Being the Church Then and Now: Issues from the Acts of the Apostles
William Loader
2. "Why do you stand looking up into heaven?" (Acts 1:11)
Telling the Story and Securing its authenticity: ministry and responsibility
Introduction
In the
first study we considered the vision of Jesus, the kingdom of God. He promised
it. The disciples expected it. It failed to come as expected. There was no
sudden divine intervention to overthrow the oppressors, to set the people free,
to restore the kingdom to Israel. Instead, Jesus turned to them and said: “It
is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father has set by
his own authority. But you shall receive power after the Holy Spirit has come
upon you and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in
Samaria and to the furthermost parts of the world.” They were to proclaim the
coming kingdom and they were to be the kingdom. They were to pray “your kingdom
come” and they were to let the vision of the kingdom set their agenda. They
were not to be waiting around for the kingdom, qualifying themselves for future
entry and busying themselves with recruiting drives so that others might one
day enter, too. They were to live out the life of the kingdom, to let God
reign, now and to allow that life and love to extend to the ends of the earth,
to all people now.
We are
that community of disciples. We are the life of the kingdom. We are the people
of the vision. We are, for here and now, the fulfilment of the promise yet to
reach its completion. That is the declaration of the Acts of the Apostles. That
is its answer to the cry: but when will you restore the kingdom?
History
seems sometimes to be brutally unrealistic. For many it is a cruel thought, a
bitter disappointment, that all that has become of Jesus’ vision is the Church.
What good news for the poor is that? What right have we to masquerade as the
kingdom of God in a world where the people of Galilee on every continent still
cry out?
1. The Kingdom for
Now: Human Beings
There were
eleven of them. One of them, a leader amongst them, had denied his Lord, when
he needed him most. The others had all abandoned Jesus at his arrest. Now they
were to be witnesses, to bear the message and the life of the kingdom to the
world. That was who they were, very ordinary human beings, but the kingdom of
God for here and now. That is who we are.
In the
narrative Luke now goes on to recount the ascension of Jesus. These disciples
need to see who Jesus is. Luke uses drama and colourful detail with a dash of
humour to portray the deeper meaning of the event. We see Jesus talking with
his disciples. Suddenly, as they look on, he is taken up like Elijah of old
into heaven, up into the sky, though without a fiery chariot, just a cloud to
receive him and two angelic announcers to give a commentary. To speculate about
where the journey into outer space ended or whether Jesus would have shown up
on radar as an unidentified flying object would be to miss the point. This was
a vision and it is Luke’s colourful version of the meaning of Easter. In the
deeper spiritual sense it is this Jesus who has been raised from the dead and
been taken into the presence of God. In the words of the creed, he sat down at
the right hand of God the Father Almighty. In the Pentecost sermon Peter will
say: God has made him Lord and Christ, this Jesus who you crucified. The
disciples need to see and know what this means if they are to make any sense of
their mission and of themselves as witnesses of the kingdom.
Jesus who
went about doing good, proclaiming the kingdom, healing the sick, giving
himself in love; Jesus, who did not stand gloriously astride the universe, but
trod the weary paths of Galilee, not much more than the area of greater
Melbourne, but with only a fraction of its population; Jesus, who for one,
possibly three years, spoke and lived love, mostly in anonymity; Jesus, who was
easily erased as inconvenient, unauthorised, controversial, socially
destabilising, wandering preacher; Jesus, whose life was poured out in love and
whose love bled down a wooden cross...this Jesus God has crowned Lord. This
Jesus God has elevated to his presence. This loving, but vulnerable, humanly
limited, wonderful yet ordinary human being, God has declared to have been his
own personal appearance and presence. This Jesus is the model, the paradigm,
the person, the power of the kingdom. That is the meaning of the ascension.
In Luke’s
drama the two angels, who had already been on stage at the empty tomb, reassure
the disciples: “This Jesus who has been taken from you into heaven will come in
the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” In other words: you can be as
sure of his return as you are of his resurrection. Or to put it more simply
still, you may be confident of the coming of the kingdom and the coming of
Jesus, because God has vindicated him. God has identified himself with him.
Jesus is Lord.
With their
“Why do you stand looking up into heaven?” the angels are directing the
disciples back to present earthly reality with a smile. Now they know who Jesus
is. Now they know who they themselves are. They are still the eleven with a
very bad track record, still eleven very human beings. Being the kingdom for
now did not make them super people; they had no wings; the angels had made sure
they had their feet and their faces to the ground. They were only human,
limited by time and space, vulnerable to prejudice and misunderstanding,
exposed to people’s whims of love and hatred; just like Jesus. But this was the
pattern of God’s presence, the pathway of love and grace which they were to
follow. Rejoicing and groaning humanity, leaping and prostrate, joyous and sad,
anointed with oil and crowned with thorns — nothing has changed. God has chosen
real humanity as the vehicle of divine presence, the promise for now of the
kingdom, just as God had chosen Jesus and vindicated him by raising him from
the dead.
Of course
there was a difference. Where he had loved to the end, they had failed. How
could they ever stand up again? How could they be the kingdom for now? Luke
doesn’t tell us of their Aldersgate experience. No words of salvation from the
law of sin and death. But the events of John Wesley’s Aldersgate, which we
remember today, and the disciples’ renewal are fundamentally the same. Love
burst through the grave. Guilt and sin and shame and fear became powerless
before everlasting love. Self justification and morbid recrimination ceased
their busy routines. There was new business; love’s business, a world parish, a
new charge to keep, a God to glorify.
These are
the ones who are to be Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth. We are
their successors. You shall be witnesses to me. We are witnesses to Christ’s
vision. We have sighted the agenda that calls all human agenda into question.
We have glimpsed the promised blessing for Galilee. We have seen the nations at
peace, the swords and the spears forged into instruments of agriculture. We
have tasted in the eucharist the meal that promises a place at the table for
all peoples. We have been born again. We see the kingdom of God.
But we are
also witnesses to the Jesus in whose ministry God’s reign already revealed
itself. We join hands across the generations with those who saw at the very
beginning, whose hands handled the word of life, who saw and heard Jesus in the
towns of Galilee and in Jerusalem. Through them we know the story, that tells
of love which sets people free. We learned of the compassion of God, as great
and greater than the most compassionate parent, opening the door again to the
outcast, embracing the lost son, listening to the women’s cries, taking the
children and blessing them. The God who did not withdraw, the God who did not
say enough, the God who offered forgiveness and reconciliation to the least
loved and least loveable. We are the witnesses of the love that did not bend to
the social and political pressures of rulers impatient to preserve stability
and security, the love that persevered in love despite the controversies over
the prescriptions of scripture and tradition. We are witnesses of the love
which was tortured and beaten, strung up and crucified, taken away and buried.
We are witnesses of a terrible story that tells itself again in every
generation, wherever love and innocence and life is crushed and broken and
swept aside. And we are witnesses of a love which refuses to be congealed in
the dry blood of defeat and hopelessness but bursts out again towards the
vision. We are witnesses of his resurrection.
We are
witnesses of that vision. We are witnesses of love’s life cycle set forth in
Christ. We also have our own story to tell, our own meetings with sin and
death, our own on going conversions and renewal, our own Aldersgates. We are
like the eleven and those with them, human beings, with all the gifts and all
the limitations that belong to our humanness. And like them, we know our
denials and our fearful abandonment of divine love. Like them, we have nothing
to boast of. Our busy self justification is just our own delusion. Yet he comes
to you and me, he comes to his Church, lifts us up, loves us without limit, and
invites us to tell the story of love over and over again to tell the story of
love over and over again. You shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all
Judea and in Samaria and to the uttermost parts of the world.
2. The Kingdom of God
for Now: A Human Community
They leave
the Mount of Olives and hurry across to Jerusalem itself. In verses 13—14 Luke
names them: Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew
and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Jude brother of
James. With them were also their wives, perhaps other women, Mary the mother of
Jesus and his brothers. Things are becoming very practical and down to earth
now. This is the first membership roll. And then they form themselves into the
first PRC, Pastoral Relations Committee. The first Agenda item: the suicide of
Judas.
They were
not only human beings. They were a human community. They had to face the shock
and the pain of that community, the scandal of Judas. It had to come out in the
open. Luke even has Peter say that Judas had his lot or portion in this
ministry they all shared. Luke is not writing an Elders’ Handbook here and it
would be wrong to twist the text around to fit the latest community therapy
theories. Basically he has Peter speak without malice and make sense of what
has happened by pointing to conflict imagery of the Psalms. It is not swept
under the carpet. The dishonesty and denial which too easily characterises many
Christian communities faced with pain and failure has not taken hold here.
The
earthly practical nature continues as Peter tells the meeting that it must
elect a replacement for Judas. Out come the ballot papers and the scrutineers.
It’s all very familiar. Here is the kingdom of God for now: human community,
human committee! God really has got himself involved in human flesh. But if
only we would believe it, we would rejoice and value also these aspects of our
humanity. Some people close off the committee from spirituality as people used
to shut away the kitchen and the loo. God enters the kitchen and the loo of our
humanity.
The issue
at stake, as Luke sees it, in replacing Judas is twofold. A group needs to be
set apart and recognised within the Christian community. They must have been
with Jesus from the beginning of his ministry. They will clearly function as
guarantors of continuity, to make sure what Jesus taught is well remembered.
Theirs is the ministry of the Word in the strict sense. They serve as important
link people with the past. All members are called to be bearers of the kingdom,
to minister the gospel to all men and women. These serve to enable them to keep
the connections. They maintain the authenticity of the story so that it will
carry authority and they are called on to expound it. Their successors in every
age will be those set apart and ordained for that specific task. The further
history progresses the more important will be their function in serving and
maintaining the authenticity of the story of Jesus. Where the connection
becomes weak, they will lose their authority and identity and either become
generals of each local troop of believers or paid fulltime, jack-of-all-trades,
paid Christians. Both fail the purpose of the order.
It was not
only a concern for the establishment of the order of ministry. The elected
Matthias made up the full number of 12 apostles. This would be a short-lived
symbol, but it was an important one. It seems Jesus deliberately chose 12
disciples as a symbol of all Israel with its 12 tribes. What he was starting
was a movement that lived by the vision of the kingdom promised to all Israel
and the world. The 12 marked the community out as the group that lived from
this vision. Had they not asked: “Lord, will you at this time restore the
kingdom to Israel?’?
We began
by noting the absurdity, almost the offensiveness, that we should declare that
Jesus’ promise of the kingdom of justice and peace and holiness is fulfilled in
the Church. It is simply not so and was never meant to be. Yet the astounding
thing is that it is partly true. Jesus promised the kingdom as near at hand and
through the events of Easter the Church was born. The Church still longs for
fulfilment of the promise, but it is not just a waiting praying church, nor
just a promising preaching one. Already in the Church the hope is to begin to
find fulfilment. The absurdity is that we are but human. But it is this fully
humanness which bore the presence of God in Jesus. God chooses the vulnerable,
limited, foolishness of humanity still, theirs and yours and mine and real as
his. This is the way of God’s kingdom. The offensiveness is that we are no
better than the disciples or the Church of any age. The track record is far
from proud. Yet it is this rabble whom grace has seized upon and it is by this
grace alone that we can stand.
This is
true for us as individuals. It is also true for us as a church. For as we saw,
the angels with their wry humour told the disciples to stop gazing into heaven
and the disciples in obedience spiralled down into the practicalities, the
realities as holy as any heavenly vision: dealing with distress and failed
ministry, securing the order of ministry of the word, and making sure the
Church’s structure reflected its vision.
In this
community enormous power will be found, but that is the story for study 3. “Why
do you stand looking into heaven?” Let us cross over to Jerusalem with the joy
of grace and the assurance that the vision of the kingdom sets us to an agenda
also of structure and sound planning for ministry.