“Why Are You Standing Here?”
Ascension Sunday at Epiphany UMC, Vienna, VA
17 May 2015
17 May 2015
Luke 24:44-53 and Acts 1:1-11
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It’s a pleasure to be invited to
preach here at Epiphany while your pastor is traveling in the Holy Land.
As it happens, I’ve spent some time in Palestine and Israel as well – from 2007
to 2008, I lived in Jerusalem as a young adult missionary with Global
Ministries of the United Methodist Church. And for much of that time I lived at
the Lutheran World Federation hostel at Augusta Victoria, at one of the sites
often associated with the Ascension stories that we heard this morning. As with
most places associated with the events of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection,
there is a big church at the site; and as with most such places, different
sects and denominations disagree about the exact
site, so there are multiple heights and corresponding multiple churches
associated with the Ascension just as there are multiple churches and tourist
booths associated with Jesus’ birth, baptism, burial, and just about anything
else you can think of.
I share this not to denigrate
pilgrimage to the land where Jesus lived and ministered, died and was raised. I
have a deep love for that land and for its people, including the Palestinian
Christian community that invited me into communion and shared ministry during
my time there. Rather, I thought about the proliferation of holy sites while
reading this morning’s passages because I think it’s characteristic of a very
natural human reaction to the experience of the divine. We want to hold on to
holy moments and spectacular happenings. We want to commemorate, to
memorialize, to keep our eyes directed toward the times in which it seemed so
clear that God was present in our lives.
This very human desire to hold on
shows up in the scriptural accounts of the Ascension, which we heard this
morning. Now, we have to remember that Luke and Acts are written by the same
author – so our texts this morning blend into each other on purpose. First, we
heard the final verses of Luke’s gospel, in which Jesus gives a summary of his
time with the disciples. He interprets scripture to them, charges them with a
ministry of witness, grace, and transformation, and affirms the promise of the
coming Spirit. Then, he leaves them. The beginning of the book of Acts,
addressed to the same person as the gospel of Luke, gives a fuller account of
that leaving, what we have come to call ‘The Ascension.’ In this second telling
of the story, we get a number of fascinating tidbits, including two people
dressed in street clothes who show up and say to the disciples:
“Men of Galilee, why do you stand
looking up toward heaven?”
Or, in a more modern translation:
“Galileans – why are you standing
here?”
A bit obtuse for heavenly
messengers, aren’t they? I mean, you can imagine the disciples reacting: “Why
are we standing here? Well, that was Jesus, who we saw perform miraculous signs
and healings, then watched him get tortured and killed, and then he sort of was
alive again and talking and walking and eating, and now he’s been whisked out
of sight by some sort of magical cloud. What do you mean, why are we standing here?
That was spectacular! Maybe we should build a shrine or something…”
I sympathize with the disciples
here. It’s a perfectly natural thing to do, to stand there, staring up toward
the heavens.
And yet – and here’s the rub – the
perfectly natural thing to do isn’t always what the church is called to do.
There is work to do, the mysterious
messengers seem to be saying. And it seems obvious, for folks who are familiar
with the story of the early church as told in Acts, what that work must be.
They are to get out and preach the gospel, to spread the church to the ends of
the known world – right?
Well, actually, not exactly. Not
yet.
You see, in both Luke and Acts, what
the disciples are ordered to do first is
to go back into Jerusalem and to wait.
Before they rush off to spread the
good news and grow the church, they are to hang out in the city, praying and
sharing with each other and waiting for the promised coming of the Holy Spirit.
It’s a strange, in-between time that
we, as modern disciples, are invited into this morning – a distinctive pause
between the definitive end of Jesus’ ministry on earth and the new beginning of
the church, the latter of which we traditionally celebrate not on this
Ascension Sunday but rather at next week’s festival of Pentecost.
I think this in-between time is
important, and often overlooked. As much as we have a tendency to stand still,
to stare up at the heavens or back at the glorious accomplishments of the past,
we also have the opposite tendency – to rush frenetically into the next thing
without taking a moment to pause, to breathe, and to be mindful of the change
that has taken place.
The author William Bridges, who writes
about life transitions, puts it this way: “First,” he says, “there is an
ending, then a beginning, and an
important empty or fallow time in between.”[i]
This fallow or in-between time, according to Bridges, will be perceived by many
as “apparently unproductive,” when in fact it is a time for “the important
business of inner self-transformation.”[ii]
It is thus of vital importance to give the in-between times their due, to honor
them as periods of disorientation, discernment, and rest.
Recently, we’ve seen this dynamic
play out in the U.S.American church. This past week, for example, the Pew Research
Forum released an annual report on the state of religious attitudes and beliefs
in the U.S.[iii] For
anyone who’s been paying attention over the past decade, the report contains no
surprises: a smaller and smaller percentage of our population identifies as
Christian; more and more people identify as religiously unaffiliated; the drop
is particularly notable in the mainline Protestant denominations and among
young adults; our own United Methodist denomination continues to age and
shrink. But what has been fascinating for me to watch is how we react to such
news.
Some of us want to stand exactly
where we are, to stare up at the heavens or backwards at the ‘good old days’ of
packed church pews and societal prestige. We’re not ready for a new beginning.
We want to hold on.
Others of us want to rush off to
start new programs or new ministries, to try to do something – anything! – to stop the trend of
decline. We don’t want to admit that there’s been a fundamental shift in our
society, a definitive ending of the way thinks once were.
What is very, very hard for all of
us, I think, is to sit with the in-between time. To return to our version of
Jerusalem – I don’t mean some holy city, but rather, our own communities, our
own neighborhoods, here in Vienna, VA or in the Washington, DC Metropolitan
area. To neither close ourselves off in the past or anxiously try to alter the
future. It is hard to sit with the in-between times, because we are afraid.
“Why are you standing here?” the
heavenly messengers ask the disciples.
“Stay here in the city,” Jesus tells
them.
If we have eyes to see underneath
the spectacular nature of this morning’s texts – with miraculously disappearing
saviors and magically appearing messengers – we find something that is actually
quite surprising: a call to start at home. To take time to pray for the Spirit
of God to fall afresh on us, so that our witnessing – whether it be in the DC
Metro area, or across the United States, or to the ends of the earth – is not
empty talk and frantic activity but rather a cooperation in God’s activity and
God’s mission.
At the conclusion of this morning’s
worship service, we will sing a hymn called “Lord, Whose Love Through Humble
Service.” One verse of the hymn begins like this: “As we worship, grant us
vision, till your love’s revealing light in its height and depth and greatness
dawns upon our quickened sight.”[iv]
It’s this connection between worship and loving service to the world that the
words from Luke and Acts call us to this morning. When the disciples want to
rush off to the next thing, Jesus says: “Stay in Jerusalem. Wait and pray.”
When they want simply to stay on the Mount of the Ascension, staring in awe,
God’s messengers ask them, “Why are you standing here?” We live in between
those two messages. We return to Jerusalem – to Vienna – to Washington, DC. We
dedicate ourselves to prayer and to discerning the signs of the Spirit. We
participate in communion and community. We share with our neighbors. We do the
slow, patient work of learning the ins and outs of our communities, paying
attention to what God is most assuredly up to, right here in our midst. It
seems very simple, and it’s all, as it turns out, quite challenging. As the
pastor, author, and Biblical translator Eugene Peterson once wrote that dedication
to the spiritual disciplines – of prayer, worship, scripture reading – “has not
been tried and discarded because it didn’t work, but tried and found difficult
(and more than a little bit tedious).”[v]
And so I offer a prayer, today, for
the space between Ascension and Pentecost. Between the definitive end and the
remarkable new beginning. I offer a prayer, this morning, for the fallow times.
For the invisible restoration of the conditions
necessary for future growth.
[i] William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (Cambridge:
De Capo Press, 2004), 17.
[ii] Ibid., 135.
[iii] Pew Research Center, “America’s
Changing Religious Landscape: Christians Decline Sharply as Share of
Population, Unaffiliated and other Faiths Continue to Grow,” 12 May 2015,
available: http://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
[iv] Albert F. Bayly, “Lord, Whose
Love Through Humble Service,” United
Methodist Hymnal 581.
[v] Eugene Peterson, Living the Message: Daily Help for Living
the God-Centered Life (New York: HarperOne, 1996). 86.
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