Standing Under an Empty Sky
Maybe faith begins not in certainty, but in learning how to remain human together when no one knows what comes next.
The disciples wanted clarity. Honestly, I don’t blame them.
“Lord, is this the time?” they ask Jesus in Acts 1. Is this finally the moment everything changes? Is this when justice arrives? Is this when the chaos settles down, and the world starts making sense again?
I have been asking my own versions of those questions lately. Maybe you have too. We are living in a moment saturated with noise. Endless commentary. Endless outrage. Endless certainty. Everyone seems to be demanding absolute allegiance to one tribe or another, as though complexity itself has become a moral failure.
Even religion increasingly feels organized around ideological certainty instead of spiritual transformation. And yet, in this week’s lectionary text, Jesus refuses to give the disciples the political answer they want.
He does not hand them a strategy for taking power. He does not map out the future. He does not explain the timeline. Instead, he tells them to wait. And then he disappears. I cannot stop thinking about that image. A small group of bewildered people standing together under an empty sky. No roadmap. No guarantee. No clear future.Just each other, prayer, and the strange instruction to remain open to the Spirit. Before Pentecost, bewilderment, fear, and confusion came.
I wonder if part of our problem is that we keep trying to skip that part. We want immediate certainty because we want strong leaders, because vulnerability feels dangerous. We want someone to tell us exactly who the good people are and who the bad people are, so we can feel clean, righteous, and safe.
But Jesus leaves the disciples in a space where they cannot control the future. And maybe that is where faith actually begins. Not in certainty, dominance, or ideological purity. But in learning how to remain human together while we wait for the Spirit to move again.
Maybe the invitation of this strange season between Ascension and Pentecost is not to become more certain, but more present. More able to sit with grief without turning it into cruelty. More able to stay soft in a world discipling us toward hardness. More able to resist the false comfort of easy answers.
The disciples stood there staring into the sky, probably terrified, probably confused, probably wondering what came next. And maybe that is holier than we think. Maybe bewilderment is not the absence of faith. Maybe it is where the Spirit first begins to breathe.
May we have the courage to remain human in a world demanding certainty.
May we learn how to stay present to one another beneath all the noise and fear.
May we resist the seduction of easy answers, rigid tribes, and the false comfort of being right.
May we become people spacious enough for grief, tenderness, truth, and wonder.
And may the Spirit of God, still moving over chaos and empty skies,
teach us again how to wait, how to hope, and how to love.
Amen.
