Acts 1:6-14
Kim and I think our little dog Chuy is really sweet, but we know he’s not that smart. We don’t kid ourselves. He definitely has a certain amount of street smarts, because he’s been out on the streets a lot – a born wanderer. We’ve had to Chuy-proof our backyard fence to keep him from escaping. But in terms of intellectual capacity? Higher level cognitive function? We never had high expectations.
Although at one point we thought maybe we had underestimated him. Our house in Ohio sat on a corner lot and Chuy would sit out in the backyard with us, watching the world pass by. When he saw somebody walking a dog coming up the sidewalk toward the house, he’d go bananas. He’d run as fast as his little legs would take him over to the side fence to give his greetings. Then, when the walkers would turn the corner that’s when Chuy surprised us. He went tearing across the yard to get to the other side of the house because he knew that was where they were going to reappear.
I thought, “Wow, he has object permanence!” Which is the psychological term for knowing that something still exists even after it disappears. I started to think Chuy was smarter than he looks. But, still, not that smart.
He would race over to the other side of the house – so much faster than the dog and human walkers had any chance of getting there. But then Chuy would get confused. Because they weren’t there yet, so he would begin to second guess himself, thinking maybe he hadn’t analyzed this situation right. He would tear across the yard again, back to where he had last seen them. But now they weren’t there anymore. Even more confused he would run back to the other side of the house, and… they weren’t there yet. So back he goes to the first place.
Kim and I would sit on the deck, cheering him on, thoroughly enjoying the show – this tiny dog leaping across the yard expending every bit of energy he had in his body in the hopes of seeing those walkers again. Chuy never got any smarter, but he got lots of exercise.
And I still give him credit for this: he knew where to look.
Then I think of these disciples of Jesus standing, glued to the spot. Faces turned upward, gazing at the clouds where they last saw him. Unable to see where to go from there. And I know these guys had object permanence because they’re full-grown human adults. But they just didn’t know where to look next.
On this last Sunday of the Easter season, we are needing to face the same reality that the first disciples did, that Jesus is not with us in the same way that we want our loved ones to be with us. And like the first disciples, we don’t know when he will be coming back. This is the truth that the church has been dealing with for about two millennia. So we’ve kind of gotten used to it.
And, at the same time, we are also facing our own reality that many of our loved ones are not with us in the way we want them to be with us. And the same reality that we don’t know when we will be coming back together. Or how we will be coming back together. It turns out none of us know as much as maybe we thought we did, even just a couple of months ago.
The disciples looked pretty foolish, really, standing in that spot gaping up at the sky. To be fair, they were dealing with divine mystery – not just garden-variety object permanence. But they still had to get a grip on what they would do next.
It would take some angelic interference for that to happen. As they stand rooted to the spot, faces to the sun, the two men in white, in other words, angels, appear beside them to point out to them the utter pointlessness of what they are doing.
They tell them Jesus has been taken away, stating the obvious. And so you have no business being here any longer.
So they went back to where they were before, that upstairs room in Jerusalem. To wait it out. They probably thought Jesus was coming right back, so they would just wait.
After his death and resurrection, he had been with them 40 days, the first verses of Acts tell us. After his suffering, by which is meant his death, it says, “he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over the course of forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.” Then, shortly before he disappeared, he told them to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Of course, they didn’t know what that was, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. But they could understand “stay in Jerusalem,” and so they did.
It’s impossible for us to know what was going on in the minds of those disciples during this time. We just know that they were in territory they had never been in before. They didn’t know the lay of the land; they didn’t know which way to look.
They were still looking to Jesus, in a very literal sense. Because even after he told them that he was leaving and that they would have the Spirit, they turn to him and ask, So, is this when you’re going to restore the kingdom of Israel? Like, now?
Eternally patient, Jesus says to them that it really isn’t for them to know the timing of such things. Then he turns the conversation away from himself and what he might do, to these disciples and all that they will do. “You will receive the power of the Spirit, and you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”
And so they did. And so they were.
And so we also are.
First, though, they had to figure out where to look, and so do we.
They made their way back to their upstairs room in Jerusalem. That much they knew how to do. And then they did the next thing they knew how to do, and that was pray. Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, Judas son of James. All these men and others, along with some women, including Mary, the mother of Jesus; all these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.
Too often, we overlook such verses in the scriptures. I have sat in Bible studies where we read verses of scripture like this, and when I ask the question, “What did they do?” everyone scours the verses looking for clear action and completely overlooking the act of prayer.
And yet for people of faith isn’t prayer one of the first actions we should take? When everything that is familiar has been ripped away, when we are suddenly living in uncharted territory, shouldn’t our first resort be prayer?
When you just can’t do the things you’ve done before. These disciples couldn’t pepper Jesus with questions that drove him to the brink of his sanity, not any more. They couldn’t follow him into boats out on the lake, or down roads through the villages of Galilee – not any more. No longer would they run errands for him, making themselves feel useful, fetching donkeys or food to eat. All that was apparently over, and they didn’t yet know what would be next. But in the meantime, they devoted themselves to prayer. And that is actually a very important and potent thing to do when you don’t know what’s next. Prayer draws us close to the source of power, wisdom, love.
I guess those silly disciples weren’t so silly after all. Once they got over the shock of Jesus being taken from them – again – they really did know where to look. They looked to prayer. Something that seems to us so insignificant, the act of prayer.
Sometimes it’s the little things that matter.
Photo: Chuy, resting but always alert.
