Look Up

Acts 1:6-14

It’s been forty days since the resurrection.

Long enough that it’s starting to seem normal to have the risen Jesus popping in, long enough that we’ve stopped being breathless with revelation and think we’ve really gotten it, this time, gotten all these things that Jesus was teaching about.

And Jesus has instructed us to wait right here for an immersion of the Holy Spirit, coming soon.

So it must mean that at last, it’s time for the thing we’ve been waiting for since we met Jesus.

Finally, finally, Jesus is going to restore God’s will to the workings of our world, and all the mess that people have made of things will be washed away and the world will work right, with real justice and real peace, an end to violence and fear, no more dead children, and a glorious abundance that will free everyone from anxiety and need.

Because that’s what the pouring out of God’s Spirit means, if you read the prophets, right?

So, gathered together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

God is going to fix the world, now, finally, right?

Right?

“Not now,” says Jesus. “And you’re not going to know when. Instead, the Holy Spirit will empower you to tell my story, here and everywhere.”

(Oh, Jesus, really? I don’t need more work. It’s a holiday weekend!)

But before anyone quite has time to digest this, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. And their eyes are drawn upward with him, watching, watching, fixed on the sky, even after he’s gone much too far for their sight.

They stand there, gazing up toward heaven,

stand looking up,

just looking,

in a way that invites comment from the messengers sent to remind them that Jesus will come again.

You know, we don’t look up a lot, at least once we’re as tall as we’re going to get.

More often, we look ahead; we look at what’s in front of us, we look where we are going.

When we need to change our perspective, we look around a bit, we look back sometimes,

but rarely UP,

straight up,

gazing toward heaven.

And where we look has an effect on what we know, what we think, what we expect, of others, of ourselves, of God.

Many years ago, trudging through wintry Chicago streets on my way to work, I heard an echo in my head of some recent sermon I’d heard or book I’d read, urging me to look up.  I don’t remember any more why the preacher or the author told me to do this. What I do remember is that I raised my head and eyes and discovered an incredible sense of space. The sky was full of layers of cloud and light that were nothing like the flat dull gray of a winter morning at ground level.

And that sense of space lingered when I turned my eyes back to the crowded, slushy streets. There was more light around the people walking toward me. The slushy sidewalk no longer seemed like a narrow and treacherous path, but like an open road – with room for mis-steps and detours.

It was odd, not at all what I’d expected, but something about looking up, about seeing that openness and unexpected light, made me more open, more generous all day: toward others, toward myself, toward the mundane challenges of everyday life: long lines, crowded trains, irritated (irritating!) coworkers, stubborn computers. It was as if the space I saw above me made more space in the crowded busyness of everyday life.

So that winter, I kept looking up.
I’d pause on my morning commute, or while running errands, and just look in an unusual direction: at clouds or icy blue, into snow flurries or sunshine, at the way that buildings and trees and infrastructure look different where they meet the sky than where they meet the solid earth, or in my ordinary line of sight.

And I kept feeling that sense of generous space, even indoors. Kept seeing my coworkers and fellow commuters and the physical world – cars and streets, desks and keyboards – with different eyes. Not all the time, but in little flashes of openness. I even discovered that I prayed a little differently, with more joy and thanksgiving, and a little less (just a little less) that my will be done.

But then I got out of the habit of looking up.

It rained for a while; I got busy with other things.

Gazing up requires stopping our forward progress for a moment, requires that we physically pause in making our own way, or let someone else drive. (Really let them drive, not that thing where I’m sort of not paying attention until I gasp and slam on an imaginary brake.
I bet we do that to God a lot, come to think of it.)

These days, I don’t look up very often.

We live in a world that wants us to drive, to keep moving forward, so I’m back to looking mostly ahead – driving, working, walking; in the grocery and in front of a computer, cleaning the kitchen or managing the commute.  I look around when I have a moment, and back when I need to. And I often look down when I’m walking, to avoid stepping on cat toys or sidewalk hazards.

And that’s where my attention goes. It goes where I look.

I pray for what’s in front of me: on the news, in conversation, in my email.

I ask God to fix the world as I see it: to smooth the things I’m likely to trip over, to make the world work right as I make my way through it, with justice and real peace, to heal what makes me cry right now, for freedom from fear and need. I pray, like the disciples after the resurrection, for Christ to restore God’s kingdom now, in the world in front of me: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”

And Jesus, again, always, says, “No, not exactly. The Holy Spirit is about to empower you to be my witnesses, to tell my story, God’s story, about the healing and glorification of the world.

If the disciples were much like us, they didn’t feel ready to be witnesses; didn’t feel like they knew enough to tell God’s story, or were pretty sure no one around them really wanted to know.

But maybe that’s only how it looks if we are looking ahead at our own work, when we are staying in our lane; praying for the healing and salvation of what’s in front of us while God is doing something that just isn’t visible from this angle.

So even as Jesus says that to the disciples, even as he tells them he’s handing over the story to them, he is lifted up, pulling their attention heavenward, leaving them looking up to the sky. Looking up, into spaciousness, boundlessness, layers of cloud and light.

I don’t know if the world looked different to the disciples when they finally brought their eyes down, when they looked again at one another and at their road back in to Jerusalem; if they found a new sense of spaciousness in their everyday world, saw new light in those around them.

But I suspect that looking up is essential to prepare us for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, to create the spaciousness inside us for the Spirit to kindle with fire and joy.

Because looking up requires us to pause, to stop our self-determined forward progress; to let God drive. And once we stop – once we stop steering, even for a minute – we make it easy to become witnesses, to be the ones who see and describe God’s way. And instead of more work, we find we are invited on a glorious ride; an adventure, a delight.

So look up with me this week, will you?
Look up, as we wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, soon.

Pause for a moment and look up,

look really up,

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and see.

The Empty Space

Acts 17:22-31, John 14:15-21

How do you find God in the middle of the pagan marketplace?

How do you find God in things like, oh, cable news? a profoundly secular workplace?

among a thicket of family, friends, or neighbors who can’t understand what you get out of going to church and haven’t the faintest interest in learning – because golf or youth athletics or the beauty of nature or therapy or yoga meets their needs for community and meaning. (And besides, they’ll tell you, in those places, no one critiques your moral choices about birth control or gets excited about which kinds of families are legal.)

It’s easier to be an atheist – or at least agnostic – in the world outside our church doors, for most people, including many of us who come here every Sunday.

Some of us are blessed with the ability to see God in everything from a child’s laughter to the bee trapped in your office; from cancer to the grocery store checkout line, every day.

But not all of us. Not me, actually.

I do spot God in those sorts of things occasionally, but a good 75% of my life, I realize I’m not even looking, and so the presence of God in traffic or the mall or Facebook goes past unnoticed.

Many of us – possibly even most of us – aren’t actually looking for God in our secular worlds. We know we can find God when we look in church, in the Bible, in a few trusted people. So why worry in the rest of the world?

But the witness of scripture – and of generations of God’s faithful – is that if we aren’t looking, or aren’t noticing, we are seriously missing out. Missing out on grace for ourselves, and the opportunity to change the world without trying too hard.

Take Paul, today, for instance.

He’s been wandering around Athens, seeing the sights while he waits for his fellow missionaries to catch up to him, and he’s “deeply distressed” that the city is full of idols. He’s awash in the evidence that nobody seems to need the God he knows, the Lord who changed his life.

But finally in his frustrated tourist wanderings, he comes across one empty altar labeled: “To an unknown God.”

Now, he could see in that just more evidence of indifference and idolatry, but Paul sees God. Our God; the God made known to us in Jesus. And now he has the grace of God’s presence right there in the midst of ungodliness, and evidence of God’s presence that he can share, that will affect the world around him.

But most of the time, the presence of God in our pagan marketplace, in your and my day-to-day life, isn’t labeled at all, much less with any reference to God, named or unknown. So we have to train our eyes and hearts to look beyond the obvious.

That starts with believing it matters to find God outside the walls of the church and the words of the Bible. We have to believe it matters with our whole hearts and minds and souls – enough to risk disappointment and foolishness and failure as we go looking – not just believe it as a good idea.

If you are content to find God only here, an hour or two a week, or in the Bible, take the rest of the sermon off, and go get coffee.

If you’re still here, if you believe that it truly matters to encounter and respond to God wherever we go, well, just as your mother or your coach or your teacher told you, practice makes perfect.

This Lent, some of us made a point of looking for moments of God in each day, and telling one another about them. It’s a habit that gets easy once you get it formed, but it can also be a habit that limits where we look, if we are not careful.

Most of my God-moments this Lent, and most of the ones I heard about from you, were moments where joy or generosity or peace was suddenly and unexpectedly evident. This is the way we have been taught (when we’ve been taught at all) to recognize God at work in the world Two thousand years ago, Paul told the church in Galatia that the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And to this day, those things provide joyful and solid evidence of God and God’s work bubbling away in all sorts of secular places.

But how many of you live lives where most of what you see and interact with – in the “marketplace” of commuting, sports, work, neighbors…on TV and the internet – is peaceful, kind, gentle, generous, loving, and joyful?

Where even half of what you encounter is that way?

The good news is that good news isn’t the only way to see where God is and what God is doing in the world. Coach and missionary Greg Finke writes that we can spot God at work even more certainly when things are going wrong. When we see a fellow human being in despair, or in need of healing, or struggling with the well-disguised forces of sin and evil that drag our hearts and attention away from God, “wherever hope and redemption are needed,” he says, “you can be sure of this: Jesus is present and working nearby.”*

We know this, Finke assures us, because redemption is the work that Jesus never, ever stops doing, whether we notice or not, whether we help or not, whether we care or not.

Have you seen that?

Have you seen that great need for healing, for hope, for redemption? In the life of a neighbor, a stranger? yourself, someone you love?

If you have seen the need, then you have seen the evidence that Jesus is near, at work, working healing and salvation.

And now I remember that even though I am used to looking for joy and peace to see God, I have found more powerful evidence of what God is up to in people’s lives when I am face to face with their needs for hope and redemption - an encounter as simple as asking how I can be praying for them.

The deep yearning of the human heart, the crying need for God in a human life, are like the blankness of that empty altar in Athens to an unknown God.

That emptiness, the gaping space itself is evidence of God already there, already at work, redeeming and making whole, inviting us to join in.

This truth echoes the promise Jesus makes to his disciples today, that after Jesus dies and ascends – when the one person to whom they can always turn to find the presence of God is suddenly and permanently absent from their lives – in that blank space, they can be sure, God is at work. The Holy Spirit: Advocate, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, is active and present, abiding with us forever.

The work of the Holy Spirit abiding with us now is to fill us with the truth that in those hungry, hurting times and places where the need for healing and hope are greatest, God is there, already at work, inviting us to join in, just as God is working in those radiant moments of joy, generosity, and peace.

And the Holy Spirit abiding in us prompts us to respond to this evidence of God’s work with all our hearts, by listening, by generosity, by praying, by loving.

Because when we look with heart and soul and eyes, for both the radiant joy and the deep yearning needs; when we see God at work and respond, others who are not even looking will find more than they knew how to seek, and God will be vividly revealed, healing and inspiring the world with and among and around us, everywhere, and every single day.

*Finke, Greg. Joining Jesus on His Mission, Tenth Power Publishing, 2014

What Sheep Know

John 10:1-10

Let’s talk about sheep, shall we?

It’s Sheep Sunday today – not a holiday you’re going to find on your average wall calendar (or smartphone app), but it comes around every year in the church, a few Sundays after Easter.

So let’s do a little word association: What comes to mind when you think about sheep?

How about “good listeners”?  Is that something you think about when someone talks about sheep?

It’s what Jesus thinks about sheep, it turns out.Did you hear him just now?

…the sheep hear [the shepherd’s] voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out…he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.

The thing about sheep – according to Jesus today – is that they know where they belong because they listen. Listen for the right voice, the voice they know.

There’s an intimacy to knowing a voice, even if it’s lost a bit in the age of almost universal CallerID. To know the voice on the other end of the line so well it can start in the middle of the conversation without any need of introduction. To recognize a voice when you are in the midst of stress, a voice you’ll respond to when you’re drowning, or half-asleep, or out of sight and mind.

That knowing – that recognition powerful enough to penetrate panic, or distraction, or any other fog and noise – comes from time spent together, time listening to one another, and from deep emotional connections – not universally happy feelings, but powerful.

It comes from love.

Whose voice do you know that way?
Whose voice do you hear often, that’s so familiar that you don’t even think about it?

Family members? maybe some co-workers? Maybe a particular voice on TV or the radio…

Sometimes those voices get so familiar that they fade to white noise, or we stop listening. (Your mother may have had something to say about that.)

That happens to us, sometimes, with the voice of God.

When the Bible all sort of starts to sound the same… and you can’t remember offhand without looking at your insert what the first lesson said this morning.

Or the Golden Rule or the Lord’s Prayer or the 23^rd Psalm or the words of the Eucharist don’t feel fresh, or relevant, or about what matters in life right now.

It happens, even with well-loved voices.

And probably, on some level, that’s how the sheep hear and know the voice of their shepherd. It’s a voice that’s familiar, comfortable, safe enough, that it provides a reassurance or guidepost you don’t have to think about too much, like making the turn into your own driveway after 20 years of living in the same place.

We need that familiarity with God’s voice: the kind of familiarity that we can follow when we’re not really paying attention. We get that familiarity from time and repetition, by reading the Bible, coming to church, to Sunday School (as student or teacher), by praying the prayers, over and over and over, and as we get that familiar with God’s voice, what we really need to hear will pop out of the familiarity, from time to time – if we keep showing up.

But that’s not the only way we need to know a voice.

Think now about whose voice would stop you in your tracks.

Whose voice do you think you would hear, in a coma, in your dreams?
Whose voice would you respond to, would call you back to yourself, in the middle of a panic?

It might be some of the same voices who other times are part of our white noise. It might be someone different for you.

But these voices – a voice you’d respond to in a coma, in the middle of drowning, or in the middle of your most intense work or play – these voices mark our deepest trust and love. And that is definitely what Jesus means about the sheep knowing the shepherd’s voice.

We get familiar with a voice by time and repetition, but we only get that trust from actually trusting; by risking trust when you don’t have to yet: By walking for the first time because your father believes you can; riding the bike without training wheels because you trusted your mother to let go. By trusting your 16 year old kid to drive their little sibling to practice; or letting your 60 year old kid make decisions for you you wouldn’t have made yourself.

We get that trust in God by packing up and moving to a new job far away, or in a new field, by taking Jesus literally about loving our neighbors when we don’t like our neighbors, forgiving when there is more to be gained by holding out for retribution, by going on out and making disciples when people might laugh at us, or be uncomfortable with your passion.

We get that trust from trusting, and from love. From loving so much that you’ll do anything for your beloved, and from knowing yourself loved that much.

That’s what the sheep know: trust and belovedness.

That is how we know the voice we follow.

Some of us happen to hear the voice of God in words, words that apply to our immediate situation: “Choose this one. Stay here. Now! Not yet. Go to Galilee….”
Some of us don’t.

Others hear the voice of God by the movement of our hearts – when joy or sympathy or sorrow or hope pull you to certain people, new ideas and big dreams, or to action.

Others don’t.

Some hear the voice of God clearly in the words of the Bible, in the actions of the sacraments,

in the voice of a loved one, or by experiencing answered prayer.

And some of us don’t know for sure how we hear God’s voice,

but I promise you, you do.

You do, because the voice of God is love.

Think about what it feels like when you know that you are loved.

Whether it’s in rare shining moments, or long, quiet, barely noticeable assurance, that knowing that you are loved is what Jesus wants us to notice about sheep and the good shepherd today.

We practice that feeling – or we are meant to – at the altar, at communion, where the shepherd feeds us. We are called to practice being beloved among our families and dear friends. We practice being beloved by God, and returning and sharing that love, because that practice is how we listen to God.

So pay attention to your belovedness.

Stay tuned to that voice. Spend time with it.

Listen. Love. Be loved.

Because that is how God saves us; how Jesus gives abundant life.

That is how the good shepherd is known, in the world, and among us.

The shepherd is known to everyone by the sheep who follow that voice: to pasture, and out of danger, through love, and to abundant life.