Wait, Hope, Learn
By The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
May 20, 2012
Text: Acts 1:1-11
It was May 1970 and the announcement had just been made that Prince Charles was coming to visit the Island of Bermuda and there was great fanfare pomp and ceremony for he was going to open the 350th parliament of that little island. It was an incredible day.
He had been preceded some weeks before by Princess Margaret, but somehow Prince Charles coming as a young man to that island was particularly poignant. As school boys in Bermuda, we were all given strict instructions to prepare ourselves for Prince Charles' arrival. Indeed, we were doubly honoured because his cavalcade was going to go right by the front of our school and we were there, lined three or four deep, sitting on walls, standing beside the road waving flags, waiting for the prince to arrive.
Our shoes were polished and inspected by our teachers: Really old world, eh? Our shirts were starched whiter than snow. Our hair was groomed, our jackets were pressed, our shorts were clean. We were ready for Prince Charles. And not knowing precisely what time he was coming but that it was around lunchtime, we were all told to pack a lunch.
Sure enough, around lunchtime, we could hear the Daimler coming around the corner with the open top, very much like a pope-mobile. I was sitting on the wall, excited and I had already began to eat my lunch. Just as his car approached, the chicken leg that was in my hand fell out onto the ground below.
I got down on my knees, picked up the chicken leg and got back on the wall. The prince had already gone by. My teacher, seeing me on my knees, scrambling for the chicken leg said the following, which I have never forgotten.
“You don't have to get on your knees for royalty, Stirling. You are not in church, you know.” I missed the whole event and there was gravel in my chicken leg as well!
It was so sad. Everyone else said, oh, he's so nice looking. Did you see his plumes and his headgear and I knew nothing. I felt robbed. So much so that later on in the day my parents, realizing my grief, took me back into Hamilton and I was able to see him go down Church Street so not all was lost. It was a great day.
I've thought about that many times and about what my teacher said. Though mockingly I realize there was an element of truth in it. “Stirling, you don't have to get on your knees. It's the royalty. It's not church.” My parents and I discussed it that evening. I said, “Why do we so often kneel in church?” Not always as formerly as Anglicans tend to do, but still from time to time, at communion services we knelt and we prayed. Before bedtime, I knelt and I prayed. There was something powerful about getting on your knees.
I know that this is Victoria Day, a day on a weekend when we celebrate one of the great monarchs of all time. This great long-serving monarch who reigned for 63 years and seven months, this monarch who oversaw so much of the expansion of the empire of which she was in control, who outlived and oversaw the governments of Disraeli and Gladstone and Palmerston, a woman who in many ways was quite unusual.
She was actually much more open-minded than people give her credit for, I think. She was someone who, for example, when the Irish were having their potato famine was very generous and came to their aid although she was severely criticized by many Protestants within Britain for helping predominantly Roman Catholic Ireland.
She was someone who surrounded herself with advisors who were Muslim and Hindu. She was someone who, herself, had a strong sense of faith and did not like a lot of liturgy and pomp and circumstance. When it came to religion, she felt like a Presbyterian, that the Bible and the Psalms would do. She was someone who I think we sometimes think as fierce and straight-laced, and she was in many ways, but she was clearly remarkable.
It's interesting, of all the countries in the commonwealth, we're the only one that sets a whole day aside to remember her. We're the only one that seems to have her name plastered all over this country from one end to the other even in the legislature on the far west of our country.
Now the Scots, they remember her and they have some public municipal holidays in her remembrance, but not in the same way as we do in Canada. We sort of have a unique bond with her really, historically. There are days in which you set aside times to remember great characters. But this Sunday is more important than just Victoria Day. This Sunday is about something greater.
One does not have to kneel before a monarch, but kneel before what we deal with today, we ought. This is the Sunday that we celebrate the ascension of Jesus Christ as Lord of Lord and King of Kings.
It's a day that, to a large extent, goes unnoticed. Even in many Christian calendars, it's often overlooked. If I ask you quietly to answer in your own mind only, when you came to church this morning, did you honestly say I am going because this is Ascension Sunday? I don't think so unless you're particularly pious.
Even I didn't realize it was Ascension Sunday until 10 days ago. So I'm no more pious than the rest of you, let me assure you. But it is. It's a day that seems to drift away, unlike Easter and Christmas and even Pentecost. Ascension, like the transfiguration, gets lost in the Christian calendar.
There are reasons for this. The ascension is not covered, for example, by either Matthew or Mark in their gospels. It is implied in John, but it is not stated in a categorical way. In Luke's gospel, it is most definitely there. But it is somewhat contradictory because Luke also wrote today's passage from the Book of Acts. Luke was the author of both Luke and Acts. And there seems to be a bit of a contradiction. On the one hand, in Luke's gospel, Jesus ascends right after the resurrection. Here, 40 days after the resurrection, he ascends. Clearly something had taken place after the resurrection of Jesus. His appearances had meant something. How long they had lasted, it is hard to know, but clearly something very powerful had happened and the ascension was the end of it all.
The early church, however, had no qualms about talking about the ascension. In the very earliest centuries, Irenaeus talked about the ascension as one of the central and most important Sundays in the year. And as the Bishop of Gaul in the second century, he had great authority.
St. Augustine in the 400s talked about the ascension in glowing terms and said, “Let us also ascend with him.” There's a sense in which, even in the early church, the ascension of Jesus was important. It is there in the Nicene Creed. It is there in the Apostles Creed and we've placed it in your order of service today to read afterwards. He ascended into heaven: Simple line, powerful phrase.
And subsequently Christian writers have spoken about the need for the ascension of Jesus. The ascension is important because it's a definitive ending of his ministry, of his resurrection and of his appearances.
I love the way that C.S. Lewis puts it in one of his tremendous works. He wrote, “There are some who regard the resurrection appearances as those of a ghost or a hallucination and a phantom like that can just fade away. But an objective entity must go somewhere. Something must happen to it and if the risen body were not objective then all of us, Christian or not, must invent some explanation for the disappearance of the corpse. All Christians must explain why God sent or permitted a vision or a ghost whose behaviour seems almost exclusively directed to convincing the disciples it was not a vision or a ghost, but a really corporeal being.”
If it were a vision then it was the most systematically deceptive and lying on record. But if it were real then something happened to it after it ceased to appear. “You cannot,” wrote Lewis, “take away the ascension without putting something else in its place.” For Lewis the ascension was the end of something and the beginning of something.
For Luke, in the Book of Acts, it was the end of something, the Ministry of Jesus. It was the beginning of the Church of Jesus Christ. It paved the way for Pentecost.
What are we to make of this ascension? Does it really make much of a difference to us? I would suggest that it is absolutely central and critical to our faith because look at the language that Jesus uses to those who were to follow him afterwards. And herein lies the real power of the ascension. He tells his disciples first of all, after he is to ascend, the disciples must wait for the power of the Spirit.
The disciples, as we read in Luke, were in a hurry. They wanted some kind of apocalyptic timetable. They wanted to know when the Kingdom was going to be restored and everything was going to work out and there would be no contradictions and Christ would return and everything would then be assumed to be under God's control.
Jesus would have none of that speculation. He didn't want them to know the times or the seasons of his return. He wanted them to concentrate on one thing, namely the Power of the Holy Spirit being poured upon them. He told them to wait in Jerusalem. And in waiting in Jerusalem, they would receive the Power of the Holy Spirit.
That is why in John's gospel, there is a parallel. Jesus says to the disciples, “I must go.” In other words, I must ascend in order that the Holy Spirit might come upon you. There was a need for finality. There was a need for an end to Jesus Ministry as we known it.
I know that in the time of Christ, everyone believed that the earth was flat and that you ascended into a heaven which was above the earth and the whole language that is used is used spatially to describe a world and a cosmos that we see very differently.
Be that as it may, something happened here. Something about the ascension had an impact on these disciples. So much so that they did what Jesus said. They waited for the power of the Spirit to come upon them and they wanted that spirit and they knew they needed the spirit. It was a handover of power to them, the power of the Holy Spirit.
I want to ask you this question, as Christians, as those who seek to follow Christ, have you really in your heart of hearts sought the power and the blessing of the Holy Spirit in your life? The reason I ask is because, while so much of our faith, rightly so, is centered on the person of Jesus Christ and much of the language that is used to describe our belief and our faith in God. This third person of the trinity, this Holy Spirit, seems to be very ill defined in our lives and yet it is the dunamis, the power that motivates and moves the church.
It is this power that motivates and moves our lives and whether we are weak or whether we are strong, whether we are bold or whether we are timid, whether we are old or whether we are young makes no difference. When the power of the Spirit is in our lives, the power of the Risen Christ is in our lives.
I often think we try to fabricate the Holy Spirit rather than experience the Holy Spirit. I love a story that I read about the very famous de' Medici family and their perhaps most notorious member of the family, Lorenzo the Magnificent, who in the 16th Century wanted to put on a lot of plays to demonstrate Christian truths. He was very big on pageants. I think he would have loved our Christmas pageant.
He would have these over the top pageants and celebrate the great moments in the church. He celebrated Ascension and Pentecost with a play. And his idea was to go into the church to set up rafters in the chancel and then, at an appropriate time, make sure the balls of real fire came down on a swinging platform and cross the stage when the disciples were gathered below waiting for something to happen.
Well you all know what's going to happen, don't you? De' Medici got it all set up. The oil was in the cans, the fires were let, the ball came down, caught the antependia and the church went up in flames.
I wouldn't mind if our church went up in flames through the power of the Holy Spirit working within us, but I don't want to even tempt anything more.
We can try and fabricate things. We can play the game and have the image, but do we have the Holy Spirit within us? Do we have in our hearts and lives and minds this great power for it is the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead and it is the same power that grants to us eternal life and that all creation will be filled with on a final day. Ask yourself, do you really seek the power of the Holy Spirit?
Jesus also said to the disciples, “Look, I want you to learn and I want you to hope. Not only are you to seek the power of the Holy Spirit in your life, you are also to humble yourself and learn from me and hope.” The ascension is about something else. It is about the passing on of the power to the apostles.
The apostles carried on the Ministry of Jesus. It was their role, it was their purpose to take what they had seen heard of Jesus and let it be known to the world it was they who would be filled with the power to do this, but this succession needed to take place and that apostolic witness became the cornerstone of the early church.
The cornerstone of Christianity has always been the Word and the Spirit, the Word which comes from the apostles, the Spirit that empowers the apostles to speak and us to believe. If we don't know the apostolic tradition, if we don't know the biblical tradition then how can we live in the Spirit and how can we, if we have the Word of the apostles, but have not the Spirit, be able to live it and to interpret it?
There's no question that the ascension was the very moment when the apostles were given the authority and Pentecost was when they were given the power. I think sometimes the church needs to keep that focus firmly in place.
It is hard for us to come into church on a beautiful weekend like this and not realize when we're in here and when we leave this place and wherever we are, we are apostles. We are the church. The power was given to those who were open to it, and that is the great wonder and miracle of Christianity. That is the greatest gift that we have been given that all of us together carry on the apostolic tradition in the name of Jesus Christ and we need to keep our focus.
I was thinking about that on a separate issue this week. As you know, there's been a lot of debate about hunger in our country and about the role of food banks. Newspapers have been full of it, UN representatives coming to Canada and talking about the hunger that exists in our land and it really is shameful no matter how you look at it. As far as I'm concerned, if one Canadian is hungry, it is too many. In certain areas that hunger is really catastrophic. I've sometimes seen it with my own eyes.
One of my friends who has been writing in the paper recently about the need to look at the way that we feed people argues that we should do it in a sustainable way, that we should only have good food for people, that we should only have food that continues to build people up and not rely on food banks to be able to provide people with food. I agree with him in principle.
I'm also cognizant of the fact that tomorrow morning someone's going to get up and they're going to be in our society and they're going to be hungry and someone needs to give them food. I don't think food banks are the ideal. I think food banks are a necessity for some, but like all, I would love to see them disappear. It seems to me that the only issue that matters is ensuring that the hungry are fed.
The methods and the models, the government roles, the ideals, the presence of food banks in churches and institutions, there's only one thing that we focus on: Feeding the hungry, and we do it in the best way that we can. This passage about the ascension of Jesus is bringing us back to the very essence of the things that we need to focus on as a Christian church and as a Christian people.
Whereas the same focus needs to be on the feeding of the hungry, so the church's message that we find in the ascension needs to be the focus of what we promote as well because, arising out of that, comes the power of the Holy Spirit to address all the issues that the world faces. From the power of that Spirit, from that call to ministry, from the presence of Christ with us now as the Ascended Lord, who has bestowed His Spirit, from that power, comes the addressing of every other issue on the face of this earth.
We do it as those who are empowered by the Spirit. When that Spirit comes upon us and when that Spirit moves us then, and only then, do we truly get on our knees and say, “Our ascended Christ, for the Gift of the Spirit, we your people, give you praise.” Amen.