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April 25, 2004
Stay Where You Are
Stay Where You Are
Psalm 27 / Luke 24: 44-53
April 25th, 2004
This morning I invite you to think some more about what took place on Easter afternoon.
After Jesus had demonstrated to the eleven disciples that He was alive by eating some broiled fish and honey, He said to them, “You are witnesses of these things . . . but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” In other words, “Wait, you’re not ready to say anything about this yet. Stay until you have been clothed with power from on high.”
One of the greatest differences between us and God is that God sees time as a friend, while we see time as an enemy. We don’t like to wait, while God can wait for ever. The principle thing God tells us to do fast is to listen. "Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger."
We Presbyterians are sometimes accused of taking forever to get something done because of our demand for “decency and order,” but we’re lightning fast by comparison with God.
I will often begin our worship quoting the words of Isaiah, “They that wait on the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They will walk and not faint.” And you take comfort in those words.
You hear me quote the psalmist immediately after this, “Wait on the Lord, be of good courage, and he will strengthen your heart.” We all find these words reassuring. I feel the reassurance when I say this. Why?
I think it is because these promises calm our fears that having to wait does not mean that God has forgotten us. We who were born yesterday and will die tomorrow, want things to happen quickly for fear they won’t happen at all. We imagine we know what should happen, or at least what we’d like to happen, and there’s no time like the present. How many buzzwords we have that project our impatience.
Meanwhile God is watching and unfolding His plan. It seems slow, but the Providence of God does not rush to its end. A thousand years, after all, are like a day to God. God is working out His purposes. “All things work together for good to those that love God, to those that are called according to His purpose.” You reply, “It may be so, but, for goodness sake, God, why are you taking so long?” And God replies, “You’re right. It’s for goodness sake that I take so long.”
We know from 20/20 hindsight that the disciples had to stay in Jerusalem fifty days, until the Feast of Pentecost, before the promise of the Father would come. But they had no idea that Pentecost would be the big day.
I put myself in their place and imagine that those fifty days must have felt like an eternity. Each morning they would get up with no agenda except to wait. Luke tells thus they were often in the Temple about their prayers, blessing God. But who cared for the daily needs? Who provided food for them all? What did they talk about? What plans could they make when they didn’t know what they were supposed to do?
There were several reasons why the disciples would have preferred not to stay where they were.
It was dangerous in Jerusalem.
They were far from home since they all lived up north around the Sea of Galilee. Most of them were married, I expect, and would have wanted to get back to their wives and children—and to their livelihoods.
They had lost the physical presence of Jesus, who held them together. The longer they waited the more their intensity diminished. It was only natural. We forget so soon the most remarkable things. It almost seems imprudent that Jesus told them, “Just wait. Stay where you are.”
I wonder if the first lesson Jesus wanted His disciples and us to learn in this walk of faith is that very little worthwhile can be accomplished quickly. Jesus told Judas, "What you are going to do, do quickly." But His brother James probably gave His more routine advice: Let everyone be swift to hear, slow to speak and slow to anger." What an odd idea: "swift to hear!" It is impossible to hear thoroughly, quickly. Listening makes you wait and be attentive. Jesus wanted His disciples to wait and listen to what the Spirit of God would say to them—in due time—after they had waited on the Lord, finding renewal of their strength.
The disciples would have wanted to strike while the iron was hot, to get on with the task of spreading the Gospel while the memory was fresh in their minds that Jesus was alive. A fresh witness is the best witness because memory fades. But Jesus said, “Wait.” They needed a power greater than their immediate excitement that Jesus was alive.
We say the term, “easy come, easy go.” What comes easily goes easily. Jesus knew the wisdom of that term. They needed the power from on high, the powerful inner presence of the Holy Spirit in order to launch their work that would spread the Gospel of Jesus to the whole world. That’s why Jesus said to them, “Stay where you are. Wait until you are empowered from on high.”
But time has moved on. Now, we think differently. Our strategies try to get as much accomplished as quickly as possible. The Holy Spirit seems like an agent we try to control, rather than the power of God that will control us. How much of our Christian experience requires haste. Efficiency requires it. We value speed, size, numbers, power, and influence. All these were strangely absent from Jesus’ agenda.
Here we find staring us in the face Jesus’ apparent waste of time. “Wait in Jerusalem until you receive the promise of the Father, until you are empowered from on high.”
Jesus challenges you and me in our haste. Are we too quick in the way we try to lead people to trust in Jesus? A few moment’s conversation ends with the question, “Would you like to pray to receive Christ as your Savior?” Jesus said, “Count the cost before you build. Don’t discover after you’ve begun to follow me that you don’t have the resources to continue.” Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me.” Where are these questions that must surely make a person think twice before signing on the dotted line?
We think of the Roman Governor Felix’s hesitant response to the Apostle Paul who had explained to Him the Gospel. “Go away for the present; when I have an opportunity I will summon you.” What a bad choice, we say.
I remember the song built on that story in the Book of Acts. It was sung plaintively before the invitation at the end of our evening services, “Almost persuaded now to believe. Almost persuaded, Christ to receive. Seems now some soul to say, go Spirit go away. Some more convenient day. Almost, but lost.”
We cite Paul’s words to the Church at Corinth as many in it procrastinated in their response to the Gospel, “Behold now is the day of salvation.” And so it is. But the salvation which Jesus offers us is not a momentary act that rescues our souls from hell. It is a pilgrimage of a lifetime. It is a daily walk with many “dangers, toils, and snares.” “Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home,” we rightly sing. We’ve got to walk that walk once we’ve begun, and that walk doesn’t happen quickly. Wait. Stay the course.
Many of us are restless. We are achievement oriented people. Even the Church is now measured in terms of achievement. But I remember that Jesus began to guide the Church by telling His disciples to wait until they were empowered from on high, until the Holy Spirit came over them. If they had charged on, what a fiasco it would have caused!
It so happens that today I have been invited to preach at the Korean Presbyterian Church after our Sunday School is over. As I pondered what God might have me say to them, I had St. Paul’s words in II Corinthians 3 come forcefully to mind. There Paul referred to the Christians at Corinth as “our letter of recommendation, written on your hearts.” This was a very gracious response to a graceless congregation that treated him unkindly.
They gave him the impression that they wanted him to provide letters of recommendation to demonstrate he was an acceptable candidate to serve them as apostle. “Do you want a letter from the pillars of the Church in Jerusalem? From Peter, James, and John?”
Kindly he said, “No. You are my letter of recommendation.” That is, you are the proof of my ministry’s good effect. What a kind thing to write to a church that gave him so much pain!
But then he went on to say more, “You are a letter from Christ delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts.”
I thought of these words of the Apostle Paul when I prepared to preach at Dr. Eleanor Filmer’s funeral service. Over the course of her life she showed such a patient spirit. And God wrote on the tablet of her heart a message that many of us could read. It was a message of patience, kindness, fervent love of God and people, and great demands on herself for faithfulness.
It takes a while to write a good letter. I wonder if Jesus told the disciples to wait fifty days in Jerusalem because God was writing letters on their hearts the message that He would dispatch on Pentecost.
It was a letter to the world, “You can be reconciled to God!” It was a letter filled with hope and reassurance, and needed seasoned hearts on which to be inscribed. Matthew needed time to remember Jesus said, “Come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He needed time to remember this, because it is much more natural to become weary and impatient with the weary and heavy laden.
If the disciples had rushed off to spreading the word of Jesus’ resurrection immediately, in the first flush of their enthusiasm, and then encountered the bitter rejection followers of Jesus met with in those difficult early days, they would have quit. But with fifty days of waiting, it was long enough that their hearts started to become plastic in God’s hands. They became pliable as they felt the wave-like feelings of exuberance and weariness, impatience and resolve begin to mold their usefulness.
This is why they had to wait. Saints are not made in a moment. Even fifty days wasn’t long, but it was long enough to plant the idea that following Jesus is not a momentary event. It was long enough for Jesus to inscribe a letter on their hearts.
This letter would first be opened in Jerusalem on Pentecost, fifty days later. Then the disciples fanned out and took it to Judea, the region around Jerusalem, and then to Samaria, where the nearly-Jews who were despised by the Jews lived, and then to places very far away, as far away as India, and eventually even America. But they had to wait to let that letter of Jesus get written on their hearts.
Seven years ago when Bonnie and I were in Scotland for that wonderful Sabbatical you gave us, toward the end of our time there we drove down into England to visit some special places. We drove to Brighton to see where Frederick William Robertson served his remarkable but brief ministry at Trinity Chapel. Then we went north to Oxford because I wanted to see Oriel College, where John Henry Newman and John Keble led a segment of their remarkable, Godly careers. Both these men lent strong influence to my life of faith. But maybe most of all I wanted to see Magdalene College, where C.S. Lewis taught and wrote many of his remarkable books.
It was there that he wrote to me a letter with a pen he dipped into ink as he wrote. You can imagine that this letter was and is very precious to me. I wonder how long it took him to write that letter. He wrote corrections in pencil over his ink letters, written with a dip pen! It was so precious I didn’t keep it, but sent it to the C.S. Lewis collection at Wheaton College as a permanent loan, not a gift.
I bought a quill pen in a stationery shop across from the Magdalene tower, and I have used that quill to write a few letters that were very important. It takes time to write a letter like this, and great care so as not to make blotches with the ink, or to put your fingers on the ink before it is dry.
How different it is to write a letter with a dip pen than it is to jot off an email message. You and I may put together an email message very quickly. When I send you all a reminder of our Thursday evening dinner, I write those few casual words of invitation, and then push a button and it goes to all of your email receptors. It’s not a personal message to each one of you. It’s a quick way to stay in touch.
I thought of these things in terms of how God speaks to us. God took the time and the trouble to write us a personal letter. We call this letter, “Jesus,” and His life was written slowly.
So it is no wonder that Jesus made His followers wait at least fifty days before they could start to share this letter with the world. In those fifty days God was writing on the tablets of their heart the message they would tell. It was a message not only that Jesus saves, but that it takes a lifetime to work out that salvation, with fear and trembling.
Most of us need to be reminded to wait, to slow down, indeed, to stop placing demands on God.
I am sometimes tempted to think of our usefulness here in terms of efficiency, equating size with importance, and speed with effectiveness. But God is working out His purposes here in His time, for purposes that are good.
I hope this morning you may hear God saying to you not only “Wait on the Lord,” to find strength, but perhaps, get started for real presenting your life to God, as a life-long venture of trust and faithfulness. Don’t rush, but don’t procrastinate either. There were those who fell away in the early going because God wasn’t being forceful enough in imposing the Kingdom of God as they understood it. Will you be among the few who today will serve God well and patiently in our time?
O Lord, help us to wait on you with trusting and believing hearts. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at April 25, 2004 09:30 AM