"why are you looking to heaven?"

The Ascension, by Salvador Dali

Most of us do really well functioning as the examiner of Scripture.  We love to pose questions to the text, expecting the text to respond with our questions in just the right way.

But have you ever noticed how often Scripture asks those questions of us?

I say this because last Sunday was Ascension Sunday.  And as we move toward Pentecost, I'm left pondering a question that's asked of the disciples -- that's us, by the way -- by two men in white robes:

Why do you stand here looking into the sky? (Acts 1.11).

The disciples have just spent what amounts to the last few minutes they have with Jesus on earth asking questions of him:  "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"  But Jesus, in typical Jesus style, glosses right over their question and proceeds to announce:

It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

The question asked of the disciples haunts me today.

For just this reason:  Americans are becoming less Christian -- and nearly a quarter don't identify with any faith at all.  That, according to the new survey published by the Pew Center.

There's been plenty of hand-wringing and worrying since the news broke last week.  So many Christians spending so much time fretting about what to do.

But, hear me out.

What if we're doing nothing more than the equivalent of what the disciples were doing on Ascension Day?  Standing, gazing into heaven, waiting on God to do something about the predicament.  Surely, I hear folks say, now's the time for God to bring revival in America, and for America to be restored to its former glory as a Christian nation.

Now, I'm not so sure being a Christian nation is all that great.  In fact, I'm pretty sure anytime a nation wants to self-identify as "Christian", we'll find what it means to be "Christian" shrinking in proportion to what it means to be "national".  That is, Christians are always on the losing end anytime a nation coopts the Christian faith for its own national ends.  It was true of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, England, France, and even America. 

But I'll leave that aside, for the moment.

No, the problem is that we're waiting on God to do something grand and spectacular -- other than what God already does.

We Christians have been given the Spirit -- the very dunamis (the Greek word for "power", from which we get our word dynamite) of God, that's meant to be expansive in love and outreach to all the nations.

So why wait around, staring into heaven, while being absolutely no earthly good?

That's the point of this power, after all.  To bring transformative healing to the nations.  In loving our enemies and our neighbors.  (Who usually, in my experience, eventually turn out to be the same folks.)  

This power we receive -- this spiritual dynamite -- is meant to explode into the world, not into heaven.  Being witnesses -- martyres (the Greek word for "witnesses", from which we get our word martyr) -- of God's redemptive love in Jesus Christ "to the ends of the earth". 

So if we're losing so many folks over the recent years, perhaps we'd do best to look in our mirrors.  Maybe the world isn't seeing this explosive power in us.  Instead of blaming the forces of secularization, I'm more prone to say the problem is in who we represent.  Whose witnesses are we?