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by Jim McCrea Acts 1:6-14 There are a lot of people who don't know how to live without excitement, without stimulation beyond the level of ordinary life. Whether that comes from pleasure or from crisis, those people thrive on activity - they have to always be doing things or solving problems or creating problems in order to on feel the rush of adrenalin. Those people regard the time that exists between one crisis or another - between one activity or another -as wasted time. Even those of us who aren't adrenalin junkies often find those quiet times difficult. It can be hard to face a period of time when not much is happening or when you have to wait for some promise to be fulfilled. Today's New Testament lesson tells us how the disciples found themselves in just that kind of situation. They had to face a period in which they would simply have to wait for Christ's promise to them to come true. After the resurrection, Jesus encouraged his disciples, taught them, commissioned them, and then - on the day when he returned to heaven - he told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait. That is, they were to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, which would give them the power they would need to witness to him there, and in Judea and Samaria, and ultimately in the whole world. And so they did just that. They returned to the upper room and prayed and waited for something to happen. But in the meantime, they were in the "in-between time" - between the Ascension and Pentecost - between loss and promise. At one time or another all of us are there - in a holding pattern between loss and promise, between the things we've lost and things that haven't developed. We're in that limbo of "in-between time." One example of that comes when someone close to you dies. You feel as if you're in a vacuum. The pain of the loss is there, and the future doesn't seem to be anywhere at all, and you're stuck there in between. Or when you go away to school for the first time. You don't know your way around the campus and you probably don't know very many of the other students. In between the security of home and the insecurity of the college, homesickness often sets in. Those of you who have lost jobs know what being in between means. You may be vice-president of a company one day and lose your job the next. And all of a sudden all those things that were so important are stripped away, and you have to go thru a period of struggle before you can find a new job. And worse yet is suffering through broken relationships, whether that might be a divorce or the ending of a friendship or an estrangement from a relative. In those moments the relationship you knew and cherished is gone and it's unclear what will take its place. So this "in-between time" of the apostles is something that you and I know from our own experience. We wonder, "Will I ever get better? Will this mental or emotional or physical illness ever leave me? Will I ever be free?" The book of Acts suggests the apostles did three things in their time of being "in between." The first thing was to gather together for prayer. They didn't know what to do specifically except that they had to pray for guidance, even when it was difficult to pray. And I imagine that it had to be. All they knew for certain was that their leader was gone. He had promised to send them the Spirit, but the Spirit had not yet come. They didn't know whether they had a future as a sect or a religion, or whether they would eventually just split up and go their separate ways -- back to the lives they'd led before Jesus called them. Even so, they did what Jesus had asked - they stayed together and prayed. The second thing Luke implies by the way he tells the story is that when you have loss, things are stripped from you. If you lose your job, your nameplate on the door is stripped from you. Your usual conversation and your usual social circle, is contracted. It's not something that you talk about at a cocktail party. Suddenly your connections are gone, and so is the daily routine of going to work. You're without many of the people who know you and respect you. Suddenly you feel as if you've lost your identity. Sickness also has the power to transform your life. It can strip away your ability to do you what you want. Broken relationships, divorce, physical or mental illness - all those losses ultimately rob you of those things that are familiar and loved. But Luke says that when all those things are stripped away - as bad as that experience may be - it has a tendency to force you to go down to the bare-bones values of your life. It may make you bitter or it may force you to realign your values. And for that very reason, some people voluntarily strip themselves of all excess baggage. For example, when Bishop Pedro was consecrated as Catholic bishop of the diocese of Brazil, he decide he wouldn't wear the usual miter and the rings, and he wouldn't carry the shepherd's staff. Instead, he said, "My miter will be the straw sombrero of the poor. My ring will be works of mercy and my staff will be service to the people." He decided to set an example by stripping his life down to bare essentials. He could have lived in a castle surrounded by great honor, but instead, he voluntarily chose to live close to the values that really count: relationships and loving one another. Or how about Boris Becker of West Germany? He has won the Wimbledon tennis tournament three times and was runner-up four other times. But after his second Wimbledon, he suddenly realized that he was becoming more than just a famous world tennis champion to the people of his native country. The German people were idolizing him and turning him into a symbol of national pride. That can be very seductive, especially when you're only nineteen. But he said, "The Germans wanted me to live for them. They worship too much. When I entered my own home town people stood there and gazed up at me as if they were expecting blessings from the pope. When I looked into the eyes of my fans at the Davis Cup matches last December, I thought I was looking at monsters. Their eyes were fixed and had no life in them. When I saw this kind of blind, emotional devotion, I could understand what happened to us [under Adolph Hitler] a long time ago at Nuremberg." And then he said: "Heroes live very short lives." So Becker chose to step back from that kind of personality cult you read about in People magazine. He wanted to be authentically himself. When the apostles went to that upper room, they had to ask themselves, "What are the values we want to live by?" It's the same sort of question that faced Job in the Old Testament after all of his possessions, most of his family and even his health were stripped away from him. And it's a question we all have to ask ourselves, sooner or later: "When you take away my house, my car, my income and my health, what really counts?" The "in-between time" is a grace-filled moment for answering that question. And the third thing is to live in the seedtime of hope. Jesus had said: "[...] you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Was that true or not? They didn't think it was possible and yet there was that tantalizing hope. They were tantalized by a hope for renewal and surprise. You may have heard of Edwin Booth. In 1865, he was the most distinguished actor of his time, something like an Anthony Hopkins of the American stage. He was one of the greatest actors the world has ever seen. But he had a horrible life; it seemed as if he lived under a cloud. He was stuck in the "in-between time" for a long time. He had a terrible father, who was an alcoholic who literally drank himself to death. In the process, he stranded his family in California, some 3,000 miles away from home. They had to find some way to work their way back to their native Maryland. Edwin chose to do that by becoming an actor. His first wife, Mary Devlin, died after two years of marriage. He later remarried and his second wife became insane. Meanwhile, he went bankrupt trying to pay for her medication. But that wasn't the end of his troubles. Above everything else, there was one thing that happened that humiliated him the rest of his life: you see, it was his younger brother - John Wilkes Booth - who assassinated President Lincoln. Edwin Booth was both pro-Union and pro-Lincoln, so he was not only offended personally, but also politically. For a long time, he did the best thing that he could in order to compensate. He transformed himself into that great actor. But the Holy Spirit surprised him one day. He was in Jersey City, when he saw a tall young man being pushed by a crowd. The young man was being nudged to such an extent that he started to fall onto the railroad tracks. Edwin Booth, who happened to be there, dropped his valise and immediately ran over. Just in the nick of time, he literally snatched this young man from death. The young man recognized the famous actor from his photographs and said simply, "Well, that was a narrow escape, Mr. Booth." And for as long as he lived, Edwin Booth took pleasure from the knowledge that the person whose life he saved was Robert Todd Lincoln, President Lincoln's eldest son. So the Holy Spirit came when he least expected it to give him a sense of honor again. When you read today's New Testament lesson, it seems as if all the action is over when Jesus disappears into the cloud and the disciples are told to go back home. But Luke doesn't stop there. He gives us a blueprint for dealing with those "in between times." You should pray even when you think you can't. You should pray even when the content of your prayer is just saying, "I believe. Lord, help my unbelief." Second, you should look for the growth that may come from your losses. Every loss forces you to look at things. At the end of life, many people say, "If I had to do it all over again, I would spend more time with my spouse. I would listen to my children more. We would spend more time together. I would appreciate each day in this world, and look at the flowers more," and so on. When you've had all the "things" surrounding you stripped away and you're faced with the bare essentials of life and death, there's a huge possibility for grace. So in the "in-between times" you should sit back and look for ways your new-found simplicity may help you to enrich your values. And third, it's a "seedtime of hope." When you drop a seed in the ground, and you can look every day as children often do, only to find that nothing seems to be going on. But under the surface, something really is happening. The seed is dying, but in the very process of dying, the shoot comes forth. That's hope. So those of you who are in the "in-between time" - or those of you who will be, and everybody will be sooner or later - be patient with those things that are dying, but have hope for the future. The Spirit that entered Edwin Booth's life is a positive sign that the Spirit will breathe where it will, and therefore, in the "in-between time," we all have a right to hope. Amen.
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