(This sermon was shared as part of Laity Sunday at First Church on Sunday, May 26, 2019.)
Acts 1: 1-11
1 In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach 2 until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. 3 After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4 On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5 For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
6 Then they gathered around him and asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 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.”
9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
I love the book of Acts. It reads a little bit like a comedy of errors, with the disciples bumbling and stumbling around the Roman empire trying to preach a message they haven’t fully figured out how to articulate yet. This one is brought up on trial, that one gets shipwrecked, and pretty much everyone ends up in jail at some point. If the Monty Python guys were looking for a sequel to “The Life of Brian,” the book of Acts would make pretty worthy source material.
The scene in our text today is especially poignant and–frankly–kind of funny. The disciples gather around a resurrected Jesus, full of giddy anticipation. They know the Hebrew Bible forwards and backwards, and they know the Messiah is supposed to restore the kingdom, to make everything right, to fulfill all their deepest hopes. This has been the dream of generations before them, and they believe they are the ones who will finally get to witness the coming of the kingdom.
The resurrected Jesus has been hanging out for a few weeks, talking and teaching and having cookouts on the beach, and you can hear the disciples impatience: “So… Jesus… are you gonna… ya know… do that thing? That thing we were promised? Ya know, restore the kingdom… all that good stuff?”
And Jesus basically says… “Nah, not right now. But y’all hang out here and go be witnesses and stuff. I’ll be back.” …and then proceeds to take the next express elevator directly to heaven, leaving the disciples staring at the sky with their mouths hanging open.
This did not go as they had planned.
They had left their jobs and homes and families to follow Jesus, to participate in his ministry, with the promise that Jesus would be the one to restore the kingdom to Israel, which the Jews had been waiting on for as long as anyone could remember. And then, Jesus was brutally killed before that could happen, and the disciples scattered in their grief, believing all hope was lost, or perhaps that they had put their faith in a false prophet.
But then, plot twist, Jesus is resurrected, returns, and continues his ministry for a few weeks. Forty days, we’re told, or the symbolic Jewish number for “long enough.” His disciples buy into a hope that they will finally get what they want, that all their suffering and work will have been worth it. You can almost hear them checking their watches as they wait for the kingdom to be restored.
And then… And then.
If you’ve ever hoped for something and watched the possibility of it evaporate in front of your eyes, you know what this feels like. We can imagine the sinking feeling they felt, the way their stomachs dropped, the fear they must have experienced, the sheer disappointment. All that had been promised–lost, then re-found, then gone again. That feeling of “So… now what?” We’ve all been there.
And we, in this room, today, can relate to it.
Just a few short months ago, we were hopeful. We seemed to be on the verge of a revolution in our beloved Methodist denomination: the possibility of full inclusion of our LGBTQ family and friends, a statement about our understanding of the type of grace and community that gets practiced every day here at First Church.
The days and weeks leading up to General Conference were a roller coaster. We were given reason to hope when parts of the Traditional plan were deemed unconstitutional. There seemed to be massive support for the One Church plan, at least here in the US, and we hoped that would carry the day. The days of the conference were turbulent–reasons to hope, reasons to be anxious, reasons to hope again… And then.
And then.
I don’t know about you, but I still haven’t fully processed my grief over the decision, even now, three months later. I still walk into this place every Sunday anxious about our future and concerned about our LGBTQ members who have been most deeply and directly affected by the decision. And, to a lesser extent, I worry about what it means for those of us who hope to find our future in the Methodist church.
It was just over a year ago that I heard the call to ministry, right here in this sanctuary. I want to be clear before I talk about my call that I speak about it from atop a mountain of straight, white, cisgender privilege. There are queer folks who heard their call at the same time I did who have been told to wait to pursue the candidacy process or to pursue ordination in another denomination, despite being lifelong Methodists. As a straight, cisgender person, I will never experience this type of discrimination. I am just one of of many people who are working on how to answer the call during this turbulent, confusing time in the church.
Hearing my call was one of the strangest, most joyful, most disorienting experiences I’ve ever had. I was raised Methodist, but I spent 16 years out of church as an adult, finding my spiritual home elsewhere. It was only in perhaps darkest moment of my life that I somehow, much to my surprise, found myself in this sanctuary on an Easter morning. It’s no exaggeration to say that this place and the community I found here saved my life. Part of why I felt so at home here is because of the gospel of inclusion and affirmation we practice here, values I’ve held personally for as long as I can remember.
Last year, Keith Thompson asked me if I would speak in this service about my experiences with addiction, a story I’d not told publicly before and wasn’t sure exactly how to express. My friends, I’ve never been so nervous in my life as I was that day. But the way you all responded to me gave me what I needed to release the shame of that story and find the kind of freedom I first stepped into this place looking for. A few days later, I woke up to the thought, “You know people do that as a job, right?” which set the events in motion for me to discern and explore a call to ministry.
Since then a army of supporters have walked me through the UMC candidacy process, written letters of reference as I applied to seminary, and sat with me as I vacillated between giddiness and fear over a major career and life change in my mid-30s. I’ve been gifted the type of affirmation and tangible support I would not have even known how to pray for a year ago. Prior to the General Conference vote, I was so excited and ready to be part of this new era of the UMC, to help create radically affirming spaces in the church, to use my position of privilege as a straight, cisgender woman to help center the stories of LGBTQ folks in the narrative of the church. I knew I was right where I needed to be, especially as it looked possible that the UMC would finally be fully inclusive worldwide.
And then… And then.
I guess I could have bailed on the candidacy process or rejected my acceptance offer from Iliff School of Theology, but once you’ve accepted the call to ministry and made that contract with God, you don’t back out of it just because you didn’t get your way. But in that moment, when the vote came down late in the day on Tuesday, I–like so many other people–was devastated. I felt like every dream I’d had for my future came crashing down around me.
And so, I did the only thing I knew to do: I called my Dad.
My Dad is a lifelong Methodist and history enthusiast who reminds me that I’m descended from generations of Methodist circuit riders who founded some of the early churches in our country. He and I don’t always agree on every issue, but we have the kind of love and respect for each other that lets us talk about the hard stuff without anger or judgment. We had not talked about the General Conference yet, and I honestly wasn’t sure how he felt about it. But I knew that if anyone could help me see the bigger picture, it would be him.
I’m pretty sure I was crying into my phone before we finished saying our hellos. I told him how angry and disappointed I felt. How much my heart broke for the LGBTQ-identified folks in our congregation whom I have come to know and love. I named person after person whom I’ve laughed with, cried with, sat next to in my usual pew for over a year, had game nights with, and celebrated all the big and small victories of life with. In my moment of deepest vulnerability, I said, “Dad, this isn’t what I signed up for. I feel betrayed by the church I love.”
In his most loving, compassionate, fatherly way, he said, “Darlin’, I’m so glad you called. I knew we’d talk about this eventually.”
He proceeded to very gently and reassuringly walk me back through history: from the Civil Rights Era, to the writings of John Wesley, to the Protestant Reformation, to Paul’s writings to the earliest Christian churches. He outlined the ways in which the issues of those days split churches and families in two and created paths for new growth, new perspectives, and new hope. He reminded me that disappointment and loss are a part of growth, and that nothing has ever changed the course of history without a prelude of grief.
He ended our call by saying, “Melissa, the only way anything has ever changed is by people like you and all those people you love staying steadfast and working for what they believe in.”
I have clung to those words every day since the General Conference decision as I struggle with my own, “So, now what?”
As I reflect on Jesus’ ascension and our passage of scripture today, I can’t help but feel like the disciples, in all their humanness, might have, on some level, missed the point of Jesus’ ministry. The point was never that Jesus was going to wave his hands or snap his fingers and restore the kingdom–although we can certainly understand and empathize with why they might have hoped for that. Rather, the point was to pave the way for Jesus’ followers to take a message of love and grace out into the world.
This was no small request. And, it’s important to note, that mission looked different than the disciples had expected prior to that moment. Carrying the Jesus message forward would require work, sacrifice, and vulnerability. The disciples would encounter hardships and disappointments that threatened their resolve and faith. But Jesus knew what the disciples could not yet see: that it would all be worth it.
My guess is that, if you asked the disciples at the end of their lives how they viewed the ascension of Jesus–an event that at the time might have felt so disappointing, painful, and confusing–they would say that it opened the door for some of the most profound moments of their lives. Moments where they walked into communities, perhaps initially feeling scared or uncertain, and ended up making transformative connections, relationships that lasted a lifetime, and planting seeds of grace that bore fruit for generations to come. They might say, as we know well, that our greatest griefs and failures often set the stage for our greatest opportunities and lessons. And I’m sure they would say that they could not have guessed how it would have all played out in that moment on the hill, staring at the sky.
If you’re like me, you might have spent these last few weeks like the disciples in the moments after Jesus ascended, staring upward, confused, disoriented, sad, grieving, and perhaps even angry. Maybe there were moments of denial. Maybe you, like me, had moments where you wanted to shut down. But we know well that, while there’s a time and place for staring at the sky, eventually we must answer the call to go and be witnesses. We cannot know now what the outcome of the General Conference decision will be. But we, like the disciples, must take the opportunity to stop staring at the sky and step out into this season of uncertainty.
Don’t get me wrong: As a longtime yogi and meditator, a wannabe mystic, and type 4 on the Enneagram, I am as content as anyone to simply stare into heaven. It’s comfortable for me to take my troubles into prayer and contemplation and to trust the Divine to work it out, and I am very happy to sit and daydream about the future. Meanwhile, the gulf between the world I envision and the world I actually live in grows wider and wider, and I am only more disappointed every time I turn my eyes from heaven back to the reality around me. Staring at the sky can be a confusing cycle that breeds disappointment, disillusionment, and very little progress.
In order to create the kind of world that’s full of grace for all, we’re going to have to do hard, vulnerable, and ill-defined work. Much like the disciples, we’ve been given minimal marching orders, so we may have to cut the path as we walk it.
The truth is that, in this moment, other faith communities are looking to places like First Church to see what we’re going to do. We know that we will stand strong in our belief that all persons should be included in our faith community. And while people are looking, we can demonstrate that we mean that in every way possible. Like the disciples, we can accept the charge to go and witness, to be in community with others in our city, to learn and listen and foster relationships.
So what is our call in this season of uncertainty? Our call, as laity, is to go and be. And today, as we reflect on Jesus’ ascension, we have a renewed opportunity to accept that call.
At our annual retreat in February, we learned about First Church’s community partners and received this invitation to “go and be.” This is different than “going and doing,” “going and changing,” or “going and saving.” It’s about fostering authentic relationships that might lead to transformative experiences both for ourselves and others, that might plant seeds that will bear fruit for generations to come. There are so many opportunities to plug in to our community partners, to “go and be” with others all over the city; to learn about issues like homelessness, domestic violence, and immigration; to build relationships and be the Church.
Since March, as often as I can, I’ve been attending Women’s Group on Tuesday mornings at Church of the Reconciler. I have to admit, the experience has been as powerful as it has been vulnerable. I’ve been given the opportunity to question my assumptions about the experiences of homelessness, addiction, and domestic violence. I can’t say that I’ve done or said anything to “help” them, but I’ve had the most amazing time hearing stories, sharing stories, and discussing how the Jesus story impacts our daily lives with some pretty incredible women.
My friends, I want to invite you to come with me! Come meet my new friends. Hear their stories and let them teach you how to make yarn bracelets, listen to the understandings of the gospel they lean on, and practice some deep breathing and yoga with us. Or join Eden Johnson or Marnie Brown as they volunteer at One Place, which serves survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. Or Jill Rogers, Jenny Walker, and others in our congregation in their work with Kairos prison ministry. Or talk to Brett Wisse and Elena Harmon about ways to support refugee and immigrant members of our community. Or, if you don’t know where to begin, talk to RG to learn more about our partners and where your unique gifts can plug in to start building relationships.
My friends, none of these things are likely to change the world over night. But this work, “going and being,” is the work that’s ours to do. Like the disciples, we might just be putting one foot in front of the other for a while, traveling dusty roads, stepping into new communities, wondering if this is really what Jesus wanted of us. But let us not forget: Jesus promised the disciples that they would receive the power of the Holy Spirit. And perhaps they did, the moment they pulled their eyes from heaven and back to the roads that lay in front of them. And I believe, that we already have, too.
Maybe the point never was that we would get the outcome we wanted and get to usher in a new, more inclusive United Methodist Church. Maybe the point was that we–like so many others in generations past at crucial moments of transformation–would have an opportunity to take a long hard look at our unique understanding of grace and how exactly we want to communicate that message to the world. Maybe the point was that we get to transform disappointment and heartbreak into entirely new opportunities to live out the gospel, just like the disciples did. Maybe, in the face of devastation, we get to go bigger and broader in our love, to go out into spaces we’ve been hesitant to set foot in, to bear witness to life with others whose perspectives might be different than ours.
So… now what?
Now we do the work in front of us… together… one step at a time.
Thanks be to God for the work we have been called to do, for the invitation to go and be, and for the opportunity to stand steadfast in love. Amen.
