What If?

What If?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 28, 2017

            Scripture: Acts 1:6-8

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

In our passage from Acts we encounter Jesus’ disciples talking to him after he has risen from the grave. These people had given up their previous lives and had spent at least the last year following Jesus. They had listen to him teach. They had seen him do seemingly impossible things. Yet there is plenty of evidence about them in the New Testament that suggests that for all their devotion to him and for all the time they had spent with him Jesus’ disciples never really got what he was all about.

For example, there’s the story in Luke of the two disciples walking on the road to Emmaus. In that story those two say to the risen Christ, whom they hadn’t recognized as Christ, “We had hoped that [Jesus] was the one to redeem Israel.” Whatever they may have meant by “redeem Israel” (more about that in a moment) it’s clear that they thought Jesus hadn’t done it. “We had thought,” they say. They were disappointed, disillusioned even. Jesus simply had not done what they wanted him to do and maybe expected him to do.

Then there’s the question the disciples ask the risen Christ in our passage from Acts. Unlike the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, these people know that they are talking to Jesus raised from the dead. But like to the two going to Emmaus they don’t get what Jesus was really about. They ask him if now he was going to “restore the kingdom to Israel.” I take them to mean essentially the same thing as the Emmaus disciples meant by “redeem Israel.” Whatever they meant, it is clear enough that they had expected Jesus to do something he hadn’t done. They didn’t get it that what they wanted him to do wasn’t at all what he had come to do or had any intention of doing.

Now, what I and a lot of scholars think that these disciples wanted Jesus to do that he hadn’t done was drive out the Romans and recreate the fabled (if perhaps largely mythic) kingdom of David. The Romans were the ones almost everyone in Jesus’ day identified as the cause of all the people’s problems. Oh sure, I suppose there were certain advantages to being occupied by the Romans. Jesus lived during a time called the Pax Romana, the Roman Peace. That was a period of about two hundred years during which Rome was able to establish and maintain relative peace throughout the Empire through the application of massive amounts of force. By the bellicose standards of the ancient world the Pax Romana was indeed a time of relative peace. It facilitated trade and cultural relations throughout the Empire. Nevertheless, most Jews living in the Jewish homeland experienced Rome as an oppressive Gentile power that taxed the people into poverty and violently suppressed any disorderly expression of Jewish identity. Most Jewish people in Jesus’ time wanted nothing so much as to be rid of the Romans.

       Now, getting rid of the Romans wasn’t exactly an easy thing to accomplish. The people of Palestine tried a few times to do it through armed force. A few decades after Jesus, in the year 66, they managed to drive the Romans out of Jerusalem for a time; but Rome came storming back, retook the city, destroyed the temple, and dispersed most of the people. Most of the people in Jesus’ time understood that they could never defeat the Romans through military force, but they couldn’t imagine defeating Rome any way but through military force.

That’s why so many of them looked to God to do the job for them. Many people in Jesus’ day longed for the coming of a Messiah, and they understood the Messiah as essentially a savior come with the power of God to defeat the Romans and drive them into the sea. When those disciples on the road to Emmaus said they had hoped Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel, and when the disciples in our story from Acts asked if Jesus was then going to restore the kingdom to Israel, they probably meant that they had seen Jesus as that militaristic Messiah or least hoped that that was what he would become.

But look at how the risen Christ responds to the disciples question about whether he was finally going to restore the kingdom to Israel. He first says that it is not for them to know “the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.” That line suggests that God did have a plan to intervene and restore the kingdom but that God wasn’t going to tell anyone when God would do it. OK, but then look at what Christ says next. He says “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When we read the risen Christ saying that we have to ask, I think: Why would the disciples need power from the Holy Spirit, and why would they have to be Christ’s witnesses, if God were going to step in and take care of things through direct divine intervention like the disciples apparently wanted? What Christ says here suggests something quite different from that to me.

So I ask: What if? What if, instead of saving the world through direct divine intervention like so many people hoped God would do, God instead was saying to us: No. Not me. You. I’m not going to do it through direct divine intervention. Instead I am going to give you the power to transform the world yourselves. What if God is saying: I will give you the power, and I will be with you to guide you, enable you, encourage you, support you, and forgive you as you go about transforming the world, What if God is saying yes, it’s my world; but you are my agents in the world. You can rely on me, but I in turn am relying on you to do my work in the world. What if God is saying don’t rely on me to come exercise divine power. Rather, I’m going to give you the power to do the work yourselves. What if that’s what the risen Christ meant by “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you”?

Folks, I am convinced that that is precisely what our risen Savior meant when he said to those disciples that they would receive power from the Holy Spirit. It appears to be true that the earliest Christians believed that Jesus would return soon, very soon, to finish the work of cleaning up the world. But what happened? Did that happen? No, or at least it didn’t happen the way so many of them wanted it to happen. The things we’re looking at here happened two thousand years ago. Two thousand years may be the blink of an eye to God, who subsists beyond time; but it is an awfully long time to us. So do you think we’re just supposed to sit around, be concerned about the eternal fate of our souls but not about the condition of God’s world, and wait for God to do the heavy lifting of recreating the world? Maybe some of you do, but I don’t. I am convinced that God has made the transformation of the world our work, always with God’s help and inspiration and always consistent with God’s ways and will of course.

Maybe, as Christ says or at least implies in our passage from Acts, God does have some time in mind to come finish the work Godself, but whether that is true or not is not for us to know. So are we supposed to just sit and let the world go on living with war, starvation, environmental destruction, and rampant injustice? What if we aren’t? What if instead of that God wants us out there in the world serving God’s people and working for an end to war and oppression? What if God wants us to be like the prophets of old, speaking divine truth to power even, or rather especially, when power doesn’t want to hear it? What if God wants us to begin the transformation of the world by first transforming our own hearts and minds so that they conform to the ways and will of God rather than to the ways and will of the world? What if all that is more true than is the hope that God will step in and do it for us?

If that is true our world and the dominant strains of our faith tradition are turned on their heads. If that is true the Christian life of faith doesn’t look much like a great many Christians have thought it looked like for a very long time. If that is true God still calls us to lives of prayer and other spiritual disciplines to calm our souls and bring us closer to God. But if that is true those things are only part of the Christian life. The other part is getting out there caring for people in need and speaking out against violence and against injustice against any of God’s people.

Folks, the world in which the church lives and works isn’t just changing, it has already changed. People today aren’t drawn in large numbers by talk of how we save our souls. People are drawn much more by talk of how we save the world. Yet even if that were not true God’s call would be the same. Next week we will celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian community that the risen Christ suggested in what he said to the disciples while he was still with them. God has given us power. God is with us, but doesn’t want us just sitting here. God wants us here, and God wants us out there. Out in the world. Doing the work of God. So once more I ask: What if? May we have the courage to ask that question, answer it faithfully, and then act on the answer. Amen.