The Rev. Dianne O Connell First Congregational Church of Maltby June 1, 2014 Acts 1:6-14 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11 John 17:1-11 WAITING FOR JESUS The sub-title of my message this morning might be, What to do in the interim? Or even better, What to do WITH the interim? We are living in the "in-between" time following a minister who served the Maltby church for more than twenty years, and before the selection of a permanent settled pastor. Your interim times have been longer than most. But then, Christians have been waiting 2,000 years so far between the ascension of Jesus and his return. Waiting... means going about our assigned tasks, confident that God will provide the meaning and the conclusions, all in God s time. And it might just be okay to be a bit lean and mean (well, lean and focused ) during this period. I am reminded of a story about a disaster off the rocky coast of Canada. After the disaster, the fishermen built a rescue station with 1
emergency equipment. Over the years more and more comforts are added starting with electricity and central heating, then innerspring mattresses and Lazy Boy chairs, for heaven s sake. When the next shipwreck occurred, everyone on duty slept through it and no one was saved. The fishermen had a right to some relaxation, some comforts, but they also had a responsibility, when it was their turn to be on watch, to remain vigilant and alert to the early signs of disaster. He or she who was on watch had ships and crews to look after and the one on watch had to stay alert to do so. Jesus in our first Scripture lesson is about to finish his watch on earth and to turn it over to the Holy Spirit. It would be the Holy Spirit s job to guide and be with us - the believers - until Christ s return. The Spirit was on watch now and in charge of the interim period. Christ explains this in our lesson from Acts, where we find the risen Christ with his disciples. Since Easter, his presence has been experienced by many, teaching and preaching about the Kingdom of God. On one occasion, he is sharing a meal with his friends, during which time he instructs them NOT to leave Jerusalem until they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit John baptized with water, 2
Christ tells them, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. We ll talk more about this, of course, on Pentecost. Is that when you will restore Israel as a kingdom? the disciples ask. It is not for you to know, Jesus replied. You have to wait. But you will receive the Holy Spirit as a helper... in the interim. After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. That s not a lengthy description of the ascension, but it s all the writer of Luke gives us. While the disciples stood there staring into the sky, two men dressed in white appeared, Why are you standing here? He ll be back. And that s true, but what to do in the interim? That time between the ascension and the return of Christ the time between NOW and the end of the world, if you will. This is a VERY important time. It s all the time we ve got. I m not anticipating the return of Christ in my lifetime, but I am anticipating the end of the world as I know it when it is time for me to Transition, if you will, into the next. My whole life represents the interim period for me and I M on watch. 3
Waiting around for the end to come without doing much would be unacceptable to me, and probably to each of you, as well. Same goes for my assignment here at First Congregational Church of Maltby, for that matter but that, of course, is a different matter. Back to the lesson: Many scholars believe that the books of Luke and Acts were written after the reign of the Emperor Nero and his bloody persecution of Christians. This would be approximately 75 AD. The author of the Gospel of Luke is identified with Luke the physician, friend of Paul. The first letter of Peter, on the other hand, is now thought to have been written maybe twenty years later, in 90 to 95 AD. I mention this because the faithful have now been waiting for the return of Christ for almost a generation. A great deal has happened, a great deal of life has been lived, with a great deal of suffering. Stay the course, advises Peter, If you must suffer, it should not be as a murderer or a thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler (verse 4:15). Suffering for being a Christian is much better than any of these. Commit yourself to God s will and continue to do good. 4
Stay sober and alert, Captain, as one translation (New American Bible+DAO) says it. And don t get too comfortable in that padded deck chair. We each are captain of our own ships, I suppose. Captains of our own lives. But I had reason to think of a particular ship captain this week. Joe Hazelwood was the captain of the tanker Exxon Valdez when it ran aground in 1989 in Prince William Sound spewing eleven million gallons of crude oil into the sound. The Exxon Valdez situation came up in conversation this week, so I thought I d check up on him. Hazelwood was cleared of all but one of the charged filed against him negligent discharge of oil. The people of Prince William Sound were devastated as were the animals and birds of the sound, the fish, everything. Twenty-five years later just this spring, two months ago - Captain Hazelwood apologized to the people of Prince William Sound, adding that it was the birds covered in oil struggling to fly that affected him the most. You didn t wanna see anything suffer like that, Hazelwood said, It was just terrible. The story is complicated. Nobody thinks Hazelwood turned over the command of the Exxon Valdez to someone else and went to bed, hoping that the ship would wreck on Bligh Reef. And the good news is that the disaster cleaned up much better than anyone would have predicted. But most still feel that if 5
Hazelwood had been on the bridge that night, it all might have been avoided. He has paid his fines, completed his community service and offered his apologies, but he still lives with regret. And most of us find some of our biggest mistakes in this world come about much like Hazelwood s mistake they were accidental, poorly thought out, we were sleepy, just not thinking. Some of us have become angry for a moment. The anger doesn t last long, perhaps, but the affects of the anger do. And our personal tankers hit the reef! So what do we do while we wait for Jesus? Most of us manage to get ourselves into a peck of trouble. And the question becomes, when we do, how do we recover and move on? Is the church any help in such situations? There is an on-going argument in our society, the question being is the Church really relevant to the problems people face today? Is the Church worth the struggle? Is it worth the suffering? The time? Does it really have anything to offer? The question could be rephrased: Is Jesus relevant today? Does Jesus have anything to offer? If the answer is No, not really, we are in serious trouble. 6
Our particular church is in an interim period. A transitional period. A reevaluation period, if you will. I ve been assigned Watch, as the transitional interim minister. We re waiting for a new settled pastor and, in the interim, we have serious work to do. Jesus said, Go build my church. But in the process we must decide and remember what goes in the church and what the church is for. Jesus didn t promise it would be easy but he did promise to send the Holy Spirit to walk with us and guide us through both calm and troubled waters. With the Spirit s guidance, our crises should become opportunities but we ve got to be able to recognize and embrace the Spirit for that to happen. How does this work? Well, first of all it takes a lot of prayer. The "Farewell Discourse" between Jesus and the disciples in the Gospel of John this morning closes with a prayer which might give us some clues. In the first section (verses 1-5), Jesus prays for himself. He has done his work to the glory of God and now he prays that God will glorify him. To glorify means to give honor and praise but here I think it has an expanded meaning. Christ is praying for whatever power is necessary to ensure that those who have been entrusted to him attain abundant, eternal life through knowing and internalizing the will of God. 7
In the second section (verses 6-18), Jesus prays for his disciples, I will remain in the world no longer, but they are still in the world, and I am coming to you. He asks that God protect them and bring them into oneness with God. As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world... Providing the foundation for John F. Kennedy s 1961 inaugural address where he said: let us go forth, asking God s blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own. It s not part of the lectionary reading for this Sunday, but how could we leave out section 3, (verses 20-26) where Jesus prays for us not just the disciples but those who believe as a result of their work, and those who believe in the generations following them. Jesus prays that all believers will be drawn into the very being of God, in complete unity... so that the love God has for Christ may be in all believers and that Christ himself will be in them. I m a pretty concrete sort of person, actually, and I didn t really have a vision of what Christ-in-me might look like, might feel like. Walter Brueggemann is professor emeritus of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary and was 8
one of many featured preachers and professors at the 2014 Festival of Homiletics. This week someone sent me a copy of his sermon. It begins with his observation that ministers have been borrowing ideas from each other for a long time and then they change them a bit to better reflect the ideas of the newly emerging sermon. Brueggemann notes that Paul obviously borrowed some themes from Jeremiah and Isaiah which he used in his letters to the Corinthians. As an example, he takes the image of Jeremiah s clay pots. Pots are fine, but Brueggemann notes that the contents of the pot is more important than the pot itself. Even the church is merely a pot, certainly not the message, not the treasure that the Holy Spirit provides for us to live abundant lives in the interim. Church buildings come and go, but the message, the gospel, lives on. Human beings are but clay pots. If Christ lives within a human being and that person passes on, what message remains? If we were to discard any of these containers and just focus on the contents, what would we find? What is the treasure that God put in the pot, puts in the church, puts in us, that gives us abundant life? 9
Brueggeman suggests the recipe for abundant life inciudes, at least, forgiveness, generosity, hospitality, and justice. The church building, the human being, fades away, but some qualities remain: The Ability to Forgive -- in order to start again among people, in a society, that never forgives and keeps score forever; A Sense of Overwhelming Generosity that counterbalances a society based in scarcity and getting more for ourselves; A Propensity for Hospitality that welcomes us in a society that is inhospitable to all but our own kind; and A Sense of Justice that protects the vulnerable in a social system that is deathly in its injustice. You ve got a God-filled person, a God-filled church, when you find one filled full of forgiveness, generosity, hospitality, and justice. There s more. But we re just in charge of the interim, remember? We re responsible for what happens on our watch. We can t fix everything, but if we can promote forgiveness, generosity, hospitality and justice, we will have served our Lord well as captains of our own lives, as members of Maltby Congregational, and as followers of Christ throughout the ages even until the end of the world. May our Lord join us at Table as we gather together to share the bread and the wine as he commanded us to do may we be Christ-filled -- in remembrance of him. Amen. 10