A person’s last words before dying carry a weight unequal to earlier words. We don’t always know they will be last words, but sometimes it’s clearer to the one speaking them than to the one that receives them.

I want to think it was that way the morning our pastor emeritus, Bruce McIver, died. I was visiting him in the hospital that Saturday morning before Christmas. We talked awhile about his feeling better and maybe going home Monday. As I started to leave, he called me back and asked me what I was preaching on. We worked it over a bit for a few minutes, and then when I started to leave again, he thanked me for coming and said he wasn’t expecting me on the weekend. I don’t know why I came, I said. But I love you. “I love you, too,” he said. Five minutes later my cell phone rang and I turned the car back to Baylor Medical Center. Bruce was dead. I’ll always remember the blessing of his last words being, I love you, too.

Sometimes farewell messages leave us hanging. Like that movie with Billy Crystal, City Slickers. Billy and Daniel Stern and a couple of other guys, Jeff Goldbloom maybe, were typical middle-aged guys looking for some wide open spaces and some Old West adventure. So they go to this dude ranch and work a cattle drive for a few weeks or so. Near the end, the rough-and-tumble, no-nonsense, burly cowboy, Curly, speaks his last words before dying. The secret of life, he says, is… one thing. And then he dies. We don’t know if there is a comma there or a period. We don’t know if Curly had more to say that he didn’t get to or if that was it. One thing. Fine. Thanks.

But here we have Jesus giving some farewell words to his disciples. He doesn’t leave us hanging, though. He gives us two things not one, though they turn out to be one thing after all.

Mother’s Day aside (but as an aside, Happy Mother’s Day mothers), this is also Ascension Sunday, the day we think about Jesus leaving us and going to be with God the Father. He has promised to send us a comforter to be with us in his absence – the Holy Spirit. Luke records Jesus’ words just as he leaves their visible presence for the time being. John includes some other words as part of what we know as Jesus’ farewell discourses in chapters 13-17 of his gospel. Side by side, they form an interesting picture of what Jesus wants us to know and what he wants us to do in his name.

Now in fairness, Jesus said other things in his times before dying. Matthew has him giving the Great Commission that we should go into all the world and make disciples of every nation. That is similar to what we get from Luke’s gospel. Depending upon which ending to the book of Mark you think is genuine – the shorter version or longer – Mark has Jesus telling us nothing, or telling us to go make disciples, cast out demons, speak in tongues, and heal the sick by laying hands on them. Oh, and also we are to pick up deadly snakes and drink poison and not worry. I’m kind of a shorter ending man myself, don’t you know?!

But back to Acts and John. Here we have two crucial things that Jesus wants us to be about. Be my witnesses, he says. And be together. Tell others about me, and honor me by being unified as sisters and brothers. Let the world know that I have unified the world before God by my sacrifice of love on the cross. And give the world a visible sign of it by your visible unity with each other. Evangelism and ecumenism. Redemption and reconciliation. Fellowship with God and with one another. Two things; really one.

But we make them two instead of one and choose one to obey and one to neglect. Some churches are all about winning the lost to Christ, but they aren’t quite sure whether any denomination but their own is saved. They see their primary duty as evangelism, but they sacrifice the unity of the body in the hope of gaining more members for the body.

I think of this, on this Mother’s Day, like the tragedy of country singer Loretta Lynn. She has a new autobiography out in which she tells about her life on the road and her sadness at home. She felt obliged to be out recruiting new fans and keeping older ones happy. She was the breadwinner rather than the bread maker. She was sometimes gone as much as a year at a time. Her husband and children felt her absence. They enjoyed the benefits of her success – money, things, nice home, but they were not together as a family. Loretta’s two grown daughters were interviewed about the book and they chose their words carefully. It’s her life and she has a right to tell her story the way she sees it, they said. But clearly they felt the sting of her absence in their lives.

Churches must not sacrifice the fellowship of Christ with one another on the altar of some greater calling to be out in the world bearing witness for Christ. We bear witness for Christ by our unity with one another as well as by our words of witness to those who do not know Christ.

That is obvious in this church. People who are not believers in Jesus Christ come among us and often end up in the baptistery confessing their faith in him. They do so in part because we have taken an interest in them, developed a friendship or even a love for them. It sometimes takes them awhile to figure out we’re not just messing with their heads. But then they come to church and sniff around here long enough to sense that we’re not faking it, that we do love and care for one another, that there is a little world of love inside this larger world of indifference that compels them to know what’s at the bottom of it. And we know that it is Christ that is at the bottom of it, because we are otherwise no different inside the church than those outside of it. We are sinners, all of us. We depend upon each other.

It didn’t make the Lord of the Rings movie, but in the first Tolkien book of the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, the eight travelers that journey with the ring bearer are men, hobbits, dwarves, and elves. At one point the group decides that all of them must wear blindfolds because an elven guard would not permit a dwarf to pass without one. One of the elves protests, but Haldir answers: Folly it may seem. Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him. [This citation and other insights are owed to Scott Bader-Saye, “Long Division,” in The Christian Century (Apr 24-May 1, 2002).] We have to stand together in all things.

But sometimes churches can also become so concerned with the fellowship inside the church that they fail to be witnesses to those outside of it. There comes an enormous imbalance in money and ministry priority when we are preoccupied with ourselves at the expense of the world. How will we be witnesses for Christ in the world if we are not in the world? How will we show the light of Christ in the corners of darkness if we are unwilling to leave the candle factory?

I was watching cartoons yesterday morning. Don’t know why exactly, unless subconsciously I was dealing with my eldest child’s upcoming graduation from high school next week. Wistful for the good old days, I guess. Now I am practicing for grandchildren. Anyway, they’ve got new stuff on Saturday mornings now. I was checking out Disney’s 1 Saturday Morning cartoon, and this boy named Phil was putting two of his school pals through the ropes of becoming members of his Woodchuck Scout troop. They did everything he asked, but finally he rejected them because he said they lacked character. They complained up the Woodchuck line and when confronted finally by the head Woodchuck, Phil tried to claim that he just didn’t have any room in his troop for two more. But he finally admitted that he was the only one in his troop and that it made him feel special to be the only one at school with a uniform.

Listen, we’ve got memberships open to all of you. The nature of being a Christian is not that it makes us special but that it makes us hospitable, not that it makes us closed but open, not that it makes us live for ourselves but that it makes us live for others.

But to do that we have to get to know others, to be with strangers, to cross the lines of neighborhoods and prejudices and class and language and even religion to meet and greet others in the Spirit of Christ. That’s why we build Habitat houses and join in the Billy Graham Crusade. It’s why we work with local schools and other community projects. It’s why we support missions around the world and here in our city.

Reconciliation of the world with God and reconciliation of disciples with each other will only happen this way. We have to be engaged together in a common mission to the world as witnesses for Jesus Christ.

I was walking the fairway of the Waterville Golf Course in County Kerry, Ireland last week. Charlie Chaplin used to spend six months a year in that little village. Anyway, my partners and I noticed the green hills in the distance where there were so many little patches of land that were separated by small stone walls. We wondered if that was for the sheep to alternate grazing fields, but we were told that it was remnant of when the British had occupied Ireland and divided up the land among the colonists. When did the British leave, I asked one of the locals innocently. They still haven’t left, said one young man. He was making the emotional point that even though the 1916 Easter Uprising led to independence for the Republic of Ireland, the Irish still feel British oppression in various ways. And of course Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom, which is a bit of a misnomer since there is nothing so divided as Northern Ireland. Catholics and Protestants, Irish and English: they live in constant struggle with one another.

What is the solution? One older man told us about the Irish-American group that has funded a program to take young people between 8 and 12 years of age from opposite parts North and South, Catholic and Protestant, and have them go live with a family from the other side for a year. Early results are proving positive. Protestant children are finding that Catholics do not really want to eat them the way they say the Catholics eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood. And the Catholics are finding that all Protestants do not want to kill Catholic children. Amazing. But that kind of witness could not happen without people getting out of their comfort zones and opening their homes and lives to others.

Jesus has gone to be with the Father, but he is not gone from us. He is with us by his Holy Spirit. He has told us with his last words how to make his presence known in the world. It includes being his witnesses and being together, these two things. But when we do them, not only do they become one in the doing, we too become one. But greater still, we come to know the Fellowship of the Ring of God, the sharing oneness of the very life of love that is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.