The Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year A

May 4, 2008

Acts 1: 6-14

The Rev. Thomas William Blake

Someone approached me after the Ascension Day service and shared with me how Ascension felt to him an awful lot like Good Friday; Jesus is leaving us behind again, we’re confused, we don’t know what’s ahead; we can only wait to see what comes next.

Ascension is a much more pleasant send-off, of course: there’s no blood and gore and death, but it’s still necessary and difficult. I liken it to my mother’s description of sending her youngest child—me—off to college: she was excited for me; she knew that it was something that had to happen; but she also knew her life was going to be very different; it was going to take a different shape; she didn’t know exactly what shape it would take; she would just have to wait and see.

I, for one, am not very good at waiting. I start feeling anxious and stressed and I start to anticipate all different outcomes, even though I can’t know the outcome: I can’t know for the time being. I try to be patient, trust God, live into God’s time and not my own, but it is hard for me to wait. Before long it all starts to manifest not just emotionally but physically as well, and my jaw bone starts to tighten up and my pulse intensifies and my countenance turns red.

Someone was shot last week in Indianapolis supposedly because she was driving too slowly; waiting in traffic pushes all the wrong buttons; we are a people on the move, impatient, restless—kind of like the kids in the back seat relentlessly asking, “Are we there yet?”

In seminary I agreed to take one of the international students—from Africa, I believe—to a doctor’s appointment; I felt responsible for his getting to the appointment on time, but he seemed unconcerned about the time; “we’ll get there when we get there,” he said calmly and in all sincerity. Someone told me later that not all cultures are as fast-paced and as precisely tuned to their watches as ours.

This is an apt observation of our culture, but I think there’s something more primal about why we don’t like to wait. When an infant cries for his or her parents’, nothing will do until he or she receives their attention. Infants typically don’t stop crying when their caretaker says to them: “hold on while I throw these towels in the washer.” We are born already impatient; childbearing women speak of the movements, the agitation, pangs of restlessness coming from their wombs.

Even our faith leads us to times of waiting. Abraham and Sarah waited nearly their whole life to conceive Isaac, and they grew impatient and then doubtful, and eventually even turned to comic relief. “I’m going to get pregnant at my age?” Sarah says to God. “Yeah, right… You’ve got to be kidding.” Then the people waited in the wilderness, then the people waited for another great king in the line of David, then people wait for the Christ’s second coming.

Here we are between Ascension Day and the Day of Pentecost, between Jesus’ leaving the disciples to be glorified by the Father in heaven and the Holy Spirit descending upon the community of believers, empowering it to be the body of Christ. There’s something to that observation: “Ascension feels like Good Friday”; Jesus has gone away again; everything’s changing; we’re on sensory overload; waiting can be hard.

There is, however, a distinction to be made between how we feel now: Jesus having ascended into heaven, and how we felt on Good Friday in the wake of Jesus’ death.

There’s finality to death that makes it different. Jesus’ disciples were not sitting around passing time waiting for Jesus’ resurrection. They weren’t expecting it; they didn’t know it was possible; it came as a surprise. Only when they had the whole perspective were they able to piece together the Hebrew Scriptures and the sayings of Jesus; only then were they able to make sense of the whole picture—why things had to happen the way they did.

We have perspective now that we didn’t have on Good Friday. The resurrection has become the lens through which we see all else. We have seen that with God all things are possible; God’s power is greater than natural law: capable of overturning even death. It is through this lens that we witness Jesus’ ascension and anticipate receiving the Holy Spirit. This time we really are waiting for the fulfillment of Jesus’ promises; we have seen and embraced his power; we believe.

This time of waiting is more like a parent sending his or her youngest child off to college; there is joy and excitement; we know something good is going to come of it; we just worry in the meantime about the transition, waiting for the next phase of our life to kick in. Jesus said, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” We know that something is going to happen, but we don’t know when, we don’t know exactly what.

When as a high school senior I was anticipating a letter from the admissions office at Duke, the university I most wanted to attend. I went to the mailbox every day armed with the insight of my peers: “you’ll either receive a thin letter-sized envelope or a larger, thicker packet; you’d better hope it’s the latter.” It turned out to be the latter, but the waiting was still hard—even with the assurance of having been accepted into other universities.

Truth be known, it wasn’t just the size of the envelope that made the waiting hard. It was the whole state of transition—beginning a new phase of life, taking on a more adult identity, moving away from home. People advised me to be patient; churchy people told me to trust God in the meantime and someone quoted to me something about lilies of the field and birds of the air and how they don’t worry about what they are to eat, or drink, or wear.

And I thought, “Well that’s easy for you to say, standing from afar. You’re not in my shoes.” That’s always my frustration, in fact, when people tell me to be patient. Infants cry because patience isn’t natural, and if my experience is any indicator, patience cannot be willed on demand. If I say, “I’m going to wait patiently,” I’m never successful; I still worry internally, and my countenance usually shows it. Worrying is natural, evolutionary, a trait of survival.

But then again, “consider the lilies of the field” is not an isolated insight from the scriptures. Our faith suggests a lot about patience. Wandering forty years in the desert required patience, and the people of Israel weren’t always patient; sometimes they were downright anxious. They did keep walking and ultimately trusting God, however. In the long run God’s plan was unveiled, and looking back on their journey it all began to make sense.

I could elaborate on Abraham and Sarah waiting so long for Isaac to be conceived, or Noah waiting for the flood waters to subside, or the people of Israel waiting for the Messiah, or the people of Judah enduring the exile, or the disciples following Jesus around without exactly knowing why or what would come of it, or us waiting for Jesus’ second coming, or why the church named patience a “virtue.” I could elaborate on these things, but I won’t.

I’ll just say that there seems a clear connection between patience and God’s plan of salvation. Today’s accounts from scripture are no exception. “While Jesus was going and his disciples 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.”

No, patience is not natural, it is not self-willed, but it comes to us as a gift from God. It’s one of those things like resurrection and ascension that goes against natural law, that defies our understanding; but if we embrace it we’ll know it’s real. Paradoxically, the ascended Jesus in heaven may even be more present than ever to us here on earth. God’s ways are not our ways.

“It is not for us to know the times or periods that the Father has set.”

In the meantime we wait in hope. God gifts us with confidence that his plan of salvation is unfolding. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth.” And they devoted themselves to prayer.

Amen.