The Festival of the Ascension of our Lord, 05/17/2012

Sermon on Luke 24:44-53, by Samuel D. Zumwalt

⁴⁴Then he said to them, "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled." ⁴⁵Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, ⁴⁶and said to them, "Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, ⁴⁷and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. ⁴⁸ You are witnesses of these things. ⁴⁹And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high." ⁵⁰Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. ⁵¹While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. ⁵²And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, ⁵³and were continually in the temple blessing God.

WAIT!

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Waiting isn't my strong suit. If I'm stuck at a stoplight, I'm likely to grab a magazine off the passenger seat. If I have an appointment with my dentist or my doctor, I take along a book. I don't like to do nothing. So, when I hear Jesus telling His disciples that He has work for them to do, but then they are supposed to wait...that just drives me nuts. The Lord tells them that they should start proclaiming the message of repentance and forgiveness in His name beginning from Jerusalem. And then He tells them to go to Jerusalem and wait for the promise of the Father who will clothe them with power from on high. He blessed them, and He disappeared.

So, after the Lord has disappeared, I see myself looking at the other ten guys and asking: "Why do we have to wait in Jerusalem if that's where we're supposed to start preaching? There's work to do. Let's get after it!"

I used to work with some people who could have waited indefinitely and been fine with that. They could look busy for years without much in the way of results. If you would have asked them, they were killing themselves for the greater good and blah, blah, blah. Nah! Ambition was a word somewhere between algorithm and apple in Webster's.

I tolerated that for longer than most, because I'm a pretty soft touch up to a point. But then I had to say: "You are out of here."

Now I wonder to myself why the Lord didn't just come right out and say, "I want you to wait ten days until the Feast of Pentecost." If He had said that to me, I would have probably asked why. And the answer probably would have been: "It's on a need to know basis, and you don't need to know." But, at least, then I would have known what the time limit was and I would have found something useful to do for ten days while I was waiting. The fact that the Lord didn't tell them they were going to have to wait ten days drives me nuts.

Now some of you are really good at puzzles. And, if you had been there with the Lord, you probably would have figured it out that He wanted them to wait ten days until Pentecost. The Lord always liked to go to Jerusalem for the religious holidays, and He had been crucified and raised at the time of the Passover feast. So, the next big feast was coming up in ten days and that must be the time He was going to do big things! And you probably would have figured out that Pentecost was a celebration of the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai. So, you probably would have figured out that there wouldn't be a better time to reach the maximum number of people at once in Jerusalem than on Pentecost. And you probably would have figured out that there wouldn't be a better time than Pentecost to deliver the Lord's message of repentance and forgiveness!

Now me, I would have been doing a slow burn about waiting and not knowing how long I was supposed to wait. And me, I would probably be grousing about why we weren't just getting on with the job we were supposed to do. Because I'm not good at waiting! I don't like to wait. I like to roll up my sleeves and get on with the job at hand.

But the Lord wanted them to wait, and I'm glad it was them and not me. Except, that the more I think about it, the Lord still wants us to wait for the promise of His Father, to wait to be clothed with power from on high.

Now this is the tricky part, as I think about it. Because we can't pretend that the Holy Spirit hasn't already been given to us in the washing of Holy Baptism. And we can't pretend that the Holy Spirit hasn't already been working on us and in us through the Word and the Sacraments. And we can't pretend that the Holy Spirit is cooling His heels in heaven for ten days waiting to come to us on Pentecost Sunday.

So what do we have to wait for? That's the question.

As I think about it, the answer is particularly uncomfortable for me. The Lord knows I'm not good at waiting, and that I live among a people who aren't good at waiting. In fact, all of us live in a world that tells us constantly not to wait for anything. Get it now. Have it now. Because waiting means denying yourself. And waiting means admitting you're not in control. And waiting means you're going to have to be alone with yourself and alone with the limits of your life and alone with your discomfort. And I'm not good at that, and the world around us isn't good at that.

But when we wait, we come face to face with the God-shaped hole that is in our soul that only God can fill. The Lord wants us to wait, so that we will be alone with Him and what He wants rather than what we want. Because when people like me aren't good at waiting, we will often settle for what isn't good for us as a substitute for what is good for us and what we really need most...which is God! And if the message the Lord wants us to share with the world is repentance and forgiveness in His name, then we need to come face to face with our own need for repentance and forgiveness in His name by admitting that we have settled for less than God far too many times. And we need to wait for that repentance and forgiveness to work on us and in us, before we are ready to tell others what they need to do about their lives.

Several years ago, Lutheran writer Marva Dawn wrote a book entitled "A Royal Waste of Time." Dawn challenged many assumptions about using entertainment in worship as an evangelical tool. Rather Dawn proposed that worship should be "...a cascade into the ever-flowing surprises of encounters with the immensity of God's magnificence and sublimity and radiance." In other words, in a world such as ours that hates to wait for anything, worship means being drawn into the awesome presence of our Maker and Owner. There in His presence we become aware of our very need for repentance and forgiveness. There we will be driven to our knees to cry out for mercy.

Bad worship isn't about waiting on the Lord. Bad worship is all about us and our experience and our agenda. In a very real sense, a technically perfect liturgy filled with technically perfect classical music can be as bad as a Christian rock concert that draws in crowds, because both types of worship can become more about gathering crowds and collecting an offering to pay for a building and staff salaries. At the end of the day, both the musical snob and the rock-on-for-Jesus person may not have been drawn into the life and love of the Triune God before whom every knee should bow and every voice cry out in repentance and with the hope of forgiveness in Jesus' name.

So, it is precisely because I am a person who hates to wait and I live among a people who hate to wait, that I need to wait in the presence of the Most High God to be receive the promise of the Father and to be clothed with power from on high. Because if I do not wait and you do not wait on the Father, then it will remain about us and what we want. And, this is the most troubling and perhaps most damning part, if we do not wait in the presence of the Triune God, then our church will look like us and not like the community of God's people entrusted with the message of repentance and forgiveness.

The Holy Spirit, the promise of the Father, is the One who clothes God's people with power from on high. And, if we are to receive the promise again and again and be clothed again and again with power from on high, then we, both you and I, need to learn that waiting is an essential element of the Church's proclamation of repentance and forgiveness. Waiting points us to the daily discipline of pausing to listen to the Word of God several times a day and to join in the ancient prayers of the Church (praying the psalms at Morning and Evening Prayer and before bedtime). Waiting points us to the regular disciplined study of God's Word with other believers joining in conversation about the Word. Waiting points us to the vital necessity of gathering to receive God's Son Jesus in the bread and the wine week after week and on holy days such as today.

When I fight my natural distaste for waiting and you fight our culture's refusal to wait by practicing these churchly disciplines of waiting in God's awesome presence, we will be drawn to repent of our settling for something other than God and will begin to grasp the life-changing power of God's forgiveness in Jesus Christ! Waiting in God's presence leads to finding the real life and the real peace that all too often eludes even lifelong Christians who find it easier to go native in a world that hates to wait.

So, thank you, for joining in this royal waste of time on the Feast of the Ascension. Because here we are in the awesome presence of the Triune God who has called us to wait for the promise and to wait to be clothed again with His power. For if we do not learn to wait in God's presence, we will not repent nor will we experience God's forgiveness because we won't know that we need it. And that's this world's problem: people don't know that what everyone is looking for and what everyone needs is the love and mercy of God. So, then, how can this or any church be faithful in its proclamation if we ourselves do not believe that we are living in the awesome presence of God? And how can Christians be faithful proclaimers if we, ourselves, do not know what it means to repent or to be forgiven?

In the name of the Father, and of the +Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel D. Zumwalt
Wilmington, North Carolina USA
E-Mail: szumwalt@bellsouth.net

Zusätzliche Medien:
Luke 24:44-53 English Standard Version, © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers]

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