What do you give one who
has everything? For Christmas, birthday,
anniversary, graduation, whatever … what do you give that he (or she) hasn’t
already got?
It’s Jesus’ last night
with his disciples. Soon he will be betrayed. It’s graduation night when he changes from
being rabbi to redeemer, from teacher and healer to martyr and messiah. And on this night of all nights, when God
Father of us all will surely give him whatever he desires, what does Jesus ask
for?
In our reading he
doesn’t pray to be relieved of the burden.
That comes later and only in the other Gospels, when he leaves the upper
room to go out to the garden. That’s
where he wonders if he really has to do this, then prays, “Thy will, not mine,
be done” – which some say is the only real prayer we can ever make – that
instead of praying for specific things – even things like health, well-being,
comfort and peace, really all we should pray for is to know God’s will and be
enabled to do it.
That Garden Prayer,
though, is in the other Gospels. In this
Gospel Jesus is still at the table with his disciples when he turns to God in prayer.
And in this final prayer
he doesn’t pray for world peace – like Miss America and many good-hearted
liberals. He doesn’t pray for revenge on
his and God’s enemies, an end to evil-doers, or a swift and sure triumph of the
right – like so many fundamentalists.
Nor does he pray for a million pieces of silver to help finance some
megaproject for the kingdom – something that many people of all stripes are
tempted with.
He prays for the one
crucial thing he does not have – or will not have any longer. He prays for a body to do God’s work and act
out God’s kingdom in the world.
“I am no longer in the world,”
he says, “but they are …”
Peter, James, John,
Andrew and all the rest hear Jesus pray to God that they be a body to do God’s
work and act out God’s kingdom in the world as he has with his.
Father, I thank you for the ones
you have given me.
I have shown them your heart and
mind.
I am no longer visible in the
world, but they will be.
I thank you for the body you
have made them to be in me,
and I pray they be of one heart
and mind with you and the kingdom,
as
you and I are one in the work of the kingdom.
It’s no accident being
at the table with Jesus and the other disciples. Nor is it our choice, our goodness or our
strength that bring us here. We are here
by God’s choice, by God’s grace and good will.
Nor do we choose who we are here with.
If we want to be in relationship with God and the work of the kingdom,
we must be in relationship with whoever else God has chosen to be part of the
body. It’s bigger than you and I; it’s
as big as God’s desire for the world.
It took the first
disciples and the early church a while to catch on to this. We see it in the stories the New Testament
tells of their struggles and their growth into their calling. Church history since then tells us we also never
get it always right and that we often lose God’s way and what Jesus prays for.
The Book of Acts,
though, is the helpful story of how the disciples of Jesus learn to live into, and
live out Jesus’ prayer for us. It’s a
story of our becoming the answer to Jesus’ prayer, and it all begins with the disciples
learning to stop looking heavenward.
“Men of Galilee, why do you stand
looking up toward heaven?”
Heaven is big these
days. “Heaven is for Real” is the title
of a best-selling book about a four-year-0ld boy – the son of a Nebraska
preacher, who sees heaven while undergoing surgery – and is able to talk about
it after. The book is now also a
movie. It led to a book-style special edition
of Time magazine titled “Discovering Heaven.”
Maybe it’s also leading some to give God and religious faith another try
– maybe there’s something to this faith thing after all.
When I was a child in
the church, heaven was what it was all about.
The ultimate question was whether I would be in heaven or hell, and the
good news of Christianity was that it was a way to be sure of heaven after I
died.
I’ve since come to
see, though, that God and Jesus are more concerned about Earth than heaven, and
that heaven in the Bible is not so much where we go to be with God after death,
but where the power of God comes from to shape life in a good way on Earth right
now.
Our
bulletin this week includes this quotation from John Holbert, the Lois Craddock
Perkins Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology in
Dallas, Texas:
…heaven-gazing with increasingly stiff necks
is not the work of a true disciple
of Jesus. Real disciples head for places of Holy Spirit power, a power
that
will make them witnesses, proclaimers of the
good news of Jesus the Christ,
the one who has
come to release the captives, to pay special
attention to the
disabled and all the marginalized of the
society, to see the places where
oppression is rampant
and speak [and act] against it. In 2014 we have far too
many heaven-gazers and far too few disciples.
Or, as he says in the summary to his blog post: “Ascension Sunday is about the
dangers of looking high when Jesus asks us to look low at the people he has
come to redeem.”
In this vein, Rev. Thom Shumann, a minister of the Presbyterian Church USA,
whose words we adapted for our Call to Worship, writes this little meditation
he calls “signs”:
not in a great flood
washing
us all away,
but
in the muddy puddle
where
children float boats created out of leaves and twigs,
we
find your power;
not in the superstars
who
step off the red carpet for a quick selfie,
but
in the kitchen of the grandmother
setting
out a platter of just-baked cookies
and
glasses of cold milk for the kids coming in from school,
we
feel your presence;
not in the candidate's
confetti-strewn ballroom
with
ecstatic supporters popping champagne,
but
in the inner-city emergency room
where nurses treat their patients as
if they were royalty,
we
glimpse your glory.
Even
the Time magazine special edition on “Discovering Heaven” is sub-titled, “How
Our Ideas About the Afterlife Shape How We Live Today.” It reminds us of the direction Jesus gives to
not leave Jerusalem and to wait there for the promise of the Father, for “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 (in other words, in the holy
centre and in the unholy fringe), and to the ends of the earth.”
Because
it’s not only heaven that’s real. Jesus
tells us the kingdom of heaven – the will of God being done on earth as it is
in heaven, is also real.
And the one thing Jesus
prays for is for people – for his disciples especially, to be a body that is
open to the power that will help them do God’s work and act out God’s kingdom
in the world as he has.
As we think about
Jesus – not only rabbi but redeemer, not only teacher and healer but messiah
and saviour, we know what he wants. And
we are – at least we are meant to be, the answer to his prayer.
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