Sermon: Life After Jesus

tl;dr: A sermon about witnessing for Jesus after the ascencion.

Intro - Farewell Frodo

There's a major difference in the endings between The Lord of the Rings books and the movies. After the hobbits Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin have saved the day, they return home to the Shire. The Shire was an idyllic natural paradise, with minimal industrial interference. It's also succeeded in being safely tucked away, free from the great violent struggles that have consumed so much of this fantasy world called Middle Earth.

In the movie, the hobbits return to the Shire exactly as they remembered it. They are seen relaxing in a pub and Sam even gets married. Not only is the Shire a virtual paradise, but all of the other nations of Middle Earth live in peace with each other, too. It's a classic Hollywood ending, suggesting that everybody will now be living happily ever after, with evil completely defeated.

In the books, the Shire is in a very different condition when the hobbits return, starting an extensive epilogue. Instead of being their own Garden of Eden, the Shire is being terrorized by the evil wizard Saruman. Sam plays an important part in the uprising, along with the other hobbits Merry and Pippin. Frodo, who had been the central character in the main quest, participates but not to the same degree. According to the appendices, Sam becomes mayor later, continuing to play an important role in restoring life as they had previously known it.

As we look at the Ascension story told in Acts, the story could similarly break from here into either of those two directions. We might disagree on the details of how the atonement worked, but Christians can generally agree that Jesus somehow defeated evil with his life, death, and resurrection. But what comes next?

The movie version is tempting, with everything tying up in a nice neat bow and everybody living in harmony. You can argue that for many years of Mennonite history, they tried to live similar to that of the hobbits in the Shire, sequestered away from the evils of the world.

But the movie version is not very realistic. It's not what happened in the rest of the biblical story. It's not what happened in the early Church history that followed. The early Christians became known for their willingness to care for the poor, for rushing into towns hit by a plague to help the dying, and for empowering women and slaves. They were not sequestered away avoiding the problems of the world.

Two thousand years later, we say that Jesus defeated evil and death, but evil and death still exist. We're left with the choice of what we're going to do about that: we can try to hide away, or we can get our hands dirty continuing to work for the kind of justice Jesus exemplified.

There is one piece of the story that is the same in both versions of Lord of the Rings, however. Frodo, haunted and exhausted by his journey, decides to leave Middle Earth for the Undying Lands where he can be at peace. It's probably best to think of this as a happy retirement. The parallel to Jesus only extends so far, I know. There are none of the equivalent aspects of Jesus' continued authority over the world, eternal life, or a promise of a return – in fact, Frodo makes it clear that he will not return. But those aren't the parts I want to focus on today.

Before leaving, Sam speaks to Frodo. He sees that Frodo is putting the finishing touches on the book where he had written down the story of their adventure, so Sam asks if he's finished it. Frodo looks at Sam, hands him the book, and says: "Not quite. There's room for a little more. The last pages are for you, Sam."

Throughout the main quest, Sam was essentially the sidekick. It's true that Frodo never would have succeeded without him, but it was no question that Frodo was the centre of the story. That changes with Frodo's departure. The primary actor in the story has shifted. The torch has been passed from Frodo to Sam, and especially in the book version, it is clear that there is still work to be done, despite the climax of the story being past.

There is a similar passing of the torch here in the Ascension story.

Concluding Act 4

In order for that passing of the torch to make sense, though, I need to zoom out a bit more to look at the big picture of the story. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the disciples for a few minutes. They started following this rabbi named Jesus. For some including the Twelve this might have been about 3 years, others would have been less than that. In many cases, they set aside their livelihoods to follow Jesus immediately when first given the chance.

What they expected from Jesus as they started out may not have been the same for all of them. At the simplest level, the Twelve were probably simply good Jewish boys who were not going to turn down an opportunity to apprentice to a rabbi. The fact that most of them were working in their family trade suggests that they were not good enough to have been recruited by a different rabbi when they were younger. Jesus recruits these people who are considered not good enough, and they jump at the opportunity, without really knowing the extent of what they were getting themselves into.

They probably did not imagine many of the things that would happen in those three years. For example, Jesus did not just reinterpret the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible, as rabbis were free to do. Sometimes he blatantly overruled it, claiming that his authority is greater than the Bible, with phrases like "you have heard it said… but I tell you…"

Or how about telling the religious leaders that they go out and make converts just to turn them into twice the sons of Hell that they are? That's my personal favourite of Jesus' many prophetic insults. That's not the kind of thing you expect from your rabbi.

As they began to identify Jesus as the Messiah, or Christ, that brought a lot of other expectations. First century Jews believed that a Messiah would free them from under the boot of the oppressive Romans and restore Israel to its proper glory like it had in the days of David. They had some different ideas about how this would happen. They may have emphasized victory through military leadership or proper temple practices or calling everyone back to living holy lives or some combination of all of these. Jesus again didn't deliver on expectations.

After 3 years of public ministry, Jesus gets killed by those same Romans. He didn't even fight back. How is Jesus going to overthrow the Romans if he lets them kill him? And then Resurrection, the climax of the Jesus story. Jesus defeats death. The lives of the disciples have been completely turned upside down in the last 3 years.

The biblical scholar N.T. Wright has put forward an approach to reading the Bible that I find quite helpful. Wright invites us to look at the Bible like a dramatic play. This drama has five acts: 1. creation, 2. fall, 3. Israel, 4. Jesus, and 5. the Church. Each are important, but we don't try to interpret them all in the same way.

Have you ever seen a movie with a surprise twist ending that completely changes how you see everything that came before it? The best example I can think of is an old one - The Sixth Sense – but you might be able to fill in a different example. If you watch it again while knowing the twist that is on the way, you see the same actions and listen to the same words. But you understand them completely differently than if you were just watching the first part of the movie without knowledge of what's coming.

That's what Jesus does with the biblical narrative. He's the twist to the story that forces us to reconsider everything that came before that.

This framework of the Bible having these acts within one overarching story has helped me understand the Ascension more. The Ascension marks the end of act 4 – the incarnate Jesus story - and helps push us into act 5 – the Church.

Acts 1:1-11

Before Jesus ascends, the disciples ask him a question: "are you going to restore the Kingdom to Israel now?" This tells me that, at least to some degree, they still don't really get it. They're still waiting for Jesus to be the violent messiah that overthrows the Romans.

The disciples still seem to expect those were just some nice clichés but now that Jesus is back, he can get down to the real business. This is, unfortunately, a mindset that we often fall into ourselves. We think of justice as punishing the bad guys and giving the power to the good guys, with each of us having our own definition of who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Many Christians today even believe that Jesus will come back some day and look completely different than the first time, "with a sword in his hand and a commitment to make someone bleed" to quote one popular preacher.

Jesus answers in his usual cryptic way, essentially stating that's not something they need to know. And then he says something that doesn't seem to be related. He tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit is coming and they will be witnesses, not just in Israel but expanding outward to Samaria. We could read this as Jesus answering a question he wasn't asked because he doesn't want to acknowledge their question that is still missing the point.

I think he's answering it in a different way, though. Asked if HE was going to restore Israel now, he tells them that THEY will be given the Holy Spirit and will be his witnesses, starting with the same Israel they just asked about. What if that's how Jesus plans to restore the world, through us continuing his work?

It's not just us stumbling along on our own – this commission is tied to the promise of the Holy Spirit. Jesus will continue to be with us in that sense. He also tells us elsewhere that he is present in the marginalized people we encounter around us and whenever we gather in his name, as the Church. So it may not quite be Frodo disappearing and never coming back, but this still has to be a very hard moment for the disciples as they tried to figure out what to do next.

The key word in this commission is "witness." It is a fairly straightforward word, although it does have some baggage in our current religious context, conjuring up images of street corner preachers yelling about how you'll go to Hell if you don't believe or do the right things. Witnessing simply means to share with others what you have experienced. Strictly speaking, most street preachers I've run into aren't actually witnessing – they're just preaching doctrine.

Being a witness should not be a particularly controversial phrase. This past week I have experienced multiple NBA basketball playoff games and I've experienced a presentation on the future of Microsoft SharePoint. While the basketball games are usually more exciting, what I learned in the SharePoint presentation probably has more practical benefit to how I live my life. I will likely be witnesses to both in the coming weeks, the NBA games being more in talking about how great it was the Raptors won last night, and SharePoint more in implementing new features in my work.

When it comes to Jesus, you'll probably have some times when witnessing is exciting. But the feeling of excitement is not a primary descriptor of following Jesus. Encountering Jesus does always have practical implications, though. Shane Claiborne put it this way in his book The Irresistible Revolution:

Then I met Jesus and he wrecked my life. The more I read the gospel, the more it messed me up, turning everything I believed in, valued, and hoped for upside down. I am still recovering from my conversion.

I love that statement. Encountering Jesus wrecks your life, in the best way possible. To witness to that is to live and to speak out of those new values like peacemaking, mercy, and restorative rather than punitive justice.

Great Commission

That brings us around to another term that Jesus uses in a different recording of his last words to the disciples, and that is… well, disciples. You might be familiar with this version, often referred to as the Great Commission:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Like the commission in the Ascension story in Acts, this is a passing of the torch, a call to continue Jesus' mission. There are other similarities, too, like the claim to authority and the promise of always being with us.

But the key verb is different: making disciples rather than witnessing. A disciple is somebody who does what the teacher does, not just somebody who theoretically agrees with what the teacher said. Looking back on the life of Jesus, he spent most of his time doing very practical things like healing people, feeding people, and tearing down walls of inequality with his words and actions. And he made disciples, inviting other people to follow him, too.

Tony Jones has referred to the Bible as propaganda. That's another word we generally don't like very much. We associate it with things like blind support for military violence. But the basic idea is that propaganda is a story told with the purpose of inviting you to be a part of something bigger. Jesus still invites you to follow him, and for those who have accepted that invitation, challenges us to invite others through our words and actions continuing on his Kingdom vision.

2 Corinthians 5:14-20

There's one more label given to Christians I wanted to touch on, this time from Paul in 2 Corinthians: "ambassador."

Ambassador is a much more politically loaded word. To be the ambassador of Canada to Germany means that you are a representative of Canada to the government and people of Germany. There are many ways that you can and probably should be active in German life. But that's not ultimately where your loyalty lies. Your loyalty lies with Canada, even while in the context of Germany.

The same can be said for being ambassadors for Jesus in Paul's context and in our own. Our loyalty lies with Jesus, and we're left to figure out what that means in our context. It's a similar term to "witnesses" and "disciples" in that we represent Jesus to the world, but carries that extra tension. Being an ambassador does mean we will sometimes be counter-cultural with the ways that the world usually operates. It's not being counter-cultural only for the sake of being counter-cultural, which is a trap we sometimes fall into, but because we actually believe Jesus' way is better.

One thing it will definitely mean is that we are reconcilers. Unless we do have the privilege of only surrounding ourselves with people like ourselves, we can see divisions between people all around us. There are divisions between rich and poor. There are divisions between men, women, and those who don't fall on a gender binary. There are divisions between races, and nationalities, and ages, and sexual orientations. And so on and so on. Humanity does have a remarkable ability to find reasons to feel superior to and threatened by people even just a little bit different than us.

There's a lot of people in this congregation who have a lot more practical peacemaking experience than I do, so I'm not going to pretend to sound like an expert on the practical details. There is one big theological starting point in this text, though. We no longer see people from a human point of view, according to Paul. This does not mean pretending human differences don't exist. There are a lot of problems with the idea of colour-blindness as it is popularly used to dismiss very real racism, for example.

The Bible starts with humanity being made in God's image. The climax of the story has God loving every single person so much as to die on a cross. And now, as Jesus has passed the torch to the Church, we are commissioned to see people in the same kind of way that God sees us. Whenever we see a person, we are asked to agree with God that they are these two things: God's image and infinitely loved. Jesus extended love to anybody he encountered and broke down societal walls.

As his witnesses, disciples, and ambassadors, we are invited to go and do likewise. In this great drama, we are actors. How are we going to be a part of restoring the world?