I am always struck by these days of transition on the liturgical calendar. Today we mark the Ascension, the final Sunday of the season of Easter, just before the Sunday of Pentecost. Like Transfiguration Sunday, which falls between the season of Epiphany and the season of Lent, Ascension is what the theologian Karl Barth calls “a significant pause” between the dramatic events of Jesus’ resurrection, and the promised drama of Pentecost, which is just over the horizon. As such, it is a time between times, caught between promise and fulfillment. Jesus is gone, the Spirit has not come. What are the disciples to do?

       The most powerful moments of life, and of Christian life in particular, it seems to me, are lived in such in-between moments. The anthropologist Victor Turner called them “liminal” moments, times of transition between one stage of life and another– like adolescence, when we are caught between childhood and adulthood; or during pregnancy between finding out that a child is on the way and actually becoming parents; or finding out that you have been offered a new job, but you don’t start for several more weeks. The summer between highschool and college, or between college and graduate school, or between school and your first job– or at the end of your working life, when you are set to retire, but your retirement party is still a few weeks off. Such periods can be times of intense openness and growth, but also tension and ambiguity, even fear and dread, as we pass from something old and familiar to something new and unknown. Churches have such times too, often in periods of transition between one pastor and the next, or at moments of crisis or change. In a sense, you could say our whole nation is in such a period just now as we are engaged in a national election and we don’t yet know the outcome. In such moments of our lives, what are disciples to do?

       Two options are set aside in the narrative. Just before Jesus ascends, the disciples ask, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” We can speculate why they might ask. It was long a part of the messianic expectations that the Messiah would restore the Davidic monarchy. Is that their hope? Jesus’ resurrection changed everything, yet Caesar still ruled. Their reality had been turned upside down, yet the world seemed much the same. Was the new age now at hand? What would it look like? When would it come? Can we iron out the future, smooth the transition by knowing what is coming around the bend, make the unknown known?

       It’s not for you to know, Jesus tells his disciples. The future will come by God’s own authority, but you will not know the time and day. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you,” Jesus tells them– but for now, the Spirit has not come. “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” Jesus promises, but for now they can’t quite grasp what that might mean. If the first option the disciples pursue is to become preoccupied with speculation about what is to come, Jesus urges them only to place their trust in God, and let everything else alone. So what are the disciples to do?

       Then suddenly, Jesus is gone, and they are caught up in something else. No sooner is he lifted up out of their sight, but two angels appear and scold them for staring up in to the clouds. If the first option was to speculate about the future, the second pathway the disciples pursue was to fixate on the past. This too is rejected. Jesus is gone, the show is over, the past is gone, the moment is now. There is work to be done, and you will not discover the task of the moment focused unduly on the past or the future.

S o what are the disciples to do? The answer of the text might surprise. Don’t just do something, stand there. The disciples wait, and they pray. They go back to Jerusalem, they gather with the twelve and their companions, both men and women, and they devote themselves to prayer. With such powerful promises for the future, and such important tasks on the horizon, waiting and praying might seem like an odd thing to do. But in those liminal moments, between the past and the future, between the old and the new, between the familiar and the unknown, waiting and praying is perhaps the most appropriate thing we can do.

       William Willimon puts it in this way:

       Waiting, an onerous burden for us computerized and technically impatient moderns who live in an age of instant everything, is one of the tough tasks of the church. Our waiting implies that the things which need doing in the world are beyond our ability to accomplish solely by our own effort, our programs and crusades. Some other empowerment is needed, therefore the church waits and prays. Our waiting and praying also indicates that the gift of the Spirit is never an assured possession of the church. It is a gift, a gift which must be constantly sought anew in prayer.

       So, it is telling, as we will hear next week in our text for Pentecost, that the Spirit came upon them when they were all in one place in prayer.

I t would be fair enough to say that prayer is an appropriate thing to do in all times and all seasons, but especially so in times of transition. In the face of anxiety and fear, uncertainty and unknown, prayer opens our hearts and minds to receive the gifts of God. “You will receive power... and you will be my witnesses,” Jesus promises the disciples, but for now they pray that they will be ready to receive this powerful gift when it comes.

       In the current issue of Presbyterians Today, which focuses on life in retirement, the editor Eva Stimpson asks, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That’s the question everyone asks of us when we are children, but in many ways it’s the same question we ask of ourselves over and over at the beginning of every new life stage. It’s a question that Christians never stop asking. Or, to put it in more theological language, “What is God calling me to do?” No matter how old we are, it’s a question we continue to ask, and the most appropriate way to put the question is in prayer– prayer that is more about listening than it is asking, more about silence then about words, more about openness than is it about certainty.

       When Andrea and I were in Taizé last summer, one of the most striking aspects of worship in the Taizé community in southern France was the amount of time spent in silence. That you could persuade hundreds of teenagers a week to spend several hours a day in silence goes against most of our conventional wisdom about young people. (In one of the “Zits” comic strips this past week, the father complains about how fast the world seems to be moving, to which his teenage son responds, “Really? I’m listening to a different iPod in each ear while we’re having this conversation, and I’m still bored to tears.”) Yet there we were, surrounded by eight hundred young adults gathered in silence. In fact, the entire week was about waiting and silence, waiting and silence, yet participants describe it as one of the most transformative experiences of their lives. Perhaps the good brothers of Taizé are on to something.

       We experiment with silence at Pilgrims, though it doesn’t come as naturally to us as it does to others in the Christian tradition. It takes practice. The Quaker writer Kathryn Damiano, in a tradition that practices silence almost as a sacrament, writes, “Our culture seems to promote a fear of silence. Silence seems to lack boundaries, it can make us feel that we are not in control. Silence conveys emptiness so it is harder to accept as real and full in a society that commands us to be satisfied and fulfilled at every moment.” Silence is not always healthy, she notes. Sometimes we remain silent to avoid commitments, or we silence others so we do not have to reckon with their voices. But spiritual silence, she writes, is more than simply the absence of talk: it is the presence of something. The writer Thomas Merton puts it this way:

       “Silence is our admission that we have broken communication with God and are now willing to listen. We can be reduced to silence in times of doubt, uncertainty, nothingness, and awe. When we have exhausted all our human efforts, experience the limitations of human justice, or the finitude of human relationships, we are left with silence.”

       Damiano concludes: “When we can stay in this place of silence without rushing to fill it up in some way, we are humbled to know even for a little while that we in our own power do not have all the answers.” It is in the silence that discernment comes, and awareness grow, and this, the Quakers teach, is silence’s great gift: “Awareness that comes from a grounding in silence allows us to respond more authentically.”

       Mother Theresa put it this way:

The fruit of Silence is Prayer.

The fruit of Prayer is Faith.

The fruit of Faith is Love.

The fruit of Love is Service.

The fruit of Service is Peace.

✞

© 2008 Jeffrey K. Krehbiel