“You Shall Be My Witnesses” Acts 1:1-11

Sometime the Sunday after Easter can feel like a letdown. The sanctuary may not have the same feel as last week. Perhaps we were able to gather with loved ones who have since went home. We aren’t sure what to do with this Sunday after such a big celebration. 

In the Christian calendar, while Easter is the day when we celebrate that Christ rose from the grave, we also celebrate the season of Eastertide from Easter Sunday until Ascension Sunday. Now, I’m going to possibly confuse us - this text that we are hearing today - it’s one that is usually read at the end of the Easter season - on Ascension Sunday. But as we have said several times, all Scripture can be read and proclaimed any time - so today we enter into the book of Acts. 

Last week, we gathered together and proclaimed the heart of our faith - Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected, but Luke tells us in the book of Acts that there is even more to the story. After Jesus was resurrected, he walked with his disciples, continuing to teach them. But he could not stay on this earth with them forever. He needed to ascend into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father and assume the Lordship we know he has over heaven and earth. So we do not just claim Jesus crucified and resurrected, we also proclaim that Jesus is Lord. 

And if we are honest, there are times that we aren’t quite sure what to do with that statement. 

For the first disciples, Jesus gave them very clear instructions - stay in Jerusalem and wait for the gift that has been promised to you - the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. 

They are asked to do an incredibly difficult thing - to stay in the place where Jesus had been put to death not to long ago. The place where they hid for their lives after his crucifixion. And now Jesus is telling them to stay for an indeterminate amount of time without him. They must have felt like they had just gotten Jesus back with them and now he is talking about leaving again. Not just talking, but literally leaving before their very eyes!

The disciples don’t seem to yet understand Jesus as Lord because instead of following his instructions they are caught with their eyes gazing up to heaven instead of going out to do as they told them. Until two angels show up and ask what they are doing.

Sometimes I am blessed to work with pastors who desire to be ordained. There are lots of different components to that work and twice you need to write thesis papers about what you believe about things we say as a Church that are central to who we are. One of those questions is about Jesus as Lord. 

And folks get stuck. 

Not because they don’t have the words - they have lots of words to describe Jesus’s Lordship, but because they haven’t yet distilled those words from head to heart. And I don’t blame folks at all when they struggle with that, because it is so true of many of us here and now today, just as it was with those early disciples. It is easy to say that Jesus is Lord, it is harder to follow him, especially when he asks us to do hard things or doesn’t give us all the details that we desire. 

The disciples were living in this between time. Between the resurrection and what was to come next. Between what they now know - Jesus is standing with then and has been walking with them for the last several weeks - and the unknown of Jesus saying that he is leaving again. How do you think the disciples received this news? I would guess that they were disappointed and that this holy space of the between time felt all-to-short. 

The reality is that the disciples were still shortsighted when it came to Jesus’s Lordship. They ask this question - “are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” In other words, are you going to be the leader that we expect? Are you going to do what we want you to do? 

And Jesus tells them that isn’t for them to know. 

Their vision is too small. They still think Lordship is about the here-and-now, overthrowing the Roman government, when Jesus is trying to show them what his Lordship is about. That he is in the business of transforming the world and that they are invited to be part of that work. 

And yet, they can’t even follow the first instruction. 

Because Lordship asks them to surrender their ideas and inklings and actually follow Jesus. 

Last week we read together the first eight verses of Mark 16, which is some ways felt like a very unsatisfying resurrection proclamation. The women were afraid. They didn’t go and tell. But the later writings of Mark added a more robust explanation, where Jesus appeared to the disciples again and again and told them to go and preach the Gospel. And then what comes next sounds similar to Acts 1 -  “After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God” But they also did the work in Mark’s text. They went and proclaimed, preaching everywhere and performing signs that accompanied the words. They did the work of witnessing and glorying Christ. 

The work that we are still called to today. 

In some ways it feels like we are living in our own between time. Between looking up with the disciples and not really following Jesus’s directions as our Lord and Savior in Acts 1 and witnessing to Christ as our Lord in Mark 16. Between hoping that we misheard Jesus when he asks us to do hard things and actually following him to the very ends of the earth. Between hoping that someone else will do the Kingdom work for us and trusting Christ to lead us into the work that we are called to do. 

But in order to move out of that between season we need to examine what it means to say that Jesus is Lord. To proclaim that Jesus as Lord lives on in the church through the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Which means we need to do that work of moving from our head to our heart. I once had a congregation member named Mr. Jack, who was so, so wise. Two things that he has said, amongst many, that have stuck with me are ‘you can’t be so heavenly minded that you aren’t any earthly good.’ And ‘the most dangerous place to be is the eight or so inches between your head and your heart.’ We can’t be caught with the disciples just looking up at the clouds instead of following Jesus as Lord. And we can’t be so caught up in our heads that we never actually proclaim Jesus is Lord with our hearts. When we get caught in those in-between places, well, it makes it hard to do what we are asked - to go and be Jesus’s witnesses to the fact that he is the resurrected Lord! Amen.