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.
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