In the church’s year we are celebrating the time between the resurrection and the commissioning of the young church by the Holy Spirit to go out and share with all people the Good News about Jesus. The lessons for this season have Jesus assuring the disciples that he would not desert them, that he would remain with them and they would discover his presence among them, albeit in a new way. This becomes a time to prepare for and expect widening horizons and new ventures. The disciples were not just students any longer, they were also called to be teachers and serve as mentors for the next generation.
Like disciples of every age, we are often trapped with certain prejudices and assumptions of our immediate experience. We suffer from fear of a new age. It’s hard to imagine how profound change can very well be change for the better. Yet I suspect most of the anxieties and controversies that vex us now will likely be no more than mere footnotes fifty years hence. We are like those before us who anxiously asked, “Jesus, how can we know the way? With all the uncertainty and chaos of life, is it possible for the joy and peace of God to be with us?” Jesus assures us, “Yes, yes, the Holy Spirit, My Spirit, God’s Spirit, is able to permeate all barriers, soar above all walls and barriers, open our minds to new possibilities and refresh our besieged and tired hearts.” The frontier of our age is still God’s world and God has set the Gospel loose from all the bonds the world may try to put on it.
In our particular community’s year, this is a time of graduations. Academic processions remind us all that there is a long history and tradition of sacrifice and hard work that has bequeathed a rich legacy to us. There is rightful acknowledgement of those who have helped nurture and support those who have accomplished a guided program of learning. Graduation involves the final formal declaration to the graduates that they are ready to leave forever their protected undergraduate quad and now are being sent out as life-long learners. With the tools with which they have been equipped, they will now be expected and capable of assuming greater and greater responsibilities and challenges. Like the early disciples, their horizons are now stretched wide open. It is not the end of learning for them; it is just the final chapter of one phase of their education and the matriculation into another. They have been offered much by others. Now begins their opportunities to give much to others.
This weekend is also Memorial Day weekend. I believe there are at least 25 separate accounts of the origins of Memorial Day. They all seemed to have first been initiated to honor those who died in America’s great civil war. Among the earliest in 1865 was when a group of former slaves honored the dead from a prison camp in Charleston, SC and in nearby Waterloo, NY and Columbus, Mississippi both a year later. No doubt it took some courage to be the first to decorate a neglected grave of a soldier of the opposing side, but Memorial Day became an occasion of healing transition into a greater vision and of opening the horizons of larger American society. Memorial Day became a day to honor all those who died in service to their country and to remember that they have left us a legacy to further enlarge. Memorial Day helped us get from the divisive devastation of the 1860’s into the world responsibilities of twentieth century.
I’m not so sure that the dead don’t speak for themselves and I’m even less sure that we the living should always presume to speak for them. Perhaps a greater honor to them would to be open and to listen to their eloquent silence. It is a wrong kind of thanksgiving to thank God that we are here instead of them. It is right to give thanks for their part in allowing us to stand in this place, to give thanks for enjoying what they too caught a glimpse of, and to honor them by striving for a peaceful world, with justice and liberty for all, and where war will be no more and a memory rather than a present reality.
The significance of Memorial Day, like the meaning of graduation ceremonies or the promise of Jesus to be with people of faith is virtually incomprehensible to those who first and foremost ask, “What’s in it for me?” for while we are beneficiaries of the past, we are called to live in hope and use the present well by creating a greater legacy for the future. What ever is first and foremost on your mind this weekend, be it the promise of Jesus to lead us into the future with greater truth, or your graduation or the graduation of one you love, or Memorial Day, there is a larger vision of transitioning into far greater potential that connects them all, waiting for us to discover and ponder.
