Sunday, June 1, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

In the Meantime

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 68
1 Peter 5:6–11
Acts 1:6–14

On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders
and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you.

Beannacht, from Anam Cara by John O’Donohue

I still remember what it was like when I received a certain letter from my dad’s attorney. The letter itself wasn’t a surprise. I had been in touch with this particular lawyer over the course of many months since my dad’s death. There had been many letters.

It wasn’t the content that surprised me. It was my emotion on reading the letter that caught me off guard. It said that everything had been handled; there was no further remaining business to conduct; my parents’ files, as far as the attorney was concerned, were closed.

Perhaps the letter should have brought relief. But it didn’t. Instead, a great wave of sadness washed over me, because with the closing of those estate details, there was nothing more for me to do. In all of the activity of handling the details of my dad’s death, even though months had passed since, somehow in those details and tasks, he was still with me. The letter brought a finality I didn’t want. It brought an end to a chapter that I didn’t want to have ended.

Perhaps this is how the disciples felt as they stood, gazing up toward heaven, as Jesus ascended and eventually was completely out of sight. The disciples hadn’t expected the resurrected Christ to spend forty days with them. It must have seemed like a second chance, a way for them to spend more time with Jesus, to learn more, to hear him speak some more about the kingdom of heaven and what that would be like. His resurrection appearance and stay with them kept them close to him. So to watch him ascend, out of sight, would have been so sad, so final. Case closed. Chapter ended. Now what?

What would they do in the meantime?

Before Jesus ascended, the disciples asked him a boatload of questions, hoping to hold onto as much of Jesus as they could. The last one they asked him was about his plan to restore the kingdom of Israel. They wanted to know when that would happen.

Their question shows that they still didn’t fully understand what Jesus had been teaching. We like to laugh at the disciples when they don’t understand—as if we do. But it was understandable that they hadn’t gotten what Jesus was saying. The concept of the kingdom of God was deeply ingrained in their thinking. For many years the Jewish people had expected that the messiah would come and—when he did—establish God’s kingdom on earth. So when Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, the disciples naturally assumed he was announcing that this time of fulfillment was about to come to pass: That Israel as they knew it would be restored. That things would fall into place. That the way they thought the world should be ordered would finally become reality.

And he wouldn’t answer their question, and he said the answer was not theirs to know. Only God would know when the kingdom Jesus was talking about would come to pass. Only God would know. And then he ascended. And there they were. Left wondering what to do in the meantime.

It is difficult for us to live in the meantime. The meantime is that time between one door closing and another opening. It is difficult because we don’t know how long this odd time will last. It is difficult because these meantimes take away our sense of control. We like to know when things will be restored back to the way we think they should be.

William Bridges, in his book Managing Transitions, calls this kind of time the neutral zone. The neutral zone is an in-between time, when the old is gone but the new hasn’t become fully operational. It’s a state of limbo, where it feels there is nothing to hold onto. The old ways don’t work anymore, yet the new ways don’t feel right either. Jesus’ ascension put the disciples squarely into a neutral zone.

You’ve had those times. We think about those times.

The end of a relationship with no real sense of how you will live the next chapter or even what the next chapter will be.

Graduation from college without a job and no guarantees.

Children leaving home.

The end of a project that has consumed you for months and the loss of focus that comes with its conclusion.

The wait for a new baby.

The wait for death to come.

The wait for a family rupture to be healed.

The waiting for violence in Chicago to subside. Waiting for a Middle East peace. Waiting for all of our troops to be home.

We spend plenty of time in neutral zones.

We’ve experienced own neutral zone in this church. The retirement of a longtime pastor, the interim time that followed. As exciting as Shannon’s first Sunday was, the neutral zone will continue until she becomes fully grounded here and we establish a mutual vision for our future together. The neutral zones we experience shift the ground underneath us.

I doubt that many of you realized that this last Thursday was Ascension Day, a day on our church calendar when we acknowledge the event this scripture talks about: the ascension of Jesus to be at the right hand of his God, his creator in heaven. We hardly pay attention to Ascension Day, partly because it always falls on a Thursday, exactly forty days after Easter. But also we hardly pay attention because it’s hard for us in this scientific and technological day and age to spend much time thinking about Jesus ascending up to the heavens. We can’t imagine it, and we don’t know what it signifies really.

Theologian N.T. Wright says that we have to understand that “heaven” is not a location within our own cosmos of space, time, and matter, situated somewhere up in the sky (Acts for Everyone, chapters 1–12). If we grasp that point, then we might be ready to understand the Ascension. Luke and none of the other early Christians thought Jesus had suddenly become a primitive spaceman, heading off into orbit or beyond—off into the far reaches of space. They believed that heaven and earth were interlocking spheres of God’s reality and that the risen body of Jesus is the first object that is fully at home in both and in either sphere, anticipating the time when everything will be renewed and joined together.

The risen Christ is lifted up, indicating to the disciples not that he was heading out somewhere beyond the moon, beyond Mars, but that he was going into God’s space, God’s dimension. Jesus had gone, says N.T. Wright, into God’s dimension of reality, to sit at the right hand of God. And at some point in history, he’ll be back on the day when God’s dimension and our present one are brought together once and for all. When the kingdom of heaven will be realized fully on earth. God knows this hasn’t yet happened. The kingdom of God on this earth is only partially revealed, and we yearn for more. Our yearning is like the disciples’ question: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” Our yearning is our repeated prayer: Marana tha. Come, Lord Jesus. We yearn for the full coming of the realm of God, but we are still in the neutral zone. We are still in the meantime, but the promise of those two dimensions coming together has hung in the air over the whole of Christian history from that day to this.

The disciples didn’t stand gazing up for long. They may have been puzzled, and they may have been on the verge of total disappointment over Jesus’ leaving them. I imagine them saying something I probably shouldn’t say from the pulpit. But they didn’t have much time to sink into complete disappointment, because there were these two angels, two men standing right by them clothed in angel garb. “Why are you looking up there? This Jesus you’ve been with will come again.”

Those two angels must have snapped the disciples out of their stupor and perhaps caused them to remember what Jesus had said right before the Ascension, because once they thought about it, they remembered that he had ordained them. And installed them. They had had their inauguration, because he said to them “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. “

Jesus had passed the baton. He’d made the handoff. And you and I sit in this sanctuary because those disciples accepted the job, even though they didn’t really know what was next and they had no real idea how to proceed. We are the beneficiaries of that handoff Jesus made. “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.” We are the beneficiaries of that message being passed on, day by day, week by week, month by month, and year by year over the centuries.

You know, we might not have a clue about what to do in any of our neutral zones. We might not always realize that we are actually constantly living in the meantime—the meantime between the risen Christ returning to God’s dimension and the fullness of God being realized in our dimension. We live in one big long neutral zone along with all of the other neutral zones we deal with.

But we can take our cues from the disciples. After the angels snapped them out of their stupor and got them focused on the ground again, they went home and they went to that same upper room together, where they had been the night before Jesus was crucified, and they devoted themselves to prayer—with others, with women, with others we may not know about, including any who wanted to be part of the next chapter. They humbled themselves again, in Peter’s words, under the mighty hand of God and prayed and took the next steps, one step after another into their unknown futures, sometimes tentative but remembering that they had been called by the risen Christ himself to be his witnesses.

That call is still being issued to you and to me. So men and women of Chicago, why do you stand looking up toward heaven or focused on the past or wishing things were like they once were? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him leave, but in the meantime hang together, devote yourselves to prayer, and be his witnesses. Be his witnesses.