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| "Kanakuk K-7 Trust Fall" by Kanakuk Kamps, on Flickr |
Then [Jesus] said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you — that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled." Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high."
Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and, lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
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I always hated trust fall night at youth group.
The youth room in the church I grew up in had four sets of gray-carpeted risers that you could roll around to move into any configuration you wanted. Basically, it was like a rolling, carpeted, giant staircase, with four levels for people to sit on.
Or, on trust fall night, these risers were there for you to climb to the top of, and then fall backwards into the waiting arms of your friends. No ground-level trust falls for us. Nope, crazy scary trust falls. Off of a riser five feet in the air.
We were trained well. You had at least ten people standing behind you, their arms outstretched and overlapping. You promised, on your part, to keep your arms tucked over your chest, and to fall straight back like a board, and not to bend at the waist. I watched friend after friend fall, successfully, into our waiting teenage arms. But when I was the one standing up there, glancing over my shoulder at the waiting arms below, I froze. Didn’t matter how many other people they had caught. What if they dropped me? It’s not that I didn’t trust them, per se, but I really didn’t trust that their skinny teenage arms would be strong enough. I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t mess up and fall to the side of them, missing their arms completely. I didn’t trust that some act of God wouldn’t happen behind my back and that they wouldn’t all run off to check it out and forget to tell me that they’d left.
I honestly don’t remember whether I actually did the trust fall or whether I crept back down the risers.
Isn’t that just how it is to be human? No matter how many proofs, now matter how much training, no matter how much evidence and precedent and learning we have, it still is so very hard to trust one another, especially when it feels like we are being asked to trust one another with our very lives or souls.
So here we are on Ascension. The disciples have watched Jesus rise up into the heavens, they are nudged down the mountain by two mysterious figures, and they are called and empowered to pick up where Jesus left off and share his good news with all the ends of the earth.
But before they can head down the mountain to do this work of faith, they have to do two things.
1. They have to realize - and believe - that Jesus trusts them to do this work.
2. They have to trust one another to do this work.
For all of the difficult things that Jesus asked the disciples to do - saying "Come follow me," or sending them out in ministry saying, "Take nothing for your journey," or telling them, "If you want to become my followers you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me," or saying to them in the garden, "Stay awake" - of all of the difficult things Jesus asked the disciples to do, maybe most difficult thing that Jesus ever asked the disciples to do was to trust one another to carry on his ministry without him.
This is a tall order. Is it any surprise that they just stood there, looking to heaven? Lowering their gaze would mean having to look each other in the eye instead. And it is one thing to trust God, but a far different thing to trust one another on God's behalf.
After a little nudge down the mountain, they bounded to flat ground, rejoicing, which is great and all, but as we read through Acts and through all the letters written to those first Christian communities, we know that the joy of the disciples soon turned into quibbling about what it really meant to follow Jesus and do his work in the world. Do we eat food sacrificed to idols? Do new believers have to be circumcised? In whose name should we be baptizing people? Who gets to talk in worship? Which is more important, faith or good works of the law? What of the Gentiles? What of the Jews? Was Jesus really a human or did he just appear human?
If Jesus had any idea that these mistrusts and arguments were going to happen, he didn’t let on. And it didn’t stop him from sending the disciples out in his name.
The disciples, the apostles, the early church, all of us who have come after: we take what we have learned from Jesus about service, witness, resurrection, and forgiveness, and try to live out his legacy; we chase after a Holy Spirit who likes to get places first and who is keen on the work of improvisation and surprise, and in all of this we are being called to trust that if we are doing the best we can, then so also are our brothers and sisters in faith doing the best they can, and so doing the work of God in the world means getting over ourselves and our anxieties and giving up a little bit of power and control, and giving one another the benefit of the doubt.
Where there are real abuses of power in the name of God, of course, we need to speak out about those things. Never should the name of Jesus be invoked to oppress or harm one another, to hurt or destroy. But when it comes to figuring out the best way to do the work of faith - prayer, devotion, service, witness, advocacy - Jesus empowers us not just to do these things, but to trust one another to do these things, even if we don't quite agree on how they should be done.
But let’s be honest. It’s hard.
I mean, when I walk by that guy with the portable sound system at the corner of Adams and State Street, in downtown Chicago when I'm visiting family after Christmas, and he holds a posterboard sign in one hand that says "Repent," and holds a microphone with the other hand into which he says things like "This is an evil age and you are children of corruption, repent of all your sins or be cast into the fires of hell"...I'm not too keen on trusting him as a fellow steward of God's mysteries.
And sometimes, when my Type A personality is feeling particularly ornery, I don't find it easy to trust that ministry projects will be successful unless all the i's are dotted and t's are crossed and paperwork filed in a timely and responsible manner.
A poll conduced a couple of years ago found that we, as a society, don't trust each other any more. Fewer than one-third of those polled expressed trust in clerks who swiped their credit cards, trust in other drivers on the road, or trust for people they meet while traveling. This lack of trust, according to the author of the report, "diverts energy to counting change, drawing up 100-page legal contracts and building gated communities."
We do the same thing in the church, diverting energy into checks and balances, setting up criteria for trustworthiness, whether it be church membership or being a part of the right denomination; by vetting ministry projects through multiple layers of taskforces, committees, councils, and congregational votes; by setting up expectations about how much Bible or theology one should know before they do ministry.
Except that Jesus gave the disciples about two and a half things - total - that made them worthy to do ministry. He gave them himself - his death, his resurrection, his word; he gave them the Holy Spirit (which will show up in full force next week!); and he gave them his blessing. Or maybe half a blessing, because he was snatched up into heaven while he was still blessing them.
But anyway. That’s what it takes to be a disciple and to do Jesus’ ministry in the world. It takes the word of Jesus, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and blessing. Things that we receive in baptism. Things that we receive at the table. Things that we receive each week in worship.
So this is our only criteria for trusting one another, inside these walls and outside, to carry out Christ’s work of forgiveness and salvation in the world.
And when we don’t trust each other, we have helpful things like confession and forgiveness, corporate or individual, to help us get over ourselves and our egos. We have the sharing of the peace, which isn’t just a greeting time, but is, historically, a chance to make amends with brothers and sisters in faith before approaching the holy mystery of communion.
Our challenge and our calling today is to look at one another and to say, “Jesus trusts you to do his work…and so do I.”
And when we start really believing that Jesus has empowered each and every one of us for his work, when we really start giving up a little control and trusting each other, crazy, beautiful, unexpectedly powerful things start happening.
I think about this last week’s Project Care graduation party, and the way that 80+ people celebrated the graduation of six youth, mostly unknown to them, and how this church and community donated thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts to help these students live independent lives after graduating high school and leaving the foster care system. I think about how grassroots ministries like these happen, and how nothing like this would ever get off the ground if we didn’t trust each other to do ministry.
I think about how there are so many pop-up ministries and charities in our world these days - people banding together for disaster relief, joining together in advocacy efforts, giving micro-loans to women across the world to empower them and improve their lives, feeding ministries, random acts of kindness: whether planned by the church or not, these are all ministries, these are all the work of God in our midst, and the kingdom is unfolding in our midst, if only we trust each other enough to open our eyes to these Spirit-driven acts of service.
Because this Spirit - that calls us together and sends us out - moves forward and backward and sideways, is pesky and unpredictable, and this Spirit is in each of us. But this Spirit is always moving along a trajectory toward God and toward the fulfillment of the kingdom. So if we are empowered by this Spirit, sometimes we are moving across each other and around each other and next to each other or in opposite directions, but we are all always moving toward the same end goal.
So today, remember that Jesus trusts you do to his work in the world. He has given you the Spirit to empower you and to bind us together. He has blessed you. And he has given all of these gifts to the people sitting next to you as well.
May you be blessed today by your faith in Christ. May you be blessed by Christ’s faith in you. And may you be blessed to have faith in one another, for the sake of the one who binds us together and sends us out. May nothing stand in the way of all of the things to which God is calling us, for the sake of his kingdom and for the sake of the world.
Amen.
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| "Ascension of Christ" by Matthew Garrett, on Flickr |
Acts 1:1–11
In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. "This," he said, "is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now."
So when they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But 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." When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, "Men of Galilee, 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."