Our readings for the day are actually last Sunday s appointed texts in the Christian calendar, the stories of Jesus Christ s ascension.

Transcription

1 Luke 24:44-53 Baccalaureate, Spring 2008 Our readings for the day are actually last Sunday s appointed texts in the Christian calendar, the stories of Jesus Christ s ascension. In the Gospel account of Luke, Jesus is resurrected from the dead on Easter morning, and then spends forty more days with the disciples, teaching them, eating with them, like things are almost back to normal. But then one day, Jesus leads them out to Bethany, still teaching and talking along the way, telling them they will be clothed with power from on high, and that they should stay in the city, and other things they don t fully understand and hope won t be on the test. The story says he lifted up his hands and blessed them, and suddenly is taken up on a cloud into heaven. For good this time. When the early Christians paint the ascension, they make an unusual choice. Rather than painting Jesus, presumably the center of all the action, the one who is actually doing the ascending, they seem to focus the painting only on the disciples. Jesus is nowhere to be found. Until you scan the top of the picture, and sure enough, dangling down from the sky like a boom mic in a B movie, are Jesus feet. 1

2 Now, to be fair, since then there have been a number of impressive pieces of art that focus on the majesty of Jesus ascension, where he is the center of attention and the disciples are hardly an afterthought. But I am most fascinated by these earlier pictures. Those early Christian fathers and mothers wanted to teach the rest of us something about the ascension. And maybe one of the lessons here is that the Ascension is not just about Jesus, it is also about the disciples. One big part of this story is that the disciples are left alone, to fend for themselves. It is a sort of graduation for them. The disciples return to the city, without their leader, without their teacher and friend, to wait. They re not even sure what they re supposed to be waiting for. Now that two thousand years have past, we have gotten much more civilized about our life transitions. Now whenever human beings are faced with great uncertainty, with overwhelming change, whenever we come face to face with the frightening realization that we don t know what s coming, we get dressed up. We set out cookies and punch and assorted finger foods. We buy each other monogrammed towels. Today is one of those days. You graduates, who have spent sleepless nights blending Gilgamesh and Guitar Hero, Facebook and Fractal Dynamics, You graduates who now face an unknown future, an uncertain tomorrow, and no longer have a meal plan to ensure you re at least fed on some semi-regular basis, who now are set forth to try and fend for yourselves: We have gathered here for you this morning, and we are dressed up. You should be very concerned. I know some of you are excited. This all feels a bit like a coronation right now, like you re running through the finish line tape or planting your flag deep in the snow at the summit. You aunt and uncle from Topeka have suddenly become like paparazzi, and there is a part of you that enjoys having your every move this weekend documented. And frankly, we do our best to pull off all the pomp and circumstance we can for you today. 2

3 This sermon and all speeches like it given on commencement days are supposed to be filled with helpful, generically inspirational advice like Seize the day, never stop being a student, and call your parents. But I am guessing that there are at least a few among you who feel more like the disciples. Who are watching the familiar, the precious, the secure slip out of the frame, and you worry you will never see it again. Some of you are too well acquainted with what it feels like to wait. I am mindful that you who are graduating, at least for today, belong in two different places. You are carrying two passports. One says you are a college student, a grown child, you are prone to do things like live in a concrete cubicle and eat Hot Pockets at all hours of the night. Do you remember that feeling of sitting in your first college class, taking the syllabus from the professor and thinking boldly to yourself, I am going to read every page that is assigned. I am going to write this major research paper 2 months early. There is a flash, and suddenly it is 4am the morning said research paper is due, and you find yourself fascinated by the blinking cursor on a blank computer screen, having just watched a Gilmore Girls marathon for the past 14 hours. Do you remember the first time you really loved a class? A professor or a book or a subject or all three stirring something deep inside you that you didn t know was there. Picking a major, or having a major pick you, however it happened. Laughing with friends. Starting to figure out who you are, who you want to be. The passport photo in this first one looks like your college ID, which is to say it looks like a high school mug shot. But that passport is about to expire. The other passport you clutch in your hand, the one that is shiny and new and not yet bent at the corners, says that you belong now to a future. That there are apartments to be leased, student loans to somehow pay off, groceries to buy, jobs to pursue, relationships that might just turn out to be the relationship. The photo on that second passport looks much more like a blank canvas. The image is undefined and blurry, a story waiting to be told. For today, for this brief moment, you belong to both of these worlds, but you know as well as I do that we have come out to Bethany. For what it s worth, I am a senior, too, if by being in this place for four years makes you a senior. 3

4 Like many of you, I had never lived in Evansville, Indiana before. When you showed up on that hot August day with your mini-fridges and your stackable plastic storage and all your pictures from high school, I was just as clueless as you about the best way to get to Wal-Mart or where the cheap movie theater was. And as I told the Sunday worship crowd this week, there is a special place in my heart for all of you, because you are the first class for whom I have always been the Chaplain at UE. I appreciate the fact that you have nothing to compare me to, those are good odds. And I do want to talk over your heads a moment to your families, because I think all of you have done a particularly good job in raising human beings. If at all biologically possible, you should consider making some more. These are good people you have raised, you should know that. And I know there have been difficult times, like the Thanksgiving Dinner when they announced they had changed their major to Indonesian pottery with a minor in unemployment, and you couldn t stop thinking about the second mortgage. It was a big deal to move them in that hot summer day, but this feels markedly different doesn t it? Like their feet are just dangling in your world? I would ask you graduates to be especially patient with your parents over the course of the next few days, because they have an even longer view of your life than even you do. A unique bond is formed when you change a creature s diaper 3,000 or so times. They are the ones that tended the soil, that watched and waited for you to bloom, and while they are so grateful for the man or woman who stands before them now, they can t help but remember the child they used to know. This is what Bethany feels like. The scripture tells us that Jesus blessing comes even as he is leaving. It is the mystery of change, that awkward space between the past and the future, when we don t know whether to weep or to laugh so we do both. One of the great ironies of human existence is that we seem to be in a great hurry most of the time to get into our next phase, our next challenge, our next horizon, even if the one we re currently living is quite good, thank you very much. That explains your excitement four years ago moving into a non air-conditioned commune with several hundred other hormonally imbalanced human beings. You were ready for the next challenge. You had conquered high school, or at least survived high school, and you were ready for the next big thing. But now that next big thing is slipping out of view, just barely dangling in the frame, and it is time to wonder and wait. But as I thought about those images of the Ascension this week, I realized something else, a lesson left for us across the centuries by those early Christians. 4

5 They painted and sculpted and carved those dangling feet in those images as a sign of hope. It was not simply to emphasize the heartbreak of Christ s leaving the disciples, it was to tell the world that Christ s body was now no longer in one place, but in all places. Christ doesn t disappear out of the frame never to be seen again, he flies out of the frame because there is no frame that can hold him. Not death, not life, nothing. The scriptures say that the disciples walked out of that graduation ceremony in Bethany, clutching those shiny new passports, with great joy. Isn t that astonishing not weeping or shocked or sad but with great joy. Because they had seen enough to believe that they would never be alone. In slipping out of the frame, Jesus made a promise to be in every frame, wherever they went, wherever the road took them. My senior year in college, one of my religion professors, Dr. Wingard, was diagnosed with late stage cancer. The doctors told them that they could try and make him comfortable, but that was about it. I m not sure what you would do if you were given a sentence like that, I wonder sometimes what I would do. Bob Wingard decided to go on about his life. He kept teaching, maybe out of duty, but if you had known him you would understand that that is where he was most at home. I suppose he could ve gone and sat on a beach and waited it out, or skydive or something like that, but Bob Wingard had long ago found his vocation, his heart s deep gladness, and I doubt he ever questioned what he would do with those last days. Even as his illness put him in a wheelchair, he came to class, ready to teach. And as you can imagine, we listened a little more closely than most seniors in their last semester. We prayed for him and we hoped for a miracle, but it became more obvious with every day that it was not to be. My last class with him came late in April, a beautiful day like this one. The class was on Paul s letters to the early churches. It is a moment I will never forget, not just because it was the last time I saw him alive, but because, for a moment, we were able as a class, in the presence of that great man whose feet were just barely dancing in the frame at that point, to read those letters in a way none of us ever had before. We came to the passage in Paul s second letter to the Corinthians where Paul speaks about a physical ailment that won t go away. 5

6 Dr. Wingard read the passage aloud to the class as he always did, Three times I prayed to the Lord about this and asked him to take it away. But his answer was, My grace is all you need, for my power is greatest when you are weak. Sitting there in his wheelchair, that proud old teacher s eyes welled up. We all sat silent for what seemed like hours, and he said simply, No more class today. That will be enough. Two days later, our teacher passed away, slipping out of the frame for good. A few days before our own graduation, in the middle of exam week, we all huddled into that little church to say goodbye. Being a good Methodist minister, Dr. Wingard had planned his funeral down to the last detail. He even designed the bulletin. I ll admit, I came to that church that spring day to pay my respects, heartbroken that I had heard the last lesson he would give. I should ve known better. Because as I took my seat, I looked down at that bulletin. On the cover, in bold letters, it said A Service of Worship in Praise of the Living God. In much smaller letters towards the bottom of the page, it said simply and remembering the life of Robert W. Wingard. If a piece of paper could sing, that one would ve sounded like an angel chorus. Even in his absence, flown out of the frame, he remained a teacher, reminding all of us there that spring afternoon that death did not have the final word. And that he was not done teaching, by a long shot. A final word for all of you graduates, because I know that many of you will be busy tonight and won t think to get up and go to church in the morning. I ll let you in on something. Tomorrow, in churches around the world, they will tell another story about the disciples. You see, the story doesn t end here. They walk home from Bethany to Jerusalem, trying to get back to the day-to-day work of being human. But one morning, as they are gather together in a locked room, all heaven breaks loose. The shutters shake, the windows fly open, and there is a holy hurricane. And all those foolish disciples, who used to be tax collectors and fishermen and Indonesian pottery majors, suddenly start acting like Jesus. My wish for you, as we prepare to go our separate ways, as the frame changes, is that you will trust that God will find you. No matter where you hide, God will find you. 6

7 Whether you re in Bethany or on Boeke, the story doesn t end here. Look again at the picture. His body isn t missing at all, it just looks an awful lot like the church. Like disciples, like you and me. Go and live as if it is so. 7