He Has Done It

Luke 24: 44-53
Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you – that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.” Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, “Thus it is written that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses to these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands, he blessed them. While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him, and returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and they were continually in the temple blessing God.
Sermon
Sometimes it’s a simple act that starts a world-changing movement: the American Revolution is said to have started with the firing of a single farmer’s rifle. Martin Luther didn’t do too much to start the Protestant Reformation, he just nailed his 95 Thesis on the door of a church, but that one nail split the Church and gave birth to all the denominations that we now know. And you might say Rosa Parks did even less, all she did was sat down, but this spark of defiance ignited the Civil Rights movement.
You would think, then, that if a small thing can start a great movement, a supernatural thing would start an even greater movement. That if a small thing over time can change the world then a miraculous thing would change the world immediately. And if a small act of defiance can inspire millions of others to march, chant, and organize as one, then Christ’s great act of defiance, an act that defied the power of death, would surely inspire disciples to take up their cross and follow him.
Christ ascending into heaven – it’s hard to imagine anything greater, it’s the kind of thing that drives sculptors to art of a monumental nature, composers to write songs for choirs of angels to sing – it’s the kind of thing that inspires weeping, shouting to the mountain tops, telling everyone that he has done it.
Whatever you can imagine doing if you were an eye witness to this event, I’m confident it would have felt more natural than doing what Jesus told the disciples they should do once he ascended into heaven: “I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here.”
He had such a hard time getting them to do what he wanted, getting them to follow his instructions, helping them to see, urging them to have faith – and here, in this moment, they must have actually wanted to do something substantial and Jesus tells them to stay.
This kind of doing nothing makes me nervous. It’s seems unfaithful, it seems un-American, it seems bad for business.
We don’t like to wait, but that’s exactly what I was asked to do when I went to get my hair cut last Wednesday. A chair finally opened up and I stand, getting ready to sit down finally and what does the barber say, “I haven’t had lunch yet, would you mind waiting for me to eat something.”
I’m not sure this hair cut was worth waiting for, certainly not worth waiting as long as I ended up waiting, but the more I think about it the more I realize I don’t want a guy who hasn’t eaten anything working on my hair, especial getting close to my ears with a straight razor.
There are times when taking a moment to get what you need is the best thing you can do for yourself and those around you. Just listening rather than talking should always be the foundation of prayer, and even though it’s uncomfortable, waiting may be what gets us closer to understanding who Christ is and what it is that he has done.
As he walks with the disciples, he is once again surprised that they didn’t understand the significance of his death: “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you” he said, “that everything written about me in the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.”
But it’s hard to understand if your mind is stifled by fear, all creativity postponed, all thought focused solely on hiding from the Romans and the religious leaders who just crucified your leader and are looking to get rid of you next.
A mentor of mine told me that as Christ calls out from the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he’s not just crying out in pain – he quotes the psalm that we just read – a psalm that begins with suffering but ends with victory, as a message to his followers. He gives them the first line hoping they’ll remember the rest: yes I suffer now, but this suffering is a part of my great triumph. After all of this, even those yet unborn will say “he has done it.”
They might have understood. They might have understood that his death wasn’t just a death, had they thought about his last words that way. But they didn’t, they couldn’t. Their minds were focused solely on survival and not listening to the voice of God that could have given them comfort in their time of trial.
Maybe you can relate – there are plenty of times when my mind is too distracted by hunger to really listen; more often I’m too distracted by eating to listen to my stomach say it’s full.
Or maybe you’ve been focused so much on what you’re doing on the computer that you couldn’t hear your daughter when she asked you a question; too preoccupied with work to take part in life at home.
Or maybe you’ve been focused so completely on what all is wrong with your life that you can’t see what’s right about it, focused so fully on what you don’t have that you can’t see what you do, your mind so completely centered on what you want to happen that you’re blinded to how badly wrong it all might go if it happened.
Or maybe you know you can’t think straight, but you don’t know what to do about it, and before you act you know you need some time to think.
So Christ doesn’t tell the disciples to go out, he doesn’t tell them to get to work, he ascends into heaven telling them to stay.
Your mind may be clouded with worry and want, your life focused on gaining as much as you can while you can. Time may be in short supply, your attention spread too thin over more than you can possibly focus on. And while you set out each day ready to set the world on fire, I hope you will take this time, this day in the beautiful place, the gift that this day is, I hope you will take this time “to stay,” to think, to see, to hear, and to know that he has done it.
Amen.