Acts 1:1-8 "The Meanwhile" Scott Hoezee

It's a rather funny time in the church year just now. We are midway between Easter Sunday and Ascension Day, which leaves preachers like Bob and me wondering what to do. After all, when you stop to think about it, there just isn't much in the Bible that tells us anything about what happened in the forty day stretch after Jesus' rose again from the dead but before he ascended to the Father. Has that ever struck you as curious or odd? Mark says not one word about what happened over that almost six-week period. Luke's gospel gives us just one very brief story lasting no more than a few verses. Matthew gives us just the Great Commission. Only John is a bit more expansive telling us about doubting Thomas and then giving us that story about the breakfast on the beach. So for the period of the forty days after Easter, we are told virtually nothing about what happened. Hence, the hymns in the Psalter Hymnal skip straight from Easter to the ascension. There simply isn't enough biblical material to go on to write any other songs.

Why is that? You wouldn't guess it would be so, would you? If anything, you would guess that whatever Jesus said and did following his universe-changing resurrection would have been among the most significant words he ever spoke and the most stunning deeds he ever performed. If people had paid attention to what Jesus said before he died, you'd think they would have hung on his every word after he had come back from the dead!

But if our curiosity is piqued by all this, the Bible does nothing to sate it. If we are thirsty to lap up what happened those six weeks, the Bible does nothing to slake that thirst. In fact, I was struck this past week by how casually Luke refers to a dinner with the resurrected Jesus in Acts 1:4. "On one occasion, while Jesus was eating with them, he gave them a command." On one occasion. Luke simply throws that in there as though he were talking about something very common, like dinner with his Aunt Millie or something.

Given who their dinner companion was--you know, a man they had watched die recently and who even now was eating with holes in his hands--given who this man was, why can't we find out more of what he had to say?! How often did they dine together those forty days? Was Jesus around a lot, or did he pop in and out unpredictably? Did he do any miracles? Any multiplying of loaves and fishes? Any instant distilling of water into wine? We don't know.

I wonder why. Could there be a message in even the biblical silence? At the recent Faith and Writing Festival at Calvin College, I attended a workshop by Carl Daw, who also led last Sunday evening's hymnsing at Woodlawn. At one point in talking about Christian worship, Daw invoked a musical metaphor. He said that all formally trained musicians are taught eventually that as important as it is to learn how to play musical notes, it is equally vital to learn how to play the rests.

Just think about that for a moment: sometimes an organist like Cornie must play the rests. You "play" the spaces on the musical score where there are no notes, no sounds to be made, but only a pause, an absence, a silence, which itself becomes part of the larger piece of music. The silence is part of the melody. The gaps contribute to the tune.

Maybe the Bible's treatment of the post-Easter, pre-ascension material is like that. It's mostly a gospel rest. It's like that term you often see in the Psalms: "Selah." Near as we can tell, Selah was an ancient Hebrew poetic and musical term that signals a pause in the reading or singing of the psalm. It's a rest. But again, you don't expect a rest to come after the resurrection. Long about the time when you'd think the whole New Testament would explode in a flurry of words about what Jesus did after being raised from the dead, instead you suddenly get a forty-day Selah. We as readers are forced to play the rest.

Why? I am by no means sure. But maybe, just maybe, it is a reminder of what a lot of our Christian living is like even to this day. As we will sing in a few minutes, we do serve a risen Savior who's in the world today. But that doesn't mean that our everyday life is nothing but spiritual highs, keen insights, neatly resolved problems, or a complete absence of sickness or difficulty. No, even with our risen Lord alive and well and assuring us of eternal life, we still have to get out of bed every morning and go through the routine of our days. Often life feels like a treadmill and we've surely all had the experience of weeks, and even whole months, just evaporating before our very eyes.

"Where does the time go?" we ask rhetorically again and again. We work hard. We pack those lunches for the kids day after day after day. We run the gauntlet of carpools, piano lessons, soccer games, and school programs. And more often than not, we go through those days without hearing our Lord speaking anything particularly new to us. Most days we don't receive some startling new spiritual direction or insight.

Spiritually speaking, theologically speaking, biblically speaking, many of our days are the equivalent of Selah. Most days we play the rests, not the notes. And were it not for the fact that even the gospels are good at playing the rests, we might conclude that most of our days are a kind of spiritual vacuum. But maybe one thing we can carry away from the New Testament's rather surprising forty-day silence is the idea that when we likewise have days of Selah in which we play the rests, those days are nevertheless contributing to the spiritual melody of our lives. One of the few things we do know that Jesus said after his resurrection is "Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age." That means he is with us on our Selah days just as surely as on those days when we do see an answer to a prayer or when we do feel led spiritually in a very definite direction.

So in this meanwhile time of the Christian year, and as we have once again just concluded that most common of our everyday activities of eating and drinking, let me suggest that during all those meanwhile periods that make up the bulk of life, we may well be playing the rests in the tune of discipleship, but the tune nevertheless goes on. He is with us. Always. Even in the silences of life. Thanks be to God. Selah. And Amen.