Sermon: Acts 1:6-14, Jn 17:1-11
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Sun. after Ascension, 6-5-11
Today we’re at a transition point, a thrust-forward point, if you will, in the church year as we follow in the readings the life of Jesus and of the young church. Jesus has completed his work on earth. He has taught a new way of life and performed the signs to validate His message. He has given up His life according to the prophesies and risen from the dead. Now He says goodbye to his disciples and tells them He will send a Helper. Then He ascends into the clouds. While they are there, these country boys, gaping into the sky two angels tell them to go home. They return to the upper room where so much has happened. They wait and pray for the coming of the Helper. They probably felt lost, abandoned, as sometimes we do when confronted with a new stage in life, a transition. The big transition here is that the disciples up until that time had Jesus to do it all. They just needed to ask and He would perform the miracle, save the day. Now He is gone, at least visibly. It feels like they are on their own. But of course they are not. He will be present through His Spirit, the Helper, whose coming we celebrate next Sunday on Pentecost.
So, too, we may feel abandoned by Jesus. He is not around to work the miracle. His spirit is with us to help us do the work, not do it for us. We have to do it. The Christian life involves two things, as the disciples learned: we pray, we do. Not one without the other, but both. First the disciples prayed, the Spirit came and then they did. It was quite a transformation. We are called to that kind of transformation.
We can err in both extremes. We can just pray and expect God to fix us, get us out of this jam or whatever, without doing anything for ourselves. Or we can try to do it all by ourselves, no help asked from other people or from God. One the one hand let us not underestimate the power of prayer and on the other hand let us not forget what we can do with the right kind of help.
I heard this story recently about the power of prayer. It seems in this particular conservative mid-western town, there had not been a pub, until an entrepreneur moved in to build one. The grand opening was fast approaching and one of the churches started an all-out campaign of prayer and petitions to block it. No den of iniquity in our town. Just before the opening it was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. The church members were seen walking around town with smug looks on their faces, until the bar owner sued them for bringing about the destruction of his business. In court the church members denied any connection to the lightning bolt. The judge was quoted as saying. “I don’t know how I am going to decide this, but it appears we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer and an entire church congregation that doesn’t.”
All joking aside, prayer is a powerful resource. Then, of course, at the other extreme are those rugged individualists who insist they can do it all by themselves. The movie “127 Hours” portrays such a life. This academy award-nominated film starring James Franco is the true story of Aron Ralston, a bright young mountain climber, who got pinned by a boulder in the mountains of Utah. Many of you know his story because he is quite famous. After five days (127 hours) he was able to extricate himself (I shall not go into the gory details.), having already carved his death date into the walls of the canyon. This loner, self-sufficient guy began his transformation in the canyon as he repented of not telling anyone where he had gone. He videotaped messages to his parents apologizing for not answering his mother’s phone calls and telling them how much he loved them. He was able to get himself out of the canyon using all the ingenuity of both head and heart, but he undoubtedly would have died then in the wilderness had his mother not sent a helicopter to look for him.
Aron returned to mountain climbing with a prosthetic forearm but his transformation into a human being who realized he needed both God and his fellow man continued. He is now married and has the son that he believes he saw in his delirious state in the canyon.
We are called to transformation. Some of us come to it with an overreliance on God and others, expecting Him and them to do it all, to save us from our own laziness and foolishness. Others come at it from the other extreme, with an overreliance on ourselves, believing we have the world by the tail.
It took a big boulder to jolt Aron Ralston into beginning his transformation. He recognizes today that it was the love of others, his relationship with his family and friends that came through for him. He says, “For me it was to go through this and to realize, well, God is love and love is what kept me alive and love is what got me out of here.” John Jawing
Citations: Movie: “127 Hours” directed by Danny Boyle, 2010.
Book: “Between a Rock and Hard Place” by Aron
Ralston
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