Wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it.

You may remember this as a piece of the supposed commencement address of writer Kurt Vonnegut to the 1997 graduating class of MIT. It scorched the Internet back in the days before we had the sunscreen of Snopes.com to block the harmful rays of urban legends. This one wasn't harmful; it just never happened. It was actually a mock graduation speech by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich. Somehow, it was misattributed to Vonnegut, who hasn't had such a devoted readership since Slaughterhouse Five. It turns out, though, Ted Turner actually said something like this to the 1993 graduating class of Georgia State University, as he was facing skin cancer surgery.

This is the season for commencement addresses. Colleges all over the country make plans years in advance, spend large sums of money, and hand out honorary doctorates to well-known people who will make their graduation exercises worth coming to.  President Bush and would-be president Kerry have offered their wisdom in ways that seem more like campaign speeches than commencement addresses. Go figure.

Here we are today at Wilshire recognizing our high school, college, and seminary graduates. We are proud of them and their accomplishments. I remember when my parents sent me off to college. We stood in the driveway of our house on Staten Island for a long time, tears running down my face as well as theirs. There was last-minute wisdom passed on about driving (and if you know me, you know I needed that), about handling money, about keeping the faith, about all those things they thought were important and they hoped I already knew, but that they wanted to say one more time before I commenced to college.

Commencement connotes an ending and a beginning, a past accomplishment and a future challenge. Making the grades and mastering the curriculum only inaugurate the transition to the laboratory of experience. Graduates must apply what they have learned.  They will see what stuck: what they learned only for passing tests, and what they learned for passing life.

Here in our gospel text today we listen in on Jesus' final words of wisdom to the graduating class of his school of discipleship. There are 11 of them-one having flunked out before finals, don't you know?! Jesus is about to ascend to the Father. He is leaving them with his last words of wisdom beforehand. He will always be with them by the power of the Holy Spirit, but this is his lesson before graduating on up himself into eternity. And whether we are graduating seniors or in any other stage of life that bears its own sense of transition-marriage, new baby, divorce, kids going off to college, empty nest, career change, serious illness, death of parents or spouse, or terminal diagnosis or our own-the message of Jesus applies to us, too. Before commencing to this next stage of life, temporal or eternal, remember these things from Jesus.

First, we have the scriptures to guide us. Jesus reminds the disciples that the ancient wisdom still applies. Even though he brought them a fresh word of God's favor, it is not different from the word that God had been speaking all along. You have the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms, he says.  And we would add that we have the gospels and the epistles, too. This library of faith and life is open 24 hours a day. The 66 good books that form the Good Book include history, stories, hymns, poetry, pithy adages, and how-to spiritual instruction. There's nothing generic about it. It's not like you need to get bored by reading religion all the time when you go to the Bible. It is a lively library. You can be quiet or shout out loud when you read. You can laugh or cry. You can wonder or you can argue. You can catch your breath or find the blood rush to your head. It's a book with a heartbeat, the Bible-the heartbeat of God.

Now, I have said nothing much you don't already know, but the truth is, we need to be reminded of this over and over. Ninety percent of you in the pews today have a dearer acquaintance with the Bible than 90 percent of the population. But think about your Bible-reading habit. Any regularity to it? Do you have a plan?  Do you follow it if you do? Don't think just because I am in the ministry and preach or teach the Bible every week that I am much better at this. Jesus' words challenge us all to remember that the scriptures are our foundational documents and a fount of wisdom that nothing on the bestseller list can match.

How many of you have your Bible with you this morning at church? I won't ask for a show of hands, because it would be embarrassing, wouldn't it? You come to church and assume we will preach and teach from a biblical basis and not just offer our own little speeches about life, like wear sunscreen. But then you don't come prepared to enter into the conversation deeply, to engage the text, to wrestle with those who wrote it, to argue with your fellow Christians over how to understand it. This is a lifelong discipline, Bible study. If we store away our Bibles with our school textbooks, we will end up flunking life.

But just reading the Bible is not enough; you have to read it with an open mind. And here we hear Jesus telling his disciples that he has opened their minds to understanding the scriptures. This is the second thing to remember. We will not understand the scriptures rightly unless we have open minds to what they say. Opening the Bible is only the first step; opening our minds is the second.

When you read the Bible only to reinforce prejudices, you may be reading words in the Bible, but you are not reading the Word of God in the Bible. Many Christian preachers once preached that the Bible supports slavery. And yes, you can find words in the Bible that show that slavery existed in Bible times and was not strictly forbidden. But to lift those passages out of context and claim that God has created some people to be owned by others to serve them because some human beings are more valuable in God's eyes than others is an abomination against the God who created us all equal and equally well. The same is true with capital punishment. We can become so sure that accountability for heinous crimes must include the death penalty that we go to the Bible and find those passages that reinforce our views. It's interesting, though, that the early church opposed the death penalty, and Israel found every way to come up with alternatives to it, even though the law of Moses said that only blood can satisfy blood. It turns out that it was only after Christianity became the religion of the empire and Christians weren't being executed themselves for being dissenters from the authorities that suddenly the church started thinking it might be a pretty good idea to use capital punishment against those who threatened the authority of pope or king. Funny how self-serving our views can be, eh?

Openness is a virtue that grows right out of the resurrection itself. When that stone was rolled away, all our worldly certainties were brought into question. If you can't even count on death to be sure of, what will be next? Taxes? Well, probably not. Taxes we'll have with us always. But this is why we must remain open to the leadership of Jesus' own Spirit. We are to be lifelong learners, always ready to say we have been wrong if we become convinced of the truth in a fresh encounter with God.

Yet openness itself is not the issue. As the wise and wily preacher Carlyle Marney liked to say, a window can be stuck open as well as closed. So can a mind. Jesus opened the minds of the disciples to understand how the scriptures should be read to point to him. But it not just that everything in the Bible should be pointing to Jesus; it is about how his life, death, and resurrection are the point of how we understand what life is about. These are the reading glasses through which we see the message of the Bible clearly. Just as Jesus had to suffer and die to the world in doing the will of God only to find that God was faithful to raise him from the dead, so this is the way we must live.

In 1954 the Ku Klux Klan had finally had enough of Clarence Jordan.  Jordan owed more than one Ph.D., but he used his learning to Christian ends. In the 1940s he created Koinonia Farms in Americus, Georgia, where poor whites and poor blacks could work the land together and live simply in spiritual and economic community. The Klan had harassed Jordan and the farms for years, but one night they came with torches blazing and set every house on fire except his, which they riddled with bullets. They drove off every black family except one. When a reporter came the next day to see what had happened, he found the rubble still smoldering, the land scorched and Jordan, with hoe in hand, planting the field. The reporter assumed he would find a defeated man. He kept poking and prodding Jordan about the tragedy and wondering if he was planning to give up and leave. Well, Dr. Jordan, you got two of them Ph.D.s and you've put fourteen years into this farm, and there's nothing left of it at all. Just how successful do you think you've been?" Clarence stopped hoeing, turned toward the reporter with his penetrating blue eyes, and said quietly but firmly, "About as successful as the cross. Sir, I don't think you understand us. What we are about is not success but faithfulness." Beginning that day, Clarence and his companions rebuilt, and the farm is going strong today. [Tim Hansel, Holy Sweat, (Word, 1987), pp. 188-189.  Thanks to Carl Reeves for sending this to me.]

This is what Jesus wants his disciples to understand. They are to be witnesses to the kingdom of God, more than market leaders in the kingdoms of this world. We bear witness by accepting our forgiveness and repenting of our preoccupation with worldly success, and then we proclaim this forgiveness as the new foundation of society and the new basis for a redeemed humanity. If we want to commence living the life Jesus has taught us to live, we must begin there. All our Bible reading must lead to this way of life. All our learning must be in service of faithfulness to God rather than success in the world.

The whole scene ends in worship; the way all of life must. Jesus blesses his disciples by promising to transfer the power of his life to them in the giving of his Spirit. He will no longer hold their hands, but when he goes to the Father, he will still be looking over their shoulders.

The disciples worship him and with great joy go again and again to the temple to bless God in return. The best way to honor a teacher who has blessed you is emulate his or her life. The best way to honor the Christ who has blessed us is to do as he did and bless the Lord God all our lives.

Wear sunscreen, then, and worship the Son.of God. That's advice worth remembering before commencing life.