Trinity Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Sermons 

It’s rather interesting, isn’t it,

that even though Luke wrote both his own gospel and the book of Acts,

he has included in his two-volume work

two somewhat different accounts of Jesus’ ascension.

It’s not that they contradict each other, particularly;

just that each has a slightly different emphasis.

We’re going to focus this morning on the account in the book of Acts,

and what I’m particularly interested in

is what leads up to Jesus’ ascension and disappearance.

Luke describes how Jesus has been making the rounds

for about forty days after his resurrection,

appearing to people, and speaking about the kingdom of God.

Which, when you think about it,

is pretty much the same kind of thing he was doing

before it got him crucified.

But then, after forty days –

which, you may remember, is a number with special significance in the Bible:

forty days and forty nights for Noah on the ark,

Jesus’ forty-day temptation in the wilderness,

and so on –

Anyway, after a period of forty days,

Jesus and what appears to be the eleven remaining disciples

all gather together, though we aren’t told why.

And here they ask him the $64,000 question,

one that must have been burning them up inside

ever since they realized he really wasn’t dead but still among them:

"Lord," they ask him,

"is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?"

Now?

Finally?

After everything we’ve been through,

after everything you’ve been through …

is this, at long last, the time when you will overthrow

Satan and evil and the Romans and all that,

and restore the kingdom to Israel?

All this teaching is very interesting,

and the miracles have been really cool,

but can’t we get on with the plan?

Bless their fuzzy little hearts …

they still don’t get it.

And, I think that their "not getting it"

is a part of the reason that the time has come

for Jesus to go away.

As long as he is among them,

as long one with that much wisdom and that much power

is in their midst,

they are going to continue to expect from him

things he has no intention of delivering.

"Restoring the kingdom to Israel" is not the point.

It never was the point.

But apparently, in order for them to start doing

what they’re really supposed to be doing,

Jesus is going to have to go away and leave them with it.

Take away from them the fantasy that

he’s going to work his magic and restore some "good old days"

that probably weren’t all that good anyway …

if the records of the Hebrew prophets are any indication at all!

It’s not about restoring the kingdom.

It’s about the disciples receiving the Holy Spirit

and becoming witnesses to what Jesus has said and done and taught …

And not only to their near neighbors in Jerusalem, and in Judea,

but even to the neighbors they look down their noses at, in Samaria,

and beyond that, to the ends of the earth.

They don’t get to bear witness to a Jesus

who came with a sword to overthrow corruption and abusive power

and to make everything nice for the people who followed him.

They are to bear witness to a Jesus who talked about the kingdom of God,

not the kingdom of Israel.

A Jesus who spent most of his time hanging out with children,

and poor people, and sick people;

not hobnobbing with the wealthy

or "networking" with those in power.

But because he is so powerful,

the only way that the disciples can ever get around to doing their work

is if he leaves them to it.

No, he is not going to restore the kingdom to Israel.

Not now, maybe not ever.

That isn’t even the point.

The point is,

what are the disciples going to do,

and what are they going to encourage or invite other people to do,

in response to everything that Jesus has said and done?

Now, I’ve spent a lot of time on that for a reason.

It’s not "just another interesting Bible story,"

although it certainly is an odd tale.

I think it speaks to the church in the world today

in some very important ways.

Because, like the disciples, we are living in a time when

those of us who are believers

are having a hard time figuring out why Jesus, why God,

isn’t doing some of the things we expect them to do.

We’re not so focused on restoring the kingdom to Israel …

that’s ancient history which is only partly our own.

But like the disciples in Jesus’ day,

we have not-so-old memories of glory days that are gone,

and we can’t understand why Jesus won’t just

use the power he obviously has

to restore them.

Most of us here can remember a time when

everyone we knew went to worship on the weekend.

Most of us went Sunday,

but some of our Catholic friends went on Saturday,

and maybe we had some Jewish friends who went on Friday,

but everybody went somewhere!

Unless you were really sick, or incapacitated somehow,

you didn’t not go to worship.

Most of us can remember a time not so many years ago,

when, if you put up a building and slapped a sign on it that said "Church,"

people would come.

Most of us remember when stores weren’t open on Sundays,

and there weren’t Little League and kids’ soccer games on Sunday morning,

and maybe not even on Wednesday evenings!

Some of us can remember the days when mainstream media

actually reported on matters of substance within the mainline churches,

and quoted theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr or Eugene Carson Blake,

instead of only reporting on church divisions and fights about sexuality,

and quoting televangelists who make themselves

and the rest of us look foolish.

Those days are gone.

And we don’t understand why Jesus has let them go.

Why would he not want his followers

to have that level of influence on their society, on their world?

Why does he not seem to help churches that are struggling;

why does he not light a fire under the Sunday-morning late sleepers;

why does he not strike down people who preach hatred in his name?

Why will he not restore the kingdom to Israel;

why will he not re-establish his church;

why doesn’t he just do what we all know he has the power to do?

Well, for one thing,

"glory days" were rarely ever quite as glorious as we remember them.

It’s a phenomenon I call

"looking at the past in a rose-colored rearview mirror."

Those who wanted the kingdom restored to Israel

conveniently forgot, or glossed over,

how badly Israel often behaved when she had some degree of power.

Kings stole lands that belonged to other people.

Kings stole wives who – I hesitate to say "belonged" – to other people.

The people hedged their bets by worshiping other gods.

Kings levied heavy taxes to build palaces for themselves and their hangers-on.

Merchants cheated buyers in the marketplace by using false weights.

People who couldn’t pay their debts were sold into slavery.

The rich got richer, and the poor got poorer.

Armies marched off to war on the slightest pretext.

Restore the kingdom to Israel?

Whatever for?

God’s own covenant people

did a pretty lousy job of being God’s own covenant people.

We can look at our own glory days of "Christendom," as it is often called,

and see that those times we sometimes long to restore

had their own problems that we glossed over as well.

Our churches may have been full on Sunday mornings,

but they were full of people of the same skin color,

and the same socioeconomic class …

and we may have believed that

"red and yellow, black and white; they are precious in his sight,"

but we didn’t yet live as though we believed it.

We may indeed have had success at

spreading Christianity and the gospel in faraway places,

but in the process we also destroyed ways of life

that we didn’t understand,

and sometimes did serious harm in the name of doing good.

Restore the glory days to the church?

Not if we can’t see the ugliness that existed alongside the beauty.

Having said that, though,

I think that the primary reason Jesus doesn’t

restore the kingdom to Israel,

restore the glory days we recall from our own past …

is that that’s not his job.

That’s not what God sent him to do.

God sent him to preach the kingdom …

a promised reign of God which is to come in the future,

but is also present in our midst.

It’s our job to witness to that message,

to hold fast to that vision of what is to come,

and to look for signs of it here and now.

When we see those signs, we need to nurture them,

to latch onto them, to grow them,

to invite more of that future into the present.

If pieces of it start looking like the good old days,

well, that’s okay, as long as our focus is on what’s coming, not what was.

Jesus disappears from earth

in order to make it clear that the work belongs to us,

not to him.

He is not going to be domesticated,

by the disciples or by us,

in the service of our own agendas.

No, we are to serve his agenda, his plan, his kingdom.

If someday that turns out to be the kingdom of Israel, so be it.

If it turns out to be a restoration of the church’s power, so be it.

Chances are, though,

it’s going to be something quite different from the past.

Different enough that we may not even recognize it at first.

Just as many in his own time did not recognize who Jesus was

and what he was about,

because he wasn’t what the past had led them to expect.

He is not going to restore the kingdom to Israel.

He is not going to restore the glory days of the church in this place.

He is going to send the Holy Spirit,

to give us power to be his witnesses,

at home and far away.

What we do with that power is up to us.

But I suspect that the Holy Spirit is not going to give us much power

to witness to how things used to be,

at least, if what happened after that first Pentecost is any indication!

The Spirit’s power will come to us

when we are ready to receive a vision of the kingdom

that is to come and is already,

and to align ourselves with it,

regardless of whether it looks like anything we’ve even see before.

Christ is risen … again.

And he has left us with his work.

How are we going to respond?

Amen.

© 2007 Julie Adkins (e-mail: DrJAdkins@trinitypresdallas.org)