Seventh Sunday of Easter (Ascension Sunday)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Ephesians 1:15-23
15I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason 16 I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. 17 I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, 18 so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, 19 and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power. 20 God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. 22 And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
It’s been an eventful weekend. Maybe even caught a glimpse of heaven. Friday night we had the softball game, and after the game Caleb and Judson and I drove over to the Fitness center in Tappahannock for an all-night lock-in with the children and youth of Rappahannock Christian Center. It started at 10 and we pulled into our driveway yesterday morning shortly after 6 AM.
The boys actually lasted until right around 4 AM before conking out. Though I thought I was going to be falling asleep around the same time, it turned out that I didn’t. But it was an enjoyable night. We got
to swim, and play games, and eat way too much sugar and salty stuff for our own good. They had set up a relay-obstacle race to begin … around 2AM, but I wound up in the snack room talking to Blair Eiselstein.
Blair’s mother is from the Philippines, and his father is from the United States. His father was in the service, and when he retired, he retired in the Philippines. So at the age of 11, Blair moved to Davao City, Mindanao, Philippines.
Davao city is also home to one of the Baptist Seminaries in the Philippines. Back in the 70’s, when Blair was living in the neighborhood, the Tyner family was serving as missionaries through the Foreign Mission Board, doing theological education work there. Gaye Tyner was one of the daughters of the family, and she and Blair became friends and would hang out together.
As is usually the case, they finished high school and returned to the States, each going their separate way, and they lost touch with each other. But, at least on Blair’s part, they never forgot each other.
When I moved to Louisville in 1987, I plugged into an informal network of MKs (Missionary Kids) who live in and around the city. Most, obviously, ended up there because of a connection with the seminary. Some live there because their families are there.
One of the couples I got to know were Gaye and Wyc Rountree. He was finishing up his doctoral work at southern, and Gaye had completed her MDiv. We used to share Wednesday evening meals together at church on a regular basis. I never imagined that 18 years later I would meet someone who knew Gaye as a teenager.
I shouldn’t be surprised, any more, at how often that has happened.
How many of you have heard of the play or the movie, “Six Degrees of Separation”?
I’ve not seen either the play or the movie, but I understand the principle behind it. The principle is this: if you look hard enough and long enough, you can link yourself to the majority of the world’s population in 6 steps or less. Pick any person in the world, and there’s a high probability that you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows that person. If you have internet access, and do a google search on that title – six degrees of separation, one of the links that comes up will allow you to join the experiment – it’s an interesting test.
Folks on the Northern Neck shouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever understanding the concept. Right?
When Kori and Anna Kiss were here last week, I finally had the presence of mind to ask them if they knew Errol and Mary Simmons. Turns out they do. Errol was the director of the International Baptist Lay Academy in Budapest, where Kori and Anna met.
Errol was the first missionary I met when I arrived in Spain as a Journeyman in 1985. We got to be friends over the next two years. It was a few years after I came back to the States that the Simmons’ transferred to Budapest to establish the Academy.
You can say it’s a small world, in fact, we say it is each Sunday we share our benediction – the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
So we’re making connections. Or better said, we’re recognizing, we’re understanding what connections are there that we already share.
A couple of weeks ago, Cliff commented on one of the meal deliveries that he made to the house of an elderly woman, who, on the face of it, he had no relation to and no familiarity with. He stepped into the living room and saw pictures of someone he’d known most of his life … or at least a good part of it.
How many times does that happen? How often do we assume there’s no common bond between us and the person standing in line in front of us at the box office, or sitting in the car in the next lane over, or sitting in the doctor’s office across from us, and go on about our lives as though we really don’t have any effect on our neighbors, be they across the street or across the world?
How long can we go on believing that what we do here does not ultimately on some level affect the rest of the world?
I don’t want to draw a strict causality between any two events, or maybe I do … but we do need to be reminded that the United States, with a minor percentage of the world’s population consumes a vastly disproportionate amount of the world’s resources. How do we as Christians respond to that fact? How are we to carry ourselves? How are we to act, in light of that knowledge?
Let’s uncover another connection. Being followers of Christ of the Baptist persuasion means for the most part that we shy at the mention of the Catholic Church, or at least it used to. Hopefully, we are learning to live in harmony and cooperation with other Christian traditions in the world today. The word catholic, with a small ‘c’, means universal. In the sense that all Christian churches claim Christ
as the head of the church, we are all part of the church universal. That doesn’t go against any uniquely Baptist doctrine that I’m aware of. We recognize that, though there are differences between us, sometimes significant differences, we cannot disavow claims of other orthodox Christian traditions to be to a greater or lesser degree a part of that church as well.
What does that mean for us here at Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?
Today we celebrate Ascension Sunday, marking, as the name says, the ascension of Christ to heaven. As we read in our responsive reading this morning, Christ opened the mind of the early church to understand the scriptures, and that understanding, followed by the inflowing of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, lead to the spreading of the
Gospel and the growth of the church to the point where there is no
point on earth that does not have the potential of seeing new disciples come to faith in Christ every day. Granted, there are some areas of the world where it is unlikely that it will occur, but we are not ultimately responsible for deciding where likelihood defines the movement of the Spirit of God.
What that means, for us here at Jerusalem, is that we truly are connected to our brothers and sisters around the world. Not just on Easter, or Christmas. Not just at Pentecost, but on a regular … ordinary everyday Sunday. And we don’t even have to dig deep to figure out the six degrees of separation between us and them. The phrasing itself is inadequate. There is no ‘us’ and ‘them’. We are all connected. We are family. We are community based on the Lordship of Christ. As such, we speak with many voices, sometimes in harmony and sometimes in dissonance, and yet, we are called to be brothers and sisters in Christ … BY Christ himself. As such, we are
to live our lives in shared community. The book of Acts records that all the disciples lived together and shared everything they had in common. It would be nice to see that happen. It does, to a greater degree here, than it has in past experience … though there have been a few notable exceptions … my point is not to discourage or encourage us as a congregation to copy other faith communities, but to seek to understand and follow what God has called this specific group of people, the family of faith that meets at 8800 History Land Hwy, in Emmerton Virginia, to do in order to be more and more like Christ every day.
That is an open question.
Earlier, I mentioned ‘uniquely Baptist doctrine’. There is one that comes into play here. It is the doctrine of “Soul Competency”. In just a few words, what the doctrine states is that each individual – each individual soul, has the ability to be touched by and respond to God’s movement in his or her life. We are each ‘competent’ to understand when and where it is God is leading us, and to follow that leading. That makes for sometimes complicated and sometimes fractured dealings within our church structure. That is why there are so many Baptist churches and Baptist denominations … if you’re not happy with the way things are done one place, you are free to go to a different place and begin with the vision God has given you.
What that translates into is hope. There is always a place for the Spirit of God to move – in our lives and in the lives of those around us, and through that moving to spark in us a renewed sense of purpose and direction, when the old ways become stale.
It also translates into an incredible wealth of riches, in heritage, riches in choices, in textures, in sensations that can be experienced as we draw closer and closer to God.
At the beginning of this message I mentioned I may have caught a glimpse of Heaven over the weekend. What I envisioned was that heaven is like meeting someone and engaging them in conversation, and in a few short words realize that we’re part of the same family. And that family, found all around the world, has the same father and brother.
Let’s pray.
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