly known
Him, they would not have felt the need to cling so desperately to his physical
presence.
Almost two thousand years
have passed, and I suspect that we still approach Ascension in the same way as
those first disciples, gazing up into the sky and trying to figure out the how
and missing the why.
Even if we suspend our
questions, we still tend to see the Ascension as the ending of Jesus
Christ’s ministry on earth and we miss the “why” of Ascension. We miss that it marks the beginning of
a new era in God’s relationship with His people. We mistakenly think of Ascension as a
departure that marks Jesus absence from us, and we miss that Ascension is part
of a ten-day transition that leads us to Pentecost when the Holy Spirit
descends upon the disciples, making God’s presence available to us at all
times. When you look at Ascension from
this perspective, Ascension gives us an opportunity to reflect on just who
Jesus Christ is—to contemplate the mystery that Jesus is God, the Word made
flesh, who came to live and dwell among us.
Ascension is the portal, the
point of entry, for us to ask again the question, who is Jesus for you?
This is not a day for solving
the mysteries of Jesus; this is a day for encountering the Risen and
Ascended Christ. It is a day for contemplating
that in the ending of Jesus’ earthly ministry, we can encounter God and enter
into a new beginning of the life that Jesus called “abundant.” (John
10:10).
But in that contemplation, we
need to change our opening question from “how did He do that” to “who is He?” Once we have answered the “who” question, the
“how” question becomes almost irrelevant.
Who is Jesus Christ for you? Do you know Jesus Christ as a miracle
worker? A moral philosopher? A great teacher? An itinerant preacher? A Savior?
The Son of God? And what do all
of those answers mean to you? How have
they made a difference in your life?
A few weeks ago, Carol and I
spent a few days with some dear friends of ours—friendships formed 35 years ago
in Kent, Ohio, when I was a lawyer, Carol was a teacher, Bob was a minister,
Becky was an insurance adjuster and Milt was in computer sales. It was Milt, the computer salesman, who
introduced me to a book entitled Jesus is
the Question: the 307 Questions Jesus
Asked and the 3 He Answered. The
book was written by Martin Copenhaver, a pastor ordained in the United Church
of Christ and currently the president of Andover Newton Theological School. In
one chapter of this book, Copenhaver talks about the problem we have in
responding to Jesus’ question: “Who do
you say that I am?”
Copenhaver tells about the
last sermon he gave to the First Congregational Church in Burlington, Vermont,
a church he had pastored for nine years.
He concluded that sermon with these words:
As I am
about to leave, there is something I want to tell you. I want to tell you what Jesus means to
me. I want to share my belief that
everything depends on him. I want to
urge you to learn from him. I want to
assure you that you can lean on him in times of trouble. I want to ask you to listen to his words of
challenge. I want to tell you that I
believe that you can entrust your life to him.
I want to affirm that he is Lord of this church and that in his name you
are freed to love one another and empowered to share that love with a hurting
world. I want to profess that, though
once people could not look at the face of God and live, now we are invited to
look at the face of God in him, in Jesus, and live as we have never lived
before. He is Emmanuel, God with us, God
with us all, whether we are together or apart.
That’s what it’s all about.
That’s all I know. Amen.[ii]
Those words engage me. Do you know any people who claim the name of
Jesus Christ, but who really don’t know Him?
People who remain in the beginning stages of their faith journey,
treating the beginning as the ending?
People who never take that next step in their walk with Christ to
encounter Him in all His fullness.
People who are willing to accept the gift of salvation that
Christ offers, but stop short of accepting the transformation that He
offers as we walk with Him. I, for one,
don’t want to be stuck in the beginning.
On this Ascension Day, I ask
you and I ask myself the same question. Who is Jesus Christ for you? How would you answer the question? Can you join with Copenhaver and say that
“everything depends on him,” that you “learn from him” and “lean on him” and
that you have “entrust[ed] your life to him?”
Have you experienced the freedom He offers “to love one another” and the
power “to share that love with a hurting world?” This is what the Methodists mean when they talk
about “going on to perfection”
The Christian life is more
than a philosophy. It is more than a
religion. It is more than a passive
approach to living. The Christian life
is an active relationship—a relationship that begins in God’s love for us, but
is made evident in our love for God and our love for our neighbor. It is a relationship that begins with that
experience we describe as the “New Birth” or being “born from above” but it
does not end there. As we continue in
our Christian journey, we continue in love, we accept God’s love, and in
response to God’s love we share it with a world in need.
As we are transformed, we are
able to change the question yet again from “Who is Jesus Christ for you” to “Who
are you for Jesus Christ?” How do you respond
to His love for you? It is in that
context that we can challenge ourselves with three questions that Christians
have been asking for centuries:
· What have I done for Christ?
· What am I doing for Christ?
· What should I do for Christ?[iii]
As you celebrate Ascension Day,
I join with the Apostle Paul in his prayer for the Ephesians: “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus
Christ, the Father of glory, will give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation
that makes God known to you. I pray that
the eyes of your heart will have enough light to see what is the hope of God’s
call, what is the richness of God’s glorious inheritance among believers, and
what is the overwhelming greatness of God’s power that is working among us
believers.” (Ephesians 1:17-19a,
Common English Bible).
Whether we are facing our
endings and beginnings through graduations, through final illnesses, or any
place in between, we can open our eyes and hearts to the Jesus Christ who calls
to us and invites us to follow Him. When
we do this, we find what the hymn writer Natalie Sleeth was writing about. “In our end is our beginning...”[iv] May it be so!
[i]
Preached at Cunningham United Methodist Church in Palmyra, Virginia on
Ascension Sunday, a day on which we honored our High School Graduates.
[ii]
Martin B. Copenhaver, Jesus is the
Question: The 307 Questions Jesus Asked
and the 3 He Answered (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2014), Loc. 1502 of 2044.
[iii]
Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises,
trans. by Joseph Mullan, reprinted in David Fleming, Draw Me Into Your Friendship:
The Spiritual Exercises—a Literal Translation & a Contemporary
Reading (St. Louis, Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996), 48.
[iv]
Natalie Sleeth, “Hymn of Promise,” in The
United Methodist Hymnal (Nashville: The United Methodist Publishing House,
1989), 707.
