Feast of the Ascension 2018

Feast of the Ascension-----“The Never Ending Story”

          In 1985 a movie came out called “Clue.”  The movie was based on the board game by the same name.  In the movie was a murder mystery that had three different endings.  If you watched the movie at home, you could pick the ending you preferred.  The movie did not do very well at the Box office, so we could say that the concept of picking our own ending to a story is not all that popular.

            The gospel of Mark does not suffer from a lack of popularity.  Mark’s gospel is the first gospel written in history.  The gospel is also the shortest of the gospels.  An interesting thing about the gospel is that that has several endings.  All the gospels struggle, with the same question.  How do we sum up the story of Jesus?  How do you end a story that has no end? 

            The writer of the Gospel of Luke solves the problem by writing a whole other book.  We read the beginning of that Book in today’s first lesson.  The Acts of the Apostles begins with the story of the Ascension.  The Book goes on to describe the activities of the early church, how Jesus’ work continued even after he physically left the earth.

            The Gospel of Mark’s first ending describes two women going to the tomb of Jesus.  When they look inside, the tomb is empty.  A man is at the tomb. He is dressed in white.  He asks them who they are looking for.  He then tells Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James to go tell Peter what they have seen.  But the women leave the tomb bewildered and trembling.  We are told, they say nothing to anyone.  The ending seems disappointing. But it has a purpose.  The purpose is emphasized in what is called the longer ending.

            In the longer ending all the events of Easter Sunday are described from the women finding to the empty tomb to the Lord’s interaction with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus to the appearance to the eleven in the upper room.  Jesus, in the second version, chastises the disciples for the disbelief.  He challenges them to act on their faith.

            The scene in the upper room leads into what we call the great commission.  “Go out into the whole world and proclaim the good news to all creation.”  At the end of these challenging words, Jesus Ascends to his Father in Heaven. 

            All the endings in Mark seem to have the same intention.  The intention of the writer seems to be that the evangelist is challenging the reader to overcome any hesitation in witnessing about faith in Jesus.  In the first ending we are not supposed to just be mad at the woman for being confused, but we are to be spurred into action.  If they will not say something we will say something.  If they were hesitant to speak then we must speak, or the story of Jesus will be lost. In the other endings in the Gospel of Mark we are directly challenged to speak by Jesus himself.

            But are we ready to take up this task?  In the Acts of the Apostles, Jesus does not tell the apostles to go right out and preach.  He tells them to wait.  What are they waiting for?  We know that they were waiting for the Holy Spirit to come.  The disciples of Jesus were not equipped to evangelize until they were touched by the Spirit of God.

            And that is an important thing for us to remember.  Just because we are Christian that does not mean that we are ready to preach.  We might have all the knowledge in the world, but knowledge alone does not make us effective missionaries for Jesus.  We need what we would call heart knowledge.

            For it is hard for us to speak about God’s unconditional love if we have only experienced conditional relationships in our life.  We cannot tell others about the love of God if we don’t feel loved by God ourselves.  We will find it hard to share about the mercy of God if we feel like sinners who are unworthy of forgiveness.  We need to feel like we have experienced redemption before we can say what it is like. How can we speak of acting on the inspiration of the Spirit until we act in new and different ways, until we achieve some things religiously that we never dreamed we would had we not stepped out in faith?     

            Can we share about such things?  God will inspire us, but we need to be open to where God is leading.  If we are, then we might be surprised at what we can do for the glory of God.  We ask today, “What kind of ending do we want to write to the Gospel that is our life?”

This is a rough draft, grammar may not be perfect.