Today, we celebrate Ascension Sunday – the day we see Jesus ascend to sit at the right hand of God the Father. So we’ll be diving into Acts. The full title of this book ‘Acts of the Apostles’, which is a surprisingly accurate description.
Written by the same person who wrote the gospel according to Luke, Acts is all about what happens after Jesus – when he’s no longer with them in flesh and blood and they have to figure out how to live and be and work and worship now in light of this crucified and risen Savior.
Acts is when the people of God start figuring out what it looks like to live in the space between Jesus’ resurrection and the fullness of the kingdom of God.
Scripture: Acts 1:6-14
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.
While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”
Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a Sabbath day’s journey away. When they had entered the city, they went to the room upstairs where they were staying: Peter, and John, and James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
This is one of my favorite post-resurrection moments. As Jesus ascends, the disciples are all standing there, looking up at the sky. After a couple minutes, two guys in white robes show up and go “whatcha lookin’ at?”
They apparently continue standing and staring, because eventually these strangers have to be like: “yes, Jesus has ascended into heaven, and he will return in the same way.”
But the unspoken message is closer to: “Alright, time to go. You can’t stand here forever. You have things to do and places to be. You have instructions to follow. Move along, folks.”
You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
What the disciples still wanted was for Jesus to bring the story to its completion. To sit on a throne and rule as king over God’s people. After all, he conquered death itself—he could deal with some mere Romans, right?
But that was not the plan.
Instead, Jesus said “now it’s your turn,” and ascended into heaven.
And with the grace and leading of the Holy Spirit, God’s people have been throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks ever since.
We come together on Sundays to worship God. To focus our hearts and minds on God and God’s will for our lives. This is a good and right and necessary space to rest in God’s care, to experience God’s power and majesty, and to meditate on the words of Jesus and the call of the Holy Spirit.
This is our time to marvel at God.
But there is a reason that every single worship service ends with BOTH a charge and a benediction: a call and a blessing. Because part of my job is also to shoo everyone out of these four walls, to go and live the lives to which we are called. Like the disciples, we have places to be and things to do and instructions to follow.
Jesus does not tell us to stand around, staring at the sky until he returns. We are, instead, called to be people who live the good news of resurrection.
John Calvin, the 16th-century theologian, writes in his ‘Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life’:
“The gospel is not a doctrine of the tongue, but of life. It cannot be grasped by reason and memory only, but it is fully understood when it possesses the whole soul and penetrates to the inner recesses of the heart.”
In other words: we cannot simply repeat the words on the page and call it good. If we want to know the fullness of this good news of Jesus, we have to live it.
We have to actually do the thing.
And that’s the hard part. We are creatures of habit. We humans, at our absolute core, crave what is familiar to us – not necessarily what is good or stable or helps us grow, but what is familiar. That’s why Jesus’ disciples keep coming back to this question: NOW are you going to be the king?
Has anyone here ever been on a sailboat?
A few years ago, a friend recommended a new book to me: Sailboat Church. It’s written by Joan Gray, a Presbyterian pastor and former Moderator of the General Assembly.
(Side note for those who don’t know the depths of our Book of Order: this is the person or people we elect, out of all the pastors and elders in the entire PCUSA, to stand at the podium and run the meetings that make up the national church gathering every two years. It’s kind of a big deal amongst Presbyterians.)
Obviously, we don’t have time for me to read the entire book to you. But her basic premise is this:
-Some churches operate like rowboats. We work hard, and we row and row and row in order to get where we want to go. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Other churches, however, operate more like sailboats. The Holy Spirit blows around like wind, going here and there, and these churches aren’t focused on rowing, but on catching the wind and going where that wind will take them.
They still have to do the work, don’t get me wrong. Those who’ve been sailing know that it’s a different kind of work than rowing, but it’s still work.
But those who sail are fully aware that they are not the ones powering the boat or deciding precisely where it goes and how fast.
If what we know is how to row a rowboat, then learning to sail sounds exhausting.
But once we catch the wind, we can go further than we ever could on our own power.
This story holds within it one of THE greatest tensions in our faith:
On the one hand, we do not bring the kingdom of God. God does that, and God will do it on God’s own time. (Remember that the next time someone tells you they’ve calculated Jesus’ return down to the minute.)
On the other hand, the Holy Spirit gives us power to take the life and love of Jesus into every corner of this world and make real, good, sustainable change.
We didn’t start God’s work, and we are not the ones who will finish it – AND we are called and equipped by the Holy Spirit to continue Jesus’ ministry in the world that we have.
It’s not a question of either/or. It’s both. It always has been, and always will be.
So, beloveds, let us look toward heaven to worship the God of heaven and earth. And let us also not stand here forever, looking up at the sky. We have work to do.
Thanks be to God. Amen.