Sunday 06/01/14 Freeville/Homer Ave
UMC’s
Sermon Title: “It just got real!”
Old Testament Scripture Lesson: Psalm 47
New Testament Scripture Lesson: Acts 1:1-11
Gospel Lesson: Luke 24:44-53
Today is the Seventh Sunday in
Easter, and it is also our Ascension Sunday. More specifically, this Sunday in
our church calendar is not only the last Sunday of this Easter Season, but it
is also the Sunday that we celebrate our Lord and savior Jesus Christ ascending
into heaven. The actual date that our church and many churches celebrated
Christ’s ascension was this past Thursday May 29th. Some churches
even have services on this Thursday every year, to celebrate the ascension of
Jesus Christ into heaven.
Remember that Jesus has been
crucified, was resurrected on the third day, and has been appearing here and
there to his disciples throughout much of this Easter Season. Yet he is now on
this day, ascended into heaven.
How many of you here when you were
younger secretly stayed up late at night to play, watch television, or
something else? Perhaps you did that little routine where you peered down the
hall, and then you whispered to you sister or your brother, “I think there
asleep.” Then after thinking they were asleep, then maybe you would get out the
comic books, the video games, or turn the television on, but not too loud to
wake mom of course. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Any of you here ever do something
like this, or has anyone here ever lied to your parents about where you were,
and then it blew up in your face? Perhaps you accidentally got stranded
somewhere, perhaps you got into some trouble, and needed help. In times such as
these, we then want our loving parents or family to come in and save the day
don’t we?
Today, Jesus Christ, the savior of
the world ascends into heaven. For me then, I can imagine the small talk that
might have occurred after Jesus Christ went up to be with the Father on this
day. Did one disciple ask, “What do we do now?” Perhaps one said, “Maybe we can
just do whatever we want, now that the Lord is gone?” Some of you may have heard
the quote, “When the cats are away, the mice will play.”
Imagine having Jesus with you in the
flesh for three years, during which time he performs countless miracles,
changes the world, and conquers death. After conquering death, he then appears to
his disciples for forty-days, before ascending to heaven.
I have heard young people say when
something extreme occurs, “It just got real!” Maybe a young person has to give
a speech in front of their school class, and they are fine with giving this
speech, until it is there turn to actually speak. All of the sudden there hands
are sweating, there heart is pounding, as the reality of what they have to do, “Just
got real!”
So while this day is significant in
remembering the ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven, it is also significant
in that the early church, the apostles, and all the disciples were now without
the Lord in the flesh. Jesus of course promised that he would send the Holy Spirit
to further embolden the faith of his early followers. Next Sunday, on Pentecost
Sunday we celebrate this occurrence, this miracle of the Holy Spirit descending
upon the early church, and filling them with fire and conviction. Due to this,
we traditionally wear red on Pentecost Sunday, to symbolize the fire of the
Holy Spirit.
So while the church will truly be
born next Sunday, on this Sunday the disciples are now without Jesus Christ, in
the flesh. “It just real!” In that moment of Jesus ascending, I wonder, did any
of them panic and think, “I can’t do this Christian thing without Jesus!”
Yet as we will hear next week, the
Holy Spirit did indeed come, and nearly two-thousand years later, we sit and
worship here this morning. Due to the long length of time that our faith has
existed, how could we have existed this long without the physical and bodily presence
of Jesus Christ? The answer is through God, the power of Jesus Christ, the Holy
Spirit, and scripture. You see, how did the early followers of Jesus Christ
know what to do, when it “got real?” The answer is, because God, Jesus Christ,
and the Holy Spirit revealed and showed them exactly what to do when, “It just
got real!”
In this same way, we have scripture,
we have God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and we can ensure that we are
faithfully following Jesus Christ, because we have it all written down in our Bibles.
Would we love to have Jesus Christ among us in the flesh? Sure we would! We
know according to scripture though, that the next time he will come to earth in
the flesh, will be in his promised second coming.
So the truths of Christ, the way were
are supposed to live have been given to us through scripture, and have been passed
down from generation to generation, to us here today. We know that Jesus told
us in Mark 12:30-31 for example, “you shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all
your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
There is no other commandment greater than these.”
My guess is that after Jesus
ascended, and one of the early Christians saw a neighbor in trouble or in need,
they said wait a second, “the Lord said to love and care for them.” You see what
Jesus had taught them in this moment, “just got real,” when they actually saw a
neighbor in need. In the same way nearly two-thousand years later, we must have
our own “It just real” moments, in that Jesus Christ will not be seen among us
in the flesh until he returns. So through the power God, Jesus, and the Holy
Spirit, we must preach the gospel of life. For Jesus knows when we are lying to
our parents, secretly staying up late to play, or playing it cool before giving
a speech in class.
For when Christ ascended, if the apostles
did nothing, then the church would have never gone anywhere, but today
Christianity is the biggest faith in the whole world. Clearly then, countless
men and women “got real” and preached Jesus Christ’s gospel far and wide. That
if someone is suffering, or is without, it becomes our personal responsibility as
followers of Christ to love and care for them. That when someone in the
community of faith is sick, we are all then sick. When someone does not have
enough food or clothing, we do what Jesus commands us when he said, “Feed the
sick,” and “clothe the naked.”
You see my brothers and sisters, God
is at work in this place and all around us. In order for us to be effective, to
grow in faith, to grow as a church, we must “get real,” and do this thing
called faith and preaching the gospel, that Jesus Christ taught before he
ascended into heaven. That Jesus has entrusted us with much, and we must
preach, love, and share his gospel to a broken and a dying world. A world that
need salvation, a world that needs Jesus Christ.
One of the ways we can continue to stay
connected to God, is through the reading of scripture. We have a beautiful
Psalm this morning, that says, “Clap your hands, all you prophets; shout to God
with loud songs of joy. For the LORD, the Most High, is awesome, a great king
over all the earth.” You notice the Psalm does not say, “Jesus will personally
come and teach every person on earth this scripture.” No, we have a responsibility
to “get real,” and to share this with the world. A world that desperately needs
to drink the well of life that is our Lord Jesus Christ.
This Psalm also says, “God is king
over the nations; God sits on his holy throne,” and Christ this day ascends to
the throne of his father.
In the reading this morning from the Book
of Acts, or the Acts of the Apostles, it says, “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 apostle whom he had
chosen.” This scripture then cites that Jesus appeared to the disciples for
forty-days, and, then it says that Jesus told the disciples to “not leave
Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.” This promise of
the Holy Spirit coming, is what we will once again celebrate next Sunday on
Pentecost Sunday. I wonder did the Apostles during time of waiting stay up
late, play “hooky” from learning and studying scripture, or did they play it
cool when really there were scared?
Jesus then tells his disciples, you won’t
know the day or the hour that I will return, but once they received the “Holy
Spirit” next Sunday on Pentecost, they will then share the good news of Jesus
Christ, “to the ends of the earth.”
Specifically, in Luke’s gospel from
this morning, it says, “Then he 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.” The gospel then
says, “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.” Jesus goes on telling them to preach about repentance
and forgiveness in him, that it is now time to “get real!” Then Jesus according
to the gospel of Luke, “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.” The apostles and the other disciples then headed
to Jerusalem praising God, and waiting for the promise of the Holy Spirit, that
will come next Sunday on Pentecost.
You see my brothers and sisters, God
is alive and well in the world today. The Holy Spirit can make himself known to
anyone in any place. Yet Jesus commanded the early apostles and disciples to
teach everything that he had taught him, and to “love their neighbor as
themselves.”
This goes beyond just salvation then,
Jesus further, gave us a road map, for how to treat the world, and how to treat
each other in this church.
I have to admit that sometimes, I
have to catch myself working for Jesus, instead of allowing Jesus to work
through me. Sometimes I have, and continue to struggle with the rank and file
of our church, of being ordained for example, when Jesus has already given me
new life. This weekend at our Annual Conference, as I felt broken for a while
that I was not “moving up in rank” yet, our Bishop Mark Webb, reminded us that
we are chosen, loved, and called, no matter who or what we are. We all need to
challenge ourselves to let God work through us, so that we can say daily, “It
just got real!”
I would like to close this message
with a story that Bishop Webb told us at this passed Annual Conference. Bishop
Webb told us that there was a missionary in a country in Africa. This
missionary had ministered to man in the village he was serving, and this man
grew and developed great faith. As a gift, one day the missionary decided that
he would surprise this man, and give him his very own Bible, which was actually
translated in his own language.
The missionary then proceeded to pull
out a beautiful new leather Bible. It was one of those Bibles with the gold
coloring on the outer edge of the pages, and it had a nice ribbon to mark a
page in the Bible. The next day however, this missionary was contacted and told
that he was needed in a nearby village to help there with ministering for a
couple of weeks.
When he returned back the village
that he was serving a couple of weeks later, the man whom he gave the Bible to
ran up to him with great joy. In fact, the man had the Bible the missionary
gave him with him. Yet the missionary noticed the Bible no longer looked new. Instead
it was all beat up, and it appeared that several pages had been torn out. The
missionary then said to the man, “did you beat up and tear pages out of the
Bible that I gave you.” The man enthusiastically said, “Yes I did!” The missionary
then said, “But you destroyed the Bible I gave you!” The man then said to the
missionary, but I don’t see it that way, “You see I read this book so much the
past couple of weeks that it already is getting beat up.” Then the man said to
the missionary, “As I was reading page after page, I thought, I need to share
this page with some one! So I tore it out, and gave it to someone in the village!”
The man then said, “I continue to do this, and many pages are now missing from
the Bible you gave me.” As he said that, the missionary began to look around,
and he saw the people in the village all were reading a torn out page from the
Bible he had given the man.
What is the point of this story you
might ask? Bishop Webb told us that we have one savior Jesus Christ, and that
so long ago, he taught us, he loved us, and he died for us, and like the man in
Africa, we need to share that with others. The when Jesus ascended “It just got
real!” So we all need to get real, and love, serve, and spread the good news of
Jesus Christ to each other. For this is why he came. Amen.
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