Sermon: Now What? (2017)

Delivered at Trinity United Methodist Church in Fountain Inn, South Carolina on May 28, 2017, Ascension Sunday

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Now What?

Audio Version

So when [Jesus and his disciples] had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.  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.”  When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight.  While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.  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.”

Then they returned to Jerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is near Jerusalem, a sabbath day’s journey away.  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 James.  All these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.

Acts 1:6-14 (NRSV)

Give me a revelation

Show me what to do

'Cause I've been trying to find my way

I haven't got a clue

Tell me, should I stay here?

Or do I need to move?

Give me a revelation

I've got nothing without You

From “Revelation” by Third Day

After I accepted my first job as a professional computer programmer, I started returning to my alma mater every now and then for long walks around campus.  The beautifully cultivated grounds of the university were the perfect place for me to sort through my thoughts.  On one Sunday evening, as I followed the paths around campus, I realized that I was feeling a bit lost – not lost on campus but lost in life.  Within the last few months, I had completed both of the life goals my parents had set for me.  I had graduated from college with a bachelors degree, and I had landed a full-time professional job.  I had accomplished everything for which I had spent my whole life preparing.  My life's work was complete.

My thoughts and my feelings that evening boiled down to a single question:

Now what?

---

Jesus and His disciples were gathered at the Mount of Olives, not far from Jerusalem.  The Disciples, perhaps still under the impression that Jesus was the political leader who would liberate their people from the Roman occupation, asked if He would soon restore autonomy to Israel.  Jesus told them that such matters were none of their concern and then said, “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.”  He suddenly began to rise from the ground and float into the sky, and then, as the Disciples were watching, He disappeared into the clouds.

For the Disciples, life had been nothing short of an emotional roller coaster ride as of late.  They had been called away from their previous careers as fisherman, tax collectors, and militant political activists to become students of the traveling teacher and healer known as Jesus of Nazareth.  They followed Him on His journeys, listening to Him proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God, watching Him clash with the religious elite, and pondering His teachings and parables.  They watched with wonder as He healed the sick, befriended outcasts, worked miracles, and brought peace to the disturbed.  They began to think that maybe this Jesus was the Messiah, the long-awaited leader who would finally drive their oppressors out of the land and usher in the prophesied age of peace and prosperity.

Full of anticipation, the Disciples followed Jesus into the capital city of Jerusalem.  They watched Him ride into town on a donkey, like a king during peacetime, to the joyous shouts of the crowds.¹  They watched Him throw the merchants out of the temple in protest of the corruption of the religious establishment.²  Then, one fateful night, the Disciples' hopes and dreams were shattered when Jesus surrendered to a violent mob.  Jesus was taken before the temple court and then to the Roman governor who sentenced Him to die by crucifixion.  He was mocked, beaten, and nailed to a cross.  He died in agony, and His body was sealed in a tomb.³

Two days later, the Disciples received reports that several people had seen Jesus alive and well.  Suddenly, Jesus appeared in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”⁴  For forty more days, the Disciples continued to learn from Him.⁵  Their hope was restored.  Jesus had been raised from the dead, and everything could go back to the way it was before those horrific days in Jerusalem.  Not even a brutal execution could stop Jesus.  Surely the defeat of the Romans and the restoration of Israel was at hand!

And then...

all of a sudden...

Jesus was gone.

We have no way of knowing exactly what the Disciples were thinking at that moment, but I cannot help but think that, as they stared up at the clouds into which their Teacher and Messiah had just vanished, one of them asked, “Now what?”

Now what? is a question familiar to all of us, a question we find ourselves asking at various times in our lives.  It is the type of question we ask when what was is no longer what is and while we still aren't quite sure what will be.  It is the type of question we ask when, like the Disciples, we step into a liminal space, a state of transition not unlike the interlude between one act of a play and the next.

The Disciples could not rightfully be called “disciples” any longer, for the teacher they had been shadowing was gone.  They had graduated from discipleship, whether they were ready or not.  No longer were they called to be disciples – people who follow – but rather apostles – people who are sent out on a mission.  Jesus had called them to take His message of hope further and further outward, as if in an ever-widening circle,⁶ from the city of Jerusalem, to the surrounding region of Judea, to the neighboring region of Samaria, and ultimately throughout the world...

but not yet.

Not long before this, when Jesus and the Disciples were gathered together for a meal, Jesus instructed the Disciples to remain in Jerusalem until a certain promise of God had been fulfilled.  Something had to happen first before the Disciples could set out on their mission.  Jesus told them that they would be “baptized by the Holy Spirit” and that this baptism, whatever it was, would empower them to do what they had been called to do.⁷  Until that time, they were to stand in the threshold between discipleship and apostleship, waiting.

Like the men formerly known as disciples, we all go through times of transition, waiting, and uncertainty in our lives, times when we ask Now what?

When I accepted my first job after graduation, I left a part of my life behind me and stepped into a liminal space of my own.  I turned the page on the story that had been written for me, and what I found staring back at me was a blank page.  I had met the goals my parents had set for me, so their expectations could no longer be my guide.  I had to start living my own life.  Whatever I wanted out of life, I knew I wouldn't find it in my job, for I worked in the gambling industry, which isn't exactly known for making the world a better place.  So began my search for meaning and purpose in life.

While the Disciples were still staring at the clouds, two men dressed in white – presumably angels – appeared and 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.”  (Apparently, in their neck of the woods, it's an everyday occurrence to see someone levitating to the sky and disappearing into the clouds.)  When we step into times of waiting, as the Disciples did when Jesus ascended, we might not know what to do with ourselves.  Standing around with our heads in the clouds is not an option, for there is always work to do.

In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis notes that we are often tempted to live either in the past through nostalgia or in the future through expectation or anxiety.  The truth of the matter is that the past is frozen in time while the future is ever in flux.  All we really have is the present moment, the only point in time that actually touches Eternity.  That said, we only need to concern ourselves with the duties, trials, and graces of the present, as we commend both the past and the future into God's hands.  We should only concern ourselves with the parts of the future that require our immediate preparation.⁸

If you find yourself in a time of waiting or in a time of change, I cannot tell you that better days are on the way, nor can I tell you that worse days lie ahead.  What I can tell you with relative certainty is that the next days are coming and that the next days will bring with them work that must be done.⁹  We spend our first decades of life preparing for the rest of our lives, and we spend much of the rest of our lives preparing for the weeks, days, and hours ahead of us.

The Disciples did not know what lay ahead of them.  What they did know is that what once was twelve was now eleven.  They were down a man, because one of them literally sold Jesus out and then, realizing the disastrous consequences of his actions, gave up on himself.  For the Disciples, the duties of the present moment included the selection of a twelfth.  They discerned that the twelfth must have been a dedicated follower of Jesus from the very beginning of His ministry to the present day.  They narrowed their selection pool down to two candidates and then cast lots, praying that God's will would be done.  The lot fell on a man named Matthias, and he was chosen to become the twelfth apostle.¹⁰

In the book Jesus Is Better than You Imagined, writer Jonathan Merritt confesses that, like many people, he is “impatient by nature.”  Though he always considered waiting to be excruciating, over time he came to understand something important about times of waiting.¹¹  He writes,
Periods of waiting are not passive, hands-in-pocket interims.  Rather they are times in life when God is preparing us for a spiritual upgrade.  Maybe that is why [Jesus] has made two millennia of His postmortem disciples wait for Him to return.  Jesus knows that waiting doesn't mean wasting.  It means God is working.¹²
We might not always know what to do during times of waiting, but we can be confident that God is already at work.

It is worth noting that the Disciples did one other thing while they waited for the promise of God to be fulfilled: they “constantly devot[ed] themselves to prayer.”  Though we often think of prayer as asking God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, there is so much more to prayer than simply asking God to do our bidding.  Prayer opens us up to the presence of God and to the creative work God is already doing all around us.¹³  The Disciples knew that they were called to share Christ's message with the world, but they also knew that their time had not yet come.  They had been instructed by Jesus to remain in Jerusalem and wait until the coming of the Holy Spirit.  Their time of waiting has been called “a significant pause between the mighty acts of God, a pause in which the church's task is to wait and pray.”¹⁴

The Disciples didn't always fully understand the things Jesus said, so I would wager a guess that they didn't quite know what to expect in the days ahead.  They needed direction from God, and they needed to be open to what God was doing.

Like the Disciples, I too sought direction from God.  Specifically, I sought a new direction that would guide me to what I would not find in my job.  This search drove me to try new things.  I became more involved in the Church; I tried my hand at preaching and teaching Sunday school; and I discovered the joy of writing.  Amid my search, there were even some times of persistent prayer and waiting.  In my search for meaning, I found meaning in the search itself, and I have found meaning in the work the search has brought into my life.  I lost my first programming job a little less than two years after I accepted it.  Three months later, I started a new job at a local technical college, where I have been working for over seven years.  This job is a better fit for me than the first, but, to this day, I am still searching.

For the Disciples, the intermission between discipleship and apostleship lasted for a mere ten days.  On a feast day called Pentecost, something amazing happened – but that is a story for another day.  Seasons of waiting can last for weeks, months, or even years.  Sometimes the space between what was and what will be seems less like an intermission and more like a desolate wasteland.  Sometimes we ask Now what? when the journey of life has taken us into the proverbial wilderness.  I am referring to that seemingly endless season of spiritual dryness when we feel far from anything familiar and when we are once again trying to figure out who we are and where we belong in the world.

The wilderness experience takes its name from the journey of the ancient Israelites.  For forty years, the people of Israel trudged through the desert, from the day God parted the Red Sea, rescuing them from slavery, to the day God parted the Jordan River, ushering them into the Promised Land.  In the wilderness, the Israelites experienced freedom, and they also faced great difficulty.  In the wilderness, they received instruction from God, and they also contended with God.  In the wilderness, they progressed toward their destination at times, and they also wandered at times.  The wilderness is the place where anything can happen, yet it is also the place where it often seems that nothing is happening.

Lauren Winner, in her memoir Still: Notes on a Midfaith Crisis, reflects on entering the “middle” of her spiritual life, which she describes as “a vague in-between, after the intensity of conversion and before the calm wisdom of cronehood,” and she ponders the various “middles” of life.  She notes that the word middle is often associated with things that aren't particularly good – middle school and the Middle Ages, for example – but she also notes that not all “middles” in life are necessarily bad.  In chess, the middle game is what brings out a player's strategic thinking and creativity, for it is the part of the game in which anything can happen.  Middlestead is an old word that describes the threshing floor of a barn, the place where the wheat is separated from the chaff.  Winner concludes that, for her, spiritual midlife will be a time of winnowing.¹⁵

Last year, my own journey started to feel a bit like a wilderness.  I had left the church I attended for the first thirty-one years of my life, and I came to realize that the church I had started attending afterward was not a good fit for me.  To make matters even more difficult, the Bible study group that had been my community for five years had dissolved, despite my efforts to keep it going.  I had stepped into uncharted territory, and I often felt like I was spinning my wheels.  This feeling did not last forever.  I have found a church where I believe I will grow spiritually, and my service to the Church at large is keeping me busy once again.

The wilderness experience seems dry and desolate, but it can actually be a blessing in disguise.  The wilderness might be the place where we are unknowingly prepared for whatever comes next in our lives.  It might also a place for some much needed winnowing.  We discover who we really are when we're stripped of everything we're not.  Bane or blessing, the wilderness experience is not something we can escape: it is something we must endure.  When the journey through the wilderness became difficult, the ancient Israelites began to think that they were better off as slaves and were tempted to turn back, but the only way out of the wilderness is through it.  As we journey through the wilderness, God is with us every step of the way to lead us and provide for us, in the same way that God was with the Israelites, but we must have faith.

Sometimes we find ourselves in the wilderness after a change in life, but sometimes we end up in the wilderness after a failure of some sort.  Sometimes we ask Now what? when we have screwed up so badly that we feel that there is no point in trying to carry on as if nothing happened.  We stand in the wilderness between our failure and whatever comes next, unsure if we should hope for a rebound or just give up on whatever we had started.  I think that, after Jesus' resurrection, one of the Disciples might have found himself in such a place.

In the Gospel of John, we read that, one night, Peter made an announcement to the other Disciples.  He said, "I'm going fishing."  A number of the others decided to go with him.¹⁶  There are numerous theories regarding why Peter decided to go fishing that night.  When I look at this story in light of my own, I cannot help but wonder if maybe Peter was turning in his resignation as a disciple, having decided to return to his past life as a fisherman.  Shortly before Jesus was arrested, Peter declared in his bravado that he was willing to lay down his life for Him.¹⁷  Hours later, while Jesus stood trial before the high priest, Peter denied three times that he even knew Him.¹⁸  For some reason, Jesus had named him Peter, meaning “rock.”¹⁹  Some rock he turned out to be!

After a night spent not catching fish, Peter and the others saw a man on the beach.  He called out to them and told them to try throwing out their net from the right side of the boat.  When they were unable to haul in the massive catch of fish, they immediately knew the man was Jesus.²⁰  In another Gospel, we read that, when Jesus first called Peter to leave behind his boat and his nets to start fishing for people as His disciple, He did so with a miraculous catch of fish.²¹  When Peter was apparently tempted to give up on his calling, Jesus called him back with the very same miracle.  Three times Peter had denied knowing Jesus; three times Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” and three times Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep.”²²

I originally started preaching because, in my search for meaning in life, I wondered if my calling was in the ministry.  A few years later, I came to the realization that I have a tendency to bail out on people when I feel that they want too much from me.  I figured that there was no point in pursuing a future in the ministry if I wasn't going to minister to people.  Over time, I came to realize that all of us who follow Jesus Christ – both laity and clergy – are called to be ministers to each other and to the world, and, Like Peter, I came to realize that failure is not an excuse to throw in the towel.  At times, we might be tempted to abandon our calling as followers of Christ, but graciously Christ keeps calling us back.

We all go through times of uncertainty when we ask Now what?  When we're stuck the threshold between the past and the future, unsure of what to expect, we must not keep our heads in the clouds, for there is always work to be done in the present.  When we're trudging through our own personal wilderness, all we can do is to keep on trudging.  When we're reeling from failure, we must not throw in the towel.  Wherever we happen to be, we are invited to seek direction from God in prayer and to trust in God to guide us, for God is never far away.

Thanks be to God.


Notes:

1. Luke 19:29-40
2. Luke 19:45-46
3. Luke 22:47-23:56
4. Luke 24:1-43
5. Acts 1:3
6. William Barclay.  The Daily Study Bible Series: The Acts of the Apostles, Revised Edition.  1976, The Westminster Press.  p. 12
7. Acts 1:4-5
8. C.S. Lewis.  The Screwtape Letters.  ch. 15
9. Kent Dobson.  “When: 2.”  Mars Hill Bible Church podcast, 03/16/2014.
10. Acts 1:15-26
11. Jonathan Merritt.  Jesus Is Better than You Imagined.  2014, Faith Words.  p. 103
12. Merritt, p. 108
13. Rob Bell.  NOOMA Open | 019.  2008, Zondervan/Flannel.
14. William H. Willimon.  Acts (Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching)  1988, John Knox Press.  p. 20
15. Lauren Winner.  Still: Notes on a Midfaith Crisis.  2012, Harper One.  pp. 60-62
16. John 21:3
17. John 13:37
18. John 18:12-27
19. John 1:42
20. John 21:1-14
21. Luke 5:1-11
22. John 21:15-19

The Ascension was painted by David Teniers the Younger in the mid 1600s and is based on a drawing by Leandro Bassano.  The photograph of my feet was taken by me at my alma mater.  The photograph of the desert canyon was taken by Bob Miles of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and has been released into the public domain.