Sermon — May 21, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Of all the Sundays in the entire church calendar, today seems to me be the one in which the apostles’ lives actually seem something like our own. For the last six weeks, we’ve been in the season of Easter, celebrating Jesus’ resurrection appearances. Next Sunday, we’ll hear the story of Pentecost, and the miraculous and overwhelming manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Most of the rest of the year, we follow Jesus around in his Galilean perambulations, as he heals people and casts out demons and teaches his disciples face to face. And then for a few weeks in December, we’ll eagerly await the Messiah’s birth.
But none of these are the way we spend our lives today. Jesus does not appear to us in his resurrected body and say, “Peace be with you.” (I want you to call me if he does!) We don’t sit at Jesus’ feet and engage in a Q&A about his parables, or see people cured of an illness just by touching the fringe of his garments. And while the Holy Spirit is active among us, it rarely shows up with tongues of fire and the miraculous ability to understand other languages.
Most of the year the “plot” of our church year follows Jesus himself, during a short period, the year or three in his life when he was really, tangibly present with his disciples. But today, this Sunday after the Ascension, finds the disciples in a very different place. And it’s one that’s much more like our world. The amazing story of Jesus’ time on earth, of his ministry and death, his resurrection and reappearances, is over. The miraculous manifestation of the Holy Spirit is yet to come. The one whom the apostles thought would transform the world and establish a new way of life for them and all their people has gone, and the apostles are left wondering, “What now?”
“What now?” is the great question of Ascensiontide, this strange little mini-season of the church year between the Ascension and Pentecost. But “what now?” is also the great question of our lives. Something happens. Somehow, we encounter God. And we’re left asking: What next?
If you’re sitting in this church, after all, it’s not by accident. The overwhelming majority of people in this neighborhood, this morning, are not sitting in church at all. Something happened, for you, at some point, which brought you here. Maybe it was a spiritual experience or a life crisis, a moment of great beauty and inspiration or a parent or spouse telling you that you didn’t have a choice. But one way or another, you’ve found your way here, and the question that you face, whether it’s conscious or not, is, the same as those disciples. Here we are. What next?
Well, if you’re anything like me, your instinct is to plan; to worry, fret, imagine, dream about the things that could come next. Every two or three years of my adulthood, I’ve come up with a five or ten-year plan. And the fact that every single one of them has been almost completely wrong hasn’t been enough to stop me yet. Like the apostles, I crave certainty. They ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, you’ve risen from the dead; now are you going to take charge and set up that kingdom of God you’ve been talking about so much?” (Acts 1:6) I ask Jesus, “Okay, Lord, we’ve made it through the pandemic, more or less; now is it time for a big new vision for the church? Okay, Lord, the child’s six months old. (Two years old, three, four, five, fifteen years old.) Now is this going to start getting easier? Okay, Lord, you’ve made your point; I’ve realized that this grudge is only hurting me, and it’s time for me to let go and forgive my father, mother, sister, friend, spouse. Now could you just get them to apologize, first?” And to this, and to every single one of our attempts to predict the future, to force God’s hand, to speed things up or slow them down, Jesus replies that “it is not for you to know the times or periods” that God has set (Acts 1:7).
(Of course, it’s good to have some kind of vision or strategic plan. I worry that the Church doesn’t do this enough, that we just veer from crisis to crisis. And then I remember that the five-year Mission Strategy we adopted in 2016 had nothing to say about pandemic preparedness, and the one we adopted in 2021 will probably miss the crises of 2025. Maybe it was Dwight Eisenhower who put it best, when he said, “Peace-time plans are of no particular value, but peace-time planning is indispensable.”)
Well then, maybe plans won’t work; so what’s the plan?
“I know!” the apostles say. If focusing on the future won’t work, then let’s turn our eyes to the past! We know where Jesus went, and we know he’s coming back. So let’s get out our telescopes and fix them on the heavens, and wait and watch for Jesus to return in that very same patch of clouds. And this is something that we, the Church, love to do. We tell and re-tell stories of the past. We cherish the art and the buildings and the memories we’ve been left. We hold onto our traditions and value them, simply because they’re traditions. And we don’t just do this as churches. We do it as individuals, too. You see it all the time when we, as parents or teachers or coaches or friends, try to recreate the best moments of our lives for someone else. Our lives are full of golden memories, beautiful experiences of life or worship or prayer, and we try to reenact them so someone else can experience that same transcendent feeling that we did. And it almost never works.
I don’t even mean this as a criticism. Sure, it can go too far. We don’t want the church to become a museum, a place where nothing can change or grow or be touched. We want it to be a home, and a community, and it is. But there’s nothing wrong with remembering traditions. If those apostles had just thrown out their memories of Jesus altogether, where would we be? We certainly wouldn’t be reading the Gospels. But as the pastor and author Sam Rainer says, it becomes a problem when nostalgia trumps devotion, when “memories of the past bring more emotion than the mission of the present.”[1] And it’s not a problem because there’s something wrong with what worked in the past. It’s a problem for the very reason the angels suggest when they appear and ask the apostles, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That’s where Jesus went, and Jesus really was there. But it’s not where he’s going next.
So if we want to follow Jesus in these in-between days, the question remains: What next? We can’t make a fool-proof ten-year plan. We don’t want to become stuck in the past. What’s left?
Well, what’s left is the present. And that’s what the apostles do: they live in the present. Not in the peculiarly-modern YOLO sense—they don’t fly to Bali and drink smoothies and do yoga on the beach, and post it all on their Instagram accounts. It’s something else. They go to a holy place, to the city of Jerusalem, and they go to a room, and they spend their time in prayer.
(Do you like to go to a holy place, and to go into a room, and to spend your time in prayer? Because if not, I have bad news for you, about what you’re doing right now.)
The disciples don’t seek self-indulgent pleasure or isolated enlightenment. They live in community; not just the abstract idea of community, but an actual community of actual people. Annoying people. Difficult people. Not“Beloved Community” in theory, but Peter, John, and James, Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Jameson; and Mary, the mother of Jesus, who’s just fantastic; and all his brothers, who… hmm.
In those remarkable early days, between losing Jesus, the leader of their community, and receiving the Holy Spirit that would lead them to transform the world, the disciples do what we do now. We come, and we pray, and we wait for the Spirit to lead us where it will. And in the meantime, we live together as a community of prayer; as imperfect people made holier by one another and by God.
We can’t predict when the Spirit will come, or what it will say. We know it probably won’t be in the exact same place it appeared in the past. We might suffer along the way, as Peter is always eager to remind us. But God will not leave us comfortless. And even if we don’t know the way, and even if we can’t plan ahead, God is guiding us into even greater things. For “the spirit of glory,” as Peter says, “which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you…” and “the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you. To him be the power forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 4:14, 5:11).
[1] Sam Rainer, The Church Revitalization Checklist (Church Answers: 2021), 59.