Every year about this time we engage in a little ritual. In May or June, proud families drive off to some distant university, there to celebrate with a young adult who has finally slugged through four or more years of classes, writing papers, taking exams, and surviving all-nighters, and who is now entitled to a piece of paper naming him or her a Bachelor of Arts. For that piece of paper, not only has the graduate invested blood, toil, tears, and sweat, but mom and dad have invested thousands of dollars for tuition, books, clothes, long distance calls, homesickness trips, emergencies, and credit card rescues. I hope it was worth it, because it certainly was expensive! It was huge! I remember a wedding I performed several years ago; the bride had just graduated from an expensive college, and now there was an expensive wedding to be paid for. So her father stood in the reception line, greeting everybody, with two empty pockets pulled out from his pants! But he still managed to smile. Generally we feel glad that it is over, so everyone congratulates the graduate, we party a while, we enjoy the commencement exercises, and we start to breathe again. It’s an annual spring ritual.
But Monday morning, after graduation, someone pops the big question, “What are you going to do now? What are your plans?” Am I right that the correct answer is not, “I am going to Hawaii to surf.”? Would I be on target to suggest that parents do not want to hear, “I am going to sleep until mom calls me for brunch.”? Somebody wants to hear the word, “work”, spoken loud and clear. “Work that you get paid for” sounds even better. In fact, at this point we cannot accept, “Oh, I think I’ll flip burgers at McDonald’s” or “I’m going back to baby-sitting like I did in high school.” No, you have a college degree, and so it is time for you to do something special, something big-time, something professional. It is time for you to pay off on this investment! What are you going to do now? The correct answer is, get a j-o-b!
But guess what!? Countless young people have found out that college degrees are about as marketable as screen doors for submarines! You can take that degree in English literature, with a specialty in pre-Raphaelite poetry, and they might hire you as a file clerk, because at least you do know the alphabet! You can take that diploma, whether it be the one that says you graduated cum laude, or, as the old joke puts it, the one that says you finished, “Oh lawdy” – you can take that diploma, and make a lovely place mat out of it, because, the real world is going to say that you are not ready. Despite all the preparation, all the waiting, all the money, the real world is going to tell young adults that they are not ready for real life.
This is a very strange time in history to be a young adult. Never before have we made so many young people wait so long for their lives to begin! Never before have we done to young adults what we are doing now. We have created a world of such complexity that what you can learn in traditional education does not necessarily prepare you, and so there is more training and more education and more preparation. And sometimes not even that works. I spoke not too long ago with one young man in the computer field, and asked him if he had thought about going back to school for a Master’s degree. He told me that that would be an absolute waste of time, because the graduate schools cannot keep up with the pace of change, so that the only way he could keep up was just to plunge in and learn by doing. Sink or swim. Young adults today face a world that an older generation can only begin to understand. I believe that, spiritually, it is a very frustrating world. It is an anxiety-ridden world. It is a world in which people think they have done what they need to do to prepare, only to find out that they are not ready. Not quite. There is always more.
Was it like that when a group of young adults pulled themselves together one day in Jerusalem? They had been preparing for their big moment. A couple of them named James and John felt that they were ready to be the CEO’s of this new company, the Kingdom. So where are our jobs, Jesus? No jobs, no titles, no stock option plan, no 401-k in sight. Another young man named Peter had gotten so frustrated that he just went fishing. It’s always comforting to go back to something you do know how to do, even if it isn’t what you prepared for. But he’d caught about all the fish he could handle. Do you think Peter might have been frustrated? Some of them had worked very hard at this discipleship thing; they had crossed every T and dotted every I and had followed Jesus up and down the roads; they had carefully taken notes on his lectures and had memorized his teachings, and they were “ready freddy”! But still, as they gathered in Jerusalem for their class reunion, there was nothing. No mandate. No job. No direction. Nothing.
Small wonder, then, that when Jesus came among them, forty days after His resurrection, they felt more than ready. They felt an eagerness bordering on hysteria! We’ve just got to get on with our lives! Small wonder that they would blurt out to Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Is this the time? Is it now? Huh, huh, huh!? Is this the moment we’ve been waiting for, when we get our assignments and get to go out there and hand out business cards? Oh, Jesus, don’t forget the executive chairs, the one on your right and the other on your left! Small wonder that these young adults believed that they were finally ready to get out there and live and do something significant! “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
Jesus’ response was that they were to wait, but they would receive their assignments, with power. You are nearly ready; but wait, it won’t be long. You will receive something to do, with power in it.
Let me lay out several pointed words from this story of Jesus’ ascension. Several pointed words aimed especially at young adults, but not without meaning for the rest of us too.
I
First, notice that when we think we are the most ready for life, we are actually the least ready. When we think we know all that we need to know, that is when we know the least! We want to plan everything, we want to know where our lives are going. But Christ has a different approach. He just asks us to know Him and trust Him. We cannot have all the answers. We cannot know it all. But we can know the Lord. We can cultivate a relationship with Him. And that will be all we really need to know.
"It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you .."
“It is not for you to know.” Jesus told these eager young people that they didn’t have to know the road map ahead, but that at the right time, they would get instructions from the mapmaker. Jesus told them that they didn’t have to have all the answers, but they did need to know the master teacher. The issue is not whether we are ready for our own life plans. The issue is whether we are ready to receive the one who does know those plans.
You know, it’s a sobering thought, but it’s true: that for most of us, life is a process we did not plan and a path we did not choose. If you are beyond that young adult stage and you’ve survived a few extra years, how much of your life has been what you set out to achieve? Did you actually do what you went after? Some did, I suppose, but many of us seemingly just fell into something. Did you actually create the sort of life you dreamed about? A few people can do that, but most of us sort of bop along, day to day, blundering, it looks like. It looks that way, until you look back on it, and you see that God was in it, all the way. I’ve heard people say, “I moved to Washington and took on what was supposed to be a temporary job; that was twenty years ago, and I’m still doing it.” That’s OK. That’s all right.
For when you have stayed in touch with the Lord, and simply trusted Him, then the Spirit of the Living God was in you and with you and led you. Some of us are here to testify that, plans and dreams notwithstanding, even if the expectations got shattered along the way, if you know and trust the Lord, He will not waste you. He will not throw you to the side. He will not bring you this far only to abandon you.
Young adults, I know that some of you face tremendous odds right now. You have children and mortgages; you have professional pressures and you live in a rapidly changing world. It’s hard to keep up with it all! I know that. You’d like to see the way ahead. You’d like to know how it’s all going to turn out. But I ask you to trust the God who knew you before you were even born and who has been shaping and guiding you all along. I ask you to walk by faith and not by sight. I ask you to believe that God will get you ready, God will give you what He wants you to do, God will waste nothing. The Lord will not bring you this far only to abandon you.
I had finished three years of engineering school. But I recognized that that was not my calling. The Lord had other things for me. I grumbled a bit about the wasted time. I wished that I could have gotten started on my ministry studies earlier instead of wasting time in engineering school. But an older pastor told me that, in his experience, nothing that he had ever learned was useless, and that God could use anything we know in order to accomplish His purposes. I think about that every time I get involved with the church’s plumbing and electrical systems! A little engineering knowledge doesn’t hurt even when you’re doing pastoral work! Nothing is wasted!
When we think we are the most ready for life, we are actually the least ready. When we think we know all that we need to know, that is when we know the least! Christ just asks us to know Him and trust Him. We cannot have all the answers. But we can know the Lord. And that will be all we really need to be ready.
II
But now I can hear someone objecting. I hear someone saying, “But that’s such a little thing. That’s not a really ambitious plan. That’s settling for too little. Why would I go to school and do all this work and pay out all this money just to settle for some backwater job?” I can hear someone saying, “Pastor, maybe you don’t want much out of life; if you’re happy on the back side of nowhere, then OK, just trust God and bounce along from day to day. But I want to do something big. I want to make a difference. I want my life to go.” I know there are plenty of young adults, and others too, who feel frustrated because they’ve prepared and worked, and now it feels like it’s time to get going. It’s time to have major responsibilities. It’s time to be taken seriously. But the world says “ho-hum.” The world says, “You’re a dime a dozen.” The real world uses up people in nothing jobs. I remember a former student who had majored in horticulture. He thought he was ready for something big. He got a job at a major nursery, and they promptly assigned him to digging in shrubs and pulling up weeds! He was about as crushed and angry as you can be. For this I went to school?
Oh, what a precious truth I have for you! What a fire-in-the-belly, light-in-the-eyes truth I have for you! There are no small tasks with God; when you trust God in small things, He will give you large things to do. When you trust God in the tiny little responsibilities of life, He will expand your horizons. Jesus said to His disciples:
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
Now there’s an ambitious plan. That should be enough to challenge anybody: your calling will take you from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth. But have you noticed, those disciples couldn’t start with the ends of the earth? They had to start in Jerusalem. They couldn’t claim a franchise for Samaria until they had tackled Judea. They thought they were finally ready for Kingdom business, big business. But they needed to begin where they were. They needed to bloom where they were planted. They needed to be faithful in little things, knowing that, as they matured, the Lord would make them stewards over larger things.
I’ve had the privilege over the years of helping a number of young people get to the mission field. I’m still in touch with former students who are serving as missionaries everywhere from Mexico to the Philippines. One of the things I found out from the mission boards is that they want to know before they send anybody overseas whether they are doing any missionary work at home. The logic goes like this: if you will not walk across the street to share the good news with your lost neighbor, what would make us think we ought to invest thousands of dollars to send you to some other country? Why should we think you would do on the worldwide scale what you are not faithful enough to do in your own backyard?
You and I have to be willing to be faithful where God has planted us; we have to be willing to do what God is calling us to right here and right now. If He chooses to give us a bigger assignment later, it will be because we have demonstrated faithfulness with what He has given us now. There are no insignificant tasks with God.
I was intrigued the other day with the story about Ted Leonsis, who is buying the Capitals and a share of the Wizards and the MCI arena. The story said that as a young man, because of a scary experience on a plane, Leonsis saw that life could be very short, and so he made a list of a hundred and one things he wanted to do before his death. One of those was buying a sports team, and now he’s done it, many years later. Well, the newspaper didn’t report what the other hundred things were, and how little some of them must have been. Unless I am way off base, I suspect that Mr. Leonsis’ ambitions included some very small items, but those small items were like building blocks that allowed him to get to his large goal. The Bible says that he who is faithful in little things will become faithful over many things.
If you are ambitious and you want to do great things, cultivate a relationship with God, and trust Him, in His own time, to give you what you are ready for. Be diligent and faithful with now, even though it’s not all you want. And God will empower you for more. Worry now about Jerusalem; in time you’ll take on Judea and Samaria, and who knows? The ends of the earth may not be far behind!
III
So now, are we finally ready for life when we cultivate a relationship with God? Are we finally ready for life if we bloom where we are planted? I think there’s one more element. One more thing that puts the finishing touches on. We will finally be ready for life when we get spiritually involved with our brothers and our sisters. When all was said and done on that Ascension Day, Jesus’ disciples found comfort in community and strength in sharing with one another. They weren’t ready for life on their own, individually; but they got ready when they stayed together and found spiritual support in one another.
When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, and John .. [and all the others]. ... All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
As much as I could preach to the young adults about maintaining connections with one another, I think it’s more strategic for me to point out to the whole church how much all of us need all of us. All of us need all of us. Our young adults need the support of their elders; and we who have been around a while need the young adults, and need them a great deal.
Who was present in that upper room after the Ascension? These young people drew strength not only by praying with one another, but also with more experienced people like Mary, the mother of Jesus. Now what do you suppose dear old Mary, who must have been pushing fifty, was doing in that crowd of young people? Why would any middle-agers want to hang out with these loud, boisterous, immature, still growing up, not ready for prime time types? Maybe because she recognized that they were the future? Maybe because she believed that she had something to receive as well as something to give? Maybe because she knew that our loving God, in His great wisdom, makes us able to learn from one another’s differences?
Takoma Park Baptist Church seeks to embrace young adults. We delight in you. When we see you finish college, we take pleasure in your energy. When we see you enter into marriage, we witness the future blossoming. When the babies begin to come and so many children crowd around the platform that we can scarcely seat them all, we feel hope. I want to say to every young adult in this congregation that we are excited about you. This church wants to serve you and wants to put you into Kingdom service. We understand your readiness. We can measure your energy and your creativity. Let the day come soon when you raise your voices and tell the leadership what we must do to win your generation to Christ! Better yet, let the day come, soon and very soon, when you become the leadership and you begin to shape our worship, our ministry, our very character in order to reach your world. We believe you are finally ready; or that you will be if you will cultivate a relationship with the Living God; if you will be faithful in small assignments, knowing that the great ones will come; and if you will stay in community with the whole church, for you need us and we need you.
After all, the promise of Jesus is sure. What did He say at Ascension Day?
“John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now."
Not many days from now we will finally be ready for life, for the Holy Spirit will give us the Kingdom. Not many days from now we will finally be ready, for Christ Himself will empower us. Not many days from now we will finally be ready, for in this community of faith there is wisdom, power, energy, hope, love, and, most of all, there is the Spirit of the Living God. Not many days from now we will finally be ready!
