Speaker 1: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: So we're in a series called FAQ this fall. The point is to locate ourselves in the vision of commons to be intellectually honest, to be spiritually passionate, And to keep Jesus at the center. And in the 1st week of the series, we talked about committing ourselves to a path That means we're always learning, being born again and again and again. And in the 2nd week, we talked about the kind of passion That writes yourself into the center of the Jesus story. Like, yes.
Absolutely. This sacred story is yours too, big feelings and all. And today, we're picking up the story of Jesus and the mission of the church in acts to explore how we live our purpose. But before we dive in, let us pray. Loving god, we take a moment To just notice ourselves present, here, and now.
We can feel our feet on the ground, our bodies resting, thinking, waiting, Our breath moving in and out of our nostrils, up and down in our chest. What a humbling thing it is to be these creatures, To hold our heartbreak and our celebration and our own strange and wonderful stories. For those today looking for hope, for joy, for a little bit of calm, May the beauty of Jesus be upon us, establishing the work of our hands. Amen. So around here, we talk a lot about being Jesus centered, and I'm gonna do my best To draw us into that idea today.
We'll make our way through realm of suffering and spirit, Look, q and r, the center will hold, and sky. We're in acts 1 beginning in verse 3. After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of 40 days and spoke about the kingdom of god. On one occasion, while he was eating with them, He gave them this command.
Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days, you will be baptized with the holy spirit. Now it helps to think about the book of Acts in the new testament as a dance with the past and the present. Looking back, the writer continues the gospel of Luke with the acts of the apostles by referencing just how Jewish Jesus is. There are all these Hebrew bible references folded into the story.
Here's a few. The 40 day reference takes us to the foundational stories of Noah and the flood and Moses in the desert and Elijah fleeing to the mountain of God. And baptism was a ritual washing that the prophet Ezekiel combined with spirit. He said, I will sprinkle clean water on you and put a new spirit within you. And the arrival of the gift of the holy spirit points to this prophetic hope In the Hebrew imagination that God's spirit would reside amongst God's people in a new temple right here on earth.
Another way to grasp acts is to bring it into its present, to notice the way it resembles a popular literary genre of its time, The Greco Roman romance novel. Now before you have visions of bare chested disciples, like rescuing damsels with low cut tunics or Maybe other hairy, bare chested disciples for that matter. That is not the kind of romance novel we're talking about today. Sorry. By romance novel in the ancient world, I just seen popular genre of prose fiction.
New testament scholar Mary Ann Palmer Bonds Writes about how Luke endeavors to interpret the underlying meaning of the whole of Christian history As if it were a foundational epic like Virgil's Aeneid. And without getting too much in the weeds About that epic poem, Virgil set out to tell the story of a new era in Rome. After a time of suffering, the people of Rome are finally breathing a sigh of relief with Augustus as emperor. Peace has returned. And so Virgil writes this poem about a man named Aeneas, the ancestor Of the Romans.
It's a founding myth for the new and improved Rome. And if you're steeped in the new testament and acts, you have Bells going off in your brain like Jesus is the new emperor to bring peace. Only he upends power, and the kingdom is like an empire Expanding from Jerusalem not by force, but by newness and life and the church is this Aeneas character Who sets out on an epic journey complete with missionary travels and shipwrecks and opposition. But if you're like, nope, Bobby. I didn't notice any of that.
It's fine. I get it. It's an effort to connect all the literary dots. My point is that shaping an early history of Christianity was meant to feel familiar, not foreign. The Jesus story played out for them at every level of their lives, in politics, in meaning making, in neighborliness, In their travel, their finances, their rituals, between caring about Israel's past and attending to the present acts is about how to live In the realm of suffering and spirit, how to hold the complexity of the past with its disappointments, its Terrible tragedies, it's far from perfect, people with the reality of the present, knowing at At some point, you'll have to lift your head and set out toward an unknown future and trust that you're not alone.
But still it's not exactly smooth sailing. I mean, life never is. There will be questions, maybe some responses. Verse 6 and 7. Then they gathered around the resurrected Jesus and asked him, lord, are you at this time Going to restore the kingdom to Israel?
And Jesus said to them, it's not for you to know the times or dates the father has set by his own Authority? And the question, are you going to restore it, the kingdom to Israel, might sound a little bit funny to us. It's unfamiliar. It seems Strange, but it's deeply human. Theologian Willie James Jennings talks about the question they asked Jesus In verse 6 as a nationalist question, it sounds like when will we rule our land And become self determining, and if need be, impose our rule on others.
The subtext is, no. Really? Jesus. Like, when will we have our freedom? And I imagine Jesus giving these guys, like, a lot of extra eye contact.
Maybe you know the kind when someone wants you to notice something, to put some pieces together, but you're kinda missing the point. Like, Guys, don't you get it? We're doing something bigger here. We don't need to concern ourselves with borders or power structures or calendar reminders. Just chill, wait, Breathe.
Now there are 2 Greek words for time in the passage, and I don't think that's a mistake on Luke's Part. Writing in a Greek philosophical world, there existed a way to pay attention to everyday ordinary moments and moments that are Pregnant with meaning. And the 2 words are Kronos for ordinary time marking, Kronos is quantitative, And kairos for seasons or opportunities. Kairos is qualitative. So let's turn back to the text.
In the question of the apostles, they ask, are you at this Kronos, this time? And in Jesus's response, he says, it's not for you to know the kairos, the times. No. 1 isn't better than the other. They're just different.
Kronos' meetings and deadlines, And Kairos is falling in love and getting into a flow. Jesus is saying that they're impatient for a world that he's actually not building, One where the power is centralized and ready to put up a fight if needed. Sure. That might make you feel safe for a moment, But it is not the world Jesus makes. We're doing a shared thing, Jesus says.
My power looks like Meeting real needs and challenging expectations. It's seasons that swell with meaning, Not do or die dates on a calendar. But, hey, I get it. Jesus' pitch is pretty destabilizing. In this moment of question and response, it's okay that the disorientation of Jesus's followers crashes right into his calm plan.
Jesus is walking his friends toward change, and it doesn't feel like good timing. And can you just imagine how much they'll miss him? And you likely know this, But change, whether it's good or bad, is registered as loss. Loss of an old way, A former dream, a plan you thought you could count on, and loss feels like grief. Change is loss is grief.
Remember that. It is not just you. And Jesus's followers are as we would be confused when Jesus says, I'm alive, but I'm leaving, and the rest Will be up to you. I mean, of course, they have questions. How will they know which way to go?
How will they remember everything he taught them? How will they meet the needs of endless tragedy in the world. How would Jesus cut through the drama swirling around the don't worry, darling movie? What would he do for poor Harry and Meghan? And how am I supposed to make sense of all the fashion advice at TikTok?
It's overwhelming. I don't know if I'm wearing clothes right anymore. And, I mean, yeah. Of course, this stuff is trivial, but, really, their question was Through all of the forces that pull at us, trivial or otherwise, will our center hold? Jesus goes on to say, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria into the ends of the earth.
After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. With this 1 sentence, Jesus says so much. In fact, chapter 1 verse 8 is what biblical scholars call The quintessential Lukan formulation of universal salvation. See, it really rolls off the tongue. Right?
But to put it another way, what happens after Jesus, like, Star Treks himself off the planet kinda hangs on this verse. The Greek word for witness here is. In its context, it's judicial. It's about who can give a testimony so that those who hear that testimony will render a true verdict. And a lot of language Over the centuries, employs metaphors of justice to make sense of Jesus.
Jesus takes our place on a guilty stand. Jesus purchases our freedom Because we're enslaved to sin, Jesus rescues us from evil. And those are all atonement theories, and we're gonna do A deep dive into them this next year in a series called disarming the bible. And here's the thing. I don't know about you, But I actually don't think about my faith or my spirituality or my commitment to the way of Jesus is something that takes place in a courtroom.
What this language of witness can offer us is so much more than courtroom drama. It's A confidence booster. Jesus is saying, I don't need to defend myself. I never have. You, my beloved, are my defense.
You getting up every day trying to love yourself, you letting go of what no longer serves you and those you love, you Calling out harm done to others, your right action, though maybe far from perfect, is all the defense Jesus needs because Jesus sees the best in his friends. He is so in love With what's good in us. So committed to our growth that he says, don't keep all that good stuff for yourself. Share it. The renewal of all things involves everyone.
And in our history, Christians have interpreted the expansion of the gospel in acts 1 verse 8 as something triumphant. You start in Jerusalem. You head out to Judea and Samaria, and then take it all. Take the ends of the earth. But we have done enough damage with that interpretation.
And if you don't know by now, Jesus wasn't building a nation state. The Jesus movement was about faith that gives and gives and gives rather than guards, joins rather than divides, waits, And does not rush. We talk a lot about a Jesus centered community at commons. And for some of us, A Jesus centered faith comes so easy. We bless that.
But for others, a Jesus centered spirituality is hard. I mean, where is Jesus? In the sky? Like, does this sky Jesus do much for me, Or am I on my own? So we finish with the last part of the story.
Jesus is taken up before their eyes and a cloud hides him. I just imagine his little feet sticking out from the bottom of a puffy cloud. I don't know why. Just gives me delight to think about it. As the women and men were looking intently up into the sky, Suddenly, 2 angelic figures dressed in white stood beside him.
People of Galilee, they said, Why are you just standing there looking at the clouds? This Jesus who has been raised by god will come back the same way you saw him go. Then the group all returns to Jerusalem without Jesus to pray And to wait for spirit. Now there are a couple of ways to think about this last Part of the story here, the ascension, that actually take us back to where we started. The writer, like, Sues ideas from Israel's past and captures ideas from the world he lives in.
Of Israel's past, Jesus ascending throws back to a story about Elijah ascending to heaven in a chariot of fire, and this Figure in Daniel seven, known as the son of man, who in a vision rises through the clouds of heaven to approach god there. And of the 1st century, Luke writes out a history of the early Jesus movement to compete with the stories of gods And rulers in exalted places. Only in Luke's story, 1 god is behind it all. But look, the ascension really is one of the most difficult concepts in the new testament, And I actually really like Walter Brueggemann's framing of the ascension as an incarnation of Psalm 68. It's an ascent psalm.
It starts off a little fiery, a psalm in the form of an ancient Canaanite liturgy where the gods are always ascending to power and defeating their enemies. The psalm reads, may god rise. May god's enemies be scattered. May the wicked perish before god. Sing to god.
Sing in praise of god's name. Stole the one who rides on the clouds. But then just a few verses later in the psalm, Israel's god drops down to be a parent to orphans, a protector of widows, a god who makes a home for the lonely and Sets the prisoners free, and now we're invited to see god in Jesus like this. Brueggeman writes, it turns out that the one who has ascended into power is not transcendent in remoteness, Is not splendid in indifference, but is deeply in touch with the reality of earth. What we get in the scene that opens the book of Acts, a scene we reflect on at the start of a new season together is one that's meant to empower.
You being you in your work. Us supporting each other with our faith, our efforts joining together, making a real Friends in our city and in the world. And, yes, you might feel really sure of the Jesus way one day and less the next. You might feel like Jesus is everywhere, or maybe you'll feel like Jesus is nowhere. I think both assessments are fair.
By Jesus being nowhere, he can be everywhere. And now we understand the divine By what we see in Jesus, he doesn't just belong to the apostles who heard his voice rise when he got a little excited, Smelt his sweat after a long day walking, saw him get a little frustrated by people who talked a big religious game But loved little. Jesus doesn't just belong to that small group of 1st century people anymore. Jesus belongs To all of us as ubiquitous as the sky above. What does that mean?
For our mission and our purpose? Our purpose is to live. Live as Jesus did. Eat meals with friends. Ask hard questions.
Trust creation to be creative and wild. Be unafraid to face need and hunger and loneliness. Our mission is to live. Live as he did. Make good friends and keep them close.
Forgive their blunders. Memorize the old poems and stories. Offer a new interpretation. Look for anything that's broken and heal it. Our mission is to live.
We need to at least try to live as Jesus did. And like Jesus, there will come a day When we return to god. But until then, we live here Together. And if there's a second coming, like the angels say, then maybe we're it. Or who knows?
Jesus will come again and again and again, world without And let us pray. Loving god, we pause now before we head out into the rest of this beautiful fall day, Into a new week to face the things we need to face. And we listen for something Stirring in our hearts. Maybe just a simple word. Maybe it's the way that this story holds Jesus' suffering with the nearness of spirit.
Both are true. Maybe it's a question we would just love a divine response to. Maybe it's the idea of a center holding, Change in timing and life's chaos whipping us around, but still our center holding. And the thought that you, Christ, could be Everywhere in celebration and sorrow and seeking and finding and feeling listless and finding our purpose. So we open ourselves again to you, spirit of the living god, present with us now.
Heal us of all that harms us.