Preached · January 27, 2019
Text · Acts 1 1
Welcome
Good morning. It is great to see you. If you're visiting with us today, or perhaps it's your first time back to church—my wife and I have been joking, because we've been traveling, we were on a mission trip, then we were back in Indiana for a funeral and a wedding, and so this is our first... we have not been to church since last year. And so maybe you're in good company, some of you. If this is your first time back to church in like a year or so, I'm right there with you. Welcome back, and it's good to see you. We'd love to connect with you, meet you, find out who you are and what your story is. That's part of what Lunch with Leaders is all about, after our second service, right around noon. We bought you some pizza, and we'd love to meet you—and you can meet the pastor who hasn't been to church all year.
We are continuing in the book of Acts. It's this kind of foundational historical document about what the church is all about. In the first century, when the first followers of Jesus saw Jesus ascend—saw Jesus go through death and resurrection and then disappear—and then what? It behooves us, it's a good thing for us, to go back into the Scriptures and see what they did, how they responded in a culture that was against them, in a society that was not for them, in a land and a country and a place that was opposed to them. There might be a few things we could learn from this book.
The Longest Wait
So before we dive in, let me ask you a question. What's the longest time you've ever had to wait for something? Nine months? Pregnancy is a good example. Maybe it was getting your driver's license, just waiting at the DMV. Maybe it was in the line at Hy-Vee or Walmart this weekend—could have been the longest you've ever waited for something.
I love lost-mail stories—those stories where someone sends something, and then someone doesn't get it for years or decades later. There's a story of a British schoolgirl in 1993 who puts a message in a bottle, stuffs it in a bottle, throws it out into the ocean off the coast of England. And it's found 20 years later by a couple in the Netherlands—you good old Dutch people—who wrote her back, wrote to this by-now adult woman from this message in a bottle. There's another story of a young man whose wife had just given birth. He was about to storm the beaches of Normandy, and so he sends off this piece of mail, and it doesn't get to his newborn daughter until 70 years later. It's a long time to wait for a piece of mail.
What's the longest you've ever had to wait for something? For me, I was put into the foster care system when I was six, and I had to wait until I was 14, until I was adopted. It was a long time of asking questions about worth and value, and what am I going to do, and who am I going to be? Because the last name I was born with really didn't have much meaning, and I didn't have a new one yet. Or there was a period of time—I've told some of you this story before—when I graduated college and was trying to get credentialed into a church, and it was 2008, 2009, economic meltdown. Churches weren't hiring, nobody was hiring, and so we just had to wait until one nice lady named Kathy Skalbeck called back and said, "Hey, we're looking for a worship director." But that was about nine months later. It's a long time. Waiting is a hard thing, but it's a thing we can all relate to.
And so we divvied out the passages for Acts, and I get Acts chapter 1, verses 12 through 14. And when you read it this morning, you're going to have this feeling of, "Nothing's happening." And when I read that passage, I kind of went into Brandon's office and said, "What is this? What am I supposed to do with this?" It's just a list of names, and then them sitting around between the Ascension and Pentecost, and nothing is happening. But there might be an important message in that.
Acts 1:12–14
So today we're asking that question: what are we supposed to do while we wait? Would you stand with me as we read God's Word together? This is what it says, verse 12:
Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, about a Sabbath day's walk from the city. And 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 the son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. And they all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.
Now, pause—what's the "then"? Last week we talked about the Ascension. So Jesus has ascended up to the heavens. He's enthroned at the right hand of God. He's doing the things that Jesus does. That's where we're at.
The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Would you pray with me? Almighty God, we thank you for your Word. And we thank you for even passages like this, when it seems like nothing is happening. Would we pay attention to moments like these—the moments of waiting, the moments of a pause, a space, a breath? Because God, I believe it's in those moments where perhaps you speak the loudest. Would you open up our hearts and our minds and our ears and our eyes, all of us, to hear and to receive what you have for us this morning. Have your way with us, God. We pray in Christ's name. Amen.
Do the Next Right Thing
So that's the question of the day: what are we supposed to do while we wait? How are we supposed to spend our time while we wait? Maybe while we wait for that job. Maybe while we wait for that child—or while we wait for that child to get out of the house. Maybe while we wait for the next promotion, or the next new house, or the next new stage of life. We are often in places of waiting, waiting for the next thing, the thing we know is about to happen. What are we supposed to do?
And that's where the disciples and the people gathered in this upper room are at. They know the promise of Jesus—that when I leave, you will receive the Holy Spirit. And so they do what they're supposed to do: they go back to Jerusalem, and they wait for the Holy Spirit.
So there are three things we're going to talk about today, three things you're supposed to do while you wait. Thing number one: you need to do the next right thing. Because it says in verse 12, "The apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's walk from the city." They did what they were supposed to do. In the book of Luke chapter 24, Jesus says:
I am going to send you what my Father has promised. But stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.
And so this is exactly what Jesus said. Jesus says, I'm going to send you, I'm going to go, you're going to be my witnesses—but there is this moment in time where you just need to wait.
Now, let me give you a little bit of timeline. I love timeline, because it helps solidify the historicity, the fact that this actually happened. If we assume, based off some reading of the Scripture, that Jesus died in AD 33—so 33 years after year one, Jesus would have been about 39 years old—he goes to the cross, he's crucified. And on April 5th, the day after Passover, on Easter Sunday, Jesus is resurrected from the grave. And then from April 5th to May 15th, you have these 40 days that Scripture talks about, where Jesus is doing Easter-Jesus kind of things. He's appearing in rooms, going into rooms that have locked doors, eating fish on the beach with his friends. He meets Thomas and tells him, put your hands in my wounds and see that I'm really alive, I'm really back.
There's one thing in particular that I love that we get told about in 1 Corinthians 15: that Jesus appears to the apostles, he appears to Mary Magdalene, and Paul throws in this line—he says, "then he appeared to James." Now, James is the brother of Jesus. So there's Mary and Joseph. Mary, we believe, is a virgin when she gives birth to Jesus, but then she and Joseph do the things that married people do, and they have more kids. And so Jesus has these half-siblings, one of which is named James. And we see in Scripture that the brothers of Jesus don't think much of Jesus during his earthly ministry. There's a passage where Jesus is teaching in Simon and Andrew's house, and Jesus' mom and his brothers are outside, and they want to see Jesus because they think he's gone crazy, and they want to take him home. Now, imagine that you're James. Maybe your last interaction with Jesus was, "Hey, we think you're nuts." Then you know that Jesus has been crucified. And then Jesus shows up at your door. "Hey, brother, what's up?" I would love to hear that conversation. Who do you think the crazy one is now, James? So Jesus shows up to James, James has some sort of conversion event, and we read that he's actually there in the upper room now. I'm sure there are all sorts of conversations between the eleven apostles who are left and James—"We told you so, James. Come on now."
So: 40 days, April 5th to May 15th, Jesus is showing up, he's teaching. The book of John says that if we wrote everything down that Jesus did during this time, the heavens could not contain all the things he did. Then May 15th, the Ascension. May 24th, Pentecost, which we'll talk about in a week or two. But there's this nine-day gap where the apostles are just waiting. So what do they do? Well, they do the thing they're supposed to do. They make their next right step.
But waiting is not an excuse to do nothing. When you feel like God has called you to something—to be someone, to do something—but you know there's a period of time where you've got to wait, you've got to wait until you make the move, until you have the conversation, until that event is about to happen: it's not an excuse to do nothing. When we're in times of waiting, when we're needing to just sit and wait for God to make the first move, we still need to do the things we know are right.
In that period of time when I graduated and we were waiting for our first call to ministry, we still did the next right thing. We didn't just wait around and expect money to drop from the sky. So my wife and I got jobs in industries that we really didn't love but knew we had to do to the best of our ability. I got a job as a housekeeper at my college. I got really good at scrubbing toilets—still the one responsible for cleaning our house's bathroom to this day; thanks, previous job experience. My wife did some retail for a while, which was miserable, and then we became substitute teachers. Can you imagine me with a flock of 30 kindergartners? It was fun. It was hard. It was difficult. And it didn't pay very well. But it was the responsible thing to do while we were waiting for what we were sure, what we were certain, what we knew God had called us into—ministry. We knew there was a church out there waiting, and we were waiting for them. But it was not an excuse to do nothing. So while you wait, you do the next right thing.
Hang Out With Other Christians
Let's keep reading. Verse 13. So the disciples arrive, and they go upstairs to the room where they were staying, and Luke, the author, lists out the apostles. So I think the second thing we're supposed to do while we're waiting is we hang out with other Christians. While you're in the in-between, while you're in the gap, while you're in the space of waiting, you do the next right thing, and then you hang out with other Christians.
Now, I want to take a moment to talk about that room where they were staying, or what Acts, in other translations, calls the upper room. Lots of key events happened in the upper room. It's where Jesus instituted something we're about to do this morning—communion, the Last Supper. It's where Jesus washed his disciples' feet. It's where, after Jesus had been resurrected, he shows up because the disciples—they've seen their Savior crucified, they don't know he's been resurrected yet—so they go and hide from the Roman and Jewish authorities in this upper room.
Now, if you're anything like me, you've probably been influenced by a painting you've seen by Leonardo da Vinci. You know the painting, The Last Supper—this big, long table, and they're all facing da Vinci, the photographer, and they're all having this fight and argument, and there's the Da Vinci Code about the V and its secret meaning. So you've probably been influenced by this painting, and you think there are like 11, 12, 13 people in this room, and that's it. But if you know anything about Jewish Passover celebrations, and if you know anything about this upper room, that's kind of ludicrous—because if we keep reading in verse 15, it says that Peter stood up among the believers, and there's a group numbering about 120 in this space.
So what is this space? Well, it is a massive, large upstairs of what would have been a large what we might call a hacienda—a house connected to a house connected to a house, so that families could all gather together. So there's great-grandma, and there's grandma, and there's mom, and there are all the siblings and the aunts and uncles, and they all built on to each other. It kind of looked like this: some bedrooms around the outside, and then a courtyard in the middle. And you'd connect a bunch of these together as your family grew, and depending on the success of your family business. And then if you were really well-to-do, you would build an upstairs, and it would either overlook the courtyard, or you'd build it over the courtyard, so you could have a big old family reunion in the upstairs upper room.
And we see that when Jesus enters Jerusalem during Palm Sunday, he has some sort of connection with a wealthy, well-to-do family in Jerusalem, and they're going to make preparations for that Last Supper, foot-washing kind of stuff up there. And then the disciples, after Jesus has died and been resurrected, keep gathering there. And it becomes kind of this mainstay, like a headquarters, for the infant baby church throughout the book of Acts.
We see later on who this person is—the owner of the house. It's John Mark and his mom. It's John Mark's house. Now, John Mark, to me, is kind of like the Illuminati of the New Testament. Anybody know anything about the Illuminati? It's this conspiracy theory that the Illuminati kind of control everything—they run all the world's governments and business, and maybe or maybe not they're space lizards. It's kind of out there. I don't believe in the Illuminati, but I believe in John Mark. Because John Mark has this massive upper room. He goes on a bunch of journeys with Paul the apostle, then on a journey with Barnabas, then on a journey with Peter. And then we get told in church history, like a century later, that it's John Mark who gets together with Peter and writes down what we call the Gospel of Mark. And we believe that the Gospel of Mark is the earliest gospel written, closest to the source—he's buddies with Peter, that loud-mouthed, foot-in-mouth-disease apostle Peter. And then it's because of Mark that Matthew and Luke based their Gospels largely off of that text, and we get stories like communion and the passion narrative of Jesus' death and resurrection. So you don't hear John Mark's name a lot, but he's kind of in the background everywhere. He provides the upper room, provides this space, and he eventually writes the first gospel.
So one little side note I want to make is: if you've got a house, if you've got a home, make it available, and just wait to see how God will use it. Because this upper room has seen amazing things, tremendous things, just because John Mark—a wealthy individual, a wealthy family in Jerusalem—decided to offer it up to Jesus and eventually his disciples. And it becomes the headquarters for the young infant church.
So, number one, you do the next right thing. Number two, you hang out with other Christians. So they gather together. They know they're supposed to wait; they're waiting for the Holy Spirit to descend. And so 120 of them gather in this upper room, and they hang out together, and they even hang out with people they might be suspicious of. Because, remember, Jesus' brothers are there—Jesus' brothers, who were against Jesus before his death and resurrection. But they incorporate Mary and the brothers, the half-brothers of Jesus, and they hang out with them too. And I'm sure there were some awkward conversations—"What were you thinking? Why did you think he had gone crazy? He was the Messiah." And yet they hang out with these folks anyway. So you do the next right thing, and you hang out with other Christians.
Pray
And then verse 14: "And they all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers." When you are waiting, you pray. And you don't just pray, but you pray with other people.
Now, praying by itself, that's great. If you are in a place of waiting—waiting for the next job, the next opportunity, the next time God's going to move in your life—of course, pray. Start your day, in the middle of your day, end your day with prayer. But even better is when you gather with other folks, and you pray together, and you share your concerns and your needs, and you have that vulnerability and authenticity, and you say, "We're in this place of waiting, and it's hard. It stinks. It's terrible. We don't know what's next. We know there's a diagnosis, but we don't know what the cure is. I've been fired, and there's going to be another job, but I don't know what the other job is. We were supposed to have a kid, and we thought we were pregnant, but then it ended early, and we know we want to have children, but we don't know what the answer is." When you're in those places of waiting, gather with others and pray, because that's what the early church did. They gathered together constantly in prayer for nine days.
Now, for us, looking back, nine days doesn't seem like a long time, because we know that Pentecost was only going to happen nine days later. But imagine that you're one of those 120 people. You've heard that Jesus said, "Hey, I'm going to send you the Holy Spirit, and then you're going to go be witnesses." So Jesus has ascended, you've seen this amazing thing, and then you wait. And maybe the next Sunday comes around, and you think, "Oh, Jesus really likes to do things on Sunday; maybe it's going to be today"—but the Holy Spirit doesn't come yet. And then day five, day six, day seven rolls around, and you're like, "Well, maybe we missed it. Maybe it happened while we were sleeping, and maybe we're supposed to go." I have to assume that maybe it started out with 140 people, and 20 people are like, "Eh, Jesus is wrong," go figure, and they left. But for the faithful, those nine days, which probably felt like an eternity, they gathered together constantly. "Hey, did the Holy Spirit show up yet?" "I don't think so. I haven't felt anything weird." "Let's keep praying."
Pray when good things are happening. Pray when bad things are happening. Pray when it seems like nothing is happening. You know, they say there are two kinds of people in the world: those who pray when good things are happening—"Oh, thank you, God, I'm so glad, I'm so blessed, this is so great"—and then when something terrible happens, they quit. Or there are people who pray when bad things are happening—"Oh, I need so much help, everything is terrible, I'm going to go back to church, I'm going to go find God." But I think there needs to be a third category: the person who prays when it seems like nothing is happening—when life is humdrum and predictable, and you're waiting for some next big thing, but it's just not happening. It's still a good time to gather with others and pray.
So what do we do while we wait? We do the next right thing, we hang out with other Christians, and we pray. When Emily and I were waiting for the call to Good News almost nine years ago, we were living in a house our college had rented out, and just down the road was another house where we had some friends. And even though we've never been as poor as we were then, and never as anxious or as much waiting for the next thing as we were then, we would gather together with our friends. We would share meals together. We would burn burgers on the grill, because we didn't know what we were doing. We would celebrate together, and we would pray together, all waiting for whatever it was that God had in store for us. And we look back on those months as some of the happiest times we had, because we were doing it with others, and we were being faithful to what God had asked us to do.
So if you were in a place of waiting today, know that you're not alone, and it doesn't have to be lonely. There are many, many folks who are also in that same place. If you feel discontent about where your life is right now, and you wish it would move or click forward in some way, don't believe the lie that you're by yourself. Do the next right thing, hang out with other Christians, and then pray together.
Response
So I invite you to close your eyes as the worship team comes forward. We're going to respond in song. And I just want to ask you two simple questions: What do you feel like God is saying to you today? And how are you going to respond? So as you close your eyes and take a deep breath, ask yourself those two questions. God, what are you saying to me today? And how do you want me to respond? Let me give you just a moment to chew on those questions.
Almighty God, we thank you that you are a God in the waiting places, that you are the God of the in-between, that you are the God who's not only ahead of us, not only behind us, not only above us and below us, but God, you are here with us in those long waiting moments. So God, I pray for the brothers and sisters here with me today, that wherever they are—if they are anticipating something new, or if they are looking back on what was, or if they are enjoying the moment that is—no matter where they are, that you would be there with them. God, would you help them to know how to respond? Equip them and empower them with your Holy Spirit—which we praise you is already in us and dwelling with us—to be the kinds of people you ask us to be, to be shaped into the image of your Son, Jesus, our Savior and Lord. And by the power of your Holy Spirit, God, may we be a church that's content with the waiting and looking forward to what is to come. I pray these things in your name. Amen.
This is a transcript of the sermon as preached, lightly edited for readability.
