Transition Sermon

Dear Friends,
Here is the sermon I preached Sunday morning on Hydra. These are not the exact words, but are close enough. This sermon is roughly built on a sermon that I preached last summer when the church I was appointed to was going through the transition of having two pastors leave and receiving two new pastors. Thus, it will be quite familiar to those who heard that sermon. The context was different, but the issues of transition and change were similar. I pray that these words might be words of wisdom for us in this new time and place.
Peace and grace,
Tom

Transition
June 3, 2007 (Hydra, Greece)
Acts 1:1-11

Transition…

We’re all getting ready to go through a big transition. We have spent three weeks in these holy lands and soon we will be going home. There will be big changes for each of us as we make our way back into the regular routines of our lives back home. We will pick up that pile of papers left on our desk. We will go back to school. We will reunite with our friends, spouses, and families. We will begin our summer internships. Change and transition is right around the corner.

Why look at the first half of the first chapter of Acts this morning? What does it have to do with this transition we are about to go through? Well, it is in these first eleven verses that we find a major transition happening for Jesus’ disciples as he leaves them and ascends to heaven. What Jesus tells them to do, and what Luke says as he reflects on this story of change in the disciples lives, can provide us some wisdom as we make the transition back into our normal lives. Let’s take a look and see.

Acts 1:1 (NRSV)
In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught form the beginning...

This book of Acts is the second volume in a two-book volume set written by Luke. If you pick up the book of Luke and read the end, you will notice that Luke has already told the story of the ascension, and yet here he is in Acts telling it again. And when you read both accounts by Luke, you will see that there are different details in each. What is Luke up to here? Did he have, as my elder friends say, a senior moment and forget that he had already told this story? Or do the differences between the two suggest that the ascension really didn’t happen? Or is Luke up to something else here?

I’d like to suggest this morning that Luke sees a moment of grace here in the transition that the disciples are about to experience and that this experience is worth reflecting on more than once. To the best of my knowledge this is the only example in the New Testament of the same author telling the same story twice. In my own experience, it is in moments of transition that we are particularly open to God’s grace at work in us. There is an open door in our lives when we experience change that God can use to transform us and mold us more into who God is calling us to become. It is for this reason, I suggest, that Luke reflects on this transition twice. Because it is an essential time for God’s grace to work.

When you go home and begin to tell this story and reflect upon it, do it more than once. In fact, you already have begun to reflect upon it. You have been journaling, talking to one another, praying and worshiping together, and some of us have even been blogging. But when you go home, don’t let these first reflections be the last. And as you tell this story, new things will come to the foreground. Other things will fall to the background just as it happens for Luke telling the story of the ascension twice. Some of the details will change as God reveals God’s grace in your lives. For this reason, reflect on this experience of the Holy Lands over and over again.

But what should be the first step when you go home? What is the first thing you should do? When you left your home and your jobs for three or more weeks, what did you tell the people you were leaving to do? You probably didn’t tell them just to wait. “Just sit at your desk until I come back to the office….Just wait in the living room until I come home.” If you are anything like me, you had quite a detailed plan for what everyone should be doing while you were gone. Maybe you had to take care of all your finances ahead of time. Maybe you had to draw up a calendar for when certain things should be done. Maybe you had to do three weeks worth of work ahead of time be able to be gone! But you certainly did not tell the people you were leaving, “Just wait till I get back.” And yet, the first thing that Luke tells us that Jesus told his disciples was to wait.

Acts 1:4 (NRSV)
While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father.

Jesus tells his disciples to wait. I hate waiting. I hate waiting for my pictures to upload on these slow internet connects. I hate waiting for the bus to get to the next stop so I can use the bathroom. I hate waiting to eat some regular food and get rid of this Crusader Crud I’ve got. I hate waiting for lunch to come at 3PM! I simply hate waiting. Come on Jesus, can’t you tell us to do something besides wait? Can’t we start an action plan? A strategic plan? Join a protest group or tell everyone we see about what we experienced in these holy lands? Anything but waiting. But Jesus tells his disciples to wait.

Why wait? We find the answer to this in the disciples’ response to Jesus in verse six.

Acts 1:6 (NRSV)
When they had come together they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

The disciples still didn’t get it. Jesus’ wasn’t about a political kingdom. And we usually don’t get it either. When we try to act quickly, we usually don’t get it right. We emphasize the wrong things. Or we follow our own plans and not God’s. That is why Jesus tells them to wait. But wait for what? Jesus tells them at the end of verse four: the promise of the Father. And what is the promise of the Father?

Acts 1:5 (NRSV)
John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

Jesus tells them to wait for the Spirit. The reason we don’t get it when we rush into action is because we’re trying to do it without God. If God’s Spirit is not in our work, it won’t produce much fruit. Sure we might accomplish something. But it won’t be what God has planned. And so we are to wait for the Spirit to act in us so that we join God in God’s work and not just rush off to our own work.

And what is it that the Spirit gives us? We find this in verse eight.

Acts 1:8a (NRSV)
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.

Power. That’s what we’re looking for. We each have some amount of power. But it pales compared to God’s power in the Spirit. Yet “power” is a rather vague kind of thing. Power for what and to do what? Luke goes on to tell us what this power enables us to do:

Acts 1:8b (NRSV)
And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Power to witness to God’s grace at work in these lands. In Jerusalem and Jericho, Sinai and Amman and Damascus. In Atlanta and D.C., Michigan and Tennessee and Texas. To the ends of the world we are to be witnesses to how God’s grace is at work in us and in these holy lands. And a time will then come when the waiting stops and the action begins.

Acts 1:11 (NRSV)
[The angels] 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.”

You can almost hear the frustration in the angels’ voices. “Why are you standing around with your hands in your pockets? Get going to Jerusalem and start waiting for what Jesus told you to wait for.” There is a time for action. But first comes reflecting and waiting for the power of the Holy Spirit to be witnesses to God’s grace.

And because we worship and follow not a dead god but a risen Lord and Savior, there will come a day when Jesus will come back and hold us accountable to the gift we have been given in these three weeks of experience in the holy lands. These three weeks are a talent that has been given to us. Will you bury it or will you invest it and reap the return? Because we know that Jesus will come back, we are impelled now to take this gift and invest it wisely. One day we will have to give an account of what we did with it.

So go and wait…
Wait for the power of the Holy Spirit and be witnesses to God’s grace at work in your own life and these holy lands.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.