What Now from Chad Herring on Vimeo.
A sermon preached at Southminster Presbyterian Church of Prairie Village, Kansas. May 12, 2013.
Ephesians 1: 15-23
and Acts 1:1-14
* * *
It’s the conversation in the coffee shop,
you know, when you’re focused on your own business,
sipping your Americano trying to read or tackle emails
or talk to your friend
sometimes just then that story that you overhear a few tables down
makes a perfect entre into the story of God and Jesus and the world
that we are confronted with in Holy Scripture.
This was that sort of overheard conversation: [i]
“I was visiting my grandpa near the end of his life…
When he was so sick with that cancer.
At dinner one night he startled us.
He was normally just so quiet, but he just burst into laughter
as he recalled a this chance encounter he had
that stirred his memory from decades ago.
He told us that he had run into a woman at the doctor’s office, you see.
And he was walking by when she looked at him,
and stopped him, and said:
‘Why, George Hocker, is it really you?”
At first, he didn’t recognize her, and he had no idea who she was…
But she told him her name,
and he remembered the night they had met, years and years ago…
In fact, as it came back to him,
he remembered that night with some…embarrassment.
He had been at a dance in town when he was young and single.
It might have been the first dance he had ever attended.
George was raised a Mennonite, and had lived a fairly sheltered life
He was not accustomed to such things.
No doubt he felt awkward and shy in his new clothes…
Not knowing how to dance…
Not knowing how to ask a young woman to dance…
Or quite what to do once he did.
You can just imagine the culture shock of going from a farm
Among “the plain folk”
To the “bustling metropolis” of Hershey, Pennsylvania.
And then again, making conversation is sometimes just plain hard
For plain spoken people like my Grandpa.”
The coffee-shop talker took a sip of her coffee and continued…
“I mean, from members of my family who are still Mennonites,
I know that they like to say simply what they mean
…or to say nothing at all.
It’s a noble thing to ALWAYS tell the simple truth
…and its so rare these days, certainly when it comes to polite conversation.
Just imagine it! Imagine if a stranger came up to you and said…
“The band sounds great, doesn’t it?”
And you felt compelled by conscience to reply:
“Well, actually the fiddle is out of tune,
And that guitar player is not up to tempo…”
OR, to say nothing at all!
How hard would it be to strike up a conversation
with someone you don’t know under these circumstances.
Anyway…George was at this dance, his first dance,
and this young woman caught his eye.
When she saw him staring at her,
well, she walked right over and started a conversation.
Somehow, he seized the moment and asked her to dance,
And he led her cautiously to the dance floor…
They tried a few steps, but he kept stepping on her toes.
She kept trying to make light of it, but it was getting… painful…
So she turned to him, and said…
“You know…its getting a bit warm in here.
Why don’t we go outside, you know,
And um take a look at the stars…”
“So this shy, plain spoken young man walked with this pretty young woman
Out onto the veranda… and he gazed up into the sky.
He looked at the stars. They were brilliant! He contemplated their beauty.
He noted that there was not a single cloud in the sky.
She coughed.
She moved a bit closer…. He looked at the stars.
She cleared her throat… He…looked at the stars.
Finally she said,… “Why are you staring at the sky?”
“Um, I’m looking at the stars,” he replied.
And with that, she turned on her heels and left.
And my grandpa, laughing more than I’d ever seen him laugh before,
ended the story saying to me…
“She said, why don’t we go look at the stars’
…so I went…and looked at the stars.
There was that pretty girl…just WAITING for me to take her hand…
And I was staring at the sky…”
* * *
Oh, the things that we miss when we’re focused on the wrong things!!
* * *
Those of us who were not watching very carefully
may have missed Ascension Day last Thursday.
Ascension Day always takes place
on the Thursday that falls forty days after Easter,
ten days ahead of Pentecost,
which itself is fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus;
Don’t worry. There’s no test if you didn’t follow the math.
But long ago, Ascension Day was a significant holy day for the Christian Church.
Somewhere along the way, we lower-church, Protestant types
lost the reason why…
In medieval times, the Ascension was big news.
The congregation would gather for worship with great anticipation.
And at the appropriate time during the mass,
a statue of Jesus near the altar would be drawn up slowly into the air,
ascending all the way to the ceiling,
sometimes even disappearing through an opening up there.
Just as we read in Acts, the people would stand around staring,
LOOKING UPWARD as Jesus was enveloped by the clouds.
And sometimes the church added a little non-biblical twist to the story.
As Jesus made his upward exit, at the same time, in a few churches
a statue of the devil would be lowered slowly down into the sanctuary
from another hole in the ceiling.
Imagine the drama and the power of those church theatrics!
Better than any sermon, I guarantee it!
It created a memorable moment, a visual moment, for the mainly illiterate peasants
crowded into the church, watching in awe.
In today’s age, though,
where the clouds no longer mark the bounds of human sensory experience
(as any trip to the airport will make clear to us)
the day of Ascension still has meaning and importance.
It may never be an Easter Sunday—with bonnets and bunnies and brunch.
It may never be a Christmas season: there won’t be songs
with the title “I’ll be home…for Ascension”
nor will the stores hold special Ascension day sales.
But I want to propose to you this morning
that the Ascension is an important day for us.
Its REAL significance lies in the fact
that it marks the beginning point of the church’s waiting time,
waiting—through prayer and through serving our neighbor
for Jesus to come again…
* * *
A time of waiting.
With Jesus leaving his disciples, we find ourselves in the MEANTIME…
We live in the time between the times.
Jesus has ascended; we await his return.
And like those early disciples, we can stand fixated at the stars,
Or we can listen to what God is doing among us today.
Like those early disciples, the question posed to us is plain:
What are we looking at? What now?
* * *
This scripture text we find ourselves reflecting on today,
highlights two crucial aspects of being called into this journey
To follow God on the way of Jesus Christ.
First, this day reminds us
that a fundamental part of being Christian is learning to be patient.
And nothing teaches this lesson better than a steady pattern of prayer.
I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer these past few weeks.
Jeff and I are preparing for a summer sermon series on the nature of prayer.
But what strikes me is that PRAYER
is THE important thing that the disciples did after Jesus left them:
according to Acts, they “devoted themselves to constant prayer.”
So some reflections about Prayer are in order.
But note well: To pray is to wait.
We may want quick answers to our petitions.
We might yearn to know what is in store for us.
We might have deep expectations that God will have things work
according to our schedule, our imagination
our way of seeing things.
But God will do with our prayer what God will do;
ours is simply to keep praying,
trusting that in our waiting time,
God is wonderfully and mysteriously at work.
* * *
To mark the weekly Sabbath,
Orthodox Jews have been known
“to tie a string around the perimeter of their community
as a tangible sign that within the string,
people are living in sacred time.”[ii]
That is a good way for us to envision the waiting we will do in prayer –
as if we have stepped inside a circle of string
that makes our prayer sacred time and our patience holy.
That kind of patient praying is so important for our lives!
One day you and I will find ourselves face to face
with suffering of one sort or another in our lives. Its part of being human.
Some of us, I know, are already in such a place,
or have passed through that lonesome valley…
with the death of someone we loved,
or a relationship that is crumbling,
or a job that is lost,
or a loneliness that will not go away,
or a serious illness in our family.
The time of waiting and praying can be a sacred time of holy patience,
as we trust in God to come to us.
The Ascension of Christ opens for us the waiting time,
when we learn a holy patience.
There is profound desire for us to try to know the future,
To discern what it is God has in store for us.
It is so much harder to learn to pray and to trust.
But Christ tells us that it is not that simple:
That such answers often do not come immediately to us…
The disciples, they want to know when Jesus will return.
He died once, he returned didn’t he?
If he leaves again, surely he’ll be back real soon.
“It is not for you,” Jesus said,
“To know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.”(Acts 1:6)
In her book, Plan B: Further Thoughts about Faith,
Presbyterian author Anne Lamott writes,
“The problem with God – or at any rate,
one of the top five most annoying things about God –
is that He or She rarely answers right away.
It can take days, weeks.
Some people seem to understand this – that life and change take time.
(A few years ago) Chou En-Lai, (the leader of China) was asked,
‘What do you think of the French Revolution?’
(He) paused for a minute…then replied, ‘Too soon to tell.’” [iii]
A holy patience is like that;
It knows there are forces larger than us at work in the universe.
A holy patience instead trusts God to be God,
and lives into the demands and joys of the day, of THIS day.
and THAT is a good thing on Ascension Day,
when we bid Christ farewell for a time.
* * *
If the first thing this passage suggests is holy patience in holy prayer
The second thing we learn from this passage
is to place our focus NOT on Christ’s return,
but on the world around us.
In the Ascension as described in the Book of Acts,
Jesus, having admonished the disciples to work a bit on their sense of timing,
suddenly is taken up into heaven in a great cloud of glory.
Remember, the scene creates a HEAVENWARD commotion, this Ascension.
That’s why the medieval statue-theatrics worked so well….
The disciples cannot seem to take their eyes off the skies.
They are transfixed by a glimpse into the world beyond.
But that’s not where God wants us to be looking!
God is concerned enough with these jaw-dropped disciples,
That God sends two angels to refocus them:
“People of Galilee, why are you standing there gazing up into the skies?
Jesus is gone, but will return someday.”
They say, in effect,
“What is it you are looking at?
Jesus’ work is now your work, his life is now your life.
His hour had come. Now it is your hour.
It’s time for the church to be the church.”
What is happening here at the beginning of the Book of Acts
Is essentially a story of succession.
Here the torch is being passed, the baton handed-off.
Whereas before, proclaiming the love and justice of God
was the business of Jesus, now it is OUR problem.
No wonder the followers of Jesus stood there so long, staring off into space.
The enormity of the responsibility must have dawned on them.
It was awesome enough to freeze them in their tracks.
Wait, Jesus, Just where do you think you’re going…
There’s so much to do down here…
Wait…. Please….Just wait a second….! Where are you going?!?
I’m not so sure we’re ready for you to go yet….
* * *
Karl Barth called the Ascension “the beginning of this time of ours.”[iv]
It opens the season of the mission of the church,
A season that will be confirmed when the holy spirit comes
On that day we celebrate as Pentecost.
The Ascension is essentially a call to mission, a call to service,
A call to get to work…
And what work we have to do,
When we can turn from gazing up to the stars and start looking around us:
To bind up the broken hearted
To be agents of reconciliation and forgiveness
To pray, actually pray, for our enemies
To witness to God’s amazing grace and joy and love and peace
In a world that really doubts that these things really work.
We’ve been given the most wonderful blessing of all:
Think about communities such as ours, at 63rd and Roe, are trying to be about?
When we turn our fellowship hall into shelter for those who need it.
When we visit one another to offer comfort when someone is sick
Or to help out when a newborn comes.
To help build a habitat home in our community,
Or to travel to Mission, Texas, as our youth plan to do this summer…
THAT is the work we have to do. The work Christ empowers us to do…
* * *
Jesus has risen….again.
What now?
We celebrate the church next week. Its birthday, the coming of the Holy Spirit.
This week we observe the Ascension of Jesus back to God.
Let us look with amazement at what God has done for us,
And THEN let us turn our gaze back to earth
Offering patient prayers, staying within God’s time,
And listening to our neighbor right next to us,
Tending to them in Christ’s name.
May it be so. Amen.
[1] The origins of this story are lost to me, but I heard it in a sermon in the mid 2000′s, perhaps in Chicago. It may be from a preaching resource around that time, but it is not original to me.
[ii] Sojourners, May 2005, p. 22
[iii] Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith[New York: Riverhead Books, 2005], p. 9
[iv] A Dictionary of Christian Theology, p.16
{ 0 comments }