Category Archives: Sermons

Afterthought?

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(Psalm 110, Acts 1:1-11)

How many of you have ever heard of Ascension Day? Anyone know when it is? Nothing unusual there, most Protestants don’t; these days, I’d guess most American Catholics don’t know either. For those of you who don’t know, Ascension Day falls on a Thursday, forty days after Easter, a week and a half before Pentecost; this year, it’s the first of May. It’s the day on which the church remembers Jesus’ ascension into heaven—at least, theoretically; in my experience, most churches and Christians don’t. Oh, sure, when we say the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed in church, we say, “He ascended into heaven,” and I think most of us believe it in a vague sort of way; which is to say, I think most people who affirm that Jesus died and rose again would also affirm his ascension, but have no sense whatsoever that it matters. To us, it seems more like a clerical detail than anything else. Jesus left, but he didn’t die, so, OK, he just sort of took off and disappeared, instead. If anyone came along and said, “No, no, he didn’t ascend into heaven, he just did thus-and-such,” we wouldn’t think it was all that important; we don’t think this matters.

The thing is, though, it does matter, because the ascension is important—quite profoundly so, in fact. It’s no mere afterthought to the resurrection, nor is it just a footnote to the work of Christ on the cross; rather, it’s the necessary completion of that work. Without the ascension, the resurrection is incomplete; it’s only in the ascension of Christ that all that he accomplished in the resurrection is truly fulfilled.

Now, I’m sure that seems a strange thing for me to say; it’s certainly not the way we tend to talk at Easter, or the kind of thing we usually say about the resurrection of Christ. There’s good reason for that, because the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus are the central event of human history, and it’s there that the saving work of God was accomplished; we don’t want to do anything to take the focus off that truth. However, if in emphasizing the resurrection we forget about the ascension—as we too often do—then we risk losing much of the meaning of the resurrection as well. It’s only in strongly affirming that Jesus ascended into heaven that we can truly say with the people of God throughout the ages that he is risen from the dead.

That is, of course, a strong statement, and one which requires a fair bit of unpacking, not to mention considerable support; which is the purpose of this sermon series. Over the next four weeks, between now and Pentecost, we’ll be looking at just why that statement is true, and why it really does matter that Jesus Christ ascended into heaven. There are several reasons for this, which we’ll be considering over the next few weeks, but they all come down, ultimately, to one key truth: Christ didn’t come just so we could be “saved” in the sense that we get to go to Heaven instead of Hell.

Unfortunately, this is an area in which our particular stream of Christian tradition doesn’t tend to be very helpful. We’ve inherited a legal view of salvation as pardon for breaking God’s law, which unfortunately has tended to be distorted into the idea that salvation is sort of like getting a “not guilty” verdict, so you get to go back home instead of to jail. This is true as far as it goes. Part of what Christ did on the cross was take our unrighteousness and give us his righteousness, so that by his sacrifice our sins could be forgiven—but that’s only part of what he did. Jesus’ purpose, his mission in this world, wasn’t only to make us legally right with God so that we could skip out on going to Hell—it was to make us right with God in order to heal our alienation from God, to remove the obstacle that kept us from having a right relationship with him. This is where the importance of the ascension comes in, because while Jesus’ death and resurrection are the core of that work, the ascension was necessary for its application to us.

Why? Well, first of all, consider what the ascension of Jesus literally means: it means that he returned to heaven as a human being. This was a statement which was incredibly controversial in the early church—that’s why the creeds explicitly affirm that Jesus ascended into heaven, because there was a lot of argument about that point. The reason for the argument is that a lot of people just couldn’t deal with the idea that anything as gross and physical and material as a human body could be in heaven, in the presence of God. They were very “spiritual” people, in the same way as many people nowadays are very “spiritual”—which is to say, they saw “spiritual” reality as very different from, and superior to, mere physical, material reality. They’d be very happy to talk about their immortal souls going to heaven when they died—but the body? Ugh. No thanks. That was just a temporary thing, even a temporary prison, which they believed their souls would eventually escape to live a purely spiritual existence with God, who himself was pure spirit, and therefore superior to us physical beings.

Obviously, on such a view, Jesus couldn’t possibly have returned to the presence of God as a human being—that would defeat the whole purpose, and contaminate heaven. Yet this is precisely what the Scriptures affirm: the first-century Jewish human being Jesus of Nazareth ascended bodily into heaven, and at the end of all things he will return to this earth in exactly the same way. His human body, his human identity, wasn’t just something he put on for a while and then set aside—it’s a permanent part of who he is. The Son of God is still, seated in heaven at the right hand of God, the Son of Man, Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Jew with nail scars in his wrists and feet and the wound of a spear in his side, and so he shall ever be; he didn’t just wear a human suit for a while, he became fully human, and he remains fully human.

This isn’t something we tend to think about very often, but it’s a profound and critically important truth. Jesus took our humanity with him when he returned to his Father; which means that in Jesus, God has taken our humanity into himself. He has not discarded our flesh, nor has he separated himself again from this world we know and love; rather, the stuff of creation is inextricably woven into the being of God. This is why, as we’ll see later in this series, the author of Hebrews can declare that we have a high priest who understands our weaknesses and our struggles. It’s not just a matter of Jesus remembering what it was like once upon a time to be human, powerful a thing though that is; his humanity is not merely a memory from the past, it’s a present reality. He still knows what it is to be human, because he still is human.

Now, to really unpack everything this means for us will take several sermons—don’t worry, I’m not going to try to cover everything in one service—but the most important point in all this, the meaning I want to leave you with, is this: consider just how much God loves you, that he would go to such lengths as this for you. God did something permanent, taking our human flesh on himself for all time, for your sake, and mine. He did that, and he suffered in that body more than any human being has ever suffered, before or since, for you. Where our love reaches a limit, a place where we say, “Yes, I love you, but not that much,” the love of God just keeps going, far beyond where we would expect. No matter how far you go from God, the Father’s love goes farther. No matter how great your sin, it has a limit, and God’s love doesn’t, and neither does the meaning of his sacrifice on the cross; no matter how great your sin, it’s covered.

That’s important for us to remember in our down times, and the times when we’re wrestling with a temptation we just can’t seem to beat, because those are the times when we risk giving in to despair; those are the times that the devil comes and whispers in our ears, trying to convince us that God has given up on us, that he can’t possibly love us anymore after all we’ve done. The fact of the matter is, when you look at everything Jesus did for us, everything he went through to save us, there’s no way that anything we can do can change his mind about that; the very worst we can do is but a small part of the pain he bore for us. He didn’t come down to this earth under the illusion that we’re better than we actually are; he didn’t come down to take just some of our sin, as if there were some things that even he wouldn’t die to redeem. No, he came down here to pay the price for all our sin, to heal all our wounds and carry all our diseases; he came to raise the dead of a dying world, and now he has gone on ahead to prepare our way. Christ has gone up with shouts of joy in order that we might follow him, that we might be invited to live forever in the eternal blessing of the love of God.

Still Rolls the Stone

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(Psalm 117; Mark 16:1-8, Romans 6:1-11)

I saw a quote a while back from an older pastor, his spirit clearly broken, who had come to believe that funerals were the only worthwhile thing he did. He said, “The first couple I married is now divorced; the first person I led to Christ has left the church. But the first person I buried is still dead.” My first thought when I read that was, “How sad!” That’s someone who’s lost faith. There’s no resurrection there, no Easter hope, only the wisdom of the modern world: people die, and they stay dead, and that’s it. That’s why you see cars with the bumper sticker, “The one who dies with the most toys wins”—because what’s to play for except to make life as fun as you can while it lasts? That’s why you see T-shirts that say, “No one gets out of here alive,” or, “Life is a terminal condition.” For many people, the future fact of death overshadows the present fact of life, and anything that can be done to stave it off or deny its approach is worth doing.

However people choose to deal with death, most agree that it’s one of only two certain things in life: when someone’s dead, they’re dead, and that’s it. The great Christian writer G. K. Chesterton has one of his characters, a Prussian general, say this to explain why he had ordered the execution of a poet: “Highness, . . . he would be deified, but he would be dead. Whatever he means to do, he would never do it. Whatever he is doing, he would do no more. Death is the fact of all facts; and I am rather fond of facts.” And because it is the fact of all facts, the fact which can silence all other facts, it’s the fact to which tyrants and brutes have always resorted in order to keep the upper hand. If someone becomes too much of a problem, you can always kill them; and then whatever they are doing, they will do no more.

And so the Pharisees saw the crowds following Jesus, then looked at each other and said, “This isn’t doing any good—see, the whole world has gone after him.” But they had one more hammer to use; and a few days later, they and the chief priests had manipulated the Roman who ruled Israel into sentencing Jesus to death. Whatever Jesus meant to do, he would not do it; what he was doing, he would do no more. Death was the fact of all facts; and they were very fond of facts.

Along with that fact came a few more. Jesus was buried in a rich man’s tomb; the stone used to close that tomb was a giant disc, a great stone wheel, perhaps six feet across and a foot or two thick. Once the body was inside, the stone was rolled down into a slot in front of the door that held it firmly in place against the rock wall of the tomb. You can imagine the horrible grinding noise that must have made, a sound like the death of all hopes; you can imagine how that sound must have echoed in the ears of Mary, Mary Magdalene, Joseph of Arimathea, and the others gathered there, and how they must have felt it in their very souls, as if the stone were rolling within them, crushing their hearts.

Still, there was nothing to do but go on, somehow; and as Jesus’ burial had been hurried, his body had not been properly anointed, so that needed to be done. That was something they could still do for Jesus, small as it was. And so after sundown brought the Sabbath to an end, they went out and bought the spices, and early the next morning, Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Salome went down to the tomb. They left home while it was still dark, so they could be sure to arrive at the tomb at first light. As they walked, they fretted about the stone; after all, it weighed thousands of pounds, and would have to be rolled uphill to get it out of the way, and it all seemed too much for them to do. Plus there were those Roman soldiers set around the mouth of the tomb, who might be willing to help, or—not . . . you never could tell with Romans.

When they got there, though, they found the stone already rolled away, and no one there except an angel sitting in the tomb. Mark doesn’t use the word “angel,” but that’s what he means; you can tell from the clothes that shone white in the dark tomb, and from the women’s reaction: they were terrified. We have this Victorian image of angels in the back of our minds, of pretty young men and women in soft focus with beautiful golden wings and gentle expressions on their faces, but real angels aren’t like that. God’s angels live in his presence, they’re saturated in his glory and his holiness, and when they show up undisguised, they radiate that glory; it’s as if a small sun suddenly started burning right here in this sanctuary. Their presence is stunning, blinding, awe-inspiring, overpowering . . . terrifying. God is not safe, he isn’t tame, he isn’t comfortable, and neither are his servants. That’s why the first thing angels always say is, “Don’t be afraid.”

If the angel’s appearance is staggering, however, that’s nothing compared to his message. He tells them, “You’re looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He’s been raised; he isn’t here. Look, there’s the place where they laid him. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” And how do the women respond? They run. They’re beside themselves with some crazy combination of fear, and joy, and disbelief, and awe; this is just too big, too much, too far beyond their experience for them to handle. Their emotions overwhelm them, and they run; they don’t know what else to do.

And here, Mark stops, creating incredible heartburn for generations of Christians, including the writer of the extended ending you have there in your Bibles. He doesn’t give us a resurrection appearance, he doesn’t show the women telling the disciples Jesus had risen, he doesn’t give us any of that; instead, he leaves us with the women running away in fear, saying nothing at all. Mark knows that they did in fact tell the disciples, that the word did get out; why doesn’t he tell that story, too? Why stop here?

It’s hard to say for sure, but it seems to me that this ending does something important: it drops the whole question in our laps. The other gospels end with Jesus appearing to his disciples and teaching them, and those accounts are important; but in wrapping up the story, bringing it to a conclusion, they allow us to stay outside it, if we choose. When Mark leaves us hanging, with no resolution, with the command to go tell the others still unfulfilled, it pulls us in and leaves us to finish the story. We don’t know, from Mark, what the women make of what has just happened to them, or what they’re going to do with it; as we wrestle with that fact, it brings us smack up against the question of what we make of it, what we’re going to do with it.

Which, for our lives, is the question that matters. I’ve known people who believed intellectually that the stone was rolled away and Jesus rose from the dead—they considered it to be the only historically plausible conclusion—but it didn’t matter to them; they saw it as just another odd historical fact that had nothing at all to do with their lives. And that’s not the Resurrection the Scriptures proclaim. Yes, they teach the Resurrection as an historical fact—Jesus physically died, then physically came back to life, got up, left the tomb, and went on about his work—but not only as an historical fact. It’s not just that the stone was rolled away from the tomb, but that the stone is still rolling; it’s not just that one man who was God came back from the dead, but that because he rose from the dead, so we, too, have risen from the dead and will rise from the dead.

The question is, do you believe that? Do you believe that this is your resurrection? Do you believe that in Jesus, you have risen from spiritual death to new life in Christ? Paul tells us that “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death . . . so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.” In other words, our old selves, enslaved to sin, under the power of death, died on the cross, and in Christ we have been given new life—his life—the life which triumphed over sin and broke the power of death. We are free from sin, free to live for God, free to be the people we were meant to be. Do you believe that? Do you live like your chains have been broken?

And do you believe that in Jesus, death is not the end? Do you know in your gut that just as you have risen from the dead spiritually, so you will rise from the dead physically? Yes, in this broken creation, on this marred earth, death is still a reality, and people who die do usually stay dead—yesterday when we buried my wife’s grandmother, it was something like the sixth funeral in her extended family in the last six months, and they’re all definitely still dead—but that’s not the end of the story, because Jesus Christ has shattered the power of death. As Paul says, “If we have been united with him in his death, we will certainly be united with him in his resurrection.” Death is only temporary. Funerals are only temporary. When Jesus returns, all his faithful ones who have died will be raised from the dead just as he was raised—in resurrection bodies, perfected bodies, free from sin and all its effects, free from the power of death, free from all the things that go wrong—and we will live with him forever in the new heavens and the new earth. “See,” Revelation 21 declares, “the home of God is among human beings. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”

What matters is that we understand, not just that there was a resurrection in a tomb outside Jerusalem nearly 2000 years ago, but that there is a resurrection for us. Yes, in this world, we suffer death, and pain, and grief, and loss, but there’s a new world coming; if you are in Christ, then you have the promise of God that pain doesn’t have the last word, sin doesn’t have the last word, grief doesn’t have the last word, loss doesn’t have the last word, even death itself doesn’t have the last word, because there is a resurrection. If your hopes have failed and your plans gone awry, there is a resurrection. If you’re grieving the death of someone you love, there is a resurrection. If you’re suffering, if you’re in pain, there is a resurrection. If you’re worn down and beaten down by guilt for something you’ve done, there is a resurrection. If you’re alone and lonely, there is a resurrection. If those you love have hurt you and let you down, there is a resurrection. Whatever this world has done to you, whatever is wrong in your life, take heart, for there is a resurrection. In Jesus’ death, we died; in his resurrection, we are risen; in his kingdom, we will live forever with him and with each other.

A People on the Way

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(Isaiah 61:1-3; Matthew 28:16-20, Acts 1:1-11)

What is this building? What are these walls? We call this room a “sanctuary,” which means “holy place,” a place set aside and dedicated to God, and that it is; and through centuries in which fugitives were immune from arrest within the walls of a church, “sanctuary” has also come to mean a place of refuge and protection, and this is that, too, or should be. But what else? What is this building? Is it a church? Certainly we talk about it that way; people come in and they say, “You have a beautiful church.” It’s a beautiful building, no doubt, but is the church really made of bricks? No! But if we think of this as “the church,” then logically, everything outside of it is “not the church”—that’s why we talk about “going to church,” after all—and if we think that way, then what are these walls, really, but a box that holds us in, confines us, constrains us?

This idea that we go to church, we have church, and then we leave church and go back into the “real world” is a common one, but it’s completely unbiblical. We are the body of Christ, the covenant people of God; I think we know that, but we haven’t really grasped that fact until we realize it’s just as true on Monday afternoon as on Sunday morning. The church is not a place; the building’s just something the church has to enable it to do certain things, most notably to gather to worship God. The church is all of us together, and we are every bit as much the church when we’re out buying, selling, working, playing, and the like as when we’re standing here singing. Here, we carry out the central part of our mission, worshiping God, but we also prepare for the rest of it—which happens out there, in the world at large. That’s part of really being the church, that we are as much the church when we’re apart as when we’re gathered together.

The problem is, we lose that when we let our walls define us. “Oh, those walls? That’s the Presbyterian church. And those walls over there, that’s the Free Methodists. And those walls down the road, that’s the First Church of the Brethren.” And those walls define out—everyone not within them doesn’t belong there. But Jesus didn’t define the church by walls, he defined us by our mission in this world; and if you look at the first mission statement he gave the church, just before his ascension—we have it in our passages from Matthew and Acts—you can see three parts to that mission. Remember, he’s talking to a group of devout Jews who understood that worship was at the core of everything; but that still leaves the question, what else? This is Jesus’ answer to that question.

First, go into the world. The church is not defined as a group of people who all like to worship in the same way, though you wouldn’t always know it from the way we do things; nor is it defined as a group of people with the same cultural expectations, though if you look at the way so many churches tend to segregate by age, you might come to think otherwise; nor is it defined as a group of people who all believe the same things, though our longstanding denominational boundaries could give you that view. The church is defined as a group of people who have obeyed Jesus’ call to go.

For some people, that means packing up and moving across the world; for more of us, it means sending and supporting those people, while at the same time remembering that we too are missionaries when we go down the street to buy milk. Wherever God leads us, whether Outer Mongolia or here in northern Indiana, that’s our mission field; wherever we are, we’re his missionaries. That is what defines us as the church—not the details of our beliefs, not the details of how we do church, but the fact that we are a people on the way, following Christ in mission on the road to his kingdom. That’s why my other denomination, the RCA, defines its mission this way: “Our task is to equip congregations for ministry—a thousand churches in a million ways doing one thing—following Christ in mission, in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s the church: a community of people, a community of communities, “following Christ in mission in a lost and broken world so loved by God.” That’s what Jesus meant when he said, “Go.”

Next, he says, “Be.” Specifically, he says, “You will be my witnesses.” Note that. He doesn’t say, “You will do witnessing”; he says, “You will be my witnesses.” Evangelism has gotten a bad rap with a lot of people thanks to the approach of a few—you know, the folks who grab random strangers, stick a half-dozen Scripture verses in their ear, badger them into saying a certain prayer, stuff a tract in their pocket, and walk off confident they’ve “saved another soul.” I’m sure God can use that; after all, God used Jacob, he used Jonah, he used Peter—who am I to say God can’t use anybody or anything? But our call isn’t to “save souls” in that sense, we’re called to share the life Jesus has given us with the people around us; and we aren’t called to witness to Jesus just by memorizing some spiel, we’re called to be his witnesses by the way we live our lives. As St. Francis of Assisi put it, “Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”

Now, the downside at this point is that we often don’t hear this correctly; we have the tendency to mentally translate this into “I don’t have to tell people about Jesus, I just have to go out and live my life and that’s good enough.” Well, yes and no, sort of. Go back to that quote from St. Francis and think about this for a minute: “Preach the gospel at all times.” That’s the standard: our lives are to be sermons on the word of God, backed up by our words. Our call as disciples of Christ is to go out into the world and live in it as he did—talking with others about our Father in heaven, and just as importantly, showing his love to those around us in every way we can think of. We are called to do the work he did: to feed the hungry; to care for the sick; to welcome the outsider; to defend the oppressed; to lift up the downtrodden; to love the unlovable; to break down the barriers between race and class and gender; and to speak the truth so clearly and un-flinchingly, when the opportunity arises, that people want to kill us for it.

After all, what is a witness? Look at the justice system, which depends on witnesses—on people who have seen something important and are willing to tell others what they saw. That’s what we’re called to be. We too have seen something important—we have seen the work of Jesus Christ in our lives and the lives of others, through the power of the Holy Spirit—and we too are called to testify to what we’ve seen. In our case, though, our testimony is to be not only the things we say, but everything we do, the way we live our lives, because our lives must provide credibility for our words; a witness who isn’t credible convinces no one. Kamikaze evangelism is hard for most people because it’s unnatural; but it’s easier than being witnesses, because you just go do this one thing and then it’s over. To be witnesses, to bear witness to Jesus with our lives, means that at every point, our lives are to reflect the love and testify to the truth of Jesus Christ.

Which is impossible, for us; but what is impossible for us is possible with God. That’s why Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” and then says, “and you will be my witnesses.” Unfortunately, though, when the Holy Spirit fills us with the love and the grace and the power of God, we don’t stay filled; as the great evangelist D. L. Moody put it, we leak, and so we need to be constantly filled and refilled by the Spirit. That’s one reason we’re called to gather together each week to worship, because when we worship God together, his Spirit works in us in a powerful way. As we’ll talk about later, when we spend time focusing on God, both by ourselves and together as a church, we open ourselves up for his Spirit to change our hearts and our lives, so that more and more we will be the people, and the church, he calls us to be.

So, Jesus says, “Go”; he says, “Be”; and he says, “Do.” Specifically, he calls us to do his work: as his disciples, to make more disciples. Our mission as the church is to go out into the world, not to hide behind our four walls—to live, in full view of the world, lives powered and guided and changed and being changed by the Spirit of God—so that people will be attracted by our example and thus be drawn to follow Christ as we follow him. We are God’s light in the window, calling home those who have wandered far from him, giving direction to people lost in the darkness; but when people come, it isn’t enough just to get them in the door. It’s our call at that point to nurture them as we nurture ourselves, to give them a place by the fire and feed them, body and soul, to share our life with them, and to disciple them so that they, too, can take up the call in their turn.

Now, this can be a lot harder than it sounds, because it requires us to take some risks that we might not want to take. Around this time last year, the magazine Leadership put out an issue with the theme, “Going Missional: Break free of the box and touch your world.” It was one of their better issues, highlighted by an article by Mark Buchanan called “Wreck the Roof: Are you willing to take apart the church to bring people to Jesus?” He takes his inspiration from Mark 2, the story of the paralytic whose friends tear open the roof of a house to get him to Jesus for healing—provoking a strong negative reaction from the religious leaders who were present. From this, Buchanan talks about “Roof-Tile Syndrome,” which he defines as “when we care more about keeping things intact than about restoring lives that are shattered. . . . It’s when we are so fearful about upsetting [people] in our midst that we stop taking risks to get people to Jesus.”

The fact of the matter is, as Buchanan notes, if the church is truly focused on going into the world to be witnesses for Jesus, if we’re truly focused on drawing people into our community to make disciples of Jesus, there will be roof tiles broken. Some people will take advantage of us; others will, with good intentions, completely disrupt our comfort zones (this is especially true of children); there will be damage done by people who just don’t know any better yet; and some of the risks we take will fall flat, leaving us looking and feeling a little foolish. The thing is, these are the things that come with fol-lowing Jesus, with seeking to serve Christ faithfully in our community; we cannot avoid them without amputating our witness and turning aside from our mission. Ultimately, we have to decide what’s more important: keeping all the roof tiles in place, or making disciples for Jesus Christ; and our commitment as the church has to be that broken people matter more than broken tiles. Making disciples is the mission Jesus gave us, and it’s what we have to be about, if we’re truly going to be his church.

There are two parts to that task that Jesus specifically mentions. One, baptizing, is important because it’s through baptism that people enter the covenant community; as we’ll talk about later, it’s the sign and seal of our death and resurrection in Christ, and of his promises to us. The other is teaching—specifically, he says, in making disciples, teach them “to obey all that I have commanded you.” This includes the Old Testament, which is fulfilled in Jesus, and the rest of the New Testament, which gives us the teaching of the apostles in obedience to Jesus’ command, but the core of our message is and must be the words and actions of Jesus Christ—the hard parts as much as the easy ones.

Now, this isn’t just a matter of teaching people to believe true things; by itself, that’s not discipleship. Discipling people is a matter of teaching them true things so that they will go out and live true lives. Our call and our purpose as disciples of Christ is to become like him: to think with his mind, to love the world around us as he loves it, and thus to act as he would act, to follow him in his mission in this lost and broken world so loved by God; and to do that, we need to place ourselves under the authority of his word, to obey his commandments and learn from his example. That’s why preaching and teaching are central to our life as the church, not just because we learn things, but because God builds what we learn into our lives, using it to form and shape us as his disciples.

Finally, Jesus says, “Remember, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” This is, of course, a promise, but it’s also a framework and goal for our mission. We remember that Jesus is always with us by his Spirit, that we are never alone, without comfort, guidance, protection, or care; but we also remember that there is an end to this age, and that we don’t know when it will be. We remember that Jesus is with us to comfort us, yes, but also to challenge us; he’s with us not only for our sake, but for others’ sake and his own, to enable and empower us to be Jesus to the people around us. We remember that his purpose is in part to prepare us for the end of the age, when he will come again, and to use us to prepare others. We remember that he is with us, not to make us comfortable inside our four walls, but to take us beyond them to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted and comfort those who mourn, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to declare the year of the Lord’s favor—and to warn of the day when his judgment will come—so that when we come home to his kingdom at last, we will hear him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant; enter into the rest I prepared for you from before the foundation of the world.”