The following sermon is based upon the following scriptures:

Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:24-34, 35b
Romans 8:14-17
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17, 25-27

These can all be read by clicking here.

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Out of all the reasons I can come up with as to why we celebrate Pentecost,
I want to deal with two this morning:
The first has to do with pride and prejudice,
and the second is all about power.

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austin, is considered by many to be one of the great English novels.
Set in the early 1800s,
this satire of courtship and marriage in English society,
tells the story of Elizabeth Bennett,
one of five daughters of a country gentleman and his matchmaking wife.
Elizabeth meets Mr. Darcy at a dance.
And at first glance, he appears prideful, rude and arrogant.
Naturally, he and Elizabeth are immediately at odds,
and as they continue to be thrown together in social situations,
they continue to spar.
Darcy, however, begins to fall in love with Elizabeth,
and this is despite the fact that he considers her well below his social station and has even advised one his friends not to marry one of Elizabeth’s sisters.

Eventually he proposes to her,
but listen to his proposal:
Mr. Darcy:  Miss Elizabeth. I have struggled in vain and I can bear it no longer. These past months have been a torment. I came to Rosings with the single object of seeing you… I had to see you. I have fought against my better judgment, my family’s expectations, the inferiority of your birth by rank and circumstance. All these things I am willing to put aside and ask you to end my agony.
Elizabeth Bennett: I don’t understand.
Mr. Darcy: I love you.
Only then does he ask for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage.
Can you imagine a marriage proposal from a man who has called you inferior, and who has said seeing you was against his better judgement?
Mr. Darcy is just filled with all kinds of pride and prejudice.

Of course, the same could be said of Elizabeth,
she has her own pride and prejudices,
especially against those in the upper class of society
And it is not until the very end of the novel that we find her willing and able to admit as much.

Pride and prejudice -
they have been with human kind from the beginning and stay with even now.
You may know that one of my favorite Mac Davis songs,
in fact the only one I know,
has to do with pride:

        I used to have a girlfriend
        But I guess she couldn’t compete
        Because of these love-starred women
        Who are clamoring at my feet
        Well, I probably could find me another
        But I guess they’re all in awe of me
        Who cares, I never get lonesome
        ’cause I treasure my own company

        O Lord, it’s hard to be humble
        When you’re perfect in every way
        I can’t wait to look in the mirror
        ’cause I get better looking each day
        To know me is to love
        I must be one heck of a man
        O Lord, it’s hard to be humble
        but I’m doing the best that I can.

He says he sings about humility,
but we all know it’s really about pride.
Of course pride has it’s dangers.
A young woman named Mary asked for an appointment with her pastor to talk with him about a sin that concerned and worried her.
When she saw him, she said,
“Pastor, I have become aware of a sin in my life which I cannot control.
Every time I am at church I begin to look around at the other women,
and I realize that I am the prettiest one in the whole congregation.
None of the others can compare with my beauty.
What can I do about this sin?”
The pastor’s reply:  “Mary, that’s not a sin, why that’s just a mistake!”

We are a prideful people.
We always have been.
A quick look at Genesis 3 shows us that pride was at the root of the very first sin.
You remember what I’m talking about.
God has given Adam and Eve all that they could ever want,
with just one small caveat:
Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
for on the day you eat it, you will surely die.
And what happens?
The serpent tells them that they won’t die if that taste the forbidden fruit,
no, he says, for as soon as you eat of the tree,
you shall be like God,
knowing the difference between Good and Evil.
To be like God,
to overstep our bounds,
it’s nothing more than pride.

Just ask the builders of that tower in Babel.
“Come,” they said,
“ let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens,
and let us make a name for ourselves.”
Let us make a name for ourselves.
Pride.

We think we can do it all.
We think we’re the best,
number one.
I remember a football team that had not won a single game all year once beating a ranked team on TV,
and though they had 10 losses to only one win,
you know the chant that soon came from the students lips:
“We’re number one.”

And hand in hand with pride comes prejudice.
After all, we can’t be number one without someone else being second or third or last.
And if we are the chosen people,
then that means somebody else didn’t get chosen.
Somebody else, everybody else, is less important, less loved, and less valuable than we are.
How else do you explain the human tragedy of slavery?
One can only enslave another person,
if one believes that that person is less of a human being than he or she is.
Enslaved people are really subhuman to their captors,
they’re not really people, after all,
they’re not like you and me.
They don’t have the same rights or privileges as we do.
In fact, when you get right down to it human history is filled with examples of how pride and prejudice have poisoned human hearts and minds.
This is true of Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland,
Muslims and Jews in the Middle East,
Nazis in Germany against the Jewish, Gypsy and homosexual populations of the Third Reich,
Turks against the Armenians in Turkey,
and I could go on and on.
But I think you get the idea.

And the story of Babel was just one of the stories that was told to explain why people are divided and scattered and pit themselves against one another.
But if Babel shows how we are divided,
then Pentecost shows us the way back to unity.
One of the first things we notice about Pentecost is that it reverses the curse of the Tower of Babel,
where human pride led to division and prejudice and eventually all kinds of human evil.
Pentecost unites and empowers us as Christ’s church to overcome our differences and to learn that real power comes not from placing ourselves ahead or over others,
but by being open to God’s Spirit,
and trusting that the Spirit of God can do some amazing things through us.

For instance, at Pentecost we see that from its very beginning the church was open to all kinds of people.
There were people there from every nation, Luke tells us.
Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia,
Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia,
Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors
from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs
People representing every tongue and tribe.
The fractured, divided, alienated people of the world,
broken into so many different languages and cultures after Babel,
were offered healing when the Spirit descended at Pentecost.
And you know what,
we are told that by the end of the day,
over 3000 people said yes to the healing,
yes to the power of the Holy Spirit.

And it is the power of the Holy Spirit then and now which empowers the church and each of us.
But this kind of power is exactly the opposite of the power we humans exercise in our pride and prejudice.
The power of the Holy Spirit is not about subjugating others,
it’s not about putting myself over and above another.
Rather, it is all about placing myself, in love and in service to others.
And I think this is what Jesus is talking about when he says in John,
and I quote, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”

Did you hear that?  Let me say it again:
“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”

You see, as Tony Campolo has said,
Jesus broke into history not to demonstrate his power.
He came to express his love.
This is what the gospel’s about.
It’s about love.
And of course, we can’t duplicate the power of Jesus.
We can’t walk on water.
I don’t have the ability to raise up people from the dead, neither do you.
But this we do have, the opportunity to express the love of Jesus.
and when it comes to the bottom line,
Jesus was more committed to expressing love than showing off his power.
And through the Holy Spirit’s power we can express his love as well.

Campolo tells a story about his being in Haiti.
He was there to check on some missionary work.
One of his organizations runs 75 small schools back in the hills of Haiti,
and after visiting them,
Campolo returned to a little Holiday Inn where he always stayed to shower and clean up before boarding the plane to go home.
He had left the taxi and was walking to the entrance of the Holiday Inn when he was intercepted by three girls –
the oldest could not have been more than 15.
The one in the middle said, “Mister, for $10 I’ll do anything you want me to do. I’ll do it all night long. Do you know what I mean?”

Campolo did know what she meant.
He turned to the next girl and said,
“What about you, could I have you for $10?”
She said yes.
He asked the same of the third girl.
She tried to mask her contempt for him with a smile but it’s hard to look sexy when your 15 and hungry.
Campolo said, “I’m in room 210, you be up there in just 10 minutes.
I have $30 and I’m going to pay for all 3 of you to be with me all night long.”

Well, he rushed up to the room, called down to the concierge desk and asked for every Walt Disney video they had in stock.
He then called down to the restaurant and asked if they still made banana splits in this town,
because, he said, if you do I want banana splits with extra ice cream, extra everything.
I want them delicious, I want them huge, and I want four of them!

The little girls came and the ice cream came and the videos came and we sat at the edge of the bed and we watched the videos and laughed until about one in the morning.
That’s when the last of them fell asleep across the bed.
And as he saw those little girls stretched out asleep on the bed,
Campolo thought to himself, nothing’s changed, nothing’s changed. Tomorrow they will be back on the streets selling their little bodies to dirty, filthy johns because there will always be dirty, filthy johns who for a few dollars will destroy little girls.
Nothing’s changed.
He didn’t know enough Creole to tell them about the salvation story,
but the word of the spirit said this to him:
but for one night, for one night you let them be little girls again.

After telling this story Campolo anticipates our objections.
I know what you’re going to say:
“You’re not going to compare that with Jesus walking on water.”
No, I’m not, for very obvious reasons.
If Jesus was to make a decision which is the greater work,
walking on water or giving one night of childhood back to 3 little girls who had it robbed from them —
giving one night of joy to 3 little girls that armies had marched over —
which do you think Jesus would consider the greater work,
walking on water or ministering to those 3 little girls.

And Jesus said, ““Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”
We can’t duplicate the power acts of God in Jesus Christ,
but every time we perform an act of love in his name,
We are imitating Jesus and fulfilling his promise through the power of Holy Spirit.
He has called us to be instruments of his love to people who need to experience love.
And when we do those things, these acts of love are greater than the work that he did when he walked on water.

But there’s even a deeper meaning to that verse than that.
And here it is: When Jesus was here in the flesh he was only able to look into the eyes of one person at a time;
only able to express love personally to one person at a time.
But he has ascended to be with the Father and has come back as a spirit,
the Holy Spirit that comes into our lives and fills us and drives us to love. Now if thousands and thousands of people go out tomorrow morning and each of them performs one act of love in his name,
then it can be said — you can hear Jesus uttering these words —
“Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”
because, you see, thousands are greater than one.
I could only love one person face to face at the time.
But there are thousands,
even millions of you now and each of you at any given moment can love someone intimately and powerfully in my name.”

And we can do this my friends,
we can reach out to anybody and everybody with love,
because we have been given the gift of God’s own Spirit in our lives.

A sermon based on Acts 1:1-11, which can be read here.

So here they were at the end of it all.
Today marks the last day when Jesus would be among them in human form.
Never again will the disciples see Jesus “in person.”
Never again will they “hear his voice” teaching them,
challenging them,
calling them to change.
And never again will they be able to literally reach out and touch Jesus.
Today was a day of change, great change for the disciples,
Nothing would ever be the same again.

In fact, nothing had been the same since those few days before Jesus arrest and crucifixion.
Jesus had walked with them for three years,
teaching them what the kingdom of God was all about in their lives. They had seen him work miracle after miracle,
they had tried to take his words to heart,
and over the past few weeks,
they had been through both a most terrible and wonderful experience with him,
what with the ever darkening shadow of the cross looming over them as they got closer and closer to Jerusalem,
until at last the soldiers came for him, and they ran,
and he was crucified, and they despaired;
and then, wonder of wonders,
he was alive and in their presence once again.

And he taught them again,
in the Upper Room, along the Road to Emmaus,
at the Sea of Galilee where they shared a meal of bread and fish.
But now all this was about to end.
Jesus had been hinting that he would be leaving them soon,
and I think they sensed his coming departure as they walked him up Mount Olivet.

And sensing that they would not be with him again in this world in this way,
they had to ask him the question that was burning in their minds.
And though perhaps just one person gave voice to the question,
I can just see them all straining, waiting for Jesus’ answer:
“Lord,” they asked, “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
This was the burning question -
the question that laid deep in each disciple’s heart.
Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Now there are a number of observations we can make about this question and Jesus’ reply to it.
The first observation is that it is crystal clear that the disciples still had a lot to learn.
After more than three years of hearing Jesus teach and preach,
they still don’t understand that the Kingdom of God is not some political or worldly power.
After three years of words and a cross to the contrary,
they still expect that Jesus will set up some sort of earthly kingdom.

And if the disciples still had a lot to learn after three years of teaching by and fellowship with Jesus,
then it is likely that we too have a lot to learn.
And what we need to learn is probably along the same lines as what they needed to learn.
What do I mean by this?
Well let’s look in more detail at the question and Jesus’ reply.

What the disciples are basically asking is this:
Lord, are you going to do now what we have been waiting for you to do all along?
Will you finally make thing the way they were for us in our glory days under King David?
Will you make it all right for us again?
make us a strong nation once more?
and make your people, your chosen people, into the powerful and privileged people that chosen people should be?
Yes, we know about those dark days of your death,
and we have heard your teaching about suffering and cross-bearing,
but enough is enough, already.
It’s time to get to the bottom line.
So Jesus, what are your plans? What are you going to do now?

Notice what is being asked.
Lord, will you take action? Will you do this now?
Will you make things like they used to be?
When we were in charge, when we had the power and glory

And though at first glance it may not appear to be so,
this question the disciples ask sounds a great deal like some of the prayers we pray to God -
when we ask God to do something for us,
to take action on our behalf,
to give us the power and glory, and to give it all to us now.

And of course, beneath this prayer often lies the idea of returning to the past,
of going back to the way things used to be,
back in the good old days.

Some of you are no doubt old enough to remember the Lone Ranger programs on TV.
Those of you who remember these may also remember that each episode opened with the Lone Ranger riding his horse Silver to the top of a hill,
where Silver would rear up on its hind legs and then both rider and horse gallop away to the sound of the William Tell Overture.
Meanwhile the narrator introduced the Lone Ranger as a champion of truth and fairness and invited the listeners to “return to those thrilling days of yesteryear.”

While returning to the past might make for good television,
it does not make vital and alive disciples,
nor does it make faithful and thriving churches.
And yet, how often is the past looked upon as being the direction into which we should head?

And further, we expect that Jesus, that God, will be the one that brings about the changes necessary for us to return to our glory days of yore.
Lead on, O King Eternal, we cry.
Take us back to what we once were.
Make us once again into the church of our fathers and mothers,
when the pews were filled,
when the choir loft was packed,
when the Sunday School overflowed,
and on and on and on.

And so we pray,
Lord, isn’t it about time you did something about our sorry condition and return us to the way we were?
Or in the words of the disciples,
“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

But notice, if you will, Jesus answer.
In reply Jesus says rather cryptically,
“It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”
By this he means:
No, this is not the time for any such thing.
I am not about to do what you ask,
and furthermore it is none of your business to know if and when God will take action in the future.
Keep your nose out of God’s business, and look after your own.
And then Jesus adds,
For you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”

Did you hear that?
The disciples ask Jesus to do something for them,
and he turns right around and says to them,
“You shall receive power.”
God’s not going to come down and make everything alright for us,
God’s not going to return us to the graveyard of the past,
no matter how attractive such a resting place might appear.
Instead God gives us the power to make a difference.

We often have a hard time understanding this,
for we sometimes see religion and faith as a means to get God to do what we want.
We want to reach up and turn on some cosmic switch and God will do what it is we desire.
But to this kind of thinking Jesus says,
“You shall receive power – It’s in your hands, now.

One of England’s great leaders during the nineteenth century was William Gladstone,
who had a favorite illustration about prayer.
It seems that his neighbor’s little girl, Julia, was upset because her brother had made a trap to catch sparrows.
This bothered her so much,
that she told her mother she was going to pray real hard that the trap would fail to catch any birds.
And so Julia prayed every night and worried through the days.
One night, however, her mother noticed that Julia seemed especially confidant that God would answer her prayers.
This went on for three days,
after which her mother asked her,
“Julia why are you so sure your prayer will be answered?”
Julia smiled and said,
“I know my prayer will be answered because three days ago I went out there and kicked the trap to pieces.”

We may pray, “Lord, will you . . .”
But Jesus says, “You will receive power . . .”
You will receive power, and please note,
the power you receive will not take you back to some nostalgic, yellow-paged past found only in your memories,
the power you will receive will lead you into a new future.

And perhaps this isn’t so bad,
and maybe we could get used to this idea
as long as God will give us the power to make things the way we want them to be.
Maybe it won’t be so bad if God will give us the power to “restore the kingdom” to our kind of people.

But this too needs to be questioned.
It is always a disturbing thing to me to note how so many who use the name and the symbols of Christ do so with the purpose of elevating themselves and their kind of people to places of power and privilege.
How can it be that the cross,
the symbol of our Lord’s death – his death for all people -
How can it be that this cross, lit up by flames,
can be used by the Ku Klux Klan as a means to instill fear in people who are different only because of the color of their skin?

A minister friend of mine once told a story of his being stationed in Georgia as a young soldier before the Korean war.
There he heard a preacher recount of how the Ku Klux Klan in that area was able to get churches to support their cause.
He said they would walk down the church aisle during the opening hymn dressed in their hoods,
and as the hymn ended they would deposit a large check in the offering plate.
My friend stated that if this happened to him in a church he served he would stop the service and immediately throw the rascals out.
But the other preacher said he would take a different tact.
He would wait until the group had been seated,
then he would walk up to the altar and take out the check and mark it be sent to the NAACP,
and then he would step into the pulpit,
and by the power of God,
he would preach the best sermon he could on the love of God in Christ for all people,
and what that means for race relations.

Jesus says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses”
My witnesses!
This power God gives us is not for our own purposes,
it is not given so that one people can lord it over another -
it is for divine purposes.
You will be my witnesses – witnesses who will testify to what God has done and is doing in Jesus Christ,
to make the world not the way they want it,
but the way God wants it to be.

And what are God’s intentions?
What does God want?
Listen further to what Jesus has to say;
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Now the early disciples would have had some problems with that.

In Jerusalem? Why of course…that’s home territory,
that’s where our people live,
and that is where we expect to be witnesses for the Lord.

In all of Judea? Well, okay, as long as we don’t have to travel too far into the boondocks.
After all, Judea is still our country and our people.
In Samaria…now wait a minute.
Here you’ve gone too far.
The Samaritans are heretics, they are guilty of intermarriage with non-Jews.
They are despised by everyone as we associate with.

And as far as “To the end of the earth” goes,
well here you can’t be serious.
That means we should go to the gentiles -
why they are just pagans, they are unclean, heathen and outcasts.
Further, it means to go to the Romans,
and those people are our enemies.

The disciples who had a hard time just walking through Samaria with Jesus would have certainly had a hard time with these words,
but Christ says to them,
“You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.”

So What does God want?
God wants us to show his love in Christ to the entire human family. God wants us to be servants to every human being,
for to God every human soul is so precious that Christ died for it.

One writer has put it well. He states,
No individual created in God’s image and for whom Christ died can be for me an enemy,
unless I am more devoted to something else -
a political theory, a nation, the defense of certain privileges,
or my own personal welfare -
than I am to God’s cause and God’s loving invasion of this world through the prophets, Jesus Christ and the church.

In John Drinkwater’s play, Abraham Lincoln, there is a conversation between Lincoln and a well-known woman,
who was also an anti-Southern activist.
When Lincoln tells this activist the news of a victory in which the South lost 2700 men and the Union lost 800,
she is ecstatic,
“How splendid,” she cries.
Lincoln is stunned,
“There were 3500 lives lost . . .,” he says
But she cuts him off,
“Oh, you must not talk like that, Mr. President.
There were only 800 that mattered.”
Lincoln’s shoulders droop,
and his tear-filled eyes flash as he speaks slowly for emphasis,
“Madam, the world is larger than your heart.”

And this is is what Jesus is saying to all of his disciples,
then and now, with these words just before his ascension.
The world is as large as the heart of God who made it and all those who dwell within it.
And we have been called, you and I, to be Christ’s witnesses on his mission of binding the human family together as one people sharing the love of their God.
Witnesses to the whole world,
witnesses to every person,
regardless of who they are and what they have done.

This great commission of Jesus is not easy work.
In fact fact, it can be extremely difficult.

It is indeed much easier to say to Jesus,
“Why don’t you take care of things for us?”
It is easier to say,
“You are my savior and Lord, you do it,”
than it is to do something about the injustice, the hunger, the suffering and the pain that surrounds us.

It is much easier to sit back and look with fondness and a growing nostalgia for the good old days of yore,
it is easier to rest upon our laurels,
than it is to get busy doing the work of God’s kingdom by proclaiming the good news to people around us today.

And it is certainly easier to keep our love and ministry inwardly focused so that only those who are a part of us,
or who are like us,
are ministered to.

In many ways the great commission that is found in Matthew 28 in one form and in Acts 1 in another,
has become the great omission in today’s churches.

Today’s churches are do well nurturing their members,
some even do well with outreach to the world around them through missions, social concerns, etc…
But many, if not most, churches have forgotten the great commission given to them by Christ,
the commission to witness, to share the good news with others. Witnessing is the life-blood of the church.

It is not enough to acknowledge that Jesus is the Christ.
It is not enough for us to claim God’s grace and mercy and love for ourselves and not share with others.
It is not enough for us to expect that God will take care of things for us,
that our church can be a beacon and light to the people without our ever lifting a finger to keep the fire burning.
It is not enough for us to “let go, and let God.”

Our highest calling, our great commission,
is to reach out beyond ourselves,
beyond the confines of our church,
and to witness to God’s love through Jesus Christ.
This is our reason for being,
and if this is not being done in our church,
then we simply have no reason to continue.
What will it take for us to understand this,
and for us to come to grips with this reality?

After two thousand years do we still have a lot to learn about what it means to be disciples of Christ?
It would be a shame, it would be a crime,
for us to claim to be Christ’s d

isciples,
and for us to act as though we were the church,
without our ever engaging in our primary task and main calling.

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.

I begin today with two stories about Ascension:

Story One:

Larry Walters was a truck driver, but his lifelong dream was to fly.
When he graduated from high school,
Larry joined the Air Force hoping to become a pilot,
but his poor eyesight disqualified him.
So when he finally left the service,
Larry had to satisfy himself with watching others fly the fighter jets that crisscrossed the skies over his backyard.
But even so,
as he sat there in his lawn chair,
Larry still dreamed about the magic of flying.

Then one day, a brilliant idea dawned on him.
Larry went down to the local Army-Navy surplus store and bought forty-five weather balloons, and several tanks of helium.
Back in his yard, Larry used straps to attach the balloons to his lawn chair.
He anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep,
and inflated the balloons with helium.
Then he packed a few sandwiches and drinks, and a loaded BB gun,
figuring he could pop a few balloons when it was time to return to earth.
His preparations complete,
Larry sat in his chair and cut the anchoring cord.
His plan was to lazily float into the sky, and eventually back to earth.
But things didn’t quite work out that way.

When Larry cut the cord, he didn’t float lazily up;
he shot up as if fired from a cannon!
And he didn’t stop at just a couple of hundred feet either.
No, Larry climbed and climbed until he finally leveled off at eleven thousand feet! At that height, he could hardly risk deflating any of the balloons,
lest he unbalance the load and really experience flying.
So he stayed up there, sailing around for fourteen hours,
totally at a loss about how to get down.

Eventually, Larry drifted into the approach corridor for Los Angeles International Airport.
A Pan Am pilot radioed the tower about passing a guy in a lawn chair at eleven thousand feet, with a gun in his lap,
Now that would have been a conversation I would have given anything to have heard!
As dusk fell, Larry began drifting out to sea.
At that point, the Navy dispatched a helicopter to rescue him,
but the rescue team had a hard time getting to him because the wind from their copter blades kept pushing his home-made contraption farther and farther away. Eventually, they were able to hover above him and drop a rescue line,
with which they gradually hauled him back to safety.

As soon as Larry got his feet on the ground, he was arrested.
But as he was led away in handcuffs, a television reporter called out,
“Sir, why’d you do it?”
Larry stopped, eyed the man, then replied nonchalantly,
“A man can’t just sit around!”

Larry Waters, it would seem, could give mainline churches a lesson or two in getting off their collective rear ends and doing something about fulfilling their primary task as Jesus outlines it in today’s readings from the gospel and Acts.
But before I go into this too much,
let us review story two from Acts .

This story is several hundred years older than the story of Larry Waters.
In it, Luke mentions that a group of disciples had gathered together with their teacher who had died on a cross,
but who was now mysteriously with them as a risen presence.
Recall the passage that was read just a few minutes ago,
and how Luke describes what happens.

So when they had come together, the disciples asked Jesus,
“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 Jesus 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.”

Now there are a number of observations we can make about this story,
one of which is that even after more than three years of hearing Jesus teach and preach,
the disciples still don’t get it.
They are still expecting Jesus to do all the work,
and in this case that means setting up an earthly kingdom with him as emperor and them as his princes.

Lord, are you going to do now what we have been waiting for you to do all along?
Will you finally make things the way they were for us in our glory days under King David?
Will you make it all right for us again?
make us a strong nation once more?
and make your people,
your chosen people,
into the powerful and privileged people that chosen people should be?

Yes, we know about those dark days of your death,
and we have heard your teaching about suffering and cross-bearing,
but enough is enough, already.
It’s time to get down to the bottom line.
So Jesus, what are your plans?
What are you going to do now?

And in reply Jesus simply tells them that he is leaving,
and that now they have work to do.
In Luke’s gospel Jesus puts it this way:
You are witnesses of these things,
and in Acts he adds:
you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria,
and to the ends of the earth.”

But even though Jesus is quite clear about the disciples’ new job description,
when he leaves,
they just stand there, gawking up into the heavens.
They don’t even think about moving until two angels tell them to get going.
If it hadn’t been for that, they might still be there today.

And that brings me back to the present time and today’s church.
Most mainline churches are struggling to stay open,
let alone thrive and grow.
Oh, they may claim to want growth,
but the fact is that they really do very little to make it happen.
And it’s not that they aren’t busy,’
but they are busy doing all the wrong things.
When it comes to being witnesses of Jesus and his life and love,
they become strangely immobile.
They may say all the right things,
but they do little or nothing to fulfill their primary calling and purpose.

They remind of one of the characters in a favorite show of mine from years ago,
the Andy Griffith Show.
In one episode Andy and Barney are sitting on the front porch swing.
It is a quiet night,
but a little hot and so after a few minutes of silence,
an eternity in TV time,
Barney slowly says,
“Well, you know what I’m gonna do Andy?”
No, what’s that, Barn?
Well, I think I’m going to get up,
walk down to the drugstore,
and get me a sodapop.
Yep. That’s just what I think I’m gonna do.

You know what happens?
Nothing. Barney never does get off that swing.
He just sits there,
much like so many churches today.
And the sad thing is this:
when the church doesn’t do it’s job,
it is not the only one that suffers.

There is a legend that tells of Jesus and a conversation he had with the angel Gabriel following Jesus’ resurrection and ascension.
Gabriel approached Jesus and said, “
Master, you must have suffered terribly down on earth.”
Jesus replied that he had indeed suffered a great deal.
Gabriel then asked,
“And, do all the people know and appreciate how you loved them and what you did for them?”
And Jesus answered,
“Not yet. Right now only a handful of people in Palestine know.”

Gabriel was perplexed. He asked,
“Then what have you done to let everyone know about your love for them?”
Jesus replied, “I’ve asked Peter, Jame

s, John, and a few other friends to tell other people about me.
Those people will spread the word, too.
Then, ultimately, all people will have heard about my life and what I have done.”

Now, Gabriel frowned and looked rather skeptical,
for he knew the stuff of which people were made.
He said, “Yes, but what if Peter and James and John grow weary?
What if people who come after them forget?
What if people in centuries to come don’t tell others about you?
What will you do then?”

And Jesus answered,
“I haven’t made any other plans.
I’m counting on them” (“Parables”, Jan 1984).

When Jesus ascended into heaven to be with his Father,
he left the church with us.
We are His body.
There is no alternate plan.
And as a part of Christ’s church,
we at FUMC either share the good news of the Risen Lord, the Ascended Christ,
with those around us,
or we fail in our primary calling to be his witnesses in the world.
And though we can sit around or stand around as though we don’t have a call to fulfill,
the price we will pay is continued decline and increasing irrelevancy.
Others will heed the call to be Jesus’ witnesses,
and we will simply die.
It need not be like this, of course,
for as Jesus said, and I repeat once more:
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.”

Writer and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor has imagined those apostles standing on the Mount of Olives looking up into heaven. She writes:

No one standing around watching them that day could have guessed what an astounding thing happened when they all stopped looking into the sky and looked at each other instead.
On the surface, it was not a great moment:
11 abandoned disciples with nothing to show for all their following.
But in the days and years to come it would become very apparent what had happened to them.
With nothing but a promise and a prayer,
those 11 people consented to become the church,
and once they did that,
surprising things began to happen.

They began to say things that sounded like him,
and they began to do things they had never seen anyone but him do before.
They became brave and capable and wise.
Followers became leaders,
listeners became preachers,
converts became missionaries,
the healed became healers,
and disciples became apostles,
witnesses of the risen Lord by the power of the Holy Spirit.

That probably was not the way they would have planned it.
If they had had their way,
they would probably have tied Jesus up so that he could not have gotten away from them,
so that they would have known where to find him and rely on him forever.
Only that is not how it happened.
He went away – he was taken away –
and they stood looking up toward heaven.

Then, they stopped looking up toward heaven,
looked at each other instead,
and got on with their commission of being Christ’s witnesses,
Christ’s body on earth.
To this day, too many Christians still stand staring up in heaven,
or worse yet, sit around doing little themselves,
waiting for something to happen,
waiting for Jesus to do something about the church, the world, our own lives,
when we ought to be getting on with the commission we have clearly been given, of being Christ’s witnesses,
of being Christ’s body, his hands and his feet, on earth.
We must finish the work Jesus began.

Some of you have probably heard of Giacomo Puccini,
an Italian composer who gave the world some beautiful music.
But in 1922, only 64 at the time, he was diagnosed with cancer.
Though very ill, he continued to work on the opera Turandot,
which many people consider to be his best.
Some tried to convince him not to waste his limited energy on a piece he could not
possibly finish but he pressed on.
When he death was near, he said to his students:
“If I do not finish Turandot, I want you to finish it for me.”

Puccini did not finish the opera,
and after his death his students gathered together all of the scores and his notes, studied them with great care,
and then finished the opera.

The opening performance took place in 1926 and was conducted by one of Puccini’s students.
When he reached the place where the his teacher had stopped composing the conductor put down his baton,
turned to the audience and said to them,
“Thus far, the master wrote, and then he died.”
No one moved and no one made a sound for several minutes.
Then the conductor picked up his baton again and said,
“But his disciples have finished his work.”

On the day of his ascension,
Jesus disappeared in a cloud before the eyes of the disciples and is finally hidden from their sight.
The disciples just stood there looking intently into the sky and they hear voices from two men dressed in white saying,
“why do you stand here looking up into the sky?”
Now though we may laugh at Larry Walters because he did such a drastic thing without thinking it through,
it is the same message that came to the disciples,
“A person, even a church, can’t just sit there” or even “stand around” as the case may be.

Let us pray:

Risen, ascended Lord, how you trust us.
You have handed over your ministry into our hands,
and we are often so feeble, frail, and sinful.
Yet, you trust us to continue it.
Forgive us when we have failed you,
when we have not followed through with the mission you began.
Help us to so know your mind and spirit, O Christ,
that we can continue your work in the world around us today.
In his own name we pray.