Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends in Christ,

I wonder what you make of new beginnings? Of course, as any new time in our life begins it almost always is also marking a time when something else is ending. Perhaps you begin a career while school winds down. Or you welcome a new child and say goodbye to those years when it was just you and your husband. Maybe it’s moving to a new city and saying goodbye to one you had come to know so well.

We see, this past week, the Feast of the Ascension. Jesus goes up to be with the Father and the disciples are saying goodbye. Before he goes he leaves them the farewell discourse in which he prays to the Father, for them all to hear, in a way that gives them a sense of who they are to be as one phase of their ministry ends and another begins.

In his departure Jesus truly shares his earthly ministry with them. It is no longer a band of disciples following Jesus around. It will be a band of disciples sent to the corners of the known world to preach and teach in his name. As that miraculous phase of healings and transfiguration and resurrection and now ascension draws to a close they are now tasked with a new beginning.

Of course it might have been understandable had they simply headed back to each of their homes to tell stories and tall tales of the time they spent with him. But they couldn’t take that path — it was not the way that had been laid out for them. Instead they were to go out and, yes, tell the story. They were to go out and share the news. But they were to welcome others to tell it too.

They went out looking not for an audience but for a Church. They went out to find all that had been planted, all that was to grow, all that was to flourish. They also went out to their own end. In their ends, in their martyrdoms, the Church grew. By their faithful end some new beginning unfolded and some new planting of the Kingdom took root.

I suppose this brings us to our own day. We who have benefitted from the ends and beginnings and ends and beginnings can ask ourselves what has been begun in us? What has come to pass through us? What beginning shall come forth at our end? It is the story of the Church that from generation to generation we plant, someone else waters, and someone else shall bring in the sheaves.

What have we planted? What shall we water? What harvest is waiting to be brought in? The cycles unfold from generation to generation and no end is the end and no beginning starts without an end. So we too stand, looking up toward the heavens, and wonder what is next. What has Jesus passed on to us? What shall we do with this end and this beginning?

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert