Acts 1:1-14
A part of this reading says: "After Jesus was taken up into the heavens the apostles returned to Jerusalem, a mere Sabbath's Day away, and entering the city, they went to the upstairs room where they were staying."
You read between the lines. It's not hard to do. Luke is giving us a very common theme that speaks to us today. He's saying, "Look, this is a shattered community. They have lost their leader. And not only lost him, but lost him most shamefully, because their leader was roughly grabbed and given a criminal's death."
And so they don't know what to do. They remember some words of Jesus and they go to this upper room to figure things out, and to hope that his words might be true and that something might happen. But for the moment you have to appreciate that they are in the "in-between time." They're between the Ascension and Pentecost--between loss and promise.
And the scriptures show us how they handled that, and that's important because all of us at one time or another are exactly there---between loss and promise, between things that you have lost and things that have not yet unfolded, and you're in that limbo of "in-between time."
An example is when someone close to you dies. You are in a vacuum. And the pain of the loss is there, and the future doesn't seem to be anywhere, and you're in between.
Those going away to school for the first time---going away to college. You don't know the place or the kids well enough; you don't know your way around. And there's the security of home and the insecurity of the college; and homesickness sets in. You are in the "in-between time." Between pain and promise.
Those of you who have lost your jobs, you know what being in between means. You can be vice-president of a company one day and lose your job the next day. And all of a sudden all those things that were important are stripped away, and you don't yet have a new job.
And perhaps worst of all even worse than death in many ways--is suffering through broken relationships, whether it's a divorce, or the break-up of a friendship, or estrangement from a child who's living a life that you don't like living in disgrace and sin, living through addictions or prison.
So you see this "in-between time" of the apostles is something that you and I know from our experience. Will I ever get better? Will this mental or emotional or physical illness ever leave me? Will I ever be free? We all know those questions.
The scripture suggests three things to do, the things the apostles did.
The first thing they did was to gather in prayer. They just didn't know what to do 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 was that their leader was dead. He had promised the Spirit, and the Spirit had not yet come. They didn't know whether they had a future as a sect or a religion, or whether they should just split up and go back into the main-stream. And even though they were not inclined to, they prayed. So that's the first thing that Luke, who wrote this story, gives us on how to handle the "in-between times."
The second thing is interesting. Luke implies: "Look for and savor the message of simplicity."
What does he mean by that? He means that when you have loss, things are stripped from you. If you lost your job, your name on the door is stripped from you. Your conversation, your 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're without identity. It's that kind of thing. Things are being stripped from you.
Sickness strips the ability to come and go as you will. Broken relationships, a divorce, physical or mental illness--all these losses ultimately strip you. And Luke says that when things are stripped away, as bad as that is, it has a tendency to force you to go down to the bare-bones values of your life. You and I have read stories about people and know people who have met great tragedies that in the end helped them to focus on what really counted. You are divested of your cumbersome symbols; and hopefully, being stripped this way and having to live more simply, you realign your values. Maybe the best thing to do is to look at those people who voluntarily strip themselves. They don't have to do it.
- I think of one of the bishops in a diocese of Brazil, Bishop Pedro. When he was consecrated, he would not wear the usual mitre and the rings, and wouldn't carry the crozier. Instead, he said, "My mitre will be the straw sombrero of the poor. My ring will be works of mercy, and my staff will be service to the people.'
Or if you don't want to talk about a bishop, talk about a tennis star.
- I was much impressed by Boris Becker of West Germany, who twice won the Wimbledon tennis tournament. He suddenly realized that he was becoming more than a famous world tennis champion. He suddenly realized that Germany was making him a source of its new pride, and he found himself being idolized. And that is very seductive--whether you're fifty-nine or twenty-nine, much less nineteen. But for his young age, he said this, and I quote: "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 a long time ago at Nuremberg." (Here he was making a reference to when Hitler mesmerized the German people.) And then he said: "Heroes live very short lives."
So in this stripping away time, you are forced to say, "What are the values I really want to live by?'
And when the apostles went to that upper room they had to ask that question: ''What are we basically, when all is taken away - you take away my house, my car, my income, my health, what really counts?'
The "in-between time" is a graceful moment for answering that question.
And the third thing is to live in the seedtime of hope. Jesus had said: "If you go there, the Spirit will come upon you."
Was that true or not? They didn't want to believe it and yet there was that tantalizing hope. They were tantalized by a hope for renewal and surprise. For example, we are all delighted that Mathias Rust took his little Cessna airplane and flew into Red Square?
[On May 29, 1987, Mathias Rust, a nineteen-year-old German, flew a single-engine Cessna from Helsinki to Red Square. His flight went undetected by Soviet air defenses. He embarrassed the heck out of the Soviets, so much so that they fired many people in the military. Gorbachev wanted to do that anyway. (My guess is that he hired Mathias, but that's only a personal theory.]
But you see the thing that we're so delighted about is that this is a surprise of the Spirit. Moscow has antiballistic missiles to defend it, and all kinds of sophisticated radar, and the Moscovites didn't dream that something like this could or would happen--and then a nineteen-year-old German flies undetected and lands there. Surprise of the Spirit. And if you look at the photographs of Red Square, where does he land? In front of the great cathedral of St. Basil, that magnificent building. It has been turned into a museum of atheism by the Soviets. But it stands there, and religion is flourishing in the Soviet Union as never before. Try as they might to kill God, God keeps popping out in the most unexpected places. So it's significant that the plane landed in front of St. Basil's because that stands not as the official museum to atheism, it stands as a symbol of unexpected hope for the deeply religious Russian people.
Let me tell you another true story.
- Most of you at least know the name of Edwin Booth. Back in 1865, Edwin Booth was the Laurence Olivier of the stage. Actually one of the greatest dramatic actors the world has ever seen. But he had a horrible life, and he lived under a cloud. He lived in the "in-between time" for a long time. He had a terrible father. His father, Brutus Booth, was a drunk and drank himself to death. He stranded his family 3000 miles away in California, and they had to work back to their native Maryland. The only way that Edwin knew how was by becoming an actor. His first wife, Mary Devlin, died after two years of marriage. Talk about a soap opera, one thing after another. He remarried and his other wife became insane, and he went bankrupt trying to pay for her medication. What else could happen to him? What else happened was something that embarrassed him his whole life long--his own younger brother assassinated President Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth was Edwin's younger brother. Edwin was a pro-Union, pro-Lincoln patriot, so not only did it offend him that way, but this was his brother. And everybody knows what it means to have a member of your family embarrass you, which is a great understatement. After all, his brother killed the president of the United States, one of our greatest. And for a long time, in that seedtime, in that "in-between time," he did the best thing that he could in order to compensate. He became that great actor. But the Spirit surprised him one day. He was in Jersey City, and there was a tall young man there being pushed by a crowd, nudged to such an extent that the young man started to fall onto the railroad tracks. Edwin Booth, who happened to be there, dropped his valise and immediately ran over, and just in the nick of time literally snatched this young man from death. The young man recognized the famous actor from his photographs and simply said, "Well, that was a narrow escape, Mr. Booth."
So it looks like a little, harmless story that Luke is telling, but he's saying that the time between the loss and the promise is hard, but the scripture has left us a program for the "in between time.'
You must pray. You must pray even when the prayer that you make is "I can't pray." You must pray in faith even when the content of your prayer is 'I can't believe and I don't think you exist at all." You must pray to a higher power. The "in-between time" is difficult, a transition in your life.
Second, you must look for the value-message in the stripping away. Every loss forces you into looking at things. People know that, especially those who visit hospitals. In hospitals I've heard more than one person 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 forth and so on. When you're stripped away and you're faced with essentials of life and death, there's a great grace there. So in the "in-between times" you must sit back and look for the calling mystery of your new-found simplicity that will help you to realign your values, so you can be a good human being.
And third, it's a "seedtime of hope." The word "seed" is good, for those of you who putter in gardens. You drop the seed in the ground, and you can look every day as the kids do, and nothing's happening. But something is happening. Unknown, invisibly, something incredible is happening, some thing you could watch with time-lapse photography. What's happening is that the seed is dying. But in the very process of dying, as it must die, the shoot comes forth. That's hope.
So those of you who are in the "in-between time," or will be, and everybody will be--just be patient with the dying, but have hope for the future.
The Spirit that entered Edwin Booth's life and the unexpected landing in Red Square are positive signs that the Spirit will breathe where it will, and therefore, in the "in-between time,' we have a right to hope.
(Reprinted with permission from Telling Stories, Compelling Stories, pp. 82-88, copyright 1991 by
William J. Bausch. Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, CT. This resource, as well as many others, is available at a discount through the Homiletic Resource Center. If you enjoyed this homily, you might consider purchasing the BAUSCH TREASURY, a complete set of his homiletic books, including his new ones The Yellow Brick Road, The Word In And Out Of Season and A World of Stories for Preachers and Teachers, as well as all of his previous publications: