A Sunday celebration of High School graduates
Lost in all the cryptic language of Jesus' prayer on the disciples' behalf is that this week's Gospel may very well be Jesus' riff
on of a graduation theme. It is a somewhat twisted graduation by our standards, but then again Jesus never seems to live up to our standards. Instead of telling the disciples (graduates) that they are going to go out and change the
world Jesus focuses on why the world they are heading into a messed-up place. It is a place where they will be tempted; a place that they do not belong; a
place that does not know God.
I’d
assume this is why Jesus was not voted to give a senior speech by his class at Nazareth High School.
Of
course, lest I confuse you, Jesus is not exactly giving a graduation speech,
but—as with high-school graduation—he is praying on behalf of disciples who are
about to go off into the world without him, and he’s is telling them, in his
best Dr. Seuss impersonation, “Oh, the places you will go.”
The
world is a funny place if you think about it. I don’t mean the physical earth,
though that is often a funny place as well, but what I mean by the world is what
we perceive of the place we inhabit. What is your world? As children our worlds are pretty small. We
have family, maybe a small geographical area with which we are familiar. Our worlds pretty much consist of that. Then they get
bigger and bigger. Pretty soon our worlds encompass a city, then a county, then
we travel and experience other places and other people. We discover people who
think differently than us; people who look different from us; people who have
beliefs that are very different from our own. When we learn the world grows.
Sometimes
a big world can be scary. For parents of children heading off into some of
those unknown places it will sometimes be scary. For youth who are graduating
off into the world beyond their parents’ homes sometimes it will be scary--even if they never admit it to mom and dad. For
grandparents who do not know the particulars of where there grandchildren are
moving it can be a very frightening place. The world is big and the world
scary.
But
the world isn’t just that. Jesus, after all, goes through all this work of
talking about the challenges of the world only after giving us the most famous
verse of scripture that tells us something vividly important. You know it… “For
God so loved… the world… that he gave us only begotten Son that whosoever
believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” God so loved the
world. See, the world is crazy; it’s big and unknown. It’s a place that
so often does not know God, and yet God knows it. God knows the whole thing and
more than that he loves it.
It’s easy for us
to stay in comfortable places that keep our world small. The easy way through this life is
to never experience anything that challenges your worldview, but as Christians
we also have a calling to witness; a calling that pushes against the boundaries
of our small worlds. The Great Commission is at the heart of our Christian
witness. Jesus says, “Go… and make disciples of all nations.” Go out into
the world, because that’s the only way the world that does not know God is ever
going to hear the good news. Without you, the world will remain an awfully
scary place. The world needs to hear from you.
At the Northwestern Minnesota Synod Assembly
last week the CEO of Lutheran World Relief, John Nunes, talked about one way that
we--Lutherans who rarely take on anything more adventurous than camping the next county over--go out into the world. He talked about a time when he
was visiting the West African country of Burkina Faso and he entered what
was essentially a mud hut to find a Lutheran-made quilt lying on the dirt floor.
The quilt was that family’s carpet. Nunes went on to talk about
others who used quilts when they had to move possessions. They might not have a
bag but they could wrap up their things in a quilt and throw it over their
shoulders. Quilts were being used in Burkina Faso for hundreds of other uses. Those people in West Africa were connected
to Lutherans in North America through quilting,
and they were using quilts made over here in ways that probably never occurred
to those who stitched them together.
Today, the world
is connected in ways that were unimaginable a century ago, let alone on the day
of Jesus’ graduation speech. This world is both a small world and a big one. We
can connect with people across the globe in an instant and at the same time
understand the vastness that separates us. The world is a place of “us” and
“them,” and it’s also one world connected by universal things. Those people of Burkina Faso were connected to Lutherans in North America, even if they didn’t know it; even if the
quilters didn’t know it. The blessings we share cross boundaries that we will
never physically cross. That’s the thing about the world: it’s a big, scary
place, but we’re all in it together.
In worship today we had one
of those rare instances when we got to experience the spectrum of life in the
church—I guess all we’d need is a funeral to cap it off but I hope nobody gets
on that! At both Grace and Red River we had a baptism; then we celebrated our graduating seniors. And perhaps most importantly, in the middle of
those two events, we gathered around the table for communion,
remembering that no matter where we are, no matter where we are going, we are
members of Christ’s body, living representations of the good news.
Our worlds are
always in flux. Our worlds never stay the same. It’s natural to fear those
outside of our experience, but in Christ our worlds overlap. There is no “us”
and “them”; there is simply the body of Christ of which the people of Burkina Faso or
any seemingly foreign place are members in equal standing. That is why we
gather around the table; to commune with our newly baptized and our graduating seniors, to commune with our brothers and sisters in Burkina Faso or wherever
our quilts may go, wherever our mission support and our money may go, wherever
our footsteps take us, to commune with our elderly, our youth, and everybody
in-between. We gather together to celebrate communion because this is not about
the places you will go; it is about the unity in Christ you share wherever
you find yourself. There is no “us” and “them.” It may be how we see it, but
God sees the picture with much wider eyes. As Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “We
have point of view, but God has view.”
May your view be
God’s view, may your world be big, may you go out into the world, and may you
always come back to the table.
No comments:
Post a Comment