May 8, 2005
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Many years ago when our son. Greg was just a little boy; we went to Long Island to visit Joy’s brother. On this trip, we went to the beach to play in the sand, fish from the shore, and to fly kites. This happened to be a very blustery windy day. Greg and I put together his kite and it took off almost instantly—out over the ocean. Greg wanted to hold the spool of string like any little boy would want. In about a minute, the force of the wind yanked the spool right out of his little hands and started to skip on top of the ocean water. I went after it but realized that I had Joy’s camera around my neck. I let the kite go and Greg started to cry.
The kite went higher and farther out over the ocean. Not before too long, it was as small as a speck. And pretty soon we couldn’t see it anymore. Our eyes were not strong enough to see beyond the heavens.
Two Saturdays ago, about 80 of us attended the Church Family Retreat Day at the Marin Headlands. Our meeting room was right near the ocean. Our Bible study leader Dr. Judy Siker spoke about this same passage that we have for today. On our hike which I led the group down the wrong path, we were able to look as far as our eyes could see. But where the sky meets up with the ocean, we couldn’t see anymore. Our eyes were unable to see beyond the heavens.
The Ascension of Jesus
The book of Acts records the disciples doing new things, seeing new things, and experiencing transitions and changes. Today’s passage deals with one of those great transitions: the ascension of Jesus. Once Jesus was lifted up into heaven, they couldn’t see him anymore.
For months Jesus has been warning his followers that he would leave them, but he had reassured them, “I will not leave you orphans.” In John 17, we have Jesus’ farewell prayer where he prayed for his beloved disciples. You can imagine that there were tears, hugs, and heartbreak. He told his disciples to return to Jerusalem and wait for the Spirit. They obeyed. And it was in an upper room that he came to them for the last time. They knew this was the moment they dreaded.
The disciples asked him important questions. Things like: “When will you restore the kingdom of Israel?” He said, “It is not for you to know neither the time nor the period. He continued, “But you will receive power and this is the promise of Pentecost.”
And after those words, he left them standing there looking up. As Jesus left the earth he moved upward into the heavens until he was out of sight. They stood there, feeling abandoned, looking up into the clouds. They squinted, wondered, and were sad, and turned away more than a little afraid. The disciples wanted to still see him, but Jesus became a speck and then their eyes could not see beyond the heavens.
Changing Focus
If two men in white robes didn’t come along, the disciples probably would have stayed there gazing up toward the heavens. Like the way we lost our kite over the ocean, Greg wanted to stay there hoping that perhaps the wind might change in the other direction to bring the kite back. Rather than letting the disciples just gazing up in the sky, the two angels changed their focus. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward the heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” In other words, stop wasting your time gazing up into the heaven, when it’s time now for you to change your focus.
Might this be a time for you and for us as a church to change our focus? It’s like when someone becomes a Christian, you see a whole new way of looking at things. Remember when Jesus healed the blind man’s eyes. When Jesus touched the man’s sightless eyes he could see—but only faintly. People looked, he said, like trees. And Jesus touched his eyes a second time and the man who had been blind began to see clearly. He saw faces—beautiful faces—birds, colors, flowers, the blue sky. This change of focus that Acts records says that the disciples’ newly opened eyes saw things they had never seen before.
Today is Mother’s Day and I can remember my mother used to tell me that I was the most domesticated of four boys because I like to clean. While my brothers are studying or playing outside, I was sweeping dust bunnies up in the hallway. I was just telling Joy recently that my most favorite appliance is a vacuum cleaner! In fact, Joy often wants me to have a change of focus. I see all of the lint, dirt, and dust bunnies on the floor while she tells me to look up to see the cobwebs on the ceiling. I need to have a change of focus!
Luke, writing Acts tells us that this was a time of great transition. Jesus was going away, everything was changing. From these few verses in today’s passage, we can begin to change our focus from gazing up toward the heavens to looking down here on earth. We can change from seeing cobwebs on the ceiling to seeing dust bunnies on the floor.
Focusing In
Today, I offer four ways of changing our focus; to be able to see things differently. As the disciples were about to experience great change, we too, as Christ’s church need to be opened to change. As Dr. Siker said at the retreat, the Spirit comes into our lives and into the world whenever it chooses and causes us to be unsettled.
1. My optometrist is Tommy Lim. And he tells me that most Asians wear corrective lenses. Most of us begin losing our ability to see far away. This is being near-sighted. The disciples realized while gazing up toward the heavens that they couldn’t see Jesus anymore so the angels shocked them into realizing that they were still near-sighted.
“Why do you stand here looking up? Return to Jerusalem and there, in the upper room, surrounded by people as ordinary as you and me, the Holy Spirit will come.
It wasn’t heaven they were to turn to. Jesus’ followers were to turn toward the earth and the reality of everyday life. So they left that hillside and traveled a Sabbath day’s journey to their destination, not at all sure what it meant. But they took these hazy instructions and looked for a particular winding street which would lead in time, to a house and stairs and an upper room. The first change of focus is to look into our everyday lives here on earth. For most of us who are near-sighted, we don’t need any corrective lenses to see our daily lives.
The church in every age has had difficulty following these directions. There’s a real surge of interest in spirituality today. People are hungry for something besides malls, money, competition, and rat races. And so we turn to racks of books by Tim LaHaye that transports us away from today’s realities to some future day that Jesus himself said, “It is not for you to know the times and periods,” We turn to conferences, gurus, and whatever it is that might touch the deep yearnings of our lives. But Acts warns that if this spirituality is not rooted in the world of every day, it won’t work. It will be just another burden in an over-committed calendar.
We can say that our lives all have some cracks in them. The angels are telling us that we don’t need to gaze into the heavens for the healing of these cracks. If we look closer into these cracks, we will see the great miracle of God’s light shining through them. Look at the cracks in your life and the world. This is where the light of God shines through.
2. The second change of focus is moving from God to one another. Acts’ ascension story says that if we want to see God, we are to look around us. In the room upstairs where they were staying, Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James were gathered. Not just the disciples were looking at one another, but together with them were certain women, including Mary mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers.
We get lost when we look for God too high up and too far away. We find God when we redirect our gaze to one another, and the world around us. This shift is significant—from there to here.
When we have events like the Church Family Retreat Day or the upcoming annual Church Picnic in August, there’s no question that the reason for us to meet together is to worship God. But what is also of great significance is that reality that we are focusing on one another. For most of us, this was the first time we met members of Zion Fellowship and they with us. When we focus on one another as people created in God’s own image, we can see the face of God. Like the disciples and their friends, we come together “constantly devoting ourselves to prayer” and devotions.
3. The third change of focus is to redirect our gaze to look beyond us. Jesus said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes over you and you will be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and unto the uttermost parts/ends of the world.” Every age categorizes people into “us and them.” The great shift in Acts is when the church was forced to move out beyond themselves into the world of the outsider.
The disciples are charged to not only climb over the walls of Jerusalem and Judea that kept the so-called chosen people in but to focus out and actually see the despised people of Samaria. I know that there’s a problem with securing our borders in this climate of terrorist threats but somehow having a wall and Minutemen vigilantes at the Mexican border reinforces for me how wrong it is to indiscriminately keep “those” kinds of people out. There’s something wrong here. Isn’t us were once they?
The ascension of Jesus launches the disciples to receive the Holy Spirit at Pentecost that empowered “sons and daughters to prophesy, young men and women to see visions, and old men and women to dream dreams.” They were able to see things they have never seen before. All kinds of people from all sorts of places were able to speak in different languages and were able to understand.
The change of focus to see others from ourselves is a mandate for missions and social action. The world is still in great need for followers of Jesus Christ today to consider going into ministry and missions, to bear witness in evangelism and correcting social ills and injustices. And we know that when we go to Thailand at the end of this year as a part of our 125th Anniversary celebration that the people of Thailand will understand us and we will understand them because with the power of the Holy Spirit, we can see and know each other.
We are they and they are us. When we understand this ascension gospel, we know there really are no theys—there are only wes. And that understanding enables all sorts of walls to crumble and fall just like how Jesus remove all kinds of barriers and walls that kept people from being in community and receiving the grace of God.
4. The fourth and last change of focus moves us from the general to the specific. The angels instructed those disciples to turn their gaze from the heavens to things closer at hand. They specifically went to a room upstairs in Jerusalem on a side street. Jesus pushed them to go further out of Jerusalem, out in Judea, and specifically to go even farther out toward Samaria.
God never calls us to generalities, but to specifics. When you are a member of this church, your discipleship is not simply to be a “general Christian.” But rather, we have a specific job for you to teach a class, serve on a committee, teach at Friday Night School, sing in one of the choirs, be a caregiver or a prayer partner. Every church and ours is no exception, needs more folk who will give their lives in some specific commitment. Maybe today you might make that commitment in the sight of God to serve Christ as your Lord.
Maybe the message from this passage for you is to be specific about who you are as an individual. This may be the focus you need to have. There may be something that you want to change from quitting some destructive pattern of living, or letting go of some rage or hatred or grief that is strangling you. What is one thing that you need to do to change your focus and begin building toward a constructive and healthier life?
Refocus Priorities
Last Sunday at the Gospel Choir’s silent auction, I bought Dr. Tommy Lim’s $50 eye exam donation. Now that I am in my upper 50s, I am no longer just near-sighted or just far-sighted, I need bi-focals! I need regular eye exams! Life is more like seeing both– what may be near us as well as what may be farther away. We struggle at seeing both the benefits of the changes we want and pursue as well as suffering the consequences that the changes cause to us.
For example, parents want their children to go to college, but their absence from home leaves a great emptiness. We want those new jobs in exciting new places, but we have trouble leaving behind the life we have made. We want to retire and do many things we had little time to do when we were working, but we find it difficult to live without office, title, and authority. Changes in our lives that we look forward to are often accompanied by the loss of other good things as well.
From this passage in Acts, we learn that the challenges of focusing in the midst of changes and transitions are clarified when we focus on carrying out Jesus’ commission for us. “When you receive the power of the Holy Spirit, go and become witnesses of Christ in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of earth.” The disciples were no longer unable or afraid to see what they had to do. They chose Matthias to complete their team of twelve disciples and prepared for the coming of the Holy Spirit.
Let us begin to change our focus from gazing into heaven to refocusing our lives to meet the daily needs of the world. Let us change our focus to seeing one another and discovering the face of God. Let us change our focus to going beyond ourselves and see that outsiders also need the salvation of God. Let us focus on a specific commitment that each of us would carry through as our service to Christ.
Let us pray.
Gracious Lord, lead us to change our focus from gazing out into outer space, day-dreaming of vacations and about our own self-interest and to refocus our lives on the work of your Kingdom on earth. We pray for the coming of the Holy Spirit to transform us to become even greater friends and to spread the Good news of Christ in the world. Amen.