Acts 1:6-11                Graduation Sunday          May 24, 2009

      As I look out on our graduates, I am reminded of my years in High School.  Of course, in school, I was often day dreaming and not always getting the point of the lesson.  I remember when I took Drivers Education class.  For days, they had us watch movies about collisions.  There would be these mannequins in the cars and there would be all these head on crashes with mannequins flying out the windshield.  You remember those films.  Well, at the end of the movies, the teacher says, 'Now what have we learned by this?'   No one spoke.   So I suggested, “I have learned you should never let a mannequin drive your car.”

         I want to ask today about just what you have learned and just what we can we learn in school.  You see, you cannot learn everything in school from books, computers, and teachers.   There are things you have to learn for yourself.  There are two types of learning.  There is associative learning which is education you can gain outside of yourself.  Some things, some very valuable things, can only be learned by association.  We learn our multiplication tables by rote associative learning.  It can come no other way.  Much of our progress and technology comes this way.  But there is another type of learning.  It is direct personal learning.  And this is the education that only you can discover.  This is the education about who you are in yourself.  This is the education that makes one a full human being. 

When Jesus was preparing to leave this world, the disciples still were asking him about when God was going to make Israel a strong nation like back in the days of King David.   You know, it is tempting to want to go back to the day.  Many of us as adults fondly remember yesteryear when we were young.  You too will find yourself at times with a bitter sweet feeling of thinking about the past.  But like Israel and those disciples, we cannot go back.   We can remember and we can carry with us the lessons learned from others, but to become all that life promises to us, we must go forward.  We must personally and deeply taste what life offers to us.  The tragedy of so many people’s live is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin living it.

        For the disciples who wanted to get back to the glory of King David in the past, Jesus tells then that they must find their own glory.  He tells them that each of them will experience the power of the Holy Spirit.  It will be direct.  It will be personal.  It will not be a lesson from the past.  It will not be a history class about how great Israel used to be.   This Holy Spirit expereince will be their own direct, personal experience. 

         Archibald MacLeish was a man of broad accomplisments.  He was a pulitzer prize winner in poetry and also served as one of the directors of the War Department during WWII.  He graduated form Harvard Law School but abandoned his law practice after only three years in order to become a writer.   He was friends with a range of people such as Franklin Roosevelt, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Bob Dylan.   He was the head of the library of Congress and taught at Harvard.  He wrote passionately against Communism and then was attacked as a communist during the McCarthy era.  He traveled the world, lived widely, and was sucessful in many spheres.  But all he wanted was to be real.   In 1982, near the end of his long 91 years, MacLeish asked, “What is wrong with education?  Well there is nothing wrong with education.  Education is always better than ignorance.  What is wrong is America’s belief behind education.  We believe that education, information, and technology will change the world.  It will not.  Information withour human understanding is like an answer without a question.  It is meaningless.  It is not real.” 

        Listen.  Many of us spend many years learning so many answers.  But what are the real questions?  What will make a real life?  What will enable me to understand who I am and what I am supposed to do as a real and authentic human being?  The education you have received in school is of great value and will prepare you to make a living someday.  But the knowledge you gain of yourself will prepare you to make a life for yourself.    

Today is ascension Sunday when we remember Jesus taken up to be with the Father.  For those graduating, you too are about to journey upward.  For all of us here, we are hopefully on an upward journey.  But that journey must come directly and personally.  It cannot be taught to us by others.  As much as I read and love to read, I know that it cannot be read in a book.  Authentic living as a real person comes when it is discovered by each one of us.  I pray that you find a real and authentic life as a full person of God.   Amen.