Acts
1:1-11
Rehoboth United Methodist Church, in
the Frankford section of Philadelphia, closed a few years ago after a life of
about one hundred and sixty years. It
had the largest parsonage in the conference, with seven bedrooms on three
floors, and I’m glad that friends of mine bought it and live there now. The church building has been bought and sold
a couple of times since then and I’m not altogether certain who now owns it,
but when I was familiar with the place it had some interesting aspects.
One was a sign that had been put up
in the 1840’s, when the church was recently organized, that had hung at the
back of the sanctuary since then. It
listed rules of behavior, with the word “Rules” in big letters across the top that
you couldn’t miss. I don’t remember them
all, but one said that if you needed to talk you should go outside and not
disturb everybody else. My favorite said
not to spit on the floor. You could use
the spittoons. That tells me a little
bit about what the people and the place were like before the Civil War. Yuk!
Another aspect of the building was a
curved railing that ran along the back of the sanctuary that enclosed a space
about two feet deep by a good thirty feet long.
I’m not sure when it was installed, but it was to save space for
chauffeurs to stand while their employers were in church. It came from a later era. Somewhere in between those two, Rehoboth had
been the place where Grover Cleveland spent his Sunday mornings whenever he was
in Philadelphia, both before and after his election. A century after that, the narthex was being
used to register people for LIHEAP energy assistance and the Sunday School room
was a clothing closet.
Take a person from the first stage
of the church’s life, spitting tobacco juice on the sanctuary floor. Would he (and I’m hoping it was a “he”) be
comfortable with the presidential entourage forty years later? I doubt it.
Take the wife of one of the mill
owners, whose driver carried her Bible for her and held her fur coat while she
prayed a few years after Cleveland was gone.
Would she have felt at home in the same place sixty years after her own
hey-day, in the hallway amidst the unemployed?
I doubt that, too.
At each and every turn, however, the
gospel was proclaimed, and all of this in one place, all of it in the life of
one congregation! No stage of it did not
present a challenge, and no stage of it would have been entirely welcomed by
anyone. That was life, however – the
life of a local church, and during that time Rehoboth did a great job reaching
out to the people of the city and proclaiming the gospel to them in the way and
in the terms that was best suited for them at that time. Souls were saved and lives were changed and a
lot of good was done.
It could never have happened,
though, if they had got stuck on how things had used to be, which is a great
trap to beware, and has been since the earliest days. Luke talks about how Jesus appeared to his
disciples following his Resurrection, and how it raised hopes among some of
them that he was going to bring back the good old days, the way they had been
before centuries and centuries of warring empires had rolled across Palestine
and left so many of the Jews as exiles in foreign lands and others as a
subjugated people clustered around Jerusalem.
“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, is this
the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’” [Acts 1:6]
Who could blame them? Who would not want things put back in order
after centuries of chaos? Who would not
want to see their own national pride restored?
Here was their chance. “It’s
morning in Judea!”
But Jesus pointed them away from that.
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.’” [Acts 1:7-8]
He was, in fact, preparing
them to turn away not only from the past but also from the idea that their
purpose would be tied to one place, however dear to them, or one culture, no
matter how well it had nurtured their faith.
He told them they would be getting their marching orders shortly.
“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and
Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’”
Jerusalem
was a good place, sure. Judea? That was home. Samaria?
That was more of a problem, because it was full of Samaritans. As for the ends of the earth, that’s fine in
theory, but there are some pretty scary folks out there, with some crazy ways
of living and absolutely no understanding of God’s ways. For that matter, you don’t have to go to East
Japip to run into folks like that. Even
worse, sometimes they find you. Bishop
William Willimon was fond of talking about the days when he was pastor of a
church in South Carolina that was full of odd characters. As he put it, “We had a sign out front that
said, ‘All Are Welcome,’ and people read it.”
Jesus knew it would not be
easy. He knows it isn’t easy for any of
us to live among or work with people who have different customs or ways of
life. I have neighbors who live in their
garage. At first I thought it was just
because they didn’t want to smoke inside the house. But they cook there at least four times a
week. They sit there using their
phones. When guests come over, they
entertain there. They don’t just have folding
chairs, either; they have a little table and a couple of chairs beside it and
I’m waiting for a television to appear there now that it’s warmer. This is all really minor in the great scale
of things, but it aggravates me at times.
How do people live with those who may have bigger differences, whose
priorities in life are totally different, who take no interest in things that
matter greatly to you but focus on things that you consider of no importance at
all, or maybe just totally silly?
So Jesus didn’t just send the
disciples out without one thing happening first.
“While staying with
them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise
of the Father.” [Acts 1:4]
This promise is the Holy Spirit.
He told them,
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”
[Acts 1:8]
The
power of the Holy Spirit would make it possible for them to do miracles
wherever they went, and one of the great miracles has been that over time,
wherever Jesus’ followers have gone into uncharted territory they have been
able to share the good news about how God came to live among a small and
oppressed people in an obscure part of the Middle East two thousand years ago
and found only rejection and death, but that the power of his love and the
strength of his righteousness was such that death itself couldn’t stop him, and
he rose from the grave into life. To have found the way to get that across in
all its fullness, that has been the Spirit at work.
Wherever
Jesus’ people have gone into uncharted places, and whenever change has come to
them, slowly or suddenly, as a group, or in the changes that are part of every
life, they have found that his Spirit has strengthened them to live with
confidence that he is there, too, and has even gone before them. Wherever Jesus’ people have headed into the
unknown land that is the future itself, they have discovered that their fears
about it have been unfounded because he has said,
“I
am with you always, even to the end of the age.” [Matthew
28:20]
So brace yourself for whatever he
has in mind next but know that it will be good.
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