Cabela’s opened a big store in our area a few years ago. I can easily kill an hour or so wandering around in there looking at reels, rods, fly-tying supplies, and all sorts of fishing gadgets and gear, as well as taking a turn through the backpacking section to note the latest in tents, lightweight stoves, etc. It’s a similar story for a different kind of gear at the big Fry’s Electronics north of us in Wilsonville.
At either place or others like it, an eager store employee may ask, “May I help you find something?” You know my answer because you’ve probably said it yourself (and it’s the title of the sermon this week), “Just looking.” That’s what we find the disciples doing at the end of this week’s text, Acts 1:1-11, on Ascension Sunday (Ascension Day is actually this Thursday).
We don’t know exactly what was going through the minds of those disciples as they stood “gazing up toward heaven.” It may have been wonderment at the miraculous departure or, as the angels’ directions to them imply in verse 11, the very first Christian attempt to discern just when Jesus would be returning.
The whole text, however, makes it clear that in regard to our Christian take on Jesus’ second coming, it is not a matter of “just looking,” that is, not just casually considering the possibility that Jesus will return someday. But neither is it a matter of actively buying into some predictive scheme that provides a day, an hour, or even a year for the return of Christ and the set-up of His kingdom.
Christians are not just shoppers, neither passive “lookers” wishing for whatever products our Lord has on display nor active buyers thinking that we are able to purchase the kingdom through our own efforts. Instead, rather than looking, the disciples were to tell what they had seen, to be witnesses. It’s a posture that involves waiting rather than shopping for something new.
Jaroslav Pelikan says, “The history of the church suggests that Christians are not very good at such waiting, as they have oscillated between an occasional eschatological fervor that stands on tiptoe and asks eagerly (and repeatedly), ‘Lord is it at this time…?’ and their more customary torpor which has needed to be reminded yet again ‘that the end of the world comes suddenly.'”
So waiting for Jesus is not just looking, but neither is it buying completely into either this present world or some scheme that sees the kingdom arriving immediately. It’s a diligent, thoughtful labor of witness and love that maintains a constant readiness for the arrival of our Lord.