Sermon - Now What?

Preached on June 5, 2011 at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge, Ohio, UCC.

Biblical texts: 1 Peter 4:12-14 and Acts 1:6-14

Forty days after the resurrection, Jesus ascended into heaven. That’s what the author of Luke and Acts tells us. Just as the prophet Elijah had ascended directly to heaven long ago, without dying, so Jesus ascends. He goes up, which is where the people of the first century understood heaven to be. As mysterious as Jesus ascending to heaven is, the really interesting part of the story is to focus on the disciples who stand there watching him. For about three years, following Jesus had been their life and their identity. Where he decided to go, they went, when he taught, they listened; what he did, they remembered. So there is this amazing moment right after Jesus has ascended when the disciples are still standing there, all looking up into the sky. And the question on everybody’s minds is this. Now what?

On the day when something that has shaped your life comes to an end, somewhere deep inside you ask this question.
On the day your youngest child begins school and the days are wide open…Now what?
Or, later, the day your last child leaves the home…Now what?
On the day you retire…Now what?
On the day after the funeral for your spouse funeral…Now what?
And, as we are reminded today: On the day of your graduation…Now what?

The disciples stood looking up in the air. Their rabbi was gone, and they asked the question. Read just a bit further in Acts, and these disciples find their answer. They couldn’t physically walk beside Jesus, but they would still walk like Jesus. The answer they found was to live the way Jesus lived. They committed themselves to the practice of Jesus-living: Compassionate, welcoming, strong in the face of injustice and cruelty, joyful and sacrificially loving. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? But they also know that living like Jesus means suffering like Jesus. Peter says that suffering is not an anomaly; it is the expectation. “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.” We get the idea that suffering is what God is supposed to save us from, but Peter says that suffering is what we should expect.

Now, historically, at the time that Peter writes, part of Christian suffering was from direct persecution, and we can be thankful that our lives are not in danger simply for bearing the Christian name. But beyond persecution, Christians suffered because they lived like Jesus lived, and Jesus suffered because he was willing to sacrifice his own well-being for the well-being of someone else. They did the same. If someone was hungry, they shared from their own plates. If someone needed clothing, they emptied their own closets. If others were being hurt or cast aside, they went to stand with those people and accept the same abuse. If their neighbors were sick, they would put aside their own schedules and make the journey to visit them and give them care, and they did the same for their neighbors in prison.

Day after day, they did these things, and every act of care, every act of standing up for justice, every bit of goods given away, came at a cost to themselves. But this is was what Jesus had done. Never are we more like God than when we accept discomfort, tears, and hardship for the well-being of someone else.

Any parent knows about the personal cost of caring for children.
Anyone who arranges a days off to take aging parents to a doctor’s appointments;
anyone who takes food to a neighbor after a death in the family and sits with them in silence and shares their tears;
anyone who sticks up for a person who is picked on, only to find themselves ostracized from the group as well;
anyone who casts votes on election day in the interest of others;
anyone who travels a long way to visit a friend in the hospital, even if the long journey is just around the corner, knows about the personal cost of caring for others.

You know what it is to accept suffering for the well-being of someone else. And in many of those instances, you probably don’t even think of it as suffering. It’s just what you do. It’s the right thing to do. “They would do the same for me,” you probably say.

I suggest that the reason you do these things so often and hardly think of doing otherwise is because you are in a sacred covenant relationship. A covenant binds people together in a sacred relationship of shared joy and sorrow.

We live in covenant. At the beginning of a wedding, I stand before the bride and groom and ask if they are willing to enter into the covenant of marriage. When we come here on Sunday mornings and listen to the scriptures, they tell the story of God’s covenant with God’s people. God makes a commitment to us, and we commit ourselves to God and to each other. Covenant is a commitment to others, and it is what I see people doing all the time, whether they have heard the word covenant or not.

Next Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, and we plan to celebrate a Covenant Renewal in the worship service. We invite you to affirm your covenant with God, within this faith community. It’s not about who is a member of the church or not, it’s about all of us being in a sacred relationship, committed to one another in the spirit of God. Yes, our commitments will entail sacrifice and loss, it will mean that we give to others instead of spending on ourselves, it will mean that we turn over our “Me time,” our days off and evenings, to sing in the choir, to teach a youth Sunday School class, to maintain the church building, to go on service trips, to talk to someone after worship and really listen to them the way that maybe no one else quite listens to them all during the week.

Peter writes to the Christian church and tells them that their suffering is not strange, it’s to be expected, but he also tells them this. The source of your suffering is also the source of fulfillment and salvation. These covenantal relationships that cause us so much trouble and worry and heartache at times, and demand so much of us, are also the source of God’s greatest blessing and fulfillment of our lives. And that is why we often don’t notice the hardship so much.

So, to our high school graduates: I hope that as you seek to find your place in the world, that you will find happiness and success, but I also know that you not find these things by pursuing them just for yourselves. And so I must also hope that you will open your lives to the greater sacrifice that comes from living in covenant.

The minister Frederick Buechner, who is one of my favorite writers, talked about how we find our callings. He said that we should follow our passion and our delight, because it does no one much good to pursue a joyless life. But he also said that we will not find our true calling until we find the place where our greatest joy meets the world’s deep need.

May you find the place where your great joy meets the world’s deep need. May you find the place where you are needed by others, whether it be to represent a Congressional district of thousands, to lead a company of 300 workers, to teach a classroom of 20, to assist the six people each day who come to you for support, or to care intimately for just one person. Be needed by others.

Jesus said that we achieve greatness when we learn how to be of service to others. If you would be great, learn to serve. Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one’s life for your friends. When we follow his life, when we commit ourselves to Jesus-living, we will find that in the midst of all that we give up for others, God blesses us beyond anything we could ever hope or imagine.

It was the Indian poet Tagore who captured the truth of what it means to follow Jesus. He wrote “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”

Jesus showed us that the way to God is to accept whatever it costs to live in loving covenant with others. Surely, this was what echoed in the minds of the disciples as they stood looking up at the place where he had just left, as they stood their watching, with each mouth forming the silent question. Now what?