“THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART”
Acts 1:1-11
(05-04-08) Ascension

This Sunday we mark the ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven after his resurrection. Many of us may not really give the ascension of Jesus a second thought,
nevermind a first,
but the reality of Jesus’ ascension into heaven was so important
that it was incorporated into the early church creeds,
those initial statements of faith which tried in the best human language
to encapsulate the core of this nascent movement.
“On the third day, he rose again, he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come again to judge the living and the dead.”
That’s what the Apostle’s Creed confesses.
In many ways the ascension symbolizes our ultimate hope in being united with God,
that just as Jesus was taken up into heaven,
so also we will find our eternal home there.

I can’t imagine what it must have been like that ascension day.
The gospel writer Luke, who is also the author of the book of the Acts of the Apostles, writes that after Jesus’ resurrection,
he presented himself to his disciples
and gave them many convincing proofs that he was alive.
During those forty days Jesus appeared to them and spoke about the kingdom of God. Not long before he was taken up into heaven,
when they were gathered together in Jerusalem,
Jesus ordered the disciples not to leave Jerusalem,
but to wait there for the promise of the Father,
for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Now why would Jesus command the disciples to wait?
Why was it necessary for them to wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit?
Wasn’t it enough that they had seen the resurrected Christ?
Well, the text tells us plainly why it was necessary for the disciples to wait.
For three years Jesus had ministered among the disciples.
He had taught them about himself and about the kingdom of God.
He had modeled for them a new paradigm of power,
one that finds strength in weakness,
one that shows love in service,
one that embodies true life in sacrificial death.
He had not been the conquering messiah that many had longed for,
at least not in a worldly sense,
he had given of his life on the cross.
But he had also risen from the dead,
he had overcome all that life and death could throw at him,
he had won the final victory over the forces of sin and darkness.
And yet, even now, even after he had shown himself after his resurrection,
even now, the disciples still didn’t get it.
They asked Jesus,
“Lord, is this the time you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
They still didn’t get it!
They didn’t get it that it wasn’t Jesus’ agenda to restore the kingdom to Israel.
Its not until the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit
that their agenda begins to follow God’s agenda.

For us today as well, aren’t there many times
when our agenda doesn’t always correlate with God’s plans?
And so like the disciples we sometimes have to learn to wait.
We have to wait for the power of the Holy Spirit to come upon us
and often we have to wait even when the Spirit is received,
for the Spirit to guide us through a time of discernment
so that we can know where God is headed
and how we might best fit into God’s agenda.
But we are not good waiters, are we?
The waiting is often the hardest part.
Some of that may be a function of our human nature,
but there is a large part of our impatience with waiting
that is conditioned into us by the nature of our society.
We are not very accustomed to waiting
and we are getting more and more impatient by the day.
So much of modern life seems to be built around the idea of immediacy.
Why are lotteries so addictive to so many?
Its about getting rich quick,
about bypassing the hard work of building up, saving up, over time.
How fast is your computer,
if you bought one last week, there’s no doubt one out this week is even faster.
Why are similar homes in the inner city more expensive than those in the suburbs? Because of location, they are closer to the business core and save driving time.
We get where we want to get quicker.
Drive thru’s for food, for banking, for dry cleaning,
and in Las Vegas, for weddings and divorces.
Think about all the advertisements for quick weight loss.
Take this pill, do this programme, eat this food.
Everything but the slow and steady, tried and true method
of eating less and exercising more.
That takes too long!
So much in our society is built around the concept of speed, of immediacy.

But when it comes to God, we find ourselves no longer the ones in control.
God doesn’t seem to know our busy schedules.
And for a lot of us, that’s a pretty frustrating conclusion to arrive at.
When it comes to God, the waiting is often the hardest part.
When things are going well for us,
well, it seems that God is doing exactly what God should be doing.
But when things start to go sideways,
when things don’t go as we would like them to,
that’s when God seems to be very hard to find,
where God’s presence seems impossible to discern,
when we question whether God truly knows about our pain,
hears our prayers, can answer our needs.

Maybe that’s why faith is so hard for our generation,
we have no patience, we find it so hard to wait.
We are a generation who are told
that we can have what we want, when we want, how we want it.
Church and religion is very much the same.
If you don’t like a particular church, why then go somewhere else.
No need to try to work it through,
just find one that suits your taste or meets your expectations.
Don’t like your particular religion,
then we have a plethora of other faiths at our beck and call to try out.
Why put up with a God who seems to have dull ears,
when we can carve out a God in our image
who is just waiting for us to tell him what we want, and how we want it.

But I know that for most of us here this morning,
we are people of more depth and substance than that.
Most of us truly struggle at times with having to wait for God.
Why does God seem to make us wait?
We know how difficult it can be to wait.
We know what its like to pray and not seem to get an answer.
How many of us have prayed for something
and it seems that we have not received God’s reply?
And I’m not talking about frivolous prayers.
I’m talking about prayers for healing, prayers for change,
prayers for new doors to open, prayers for peace.
And how many times have we sought out God’s direction for our lives
only to find that God isn’t as clear or as timely
as we would so desperately like him to be.
We come to a fork in the road and pray that God would show us which way to go,
And…nothing.
We find ourselves in a situation, a dilemma,
where we pray that God might provide us with an inkling of what we should be doing, and…we get no sign.

When life hurts and we need God, why does God seem to make us wait?
I think that the answer is,
that often, it is in the waiting
that we find out something profound about God and about ourselves.
Its only by waiting for God, waiting for the gift of the Holy Spirit,
that the disciples are able to finally let go of their agenda
and embrace God’s plans for them.
Its only by waiting for God
that they finally begin to truly understand the nature of Jesus’ ministry.
Only after waiting for God are they able to let go of their expectation of the messiah
as the one who would restore the kingdom to Israel
and realize that Jesus the messiah
came to restore the kingdom of God to all people.
Jesus came to restore us to God himself.
Only after waiting for God did the disciples understand
what their role would be in this reconciling ministry.
Only in their waiting for God,
only after the gift of the Holy Spirit,
did the disciples change in their own nature,
from those who expected things to be done for them
to a people who would be willing to be used by God to do things for others,
for the sake of God’s kingdom.

The waiting is the hardest part,
but it is in our waiting that our character is formed and our faith deepened.
It is in waiting that we come to understand
how little control we actually have in life
and how much control God has,
and what a great comfort that fact actually is for us!

I think of an image that we shared at the Men’s Bible Study,
that of a father who goes for a walk around a lake at their cottage
with his one year old infant son strapped to his back in one of those baby carriers.
As the walk begins the morning is beautiful, the sun is bright.
But when they reach the midpoint of the walk,
at the farthest point from the cottage,
the clouds appear and soon it begins to rain.
The father turns around and pulls up the hood of the baby’s jacket on the head of his son. But as they continue their walk home and the rain begins to build,
his son manages to pull the hood off.
And before you know it he begins to scream as the rain soaks him.
The father stops and takes the baby off his back and cradles him close to his chest,
and for the rest of the walk home the father whispers to the child,
I love you buddy, we’re gonna make it, dad knows the way home.
I love you buddy, we’re gonna make it, dad knows the way home.
(Nooma, Rain, Rob Bell)

In our waiting it often seems that our lives are mired in rain.
And because our perspective is so immediate,
it seems that all we can see is the rain.
When it rains on us, there seems to be nothing but the rain,
and it seems to rain a lot.
But God sees what we can’t see.
God’s perspective is so much bigger and larger than ours.
In our waiting we learn that we have so little control,
but maybe we also learn that God still has the control
and because God does, we find comfort, we find hope, we find peace.
God takes us in the midst of the rain
and he holds us close to his heart and he whispers to us,
I love you, we’re gonna make it, I know the way home.

In our waiting we learn that God knows what he’s doing.
We learn that even our sufferings can help us deepen our faith,
not only in the present life, but more importantly,
faith for the eternal life which is God’s promise to us in Jesus Christ.
Let’s be clear.
As precious and as profound as this life is and can be,
if we only focus our faith in God for this life,
then that’s just one more example of our sense of immediacy.
We need to grow in faith,
to look beyond the immediate needs of this life,
to the hope of the eternal life God has promised in Jesus Christ.
That promise is no clearer anywhere than in the words of our scripture this morning. While the disciples were listening to Jesus
speak about waiting for the promise of the Holy Spirit,
he was taken up before their very eyes.
Then, as they were still looking up into the sky,
two angels suddenly appeared and stood by them.
Why do you stand here looking up into the sky?
The same Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven,
will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.
This same Jesus,
the one who has come for us and saved us from the power of sin and death,
this same Jesus will come for us again.
God knows the way home
and in our waiting we learn to trust in the God who sees far more than we do,
whose perspective is far greater than ours,
whose agenda of love for us far dwarfs our agendas,
whose care for us is eternal and precious.

I don’t know what you’re waiting for.
I don’t know what you’re praying for.
It might be healing from an illness, it might be healing from brokenness,
broken relationships, broken trust, broken plans, broken hopes.
It might be direction for future choices, changes in people, changes in us.
I don’t know how or when God may answer your prayers,
but I do know this, God does hear and God does care.
And in those moments when we think that we are all alone,
God is the one who carries us close to his heart and whispers to us,

I love you, we’re going to make it, I know the way home.