“Serving God in the Present Tense”

Acts 1:6-8

Some people never do get a firm grip on the obvious. It may be staring them in the face, but they somehow remain oblivious to it. So it was with the disciples of Jesus. For three years they had lived and worked in close proximity to him. They had first hand knowledge of his life, his teachings, and his expectations. They had gone through Passion Week with him, lived through the horrors of his crucifixion, and fellowshipped with him after his resurrection. They’d had the forty days between Easter Sunday and Christ’s Ascension to immerse themselves in his presence. Forty more days of learning from the Master. And still they didn’t get it.

They were still expecting Jesus to become some sort of power trip Messiahship. Listen to their question: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom of Israel?” Even as they looked toward the future and tried to absorb the realities of the present, their hearts and minds were deeply rooted in the past. Even as the obvious was staring them in the face they still couldn’t get a grip on it.

From Scripture and history we know, that once the Spirit had come upon them at Pentecost, they finally figured it out. They did what Jesus had commissioned them to do. Beginning in Jerusalem and then moving out into the world, they were witnesses to the Good News of Jesus. Their understanding of the Kingdom was no longer limited to misplaced longings for a political Messiah. They understood that the coming of the Kingdom in its fullness was in God’s hands not theirs. They simply and faithfully took care of the business Jesus had left for them: witnessing, evangelizing, and disciple making.

But on that day when our Lord ascended into heaven they were still consumed by false expectations. In the words of Matthew 28, some of them still had doubts about the resurrection. Jesus didn’t get mad or frustrated. He just calmly and clearly told them the truth: “It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set by his own authority…. you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…” In other words, “Leave God’s business to God and be about the business to which you have been called and for which will be empowered. It’s not about the past. Nor is it about the future. It’s business that needs to be taken care of in the present tense.”

Serving God in the present tense; that’s still our calling, especially in this time of rapid change and social turmoil. Going, going, and maybe already gone are the heady days of mistaking the American dream for the Gospel message and equating discipleship with citizenship. Gone are the days equating the Kingdom of God with some soon-to-be-perfected democracy. No longer valid is the arrogant assumption that Western values and Christianity are somehow one and the same thing. Quickly departing are the days of the church being implicitly and explicitly supported and protected by the social ethos, and in many cases, the law of the land.

Such notions are rapidly crumbling in the face of in-your-face secularism and religious pluralism. The separation of church and state, not all that long ago an easily crossed boundary, has become a rigid, legalistic wall. Churches are involved in clashes with the culture and political and legal powers-that-be over zoning ordinances, the taxation of church property, and the public display of religious symbols. Our society is increasingly not only secular, but also anti-Christian.

What do we do? Well, we don’t try to recreate the good old days. They’re gone. Nor do we shut our eyes and pretend that things will somehow magically be just like they used to be. We can’t live in the past tense. Nor can we serve God in the past tense. We have to deal with what is not with what it used to be and not with what we want it to be.

And in the process we cannot let ourselves be sidetracked from our calling to serve Jesus by becoming overly future-oriented. If we’re going to be biblically faithful and theologically orthodox, especially in terms of Reformed and Presbyterian theology, we cannot get caught up in all the Late, Great Planet Earth or Left Behind misinterpretation of Scripture that’s increasingly becoming a part of modern Evangelical thought. We have no need to waste our time and energy trying to decode and interpret various versions of so-called prophetic timetables. We have no business trying to identify the Antichrist. We shouldn’t be sitting around praying and singing while we wait on some Rapture to rescue us from realities we don’t like. We ought not be trying to serve God in the future tense, and we definitely shouldn’t be trying to outguess God.

We cannot repeat the past nor can we predict the future. That brings us back to the question: What do we do? We serve God in the present tense. We take seriously the words that Jesus spoke to those first bumbling, stumbling disciples: “… you will be my witnesses.” And we take them seriously by getting down to God’s business of proclaiming the Good News of Jesus. Without bemoaning the church’s loss of clout in the secular world. Without waiting for Jesus to come back and make it all better.

I try imagine what God might say to me if I could stand before his throne and complain about the church’s loss of status and power or the increasingly hostile environment into which I’ve been called to live, witness, and do ministry. Or if I tried to weasel out of my promises to serve Jesus on the grounds that things aren’t the way they told me they would be way back there in seminary. What might God say? “So what! The situation is what it is. Deal with it!”

And deal with it we must. Again the question: how? First of all we accept the reality of our situation. It is what it is. Then we faithfully decide to grow where God has planted us. We continue studying Scripture, prayerfully seeking God’s will, maintaining and strengthening our fellowship with our brothers and sisters in Christ, and worshipping God by giving him glory, honor, and praise.

And also by remembering that the church that was born on that first Pentecost Sunday grew and thrived in a hostile environment. They, too, lived and ministered in an essentially secular and pagan culture. They had absolutely no political or legal clout. No government protected them. And yet they thrived. The church grew exponentially, first in Jerusalem, then in all of Judea and Samaria, and ultimately to the ends of the earth. Without blue laws. Possessing no tax-free property. Enjoying no favored status. With just the Gospel to which they had answered a call to witness. With no power but that of the Holy Spirit.

How did they do it? By serving God in the present tense, being faithful one day at a time, witnessing to one person at a time, living out the love of God minute by minute, leaving the past behind, and placing the future in God's hands. That’s how they did it. That’s how we’re to do it.

So what if the culture reacts with increasing hostility toward the Gospel – we keep living, demonstrating, and proclaiming it. So what if the church is becoming less and less the pampered, privileged darling of our nation – we don’t stop being the church. Maybe we even discover what church really is. So what, if like the ancient Hebrews exiled in Babylon, we find ourselves on the outside of society looking in – we don’t hang our heads and pout, we keep singing our hymns of praise. So what if we don’t know when Jesus is coming back – that’s not our concern. So what if being faithful brings us into conflict with the powers-that-be – we remember these words written by Stan Hauerwas: “We must be faithful in our own way, even if the world understands such faithfulness as disloyalty.”

We have one, and only one, Lord and King. His name is Jesus. We are to be his witnesses wherever we are and whenever we live, knowing that the Gospel we proclaim is true and that we are empowered by the very Spirit of God.

Things aren’t the way they used to be? So what. Things aren’t like we wish them to be? So what. The future has not been clearly revealed to us? So what. We serve God in the present tense. Amen.