As this is the first Sunday of the month we will be celebrating Communion this week.
The Scripture Readings are:
- Luke 24:44-53
- Acts 1:1-11
The Sermon title is Hurry Up and Wait
source
Early Thoughts: Easter has come and gone. New life is bubbling in the community. Now what?
Both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke end with a story of Jesus making a final appearance to his followers and leaving them with an instruction. But the instructions are very different.
In Matthew the Risen Christ meets the disciples in Galilee (on a mountain because everything important in Matthew seems to happen on a mountain) and tells them to go out into the world teaching and baptizing. Seems straightforward enough as we launch from the Gospel into the next phase of the story of God's action in the world. Luke takes a different tack. In Luke the final appearance takes place in and just outside Jerusalem and the disciples are told to wait for a sign that the next phase is going to begin.
SO are we supposed to respond to Easter with action, teaching and preaching and making new disciples? Or are we supposed to wait for God to do something else that will then move us into action?
 |
| There is some odd art out there... |
The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts are written by the same person. Luke is writing to his friend Theophilus to tell the story of Jesus and the Early Church. Luke ends the first volume and begins the second with different accounts of the same event. Which makes a nice linkage between volumes, though it does make one wonder what the event really looked like. There is one important piece that stays the same. Before Jesus leaves, before being taken up into heaven, he tells his friends to remain in Jerusalem and wait for God to act. Once God acts and the disciples have been filled with the power of the Holy Spirit then they can act.
Waiting can be hard.
We are so often told that we should "don't just stand there...do something" that it feels wrong to reverse it and hear "don't just do something...stand there". We can so easily see reasons to act that we want to jump in and make things happen. If we are honest, we sometimes (often?) get impatient waiting for things to happen "in God's time". Or maybe we are afraid that if we don't act now it will be too late: the window of opportunity will close or we will be too far behind to catch up.
It can be hard to know when to act and when to wait on God. It can be hard to know which one of those God is calling us to in the moment.
Earlier this year I read this book. It has pushed me to think about how we (both as individuals and as communities) respond to moments of crisis. Generally we are sure we have to act quickly, strategically and (hopefully) decisively to get things back under control. Sometimes that is true, at least as a temporary reaction. But I have to wonder if sometimes the perceived need to act quickly and decisively gets in the way of our need, as people of faith, to listen for God's wisdom and discern what God would have us do/who God would have us be.
In the end it is going to be God's action (remembering that God acts in a variety of ways using a variety of tools) that is going to matter the most. As a community of faith it is God's action that is going to bring us life and hope, not our own. If we read a bit further into Acts we find that the early church actually had trouble knowing that, they also found waiting hard and wanting to get into the action phase. But once God acted, once God filled them with the Power of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, then wonderful things happened.
What might happen if we paused to ponder and listen and wait? (And continue to gather for worship and praise as Luke tells us the disciples did continuously)
--Gord
No comments:
Post a Comment