7^th Sunday of Easter/Ascension

                                                                                                May 24, 2009

                                                                                                Omaha, NE

                                                                                                Rev. Steven W. Plank

“Time to Step Up”

Text:    Acts 1:11a – “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

Scripture Lessons:       Ephesians 1:15-23

                                    Acts 1:1-11

Proposition:  The disciples were befuddled when Jesus ascended into heaven.  The angels, however, shocked them back into a needed sense of reality by telling them that it was “Time to Step Up” and take responsibility for sharing the Good News of Jesus with the world.

Prayer for Illumination:  God our helper, by your Holy Spirit, open our minds, that as the Scriptures are read and your Word is proclaimed, we may be led into your truth and taught your will, for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

During the almost 32 years of my ordained minister as a Presbyterian clergy person, I’ve officiated at somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 funerals.  I’ve found that funerals are both a gift to me as well as a source of loss.  Many times, when I have the privilege of helping people focus on the meaning and implications for our lives of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord, especially when we are grieving, I find that my own grief gets tapped.  To be sure, one learns to find a comfortable pace to walk with one’s grief at loved ones who are now gone, but the sense of loss is still there.  By God’s grace, grief is healed, hope is renewed, and life continues for us, but grief doesn’t just evaporate into thin air at some point in time.  It’s there… you just find a sense of rhythm with grief as you journey through your own life.  Do you find that to be so, too?

Even though my own grief gets nudged sometimes when I officiate at a funeral or memorial service, my faith and hope also get renewed.  As I read the ancient words of Scripture about love and grace, about salvation and trust, about the assurance of God’s presence with us in this life as well as beyond this life, about the implications of Christ’s Resurrection for us and for all those we love – living and dead – then I find an ever-new sense of being grounded in grace, confirmed in hope, surrounded by a never-ending, undying love that is more embracing and more powerful than I can imagine!

Of those 250 or so funerals I’ve led during these past three-plus decades, the ages of those whose lives we remember in such services have ranged from 2 days old to 103 years old!  I’ve buried two centenarians over the years, and probably a score or more of people over 90.  One service I particularly remember.  It was for John Ralston, an old Scotsman in this one congregation I served.  John died in 1984 at the age of 98.  One of the reasons I remember this service is because his son asked me to put together a list of things that John would have observed during his lifetime since the time of his birth in 1886.  I had to do a little research, and that list long since has been thrown away, but it was easy to think of the highlights of some of those things.  John easily would have remembered a world not only without television but also without radio.  For the first decades of his life, horses were the only practical means of local transportation.  If one wanted to travel even what we now would consider the smallest distance at all, trains were the method of choice.  In fact, when it was time for John to go to high school, he rode his horse and wagon about two miles to a junction, and then took a train to go the eight miles into the city where the high school was!  John would have known Civil War veterans, and would have himself seen the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam, and the U.S. invasion of Grenada.  When John died in 1984, there were whole countries in the world that weren’t in existence at the time of his birth, and others that long had since disappeared in the sands of time.  Then, of course, you think of telephones, refrigerators, central heating and air conditioning, indoor plumbing, cars, busses, trucks, airplanes, jumbo jets, and space travel!

It was astounding to think of the changes that John Ralston had seen during his 98 years on this planet of ours.  It still is astounding.  For those of you who are young, just trust me when I tell you that there was life before 24-hour cable TV, before cell phones, before computers, and before Facebook and Twitter.  For those of you who are older, just trust me when I tell you that you don’t have to know what those things are that I just mentioned, nor do you have to know how to use them!

Now, imagine the change that the disciples of Jesus saw.  Oh, they didn’t seen changes in technology or means of travel or communication or politics.  But just imagine what the preceding eight weeks or so had been for those unnamed disciples in our lesson from the New Testament book of Acts.  For three years they had traveled with this amazing man named Jesus, which is the Greek version of the name Joshua, which in Hebrew means, “God saves.”  (And who said that names aren’t significant?)  They had seen Jesus do astounding things, and their minds had begun to verbalize what their hearts had instinctively dared to hope… that this Jesus was the long-promised, long-awaited Messiah of God!  Hopes began to grow stronger as they saw authorities confronted, injustices denounced, justice lifted up and practiced, love embodied, judgment promised, forgiveness offered, healing and wholeness bestowed, the outcasts welcomed, and grace given abundantly and freely.  Something must have been in the air as they approached Jerusalem during the pre-festival preparations for Passover.  Then there was that incredible morning when crowds welcomed Jesus with gleeful abandon as he entered the ancient city… and their joy was dashed when they saw those same crowds using that same abandon, but this time with disdain rather than joy.  The disciples watched in shocked disbelief as one of their own betrayed Jesus… as Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night as a common criminal would be… as both Jewish and Roman courts of justice proved to be anything but just.  And can you imagine what it must have been like for them to watch their rabbi and friend, mentor and, yes, Lord, be forced to carry his own instrument of torturous death to the hill where he was then crucified?  It’s hard to truly imagine, isn’t it?

And then… well, and then… there would have been the incredulous joy of the Resurrection… of Jesus’ appearing to them in upper rooms, along the road, by the sea, on the beach.  They heard again – but this time in new ways with new hearing – words of peace from Jesus… words of love… words of compassion… words of forgiveness… words of grace… words of promise.  They could only have just begun to get used to this new “reality” of Jesus being with them after the Resurrection, when suddenly, when they were with him one day, asking him yet again about the coming of God’s rule to this world and to our lives in all of its fullness, when Jesus promised them the power of the Holy Spirit to enable them to be faithful disciples and witnesses to God’s Good News to the entire world… and, to their incredulity, they watched Jesus disappear into the clouds… and, somehow, they knew this would be the last time they would see him.  Can’t you hear them?  “Wait!  What are you doing now?  You just helped us get beyond the tragedy we witnessed of your trial and death!  We were finally getting over the shock of your Resurrected Presence, and finding a rhythm of learning how to live with you in that way, and now you’re gone again???  Forever???”  Can you see them there?  Can you imagine a little of what they must have been feeling?

And suddenly, as they were standing there in disbelief yet again and shock once more, two of those pesky heavenly messengers suddenly stand beside them and say, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”  I can just see the disciples look at those two, and, angels notwithstanding, ask them, “Are you nuts?  What do you mean, ‘why are we standing here looking up toward heaven?’  Just give us a minute, would you?  And give us a break here!  We’re trying to adjust the best we can!”

But the angels’ words hit home.  After all, Jesus had just told them, “You’ve got work to do.  You’re to be my self-giving, sacrificial witnesses.  You’re to share the Good News of God’s incredible love to the entire world!  And, so that you won’t feel overwhelmed at the task, the Spirit of God will come and walk with you, empowering you to do God’s work in God’s world for all of God’s people.”  So they must have taken a deep breath, letting the truth of those words hit home and begin to take root.  They had work to do… and the work now truly was theirs to do.  No longer could they sit back and wait for someone else to do it.  No longer could they sit back and simply be observers, watching Jesus do God’s work.  The work was now theirs to do.  It was their “Time to Step Up.”

There is lots on our proverbial “plates,” isn’t there?  There are activities in which we and our families are involved.  Work, even with the advent of computers and a more paperless environment, has become more demanding and time-consuming than ever.  We feel the need to fill even our leisure time with more things to do.  Those rare moments that we have quiet at home we fill with the noise of radios or televisions.  Even those times when we might put other things aside long enough to go for a walk, we carry along our iPod or MP3 player, and time just to think and observe and listen to the world around us is robbed by other sounds.  We have lots to do, and we give ourselves more things to do than we have time or energy to do them.  And then we consider the needs of the Church… and the needs of our society… and the increasing numbers of unemployed and hungry people on our streets and in our communities.  It can feel pretty overwhelming.

But the words of Jesus still call to us over the millennia:  “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”  And the words of the angels still echo in our ears, both judging us and calling us to redeem our time:  “Why are you just standing around?  There’s work to be done for God in this world!”  And we realize that it’s our “Time to Step Up.”

It is our “Time to Step Up.”  Environmental issues are pressing in upon us, and we no longer can wait for “somebody else” to magically fix things.  We have to step up… and so we’ve made the decision here to no longer use Styrofoam plates or cups, but to use containers that are environmentally friendly.  We have several people who volunteer to pick up all of our bulletins and the used paper from our office and make sure it gets recycled.  We strive to buy coffee from a company that works directly with coffee growers in developing nations, helping them to better their lives, thus giving them the resources to stay in their homes rather than immigrate here or to some other developed country.  It’s “Time to Step Up.”

We have realized that we no longer can afford to “do church” as we long have.  We – not just in our congregation, but in most congregations in this country and in much of the world – no longer have the people and resources to keep our own large buildings, hire and call staff to do our work, or simply give money away to “mission out there.”  We have mission and work to do here.  We don’t have much money to give to mission projects elsewhere, but we are finding ways to give our facilities here for the use of non-profit groups.  We are looking for hands-on ways to help people in need in our community.  And we need to continue to look for ways to cooperate with other churches, sharing staff (as we already are with me with the Presbytery), sharing programs, and even sharing facilities.  Nobody else is going to find a way out of the challenges that are presenting themselves at our doorstep and in our financial reports.  It’s “Time to Step Up.”

In all sorts of ways, it’s our time… our time to work… our time to look for imaginative ways to solve political and environmental and societal and ecclesiastical challenges that confront us… our time to find ever-new ways to communicate the Good News of Jesus Christ to those who hunger for meaning and integrity in their lives and relationships… our “Time to Step Up.”  And it’s time to do that, knowing that the Spirit is waiting to empower us as we take steps before us… knowing that there is strength and comfort and encouragement when we take those steps together.

AMEN!