The Promise
Notes
Transcript
I like to overthink things from time to time. Does that resonate with any of you? Yeah I figured as much. And you know one of the things that I often over think is like how did something begin? Like what was happening inside the mind of someone who invented something that changed the world like the automobile, or even farther back in time. Like what process of trial and error went into creating new types of construction materials?
Or here’s a super deep one that maybe you aren’t ready for… who invented dinosaur sounds? You are just now in this moment realizing that someone made dino sounds up… there was no one here to actually hear and pass down what kinds of noises they made. But someone made an educated guess and it stuck. And we don’t even question it.
This is how I’ve always been, so I’d like to throw a special shout out to my Mom, who had to endure my thought process and question asking for a lot of years. So happy Mothers day. You’re a champion.
But along the lines of overthinking things that we’ll never have the chance to actually know for sure, I was thinking the other day about what it must have been like for those first humans who learned how to start fires on their own.
A fire can be the most destructive force on earth right? We only need to watch the news for months out of the year to see what a wildfire can do to entire sections of California. Wildfires spread quickly and burn for a long period of time, displacing populations and destroying everything in their path.
But I got to thinking the other day about how the first people to harness fire for good got the idea that “hey this thing that we experience and see could be something that helps us out.” I’m sure fire for them was just a natural phenomena that happened when lightning struck a tree.
But at some point, someone decided — this could be something that we can use for good -- To cook meat, to keep warm, and eventually to manipulate metal into tools.
Those early people saw something they didn’t understand, but it gave them an idea, it gave them hope that something different could happen here, life could change, maybe the world would be different.
How to Start a Fire
How to Start a Fire
Today we being a new sermon series Called “How to Start a Fire.” We will be looking at the Book of Acts, and how it gives us the story of how the early Church spread like a wildfire across the known world.
And what we will find today is that the work of starting this fire that was known as “The Way” began long before any of the primary actor’s understood what would occur. The beginning of this story occurred when all of Jesus’s disciples were still just trying to understand the things that were seeing and experiencing as they traveled the world with Jesus. It all began with a promise, and with that promise the idea that just maybe Jesus’s disciples might be able to do the work of Jesus themselves.
In the Gospel of John Jesus makes this promise to his disciples while he is preparing them for his crucifixion:
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.
This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you.
In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.
On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.
They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?”
Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.
Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.
“I have said these things to you while I am still with you.
But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.
Jesus’s words here are a promise that God will be with His people — That even when Jesus is physically gone, they will not be alone. They will have God’s presence with them in the form of the Holy Spirit, which will give them knowledge and as we will find out, the power that they will need in order to continue the mission that Jesus came and began here on earth.
But then as you may remember, a pretty deep collective trauma occured to the disciples. You see even though Jesus had tried to prepare them for his crucifixion and death, they were still stunned.
And I don’t know about you, but when I experience something particularly traumatic, when life gets really hard, it becomes really hard to remember the promises of earlier times. It’s hard to see past the mess and pain that we find ourselves in. And Jesus knew that.
As you may recall, on Easter we celebrate the fact that Jesus came out of the tomb. Jesus was raised from the dead and then walked along side of and taught the disciples for another 40 days. This is the period of time that we celebrate Jesus’s continuing and equipping presence among the people that He had called to do the work of building the church.
And it’s in this sweet time, when the collective trauma that those who loved Jesus experienced was eased by the joy of the resurrection that Jesus knows that they need to have the promise reiterated. See they must have been tempted to believe that Jesus was sticking around for the long haul; that Jesus was going to be the one to do all of the heavy lifting in the work of spreading the Gospel.
But that wasn’t the plan. Jesus was going to ascend into Heaven, and he was going to do so soon. And so he gathered his disciples together to speak to them one last time, and this interaction is where the story of Acts begins. So we should begin there.
Acts was written by Luke, the Non-Jewish Physician who wrote the gospel of Luke. These 2 books — Luke and Acts — are the only books in our Bibles that were not written by Jewish people. But Luke was well versed in the culture and religion of Israel. He set out to compile a historical record of the life of Jesus, particularly the way that Jesus’s message was a message for all people, and then continued to write the book of Acts in order to show how that message of Jesus made its way to all people, despite the many obstacles that it faced.
And so the book of Acts begins in this way:
In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning
until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.
After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
So this is the set up for the whole story. Luke is linking the book of Acts to the Gospel of Luke which begins addressed specifically to this person named Theophilus who is believe to be the person who sponsored Luke’s fact finding mission.
He says “hey you remember what I wrote in my last book right? Jesus taught, died, came back, and then hung out with a bunch of people for 40 days before heading to heaven? Well in case you forgot, he was talking to them about the kingdom of God.”
Then Luke goes on and writes these words
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.”
Luke shows us this reminder, this reiteration, of the original promise that Jesus made the Disciples in the Gospel of John. Jesus said to them, “the Holy Spirit is coming, and coming to you soon.”
And it’s this promise that lays the foundation for the world to change. But Jesus doesn’t stop there in just promising them that the Holy Spirit will be coming. Because that’s all well and good right? But why is the Holy Spirit coming?
Luke goes on:
So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
You have to love the disciples. They are like “OH! Is this the time you’re going to do the thing we’ve hoped for and that you definitely said you weren’t here to do? Like repeatedly? Were you just stringing us along? You’re going to do all the hard work right Jesus?”
And Jesus is like, well no. This is not the time children.
The disciples have this very narrow view still. They still think that the world revolves around Israel, and that Jesus’s mission was nationalistic in nature. That Jesus had come to restore Israel’s autonomy, to put them back on top of the Geo-Political food chain, or at least put them back on the map.
And this is one of the most important lines in the entire book of Acts. It defines the tension that is going to happen within the Jesus movement, and what it will eventually overcome.
Jesus’s followers are still thinking very narrowly about Jesus’s goal. They immediately want to build walls and contain this gift that they have been given, and they want to contain this promise that Jesus has just made them.
But the beauty of Jesus’s mission and the book of Acts is Jesus’s response to their question. No, no this is not the time that I’m restoring the kingdom. This is the time when YOU, you my people will become the ones who get to work.
And the work you are going to get to doing is to bring my story, my way of life, my Gospel message of salvation to Jerusalem, to all Judea and Samaria, and eventually to the ends of the earth.
And this is the pattern that we are going to trace over the next several months as we travel together through the book of Acts. Jerusalem — the Holy City is going to be ground zero for a fire that is going to spread outwards to encompass all of Judea — The Jews, then out to Samaria — to the long lost ethnic siblings of the Jews from the northern Kingdom, and then out and across the world.
The disciples are thinking small, but the promise is big. The promise has no boundaries. And this is the orienting vision that Jesus has for this rag tag band of his followers. You will receive the power that I have wielded in front of you.
You’ve seen what the power of God can do through me, and now it’s about to be your turn. Go on, harness it, and change the world.
Accepting the Position
Accepting the Position
The disciples in this moment remind me of what it must have been like for human beings to stare out at a naturally occurring fire and wonder to themselves… what if we could do that? What if we could start a fire… what could we do with it? Could we change the world?
The disciples sat in the awe and mystery of this promise that Jesus made — That through them the power of God might be known to many.
And this is the same promise that all of us, every generation of followers of Jesus are left with. We come to the table of Jesus and we are told that we have been given this power, this Holy Spirit, and that through it we are empowered to change the world.
In fact the mission of the United Methodist Church is to make disciples for the transformation of the world. But it’s so easy for us to either forget the promise that we have been empowered to do this work, or to think too small, to try to place walls around just how much we can accomplish for the kingdom of God in the world.
The promise of the Holy Spirit and the purpose to bring the message of God’s love and the Gospel of Jesus is an invitation to wonder, to dream, and to take action.
Much like those people who first had the thought to try to harness the power of fire, we are faced with the reality that if we are willing to listen to and embrace the power of God within us as individuals and as a community, we too might be able to start a fire that changes hearts, lives, and communities.
It’s my hope that as we take this journey through the book of Acts that your hearts and minds would be open to the wonder and awe of the movement of God and how God is calling us to be a part of that continuing work here in our piece of this world. I pray that you will be inspired, and that together we will know just how far and wide our influence can spread when we take the initiative to learn How to Start a Fire.
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