Acts 1 Sermon: Strange and Familiar

Scripture: John 14:8-12; Acts 1:6-14

Philip said to him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?" -- John 14:8-10

When they had come together, they asked him, "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" 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." When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. -- Acts 1:6-9

A Book Unlike Any Other -- and Yet

The Bible is a strange and familiar book.

A bush that burns without burning up. Plagues that darken a sky. A sea that splits down the middle. You read those passages and think: I have never seen anything like that.

How strange.

But then you turn the page, and something else happens. You read a line, and it grabs you. Not because it's strange, but because for a moment you caught a glimpse of yourself, or your neighborhood, or your nation, in a book written no earlier than 2000 years ago.

Strange and familiar. Both things at once.

A Woman Named Christine

There's a story in Luke 7 that starts the way a lot of stories start in small towns. The text doesn't give us the woman's name, but when I read the Bible and someone is unnamed, sometimes I name them. It humanizes them.

In this case, we are going to name her Christine. Christine had lost her husband, and now her son. You may know how it was back then in a society centered around the man. A woman alone had almost no options. She couldn't just go get a job. She couldn't start a business.

Strange, right? To build a society that put your mom and sister and aunts in such a precarious position.

But it was only 37 years ago that the Women's Business Ownership Act was passed, and that law provided equal access to business capital and eliminated the requirement that a woman get help from a man to get a loan.

Strange and familiar.

So Christine has lost her husband and her son. And her son was her safety net, her future, her only remaining hope. And now she was carrying him in a funeral procession.

People watched from the side of the road. They shook their heads. They said what people say. Such a tragedy. Such a shame. And maybe somewhere in the crowd, someone thought: this is unfair. One day, someone is going to have to do something about that so that our women are not in a precarious position.

In that crowd was Jesus, and he did something about it.

He saw her and something moved in him, and he acted. He walked up to that funeral procession, and he stopped it. He spoke a few words, and the boy sat up, and Jesus gave him back to his mother. Strange. Good, but strange. Strange and good.

Ten Thousand Hungry People

A little while later, Jesus' reputation had spread well beyond the confines of Jewish towns and villages -- before phones, internet, and a 24-hour news cycle -- about as far as from here to Albany.

It spread across cultures, to the Decapolis, a region of ten cities, Gentile territory. They had no particular reason to follow a Jewish rabbi, but people were coming to him, crowds of them, because they were desperate.

This was the world the Roman empire made. The powerful had full plates and lavish tables and multiple houses and didn't lose sleep over where the next meal was coming from. They had extracted wealth from the workers. See: familiar.

These desperate people followed Jesus into a wilderness. And just imagine how bad home must be if you are willing to follow him into a wilderness. They were hungry in the most literal and spiritual sense. Thousands of them.

The disciples looked out at that sea of people -- maybe ten thousand of them when you count women and children -- bony fingers, sharp jaw lines, tired eyes. And the disciples said, "Jesus, we're going to have a hungry crowd. You should disperse them so they can go get food. It's going to cost too much money to feed them."

In other words: we don't have enough. Someone else is going to have to solve that problem.

Once again, familiar.

Someone else is going to have to tackle that problem. And Jesus said: you give them something to eat. Me? Us? But I just complained about it. I didn't say I wanted to fix it.

So they did. Reluctantly, with no idea how this was going to work, they followed Jesus' directions. They sat people down in groups and they started serving them. They had bread in a basket and some fish too. And they'd reach in the basket and get bread and fish and take it to the group. All twelve of the disciples did this.

Each one thought: when I get back, that basket is going to be empty.

But they'd get back to Jesus, and reach into the basket, and there was fish. There was bread. Over and over and over again until everyone was fed. There was enough. Group by group, reach by reach.

Their picture of what was possible when following the call of God was being carefully dismantled.

Which actually mirrors how a lot of people experience provision in their own lives. You don't get the whole answer. You get enough to take the next step. You don't know how it's going to work out. You just know the basket isn't empty yet.

The disciples -- the very disciples who said someone else will have to handle that -- were the ones who ended up handling it.

How strange. How familiar.

"Greater Things Than These"

And later, the disciples are sharing a meal with Jesus, and they have a conversation. Jesus had been trying to tell them something important, but they kept interrupting him with anxious questions. Thomas had said, "We don't know what you mean when you say you are going somewhere we can't go yet." And Philip asked, "Show us the Father, and that will be enough."

They are grasping at straws.

Imagine what they had seen by that point. Christine's son had been raised back to life. Around ten thousand people had been fed on what appeared at first to be a meager amount of food. The blind could see. Hard-hearted people believed. People with no church background were believing. The lame were walking and the excluded were welcomed back in.

And then Jesus says: Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing. And they will do greater things than these, because I am going away to the Father.

Excuse me? Greater than these things we've seen? Not despite your absence, but because of it? The going away isn't the obstacle -- the going away is the point?

Strange.

What they don't see is that this is what all of it had been moving toward for three years. The progression is noticeable. First, Jesus does it and they watch. Next, they do it and he watches. Lastly, they do it when he is no longer physically with them.

Familiar.

Why Are You Looking at the Sky?

And that brings us to Acts 1, on a hillside, under that cloud. Eleven disciples standing there with their necks craned back, squinting like they are looking at an eclipse.

And two angels appear and ask: What's up there?

Why are you here on earth looking into heaven?

The truth is -- because we are unsure what to do next. Because we thought the answer was up there. Because we were hoping for someone else, someone bigger, more equipped. We kind of thought God was going to come down and fix all this mess.

But it's just us.

Sound familiar?

My pastor when I was a teenager would say: some people are so heavenly minded they are no earthly good.

We Already Know What to Do

A year or so ago, someone said, "High schoolers need to know we care. Yes, they park in our lot, but we need them to know we see them and that they matter." Someone should do something about that.

So someone said: hot cocoa in the winter, lemonade when it's warm, a cookout on occasional Fridays.

SNAP benefits were cut by the federal government. Shelves went empty at Dutchess Outreach and other food security organizations. And it ripped your heart open. What do we do? Someone's got to do something. We organized a food drive, which helped us deliver hundreds and hundreds of food items. Then, for the Easter offering, you came through with well over $12,000. The shelves aren't empty.

Someone said: one day someone is going to have to do something about cold, cold religion -- about a version of religion that is remote and judgmental, that doesn't have room for people who are complicated, who are on the mend.

And this church said: we will do something about it. We are going to try to have arms as wide as Jesus.

Familiar and strange.

Someone should do something about food insecurity, about housing access, about caring for the earth.

And we are trying. Imperfectly, incrementally. Sometimes it means we are learning to reach into the basket even when we are not sure if there will be enough. We are learning that we can become the answer to someone's prayer.

There's a reason the book is called Acts.

Not Beliefs. Not The Book of Good Intentions. Not The Book of Thoughts and Prayers.

Acts.

The church acts because God acts, because Christ said go, because the Spirit blesses the church when it carries out the ministry of Jesus.

Becoming by Doing

Here is what I want you to notice: the disciples who stood on that hillside staring at the sky were not the same people who once said, "Send them away -- not my problem." Something inside of them had changed.

The watching, the doing, the trying had led them to become someone new. And this is what is crucial: the doing and the becoming were never two different things. They became who they needed to be by doing what they were called to do.

That is still how it works. You become who you need to be by doing what you need to do.

We don't look to heaven expecting answers to fall down. We don't look up to find out what we should do. We already know what we should do. We've known for a long time.

We look to heaven for the wisdom to see clearly, the courage to move when it costs something, and the conviction to keep reaching into the basket.

God looked at the world -- beautiful and broken -- and said to the angels, "It's kind of a mess down there. Someone should do something about that."

And God did.

God sent you.