Wait...Wait...Wait!

Wait…Wait…Wait!

Acts 1:1-5

I have a black lab who lives for one thing and one thing only.  Sure…walks are nice.  She loves her people, too.  Of course, if there is something dead or disgusting on the trail, well, she will roll in it and you will swear she’s smiling from ear to ear.  However, when all is said and done, my girlfriend is always on guard for any evidence of…chicken.  She can smell it from a mile away.  She can literally be chasing a deer at top speed.  If, while she is running, you quietly whisper the word, “Chicken…” she will veer away from the deer and make a beeline back to you. 

This is why, when there is a roasted chicken in the oven, she will be glued to my side:  “Whither thou goest, I will go,” it says in the Book of Ruth.  Of course, Karma doesn’t know that.  She just knows that sooner or later, before the night is done, she will have chicken of her own.  She has to wait while it warms in the oven. She has to wait until her humans finish their dinner.  She has to wait while the dishes are done.  Then, all you have to do is make eye contact.  She begins to wiggle.  Her tail whips back and forth.  With the slightest movement on my part, she tears off for her bowl.

Once she’s at that bowl, she hovers.  Then, I ask her to back up which she reluctantly does.  I ask her to sit.  As time, itself, suddenly seems to come to a stop, we simply pause together for the extra beat or two or ten.  Finally, I put the chicken in her bowl.  She lunges toward the bowl and I say that word she hates… “No! Wait…Wait…Wait…”

There’s a really funny set of Youtube videos of dog owners putting down what the dog thinks will be their usual full bowl of dog food but this time they’ve only put one piece of kibble in the bowl.  The challenge is to film the dog’s reaction.  My favorite dog is a terrier.  It takes one look at the single piece of kibble and then lunges in attack mode at the owner!)

“Wait…Wait…Wait!” Last week, we talked about the seekers, the folks who are spiritual but not religious, who believe in God but don’t necessarily believe in the church.  I told you that I think they have truths to tell us that we need to hear. One of those truths is that God and spirit-filled experiences are not the sole property of religious institutions.  Rather, from the beginning of human beings. the presence of God has been woven into the very fabric of life.  Learning how to wait is an example of such a universal experience.  You can be a Muslim or a Jew, a Christian or a Buddhist, or a “none of the above.”  Regardless, you’re going to have to come to grips with waiting. You might even learn to do it well.  You might even learn that meaning can be made while you wait…

So far, we’ve made the case for two things when it comes to waiting.  First, sometimes the value of waiting is that the pause allows us to empty ourselves.  It is possible to just get going so fast, to be thrashing so hard through your day, to be so full of what happened five minutes ago or five days ago, that we can’t be where we are.  In the words of the Tao Te Ching, “Who can make the muddy water clear?  Let the water calm and it becomes clear.”

As parents, we recognized this when we learned our children’s ways so well that we knew when they were simply overloaded.  What did we do?  If they were acting out, we gave them a time out, maybe because we believed that they might think things through but mostly because we knew that they couldn’t take another thing in.  Like the glass that is full not only to the top of the rim but actually slightly above that rim, all it would take is one more drop to cause a flood.  Over time, we hope to help them learn to step back before they get so full, to breathe, to take a break.  Of course, more often than not, taking that step back also remains our challenge, especially given that almost no one loves us enough any more to look us in the eye and say, “Buddy, you’re in time out!” (Can you imagine how we’d slam our foot down and cry out, “For how long?” Or, maybe we’d be so relieved, we’d just thank them!)

“Wait…Wait…Wait!”  Essentially, the disciples have been in time out for a while now.  It’s not like they are in the corner with their noses against the wall.  However, they have been told to wait in Jerusalem.  For once, they are doing what they were told to do.  They worship.  They pray.  They hang out together in that upper room.  Someone probably whistles when things get too quiet.  Someone probably taps their toe.  

The thing is that they don’t really know what’s next.  Sure, Jesus told them that they would be “Clothed with power,” which sounds awesome but doesn’t really fill in a lot of details.  What they actually know is that life is about to fundamentally change—again.  This is another of those universal human moments.  Change is coming.  We can feel it in our bones.  However, we can also hear life saying to us, “Not yet!”  If we’ve done the hard work of calming ourselves and emptying ourselves, then we can make can make use of our time by sorting things out.  We get to remember how many times we’ve been through change before.  We get to remember that many times, the changes that we couldn’t imagine made all sorts of sense once the change finally arrived.  We get to remind ourselves that things in life are rarely random. 

f we just think about the disciples for a moment, we can see this. Like every other human being, they had changed from the moment they were conceived.  They were born and became infants who crawled into childhood who ran their way into adulthood.  Things had always been changing and yet there was a sense of continuity. They had just—more or less—always been about the business—more or less—of being who they had always been—more or less.  (We can all tell our stories of when we were, more or less, ourselves, right?)  Like the rest of us, things happened to them that challenged them to the core:  they fell in love; they lost people they loved; they had great victories and crushing defeats.  All of these experiences changed them. Finally, a blizzard of changes started on the day they first met Jesus and on every day that followed.  Hearing him teach and preach, changed them.  Watching him heal people and care for the lost and the lonely, changed them.  Watching him bravely ride toward Jerusalem, changed them.  Then, there was the day they watched him die.

You would think that by the time the risen Jesus promised them yet another change, change would have been old hat, right?  However, I think they were thoroughly stumped.  “Clothed in power?”  Of course, the whole time they had been with him, they had been in the presence of an out-of-this-world power.  This wasn’t the power of a judge who could sentence someone to die.  This wasn’t the power of a priest, who could pass judgement on God’s behalf on anyone.  No, Jesus’ power rested in the way he moved in the world, in the way he treated the people he met. This power was harnessed when things lined up in the way you knew God would line them up and people did the things that God would have them do.  It was what Jesus kept calling, “The Kingdom of God.”

When people shared the food that they had, it turned out that there was more than enough.  It was a miracle but was it really a surprise?  All people had to do was share…

When Jesus invited himself to dinner at the home of the despised tax collector, Zacchaeus, lives were changed.  A liar and a cheat turned into an honest follower.  It was a miracle, but was it really a surprise? All that tax collector needed was for someone to see him through God’s eyes.  That’s a powerful thing…

When ten lepers cried out for help—for healing—it turned out all they needed was for someone to listen and actually care.  It was a miracle, but was it really a surprise? Maybe the only surprise was when. given a whole new complexion and a whole new lease on life, one of them actually returned to say thank you. I turns out that man was one beautiful soul long before his skin cleared.

Miracles happen. Change happens.  However, those miracles and changes are rarely a total surprise.  In fact, usually, the only reason we’re surprised is because we were just stubbornly looking at things the wrong way.  Why would God’s son challenge the powers that be instead of being the most powerful?  Oh ya…that was Moses heading to Pharaoh right?  That was David staring down Goliath, wasn’t it?  That’s how God has always rolled. 

Why would Jesus come to show us how to live?  Well, if you think about it, giving us rules to live by hadn’t worked out so well, had it?  God boiled things down to ten rules and we couldn’t keep track of them.  God gave us prophets to remind us of the rules.  We had a tendency to attack the prophets.  God tried to tell us what to do.  Then, like everyone of us who have tried to tell someone how to do something, God nudges us slightly to the side and says, “Here…let me show you how.”  Sooner or later, when all else fails, we turn to the person we’re trying to teach and say, “Here…watch this.” We’ve all been the person who desperately watches our teacher’s every move, knowing, full well, that we’ve barely got a chance.

Here’s the thing we know that the disciples knew, too:  sometimes even when someone tells you what to do, even when someone shows you what to do, we still don’t get it.  We get frustrated with ourselves. We act out our frustration and make things worse.  We begin to feel like somehow our worth as human beings is on the line.  And in the quiet of that moment, we ask ourselves, “What’s left to try?”

That’s where the change comes in.  Once you see it, it makes sense.  God had been larger-than-life, and wholly other and offering us instructions from mountain tops. Later, God had become one of us, someone we could listen to and follow and emulate.  We listened for a while, then we turned away.  Finally, having been beyond us and having been beside us, God is about to move inside us, into our hearts and minds and into the world around us in the most intimate of ways.  The God who had, our ancestors tell us, moved across the face of the earth as Spirit was about to be the Spirit who inspires us and empowers us to actually move in the world in Christ’s way. 

Again…this makes sense if you really think about it.  Without even thinking about church, just life, we recognize moments when we are moved by our consciences to be our better selves. Later, someone pops into our awareness at exactly the moment when they need us which we will discover if we follow through and call them to find out what’s going on.  Or, we all have been moved by the plight of someone who is half a world away but who we know is just as much of a child of God as we are.  This is how life works when we don’t get in God’s way.  Spirit is the counselor, the one who inspires us. Spirit whispers to us constantly…

This would have made sense to the disciples, too.  They had been empowered just by being in Jesus’ presence.  He sent them out at one point to heal and preach and teach, on their own.  They felt for themselves how the Spirit worked.  Later, he challenged them when the crowds were hungry, “You do something.” What if, this time, the Spirit was about to move in and stay, for good?

They didn’t know it yet but change—huge change—was just a few days away.  If only they could hold on and wait a bit longer…