Meantime
Acts 1:6-14
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Acts 1:6-14
6 So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. 8 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.” 9 When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. 11 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.”
12 Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away. 13 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[a] James. 14 All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
Toward the end of her 1994 one-woman show titled Blown Sideways Through Life- a show chronicling the 64 different jobs she had had that far in her life- Claudia Shear observes that no one is “just a busboy,” that everyone we meet and those we often overlook, “have a story that will stop your heart.”
Isabelle Conway has a story about how her heart was literally stopped. When she was six she was taken to the doctor because her heart would suddenly start beating very fast. The doctors told her that it sounded like supraventricular tachycardia. Nothing could be done about it, she was told, until it happened again so the doctors could see just what was happening. Sure enough, it happened again and Isabelle’s mother rushed her to the ER. By the time they got her there her heart was racing at 360 beats per minute. So they told her that they needed to give her some medicine that would stop her heart, but then it should pick back up at a normal rhythm. And if it didn’t, they told her, they would defibrillate her. So they put the electrodes on her chest, just in case, and then administered the drug into her IV. Everyone watched the monitor as her heart started slowing, and slowing, until it stopped entirely. Then it began to beat again. It may have only been a moment, but I imagine that it’s the longest moment ever when you’re waiting to see if your heart will start beating again. Of course, most heart-stopping moments aren’t quite so literal. There’s the heart stopping decision to tell someone that you love them for the first time. As soon as the words are out of your mouth your heart stops beating until they say something back. Or there’s the kind of news that stops your heart, when a doctor says, “we need to talk about your test results,” or when the voice on the other end of the phone informs you that there’s been an accident. Your heart stops while you’re waiting for the rest of it.
The people who had come to know Jesus, the ones who took him up on the invitation to follow and learn from what he was doing, the ones who came and saw what he was about, they had their own share of heart stopping moments. Maybe it was the first time they heard him speak, or saw him change someone’s life with just a touch. Maybe it was in an exchange with someone powerful when they began to realize he might be on dangerous ground. Certainly, their heart stopped at the arrival of the temple guard in the middle of the night, or the first sign of violence when a sword was drawn and blood spilled. The sight of him hanging on that cross, or his lifeless body wrapped and laid in the tomb, that was the first time they had to wait for his heart to start beating again. And in some miraculous way it did.
That’s the joy that we celebrated at the beginning of Easter, at the outset of our season of resurrection. It’s the joy that carried us through doubt, blindness and incomprehension at the beating heart of the risen Jesus as he talked, and ate, taught and pointed to the new reality that had come into being at his rising. And just as his disciples were getting used to having him back with them, just as they were coming to understand him and everything else in a new way because of what he had done by defeating death, he left them again. I have no comparable experience to watching a once-dead, recently resurrected person ascend into heaven, in fact I’m still not sure that I entirely understand what that sentence means exactly, but I’m guessing that it’s a pretty heart stopping experience; one that is at once profoundly amazing and deeply sad. The amazing part should go without saying. Have you ever seen a once-dead, recently resurrected person ascend into heaven? Right. Amazing. But my guess is that we’ve all had the sad experience of seeing someone go.
Transitions aren’t easy. They may not always stop your heart, but they can have that quality. It’s graduation season. My social media is filled with pictures of graduates in cap and gown and videos of commencement speeches. They can range from the humorous to the inspiring. One of the best I’ve seen this season comes from Dante Pearson who was chosen as class speaker for the 2017 MBA class of Wharton Business School, who introduced himself as a proud member emeritus of the Wharton admission waitlist. Then he shared what that experience had taught him, that life is one big ‘waitlist.’ “Waiting to start work. Waiting to get married. Waiting to have kids. Waiting to get promoted, and ultimately waiting to retire. You see,” he went on, “life is what happens when you’re on the waitlist.”
It’s clear before he leaves that Jesus’ friends are waiting for something specific. They want to know when he’s going to make Israel great again. When is he going to bring back the good old days when they were a kingdom in their own right and didn’t have to put up with Gentile occupation? When is he going to put things back the way they were? It’s a very human impulse, to want to go back. One of the first things the Hebrew slaves did after being freed from centuries of misery and oppression in Egypt was to complain about where they found themselves and talk about going back. What used to be is familiar. It is comfortable. It is known. For Jesus’ friends it was the dream of days gone by that may have never been. Just what is it that they want restored after all? There was never a time in their history that they didn’t find themselves at odds with their neighbors. What were they waiting for him to do, wage a war against the prevailing culture of the day? There are still followers of Jesus who’d like to take up arms and take things back. But that isn’t Jesus’ style. And he lets them know that it isn’t theirs either. That’s not for you, he tells them. That’s not what this is about. That’s not what any of this is about.
The risky thing about that heart stopping moment when we’re waiting to the find out what’s next, isn’t just the risk of your heart stopping, it’s the risk that we might be waiting for the wrong thing, waiting for what we want, or think should happen without stopping to listen to what Jesus says is going to happen. So that even when our hearts start beating again, they beat in the entirely wrong direction- waiting to start work, waiting to get married, waiting to have kids, waiting for the promotion so that we can eventually wait to retire.
I was visiting with Marshall Farris this week and he was telling me how much he missed church. He and Joan have moved into an assisted care facility where they have a kind of hymn sing on Sunday mornings for the residents. It’s really not the same, he told me. Then he described the scene, a room filled with white-haired people singing songs about waiting to go to heaven. This is what those two men in white robes are warning against when they show up on that hillside as Jesus is going. Perhaps the only pull stronger than the one to go back to what was is the desire to skip to the end. That’s the other part of waiting for the wrong thing. Again, it’s what Dante Pearson recognized about life on the waitlist. “We tell ourselves, ‘when I get into business school, then I’ll actually have time to volunteer. Or when I’m done with my first year of work, then I’ll actually have time to write that novel.’” The faith-based version of this kind of thinking is like that room full of people singing about waiting to go to heaven. “When I die, then I’ll see heaven.” That seems to have been a problem ever since Jesus took his exit from the Mount of Olives, so we have these words from the same men in white robes who told the women on that first Easter morning that Jesus was not there in the tomb. Because Jesus won’t be found in the sky any more than the living can be found among the dead, or our present can be found in trying to re-create the past.
Just what are we supposed to do in the meantime, then? What is it that God has for us when one thing has ended and the next has yet to begin? What do we do while we’re on the waitlist? Waiting for the treatment to make us better. Waiting for someone to call with a job offer. Waiting for an answer or a sign. Waiting for our hearts to start beating again after they’ve been stopped. Jesus makes it pretty clear before he goes- we are to be his witnesses. From our own backyard to the ends of the world we are to be a living, breathing witness to the power of resurrection, of life over death, hope over despair, love over indifference, forgiveness over revenge. In our families, with our friends, where we work and how we play, we are to be a living sign of the new reality that we have already come to see for ourselves in Jesus who brings all of heaven down to earth. We don’t have to wait to go somewhere else to see it because the other thing Jesus makes clear is that it is coming to us, not later but soon. Even now. The Holy Spirit of God will breathe life and breath into our lungs and into our lives and give us everything we need right here to do what we are called to do and to be what we are called to be. It comes to us in the heart stopping moments of life and restores the rhythm. It comes to us in those moments when we see the person in front of us as more than just whatever they’ve been reduced to in our minds. It comes to us in the stranger welcomed as a friend. It comes to us in a prayer shared, bread broken, and stories told. It comes to us in the meantime, when we find ourselves on the wait list and shows us that what we’re waiting for isn’t far off. In fact, it may already be here.