Are We There Yet?

How Much Longer?

John 10:22-32; Acts 9:36-43

* I often have detailed notes, even a manuscript, with me on Sunday mornings. This Sunday was no different. I admit to not being too content with how to conclude this sermon. I have added a couple of notes here that summarize how the sermon ended. The audio is more complete.

After flying only between Oklahoma City and Dallas three times in the late 1980s, I made my first international flight reservation in 1996. It did not take long to realize the flight to Hong Kong Island would be much longer than the less than an hour flight from Dallas Love Field to Will Rogers.

Preparing for the trip to attend the meeting of the General Council of the Baptist World Alliance, I read that the particular flight I was on included one of the longest legs from the United States to anywhere in the world.

Before you could choose your entertainment at your seat, screens visible in the cabin offered announcements, pre-selected in-flight movies, and a flight tracker. That meant rather than pester the steward staff asking how much longer or are we there yet, you could watch the glacier-like movement of the little plane from here to there.

And you thought only children on long road trips asked, “Are we there yet?” Or, “How much longer?”

One winter day during Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication, Jesus' adversaries came asking what sounds like, "Are we there yet?” “How much longer?”

History was on their mind. Almost 200 years before the events recorded here in John 10, the Seleucid King Antiochus Epiphanes IV decided to antagonize the Jews. He banned Jewish practices, took control of Jerusalem, and defiled the Temple. Judas “The Hammer” Maccabaeus led a revolt that began in what we might term guerrilla warfare. Outmanned and with fewer weapons, Judas “The Hammer” helped win the liberation of Jerusalem. The Seleucid army retreated. After the enemy fled, the Maccabees cleansed and rededicated the Temple. From there, Israel memorialized the victory with the annual Feast of Dedication, known as Hanukkah.

Nearly 200 years later, Israel is now under Roman rule. Expectations ran high in anticipation of the next liberator, the Messiah. Jesus has created such a stir that, as John tells it, they come to Jesus and sound as if they are tempted to pitch in with Jesus. If they would just confirm their hopes that he would be the next Hammer and free Israel from Rome’s clutches?

Are we there yet? Is it time?

And if it is not time, How much longer?

How long will you keep us in suspense?

The passage from John 10 that Alex read is part of a longer section in John where Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd. As we delve into our reading, the notion of sheep hearing the right voice has led Jesus' questioners to clarify their confusion. How will Jesus fit into their expectations?

If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.

Does that sound backwards? If Jesus is the Messiah, then wouldn't we think that we should align with his expectations?

Are we there yet?

John knows what he is doing as he lays out his Gospel. His opening prologue, what we might receive as the preface, includes,

No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Jesus responds to their question,

I have told you, and you do not believe.

Jesus drives the point home.

The works I do in my Father’s name testify to me; but you do not believe because you do not belong to my sheep.

Their refusal provides clear evidence that they cannot hear Jesus.

Jesus came to reveal the Father. And, he is doing so in such a way that the Father’s interest is beyond their political interests. Consider the signs that John gives, which bear witness to Jesus. Jesus turned water into wine in John 2. Healed a royal official's son in John 4. Healed the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda in John 5. Fed 5000 in John 6. Walked on water in John 6. Healed a man born blind in John 9. Another sign will come in John 11, when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.

John uses the word signs to point to their purpose. They reveal that Jesus is the light in the darkness, warmth in the winter of their discontent. Signs, even when Matthew, Mark, and Luke use the word miracle, point to something beyond the event in itself. That is, Jesus was not a miracle worker but the One who brings the Kingdom. Therefore, all that he does points to the coming Kingdom. Signs and miracles reveal what the world will one day be.

These are the indicators we need have in mind when John the Revelator declares there will be no more sorrow. All that brings us grief will end. When John points to Jesus’s works as signs, he is claiming this is what we may expect in the world to come, in the Kingdom of God.

Jesus draws the straight line to the Father, and so to the coming Kingdom. His conversation partners pick up rocks to stone him. Hear Jesus’s question,

I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which one of these are you going to stone me?

It is here that we may hear and see Jesus’s answer to the question, Are we there yet? How much longer?

How so?

Amidst a world rife with needs great and small, Jesus’s works point to the reality that the Kingdom of God has come. That is, what John calls signs, what we view as miracles, are the evidence of the Kingdom that is on its way. When we pray for a miracle, we are asking God to give us a sign of the coming Kingdom. And we pray, believing that we may persuade God to make the coming Kingdom clearer.

It is as if we realize we are not there yet, but want reminders of what the world will be one day. John makes plain that signs, even miracles, are indications that the Kingdom of God is breaking in; it is on its way.

Here in Eastertide, the Season given to disciple those who have trusted Jesus, we might ask, “What does this look like?” What does it mean that the Kingdom of God has come in Jesus, but we are not there yet, when we want to know how long?

[Tabitha - female disciple. Cares for widows in Joppa. What we might call small glimpses of the Kingdom. Yet, which of Jesus’s works would you exclude? And in doing so, which group of people would be neglected?]

[Peter responded to the needs of the widows. Look at all that Tabitha made.] Rather than return to fishing, fully aware of God's forgiveness in Jesus, Peter persevered. We find him in Acts doing the unthinkable. It is not inconceivable that Peter speaks to the dead Tabitha to get up, after all, he had been there when Jesus did the same. But Peter is staying with Simon the Tanner in the passage just before the more familiar incident that leads him to Cornelius.

Tanning hides included being around dead animals. That Peter, who, in the next chapter over, is afraid of unclean animals, is staying in the house of Simon the Tanner, risking himself to be declared unclean!

On the one hand, it appears that Peter is realizing what it means for the Kingdom to have come and what it looks like to recognize it.

[Caring for widows on the one hand and raising the dead on the other provide the bookends of all the ways we might see the world to come - the way Jesus Changes Everything.]

We are there and we are not.

No longer and yet a while longer.

But these are indications along the way that the Promise of God that gives us Jesus will not fail.