Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 4, 2008

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

The earliest Christians thought that their world was a mess. Indeed, in many ways it was a mess. The Roman Empire, the mightiest empire the world had ever known up to that time, ruled their world with an iron fist. There were to be sure some benefits from Roman rule. The Roman emperors didn’t make the trains run on time the way their remote successor and would-be imitator Mussolini did. There were no trains. But the emperors did the first century equivalent of making the trains run on time. They built roads that connected all parts of the Empire. And they managed, for a time at least, to keep those roads rather safe. They brought the most advanced technology of the day to remote corners of the Empire. They had a legal system that was, within the limits of Imperial rule, quite rational and workable. There were indeed advantages to living under Roman rule.

But those advantages came at a terrible price. The Romans maintained peace through the massive and brutal application of force. They had used it against Jesus in the same way and for the same reasons that they used it against countless other people, most of whom we’ve never heard of and never will. The Romans demanded absolute obedience to and even worship of the Emperor. Anyone who didn’t go along was suspect at best and treated as a criminal at worst. There was a kind of peace in the Empire, but there was very little freedom. The early Christians felt the crushing power of the Roman boot, and they didn’t like it.

Yet they knew that they couldn’t do anything about it. They were a small group of people, and they were utterly powerless in the face of Roman might. So the early Christians turned to God. They hoped that God would step in and do something about the mess the world was in. They actually expected that God would do something about it. They expected God to break into the world, destroy the Roman Empire (or at least kick it out of the Jewish homeland), and usher in God’s kingdom of justice, and of peace through justice rather than peace through terror.

This hope, and even to some extent this expectation, is in some ways understandable. We’d all like to see God intervene and clean up the mess that our world is in too. We’d like to see God step in and do all the things we can’t seem to do—stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. End the threat of terrorism. Solve global warming. End world hunger. Bring peace to Israel/Palestine. It really would be great if God would do all that, wouldn’t it? So we can understand the early Christians’ desire for the Second Coming of Christ and the creation of the Kingdom of God on earth through divine intervention.

Even Jesus’ closest disciples thought that that was what he was going to do, if not during his lifetime then immediately upon his resurrection. We see them thinking that way in our reading this morning from Acts. In that reading the risen Christ has appeared to his disciples in Jerusalem. In the verses just before our reading he has promised his disciples that they would soon be “baptized with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 1:5 NRSV) So the disciples know that something significant is about to happen. They know what they want to have happen, so they ask him: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 2:6) They meant the question literally. They meant it politically and even militarily. They knew that Jesus was the Messiah, but they didn’t know what it meant for him to be the Messiah. They were stuck in an old way of thinking that expected the Messiah to be a military leader who would restore the very worldly kingdom of David, which had existed one thousand years earlier. Theirs is a worldly expectation. Even though they had spent a lot of time with Jesus, and even though they had known him risen from the dead, they were still trapped in that old, worldly way of thinking.

In Acts Jesus doesn’t directly refute their expectation of how God will act in the world. He deflects that expectation more than he disabuses them of it. He says: “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” (Acts 1:7 NRSV) Don’t worry about God restoring the kingdom to Israel, he’s saying. That’s not for you to know. Then he tells them what is for them to know. He tells them what God will do. God will send them the Holy Spirit. Jesus says: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you….” (Acts 1:8 NRSV) He’s saying: Don’t trouble yourselves with whether or not God is going to restore the kingdom to Israel. In other words, don’t worry about God providing a worldly solution to the world’s problems. Instead, concern yourself with what God will do. God will send you the Holy Spirit. That’s how God works. That’s what you should expect from God.

The truth is that God doesn’t work the way the disciples wanted God to work, the way we’d often like God to work. It’s probably easier for us to see that God doesn’t work that way than it was for the first disciples. Two thousand years have passed since their time,, and God has never worked that way in the world. We know that, and they didn’t. Jesus knew it though. God acts by being present with us through the Holy Spirit, not by adopting the world’s ways of violence, not by destroying enemies, but by building up the faithful of all times and places through God’s Holy Spirit.

We hear essentially the same thing using different words in our reading this morning from the Gospel of John. There, as he nears the end of his life on earth, Jesus says that his role has been to give “eternal life” to people. Most of us probably think that that means that his role is to get us to unending life in heaven. But that’s not what our text this morning says. After Jesus has said that he is about giving people eternal life, he says what eternal life is. He says: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3 NRSV) What Jesus give us is neither a restored kingdom of David nor a free pass to heaven, or at least not only a free pass to heaven. What Jesus primarily gives us is life in the Holy Spirit, which is life in the knowledge of God through Jesus Christ.

And that truth has enormous consequences. God changes us through the Holy Spirit and our knowledge of God in Christ, but it is up to us to change the world. The world certainly does need changing, and God certainly does want it changed; but changing it is pretty clearly a job God has left up to us. All those things that we want to see happen in the world aren’t going to happen unless we do them. God is not going to descend from heaven and put a stop to all the fighting and injustice in the world. God is not going to use miracles to feed the hungry people in the world. God is not going to stop global warming. Those are things that only we can do. Jesus did not restore the kingdom to Israel. God doesn’t intervene in the world like that. God leaves the creation of systems of peace and justice up to us.

God leaves those things up to us, but God does not leave us to do them alone. God is with us as we do them. God is with us as the Holy Spirit, as Acts says. God is with us in our knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, as John says. God is with us prodding us, encouraging us, inspiring us. God is there to give us inner peace in the face of what seem like impossible tasks. God is there to comfort us when we fail and to forgive us when we fail to try. God is there to give us the wisdom to know what to do and the courage to do it.

So. Is this the time? No, if what you mean by the question is whether this is the time when Jesus will restore the kingdom to Israel, the time when God will intervene in the world and make right we seem always to make wrong. There never will be such a time. God doesn’t work that way. But is this nonetheless the time? Yes, if what you mean by the question is whether this is the time for us to undertake God’s work of peace and justice in the world. It is always that time. Yes, if you mean is this the time when God is with us through the Holy Spirit. It is always that time. Yes, if you mean is this the time when we can have eternal life in the knowledge of the one true God and of Jesus Christ whom God has sent. It is always that time.

So. Is this the time? Yes. This is our time. Yes. This is God’s time. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for. This is the moment when God calls us to action, and it is the moment when God promises to be with us when we respond to that call. So let’s get on with it. It is always the time, and the time always requires urgent action. With God’s help, we can do it. Amen.