What Do You Do When Jesus Is Gone?

Acts 1:6-14

This week at the sermon roundtable, we speculated about what this story has to say to us about our lives. So, let’s try this exercise. What do you do when Jesus is gone? We will look at the text first.

It seems as though his followers’ first choice was to stand right where they were and wait. Helplessly, passively, they wait. Their eyes followed him as he was hoisted up on a cloud, rising higher and higher until they could no longer see him. They would likely continue to wait, but they sensed that somebody was watching them, so they glanced down. There stood the angels, who asked them, “What are you standing here for?” What, indeed?

By now they felt foolish, so they walked back to Jerusalem, to the upper room. There they gathered with the women who have been their companions on this journey. And they constantly devoted themselves to prayer.

Now it’s our turn. In the church, these days, it can feel like Jesus is gone. Just up and left, it seems, leaving behind a lot of buildings. Some of them have been turned into condos with stained glass windows (to borrow a line from The Drop), with many others still resisting that fate but getting the uncomfortable sense that the party is over. So, what do we do?

Well, we sort of hang around, just doing what we have been doing because we’ve always done it that way. We look around, blink in confusion, and wonder where all the people went. The young people. The children. A whole lot of folks who used to fill up the sanctuary and the classrooms and the offering plates – where did they go?

Then we get kind of irritable about it. They shouldn’t have left us. They should come back.

But then someone says (maybe it’s the angels), “What are we just standing here for? We need to do something!” So, we start frantically looking around for a program, the magic program that will fix all our problems if we just apply it the right way.

I have been a part of a small church transformation program for about two years. During this time we have been trying to learn that transformation, true transformation, is not about changing the programs.  Every time we get together we talk about the fact that transformation is much more a process of reshaping, remolding than a process of tweaking around the edges or slapping up new wallpaper.  It’s a thing that is not easily learned, but it seemed as though we were making real progress. Then at the last meeting, I heard someone say, “I think that if we found the right program…” and another say, “The problem is, no one really planned a program for this.”

Did the first followers of Jesus think about programs? I don’t know, but here’s what I do know. They constantly devoted themselves to prayer. This is exactly what the text tells us.

Prayer is, of course, an action, and it is mystifying to me that we have this tendency to overlook it in search of more active actions. I don’t know what it is that we don’t seem to like about prayer. Maybe we lack the patience. Maybe it just feels too much like inaction, at a time when we want to impress Jesus with how active we are in his name. We cast an admiring nod at the early followers for their constant devotion to prayer. We might call them saints for displaying such devotion. We don’t, however, seem to consider it a model for our own lives. But what if that is exactly what it is?

Oddly enough, prayer is the program that is always appropriate. It is the program that will actually lead to transformation. It is the program that will bring Jesus near to us.

What does this story from Acts say to us about our lives? Perhaps it is saying that prayer is the action we need to devote ourselves to. Just a thought.

When They Know Your Name

John 10:1-10

When I was very young I loved Romper Room. I planted myself in front of the TV daily to watch Miss Beverly and the lucky children who got to play with her in her TV classroom. Whatever she said was gospel to me. I was a staunch proponent of the Do Bee concept, ever wary of the Don’t Be. My grandmother loved to tease me and sing the Do Bee song backwards, “I always do what’s wrong, I never do anything right,” just to see me get apoplectic. I loved everything about Romper Room. But the moment Miss Beverly picked up her magic mirror at the end of the show was unfailingly a moment of despair for me.

She would begin to name all the children watching at home whom she could see through her magic mirror: Bobby and Cathy and Barbara and Jimmy, Lucy and Davy and Billy and Nancy, and on and on. Every day I sat holding my breath waiting for her to see me, but she never saw me. My mother told me once how hopeful I looked, listening and waiting, and how disappointed I was every time.

It’s nice when they know your name. If Miss Beverly had called my name just once, I would have pledged myself to her for eternity. But, alas, she never knew me.

***

When I read in John’s gospel that Mary recognized the risen Jesus when she heard him say her name, I always think of this earlier story from John – the parable of the Good Shepherd, who calls his sheep by name. They know his voice and they follow him. The sheep can discern the voice of the shepherd from the voices of those who would do them harm.  They will run from a stranger, Jesus says, because they do not know the stranger’s voice.

Yet, I am all too aware that trust can be given to the wrong ones if they seem as though they know you. Children will naturally trust someone who knows their name and says they are a friend. Even adults will often misplace their trust. Our trust of certain institutions, for example, has often been given unquestioningly.

So, as comforting as the text sounds, our conversation at the roundtable this week soon turned to matters of distrust, and not knowing, and concern about how we learn to recognize the right voice – the voice of the Good Shepherd.

Often the advice given is not helpful. How do you know a false prophet? If their prophecy turns out to be false. Or, how do you know a false shepherd from a good shepherd? If they cause harm to you. While I very much like the message of this parable – that the sheep are safe in the enclosure of Jesus – I am not comfortable with the notion that our safety is as simple as that. There are thieves and bandits in our midst and people are less and less likely to give their trust to the church – with very good reason.

Sexual harassment and abuse has been in the news lately, again, and with it come the inevitable conversation about institutions that seem to be especially prone to abuse.  Katelyn Beaty, an editor for Christianity Today, writes in today’s New York Times that these institutions “are usually insular organizations that resist external checks and revolve around authoritative men.”

Beaty notes that too often when abuse happens in the church, our first reaction is self-protection. People close ranks around the institution out of loyalty, or a belief that it could never happen here, or the fear that there could be a blemish on our reputation.

It should be obvious to us that closing our eyes to thieving and banditry doesn’t make it gone. Ignoring untrustworthiness doesn’t make us and our institutions trustworthy. But somehow it isn’t always obvious, and I am concerned that we who profess to be the body of Christ, the Good Shepherd, are not as careful as we should be about cultivating trust, about earning trust. The question I need to ask is, how do we create trusting, safe, and caring environments?

The greatest danger to the church and those we minister to is to assume trustworthiness without the benefit of any evidence. Saying, “Trust me,” is certainly not enough when there are no actions to bolster the words. It is past time for us to put our focus on demonstrating all the qualities that inspire trust – to be the voice of caring, faithfulness, humility, truthfulness, and unconditional love.

That they might know the Good Shepherd through us.