Sometimes playwrights (of which I have been one…) have a problem: How to get a character off the stage. I wonder if God faced this dilemma with Jesus? After all, he’s risen from the dead, very much alive and embodied, if somewhat different than before. Yet the embodied Jesus needs to exit the scene – his work is done, his mission fulfilled, and it’s time for the Holy Spirit to be released upon all flesh. He can’t go into the earth or wander off. There’s only one way he can go: up.
…as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. Nice exit!
For the rest of this week we turn to the story of Jesus’ ascension, which Luke tells in more detail in Acts than he does in his Gospel. Both accounts, though, begin with Jesus’ instructions to his disciples:
While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
It is put even more urgently in Luke’s gospel: “And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high."
Promises are challenging – they require us to trust the person making them. And they are by nature future events - they are only promises before they are fulfilled, at which time they become gifts. And we rarely know exactly when the promise will be fulfilled. It is often when we least expect it – for the disciples this one was met some time later, as they gathered to do the prayers for the Jewish feast of Pentecost.
We too have been promised the gift of the Holy Spirit, and we have already received this gift. We can feel the Spirit in prayer, in worship, in ministry. And yet we can also go through periods when we’re waiting for the Spirit’s life to be activated in and around us, for direction to appear, prompts to unfold laying out the way forward for what God has already intended to do through us. The waiting is hard!
In what areas of your life do you feel you are waiting on the Spirit? Waiting for a promise to unfold, a path to appear? Have you told God that you’re waiting? How you feel about the waiting? That doesn’t always shorten the wait, but it deepens the relationship.
The Spirit acts when the Spirit acts; our job is to wait with grace, keeping busy with what is already before us even as we wait to behold what wonders God will reveal in us next.
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