Sermon for Sunday, June 1st 2014

Sermon – Luke 24:44-53

June 1^st, 2014

The Destination and the Journey

  

Grace and Peace Bethany Lutheran Church, from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ,

Today is Ascension Sunday in the church calendar – the day we remember Jesus being taken up into heaven 40 days after the resurrection.

Though, technically, last Thursday was actually Ascension Day because that marked 40 days after Easter, but we were pretty sure nobody wanted to come to church on a Thursday evening, so we celebrate it today!

We learned from our reading in Acts, that after Jesus was resurrected on Easter, he stayed around for another 40 days with his disciples.  When those days were up, Jesus was lifted up into a cloud (hence, ascension) and just like that (snap) he was gone.

I’m sure it was a little hard for the disciples to see Jesus depart from them. He had just died and been resurrected. And here he was being taken up into heaven, leaving them to build his church without him.

You can imagine how nervous they were to strike out into the real world without their teacher at their side.

And I wonder if the disciples suddenly felt like graduates out in the real world. They had the whole world in front of them, which was probably liberating and terrifying at the same time.

That’s why, in a lot of ways, the ascension strikes me as being very appropriate for a Sunday when we celebrate the graduates in our community. These students are also in a place where they have the world at their fingertips.

But when they finally graduate from college, get a job and start their own families, they are going to look back and realize something. All the classes they took, Calculus, physics, Spanish, etc. and they are going to realize … that they don’t remember any of it.

When that happens, they will ask themselves “What was the point?” All that studying … all those nights cramming for a math final … all the time that looking through endless rows of flash cards … will seem, like a colossal waste of time.

Trust me. I am an expert both in forgetting things AND wasting time. I took physics in college, but today I could barely tell you any of Newton’s laws. I took Calc I and Calc II, but I had to look up what a derivative was on google as a refresher.

I took Norwegian in college.  Can jeg snakke Norsk? Can I speak Norwegian? No.  No I can no longer speak any Norwegian besides that phrase and a few choice swear words my Grandma taught me as a kid.

Believe me when I say, 99% of the things learned are going to be gone. It’s a depressing thought.  I know. 

The disciples must have felt that way too.  None of them were scholars.  They were fishermen and tax people and common laborers. 

Our reading said that Jesus opened up the scriptures to them, but I’m sure like many of you, the disciples then promptly forgot it all.

Their job was to go out into the world and tell people about Jesus – not translate the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. 

They were building churches and spreading the good news of a resurrected Jesus.  They didn’t need to memorize all 613 laws that are in the Old Testament, and I’m guessing they didn’t.

So then…What was the point?  Why stuff so much information into your head if it’s going to slip out again? Why not just skip to the end?

They could have saved 3 years and lot of heartache if Jesus just taught them to build churches.  Just like our graduates could have saved four years and a lot of #2 pencils if they had just trained for jobs. 

Of course, if that’s all there was to school, it would be a colossal waste of time ... but we all know there’s more to it than that. 

Hopefully most of us realize that school is about more than getting a good job. It’s about more than cramming information down our heads. It’s about more than getting A’s on essays and homework assignments.  

School is about shaping minds so that you can unleash your potential on the world.  Or, to use an appropriate cliché here, it’s not so much about the destination, but about the journey, and how that journey shapes who you are.

The math classes these graduates took trained them to think logically.  The books they read for English classes inspire them to unleash their creativity on the world.  And the foreign language classes? I’m assuming most of them picked up a few choice words that will help them on their way.

And I think the same thing is true for church and religion, except instead of shaping minds, I think God is far more interested in shaping hearts. 

Often, people assume that church is about being really good so that when we die, God will lift us up into heaven like he did for Jesus in our scripture today.  

But our Lutheran tradition in particular says that, in fact, we already have eternal life in Jesus Christ.  We are connected to Christ through our baptisms.

And if we already have hope of the resurrection, then it’s not about how much religious stuff we know. 

Like the disciples, technically we don’t need to memorize all 613 laws in the Old Testament.  We don’t even need to memorize the 10 commandments.  We don’t need to go to church at all!  How often do you hear your pastor say that?

But just as school is about more than getting a job, following Jesus is about so much more than getting into heaven. Even the disciples fell into the trap of thinking it’s about their destination rather than the journey.

In the book of Acts, Jesus sets them straight.  His last action before being lifted up was to send them out to make sure they had a purpose.  And so he sends them to “all the ends of the earth.” 

It was his commencement speech.  Now, go and do some good.  Don’t just wait around until you die and float up to heaven, go out and do some good.

Then, if that weren’t enough, as the disciples were looking up into the clouds where Jesus had gone, two men in white robes appeared by them.

The men asked the disciples a funny question.  “Why are you looking up towards heaven?”  Why are you looking up? It was as if to say, you aren’t going to find Jesus up in the clouds.  Look forward, or better yet, look around you.  

As Christians, we don’t find Jesus in the clouds, we find him in the faces of the people in need – of those all around us.

It’s not about the destination.  It’s not about getting up there (point) with Jesus.  It’s about the journey. It’s about the people we travel with.  It’s about loving the people around us.

That’s God’s word of grace to us all. The end game has been taken care of.  All that’s left for us is to love the people God puts in front of us. 

It’s a lot harder than it sounds, but this is where you start practicing.  I said earlier that you don’t need to go to church to be a Christian, and that’s true!  But church is where we come to have our eyes opened and our hearts shaped by God. 

Just like we need school to train our minds to think logically, we need church to train our hearts to love properly – to love as Jesus loved the world. 

Brothers and sisters in Christ, Church is merely a beginning – a starting point.  Like our graduates, we have a long road ahead of us, so let us not look up towards heaven, but around towards our neighbors.

We start here by learning to love one another, then we can go out into the world and learn to love asGod first loved us.

Amen