Graduation - Acts 1:6-14

Over the past few weeks I’ve seen celebratory signs in yards, shoe polished windows on minivans, and more than a few teenagers in parks, garbed in flowing medieval dress, topped with flat tasseled hats, their families adoringly snapping pictures. The class of 2020 has graduated and what a strange graduation it has been--online ceremonies, remote speeches, diplomas in the mail. Many of us feel for these graduates, but I’m sure that despite the strangeness, the meaning of this time still holds hope. School is over and new independence, learning, and possibility lie ahead. 

The question before these graduates, in one way or another, is how to grow from here, what to do in order to embrace the fullness of what life is meant to be. For some, this will mean more education--college or graduate study or learning a trade. For others it will mean the mundane lessons of how to cook a meal, make ends meet, and do laundry. In whatever form, the class of 2020 is tasked with moving toward maturity.

To do that, they and all who want to live into life’s fullness, would do well to take some advice from another group of graduates, those in the class of 30. Not 1930 or 1830 or 1730, just 30--the uncertain guess of the date when Jesus left his students standing on a mountain outside Jerusalem in what had to have been the strangest graduation of all time.

Instead of the students leaving the stage, it is their teacher who leaves; instead of the best student getting to make a speech it is their teacher who gives them one final word before exiting up into the heavens, the universe beyond the world. Before he leaves, the class of 30 has a parting question. Like many graduates they want to know when the aim of all their education will finally come to fruition. For them, that is the restoration of Israel, which in effect is the restoration of the world--the healing and reconciliation of all things. This is what they’ve been working toward. But like many a parent or mentor since, Jesus directs them to the more immediate task. “How about you find a job,” he says in effect. And Jesus, being good to his students to the end, gives them one. They are to be witnesses.

Witness, for those who grew up in certain American strains of religion, can have a bad rep. We’ve all seen street preachers who seem more interested in their daily score of saved souls than in showing the way to Jesus. But at its best and truest, to witness means to speak the truth about what we’ve experienced, to point to the world where God’s grace and mercy have found expression. We say “look” to those who don’t yet see it and we help them find a glimpse of grace, hidden among the weeds.

I do this all the time with bird watching. I see an indigo bunting in a field, vibrant with a blue that is impossible to reproduce in a book or picture. If there’s anything in the world worth getting excited about its an indigo bunting, but it is slightly hidden in the grass. If you don’t know where to see it you will miss its beauty. So I tell anyone who will listen, “look, there’s this amazing bird there,” and some stop and some want to look and some see it and are filled with as much amazement as I have, while others just shrug. That is witness and that is the call of the disciples. To point out this beautiful and amazing reality in the world, the God who came among us and taught us how to be human, and suffered in the most human way, and opened for us an abundance of life beyond life. If you see it then you can’t help saying, “look!” That’s the job Jesus gives, this job of saying “look.” 

Having provided them a job, Jesus leaves. Graduation is over, and the students milling about are moved on by angelic ushers who tell them to stop staring up and start looking forward. As their new reality sets in, these graduates begin to live into what they’ve been taught. Like an apprentice left alone to do her work for the first time, all their practice and training kicks in and they set to the task they know how to do.

The first task they take up in their new lives as employed apostles, is the job of prayer. It is prayer, they know, that will provide the ground for all else.  It is by prayer that they will be connected to the reality of beauty, love, and grace to which they are to bear witness. It is prayer that will lead them into maturity and all the possibilities for growth that graduation marks. And so as our reading in Acts says, they devoted themselves constantly to prayer.

By taking up this task they are doing what they had learned in the school of discipleship. Jesus had taught them how to pray, in both word and example, and he had prayed for them many times. They remembered, perhaps, that last night they were together before the crucifixion and all became unsettled. It was then that Jesus prayed that they would join with Him as He was joined with His father. It was from and in that unity that they would be brought by the Spirit to very heart of God. Witness was the work, prayer was the way.

Our graduation may not take place on a mountain outside Jerusalem, but for those of us in the school of Jesus the same work and way remain. We are called to bare witness to the grace and mercy of God in the world, especially in the person of Jesus who is the bruised and beautiful embodiment of it all. Witness, although it is our work, is an outcome more than an effort. The effort lies in the life of prayer, the devotion of our time and energy to exist within the community of God. It is by prayer that we enter that oneness by which we live now as Christ’s embodiment in the world. Jesus’s exit to the place beyond the world opens up our role as the continuation of His presence, a presence we maintain by prayer.

The world needs the living Christ, now as much as ever. In a time of confusion and chaos; unsettled by the tenuous nature of our lives, we need graduates who have learned the lessons of their master, who can be light and salt in the bland darkness of the-way-things-are. To live as that luminous flavor in the world, we must do as those first graduates of the school of Jesus did. We must dedicate our lives to prayer.

Go, be quiet, listen for the music beneath the noise. Wait until your mind has settled like silt in the water. Be present to God and learn what it feels like. Then carry that presence into your day, returning whenever the feeling passes, whenever you realize you’ve lost the hum of the God-harmony in your heart. With time it will take less effort, with time the symphony within will grow.

Though you may not always see it, you will learn to trust that somewhere hidden God always waits. And then, like a flash of iridescent indigo, you will see him in the face of a neighbor, in the eyes above the mask of the woman at the checkout, the reckless play of a teenager; you will hear Him in the oxygen hiss of the loved one through the webcam, the song of a thrush that you never noticed above the traffic, the electric life of a 2 a.m. storm. And when you hear, and see, and feel God you will have to say “look, listen” to anyone who will stop, because it’s so beautiful you can’t help but share it. That will be your witness, and no one has to pay attention, except for you who must learn to ever more pay attention so that over time God becomes less a glimpse here and there, but a reality you live in.

Our graduation has come. It is time to live the lessons of our teacher, to grow up into the patterns of fullness he showed us. Let us dedicate ourselves to prayer, moving our lives into his life, so that we may show the loving, merciful, beautiful reality of God, here and to the ends of the earth. Amen.