Wait: the Church’s first job
May 12, 2024
Wait upon the Lord
Ascension
Lighting the Christ Candle
Welcome and Announcements
Call to Worship
Come gather ’round; Jesus is here.
We wait for the coming Spirit.
Come gather ’round; see the power of Christ before you.
With joy, we praise God.
Hymn: 265 Hail the day that sees Christ rise
Prayer of Adoration
Almighty God, through Jesus Christ, you revealed to us a power
that has no parallel. May the eyes of our heart be enlightened to this power and all it has done in our lives.
Pour out your Spirit of power upon us, that we may hear your voice and be guided by your will. That we may proclaim your glory with love, we now pause to confess our own sinfulness, saying together,
Prayer of Confession:
Lord, we are impatient! We want everything right now, instantly! We don’t want to wait for anything. We rush our holidays, our celebrations, our very lives and then wonder why our spirits are exhausted and depressed. Slow us down, Lord. Help us to enjoy the process of waiting for the wondrous things you offer us. Let us feel the power and beauty of praising you and singing your praises.
Place us on paths of peace and hope. Let our hearts be at peace knowing that you have taught us what we need to know to serve you joyfully in this world. Inspire us and give us delight for what is to come. AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
God has given us a spirit of wisdom and revelation, that the power of Jesus Christ may be visible in our daily living. God has given us a heart to hear and respond to his voice and to follow his will. These are our gifts, because in Jesus Christ we have been forgiven and set free to be God’s people. Amen
Passing the Peace
Hymn: 24 I waited, I waited on you Lord, 2X
online: I waited for the Lord
Scripture:
Acts 1: 1-11 p 1690
Luke 24: 44-53 p 1644
Sermon: Wait: the Church’s first job
It is no secret that the Church has been in decline for a long time. This has left congregations with a general sense that there is a problem. And we all know that where there is a problem there is also a solution, and all we have to do is fix it.
First though, we need to measure the problem. Is it:
Attendance
offerings for the congregation’s needs
offerings for mission
lack of mid week groups
a decline of hits on the website.
Once we have defined the particular problem in the congregation then we seek a solution.
We plan bring a friend Sunday.
We announce a stewardship campaign.
We try to restart the Sunday School
We take up one of the many offers to make our website more exciting.
Or we try to make worship more exciting with bands and choruses and popular music that will attract younger people.
Do you recognize anything on that list?
Maybe tried a few of those things?
According to Andrew Root and Blair Bertrand, whose book, When the Church Stops Working, I read in January, usually those actions will lead to further decline.
Instead, they ask us to consider what might be missing from the action list of things we try.
………….
Any ideas?
……………
What we are missing is God, or more importantly discovering what God’s will for the congregation is.
When we are busy running around and trying anything we can think of and doing all of it in our own power, we are missing the step of stopping, waiting, praying, listening for and understanding what God is asking from us.
Root and Bertrand are clear that what the congregations need is to stop working. More importantly, the church needs to stop working and start waiting.
Isn’t that just a colossal waste of time?
Wait.
For what.
Waiting is definitely a lost skill. We get impatient when the 1 minute cycle of the microwave takes too long. When we have to wait for a late bus or plane, we get bored and restless or frustrated and angry.
People have lost the ability to wait, from short waits, to long waits, to waits that seem eternal.
But waiting is a necessary step in the process of discovering what God wants to do and what God is asking of us.
Root and Bertrand focus a lot of attention in the account of the Ascension and especially the command that Jesus gave to his disciples right before he departed.
Do you remember what that command was?
…….
Let’s listen to that account again:
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. Acts 1: 1-4 NIV
That command is even clearer when we read it from the Message: In face-to-face meetings, he talked to them about things concerning the kingdom of God. As they met and ate meals together, he told them that they were on no account to leave Jerusalem but “must wait for what the Father promised:
Wait.
On no account leave Jerusalem.
You must wait for what the Father has promised.
I think that most of us will sympathize with the disciples. This has been a month and a half of conflict, danger, death, resurrection and teaching. They are still reeling from the emotional and spiritual impact of it all. Now as they are grieving for the second time that Jesus is gone, they are told wait. Wait for what God will give you.
All of that is precisely the reason they are called on to wait. They need time.
They need time to sort their feelings.
Time to reflect on what Jesus has been teaching.
Time to learn to trust God in the new situation.
Time to learn to hear God’s voice if they are going to have any hope of fulfilling God’s will in bringing the Church into being.
That is key. God’s calling is difficult and demanding. We need to be able to stop, wait and listen for his voice.
Wait for what God will give you, this is a commandment.
Jesus has already explained that what God will give them is the Holy Spirit who will reveal to them all they need to know. That doesn’t mean they are going to remember the command to wait when they stop straining to see him as he rises to Heaven.
They have a history of forgetting about the revelation of God—even that Jesus is the revelation of God, and that his words are therefore also a revelation of God.
During Lent we spoke often about that revelation of God, from knowing that Jesus is the Messiah to understanding what Jesus was teaching about going to Jerusalem to die.
We saw that being able to understand the revelation of God was pretty hit or miss for the disciples. In part it was about obedience; but mostly it was about shutting down their own will and desires in order to seek what God was calling forth from them.
So the disciples have learned that lesson and they went back to Jerusalem and waited. Right?
Wrong?
Let’s find out what they did do….
12 Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk[c] from the city. 13 When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. 14 They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. Acts 1: 12-14 NIV
They started well.
They went back to Jerusalem.
They all gathered together in the upper room.
They were in constant prayer.
But prayer is not always what it seems to be. We remember that before the crucifixion when Jesus explaining God’s will, the disciples argued with Jesus, from their own understanding and desire of what the Messiah would do.
Sometimes our prayer life is the same way.
We pray for what we want. We don’t hear an answer, so we pray for what we want with more effort, maybe louder, maybe including the words, “God I have asked you this so many times before”, maybe even with a bit of a nagging tone.
When we pray for the thing that WE WANT over and over again, we can begin to believe that what we are demanding is indeed God’s will for us.
Of course, we don’t know for certain what the disciples were praying about or for, but the actions they took while waiting, can seem to lead us to believe that they were trying to figure out what they could do to in order to be witnesses to the resurrection.
We go back to Acts. We continue further in the passage. We have not read that yet….Peter is speaking to them about the actions of Judas and his death, and that they needed to replace him. It sounds like he is listening to God, he even quotes Scripture…
20 “For,” said Peter, “it is written in the Book of Psalms:
“‘May his place be deserted;
let there be no one to dwell in it,’[e]
and,
“‘May another take his place of leadership.’[f]
21 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus was living among us, 22 beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”
23 So they nominated two men: Joseph called Barsabbas (also known as Justus) and Matthias. 24 Then they prayed, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen 25 to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs.” 26 Then they cast lots, and the lot fell to Matthias; so he was added to the eleven apostles. Acts 1: 23 – 26
It seems reasonable—they were down to 11 and they needed 12. Scripture pointed out that a missing servant needed to be replaced. They nominated 2 and the lot indicated one of them.
But they had not been commanded, “go back to Jerusalem, and elect a disciple to take the place of Judas and go be witnesses to the resurrection.”
They had been commanded to wait for the gift from God, and then be witnesses to the resurrection.
But Peter’s plan sounded strong. And they thought 2 people would work. And then flipped a coin to see if God approved of one of them?
It’s a self fulling prophecy.
The coin only has two sides. Unless the coin falls through a crack in the floor and disappears forever, it will indicate heads for person A or tails for person B. Where is God speaking in that?
Well, I think that God was speaking when we never heard anything more about Matthias in Scripture at all. Never another mention of him. Root and Bertrand outline their understanding that God had someone else in mind for the chair of the 12th disciple. More of that in a few weeks.
They had done what they could think of to do. That chore was now done, they have the full compliment of disciples and can go about being witnesses.
Maybe it was a good thing they were afraid of the Romans, so they stay in the upper room and they go back to waiting.
Waiting is crucial.
When we get anxious and do things out of our own thought and our own will we are missing what God is saying to us.
We don’t hear his voice.
We don’t recognize his voice.
We don’t trust what we think he might be saying.
When that happens, we take control into our own hands and substitute our will for God’s will and our action for the work of the Holy Spirit.
However, no one likes to wait.
But waiting is so important that Jesus commanded the disciples to wait. Wait for what God is going to do.
Root and Bertrand write that the church was born out of the waiting.
In fact, they argue that we wrongly call Pentecost and the gift of the Spirit the birthday of the Church. Instead, the birthday of the Church is when the disciples were obedient and waited for God to act.
They were fortunate that their waiting wasn’t a long time. They were fortunate that when God spoke to them it was loud, bold, dramatic and accompanied with tongues of fire and marvelous signs, so there was no doubt about what he wanted from them. But that is a story for next week, when we will continue to talk about waiting on God.
Waiting on God as we will discover, looks like many things. It can happen when we still the noise that is always around us, by time at the beach or walking the dog.
It can happen when we focus in our prayer chamber on being silent before God.
It can happen when we do something that God asks us to do, even when we know we will never benefit from it.
It can happen in the normal rhythm of life as we practice movement that brings us to God, like getting on our knees, or folding our hands, listening to hymns.
It can happen when we are learning to hear God’s voice and ask him to clarify that voice before we act.
And it can happen when God literally turns our lives upside down.
We don’t know what it will mean for us, but it will not happen in our timing.
We cannot be impatient. We must learn to trust the peace the Spirit gives us as we wait. We must learn to trust the silence. More importantly, we must learn to trust that God is in the silence.
Waiting is the most difficult and most important thing that God will ever ask of us.
So, from now we wait. This series on waiting will continue until August. Then in the fall, we will engage in a series of Bible Studies on praying with an intention to enter God’s will. The Session was clear that they didn’t want that study to take away from the need to be waiting, and that is what I am preparing. Lessons on prayer that will lead us into silence and waiting.
Then as a Session and a congregation we will continue waiting as we learn to listen for what God will reveal to us. We will continue the waiting until we hear what God is asking of us.
We have learned that all the things we have come up with in the past have been fruitless. What we have tried in our own power has not worked.
So let us ask some questions:
What if we follow the commandment to wait? We have everything to gain by waiting on God.
What will we gain?
I am not sure, but I do believe that as we wait, we will learn how God speaks to us. We will learn to trust his voice.
We will become resilient as we face and overcome temptations to take things into our own hands.
We will learn to trust the signs that God is acting among us.
And when God does speak, if it is in a still small voice or with the flames of the Spirit, we will be able to hear his voice, and we will move from the obedience of waiting to the obedience of Holy Spirit directed action.
We are called to wait.
We are commanded to wait.
Jesus told them that they were on no account to leave Jerusalem but “must wait for what the Father promised: the promise you heard from me. John baptized in water; you will be baptized in the Holy Spirit.”
We commit to wait, and trust that when God speaks, we will hear and trust his voice.
Amen
Affirmation of Faith:
Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. Isaiah 40: 31 NRSV
Hymn: 271 Let all the world in every corner sing
Offering and Doxology 830
Offertory Prayer
Pour your Spirit upon these gifts, O God. Send them into the world as a sign and song of your joyous work of love. Use them to call and welcome into your house of love all who are in need of your mercy, all who need your special care and all who are your friends and and our brothers and sisters. Amen.
Gathering Prayer Requests
Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession
Holy One,
We gaze towards misty heavens, longing for a glimpse of you.
We watch the skies for just a glimpse of your dazzling grace, a sign of what you call us to do next.
Your voice comes to us through the ordinary moments, keep us attuned to that voice we pray, as we wait and listen for what you will speak to us next.
For now, remind us that You indeed will empower us to be your light and life and hope in this world, to the ends of the earth,
wherever courage and grace is needed. Therefore we pray for our ourselves, our community and the world you love.
JOY
CONGREGATION AND COMMUNITY
WORLD
As we go forth to wait, show us how to be your people so that in our ordinary living we may hear your voice. Keep us patient and help us to live fully immersed in your love that we may be an example of how to trust you without question.
Help us to listen deeply, see far and wide,
and live faithfully.
In Christ we pray as he taught us, saying:
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen
Amen
Hymn: 274 Crown him with many crowns
Benediction
The power and love of Jesus Christ is with you. You are sent forth to wait. Go in confidence and know that the power and love of God goes with you. Go in peace and trust that God’s voice will come to you. Dwell, confident in knowing that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit is with you now and forevermore. AMEN.
Blessing Song: 500 Open my eyes v.1
Open my eyes that I may see
glimpses of truth thou hast for me
place in my hands the wonderful key
that shall unclasp and set me free
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