“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you”
(Acts 1:8).
Discussion questions:
- How have you witnessed the Spirit working in these times? Where have you seen evidence of joy and boundary crossing community?
- Does it seem like foolishness to invest hope in the Spirit’s power? What would trusting and following the Spirit look like for you, for your communities, for your church?
- How would such trust in the Spirit move you beyond your comfort zone? What joys do you imagine might be waiting for you there?
When my son was ten years old he discovered a series of children’s books that pitted members of the animal kingdom against each other and speculated on which one would win a combat. The books described the strengths of each animal and then offered a verdict on which one would defeat the other. The one I remember best, Giant Squid Vs. Whale: Who Would Win? eventually decided for the squid.
When Bishop Mariann Budde preached at the National Prayer Service on the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the nation was able to see two different powers at work. One power was that of the presidency and the federal government, represented not only by Trump but by members of Congress, Cabinet secretaries, and other potentates. Over against this power was a Christian preacher drawing from Scripture to plead with the President to show mercy to the vulnerable. It would not seem that Bishop Budde had the capacity to unsettle a man who had just been granted the vast powers of the United States presidency, but in fact she did unsettle President Trump, as was evident in his body language as he listened to her, and by his later demand for an apology from her, calling her sermon “ungracious” and “nasty in tone.”
This exchange displayed the confrontation of two kinds of power—the political, military, cultural, and economic might of the Presidency, on the one hand, and the power of the Gospel, on the other. St. Paul describes this latter power as foolishness and weakness; yet, paradoxically, “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor. 1:25). This is a power that the rulers of this world, who seem to hold all the cards in their hands, are mysteriously unable to dominate or domesticate, and that instead upsets and stymies them. If we captured this contest in a title like my son’s books, we might call it Spirit Vs. Empire: Who Would Win?
God’s paradoxical power is available to us through the Holy Spirit, through whom God, who is for us in Christ, is also able to be within us. The Spirit, often identified with the breath, is God coming into our bodies in our very breathing. The Spirit allows us to be transformed by the power of Jesus’ cross and resurrection, as the disciples were when the Spirit came upon them at Pentecost. Prior to this, even after Jesus was raised from the dead, the disciples seemed unable to continue his movement; yet when they were “clothed with power from on high” at Pentecost, they were transformed from a group turned inward in a posture of uncertainty and fear to a group of unstoppable proclaimers of the risen Christ. They became capable, as one awed onlooker put it, of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6).
The way the Spirit operates in Acts illuminates how we in our times can appropriate the Spirit’s power. The essential gift the Spirit gave the disciples in Acts was the capacity to bear witness, in both words and deeds, to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. It is notable that this mission was not on the face of it overtly “political,” in the sense that it did not appear to challenge societal power structures. Nevertheless, this Spirit-inspired witness to Jesus was deeply threatening to the religious and the political/imperial authorities of the day, because it proclaimed that the risen Jesus held a power higher than all earthly powers, and that following Jesus would necessitate defying those earthly powers. As Peter and John told the council of religious leaders, “Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19). Whether or not the apostles explicitly challenged imperial rule, by proclaiming a power greater than empire their words and deeds became political. This became apparent when the political rulers, in the person of King Herod, perceived a threat in this burgeoning movement, and began to execute Jesus’ followers (Acts 12:1-2).
Even in the face of persecution and martyrdom, the disciples were unstoppable. They refused to stop preaching in Jesus’ name, even when the authorities ordered them to do so. Several imprisonments could not slow them down, for by divine intervention they were freed from prison and went on preaching. They were miraculously delivered from danger—mob violence, shipwreck, snake bites—on numerous occasions. These dramatic rescues punctuated the disciples’ tireless travel throughout the Roman Empire, proclaiming Christ. The impression created by this narrative is that these disciples were being sent, fueled, and protected by a power greater than themselves, the Spirit’s power granted them at Pentecost, which allowed them to maneuver through all the obstacles empire presented and to continue their mission.
In addition to prompting the disciples to proclaim Jesus as Lord the Spirit also pushed the disciples into actions that bore witness to Christ’s lordship in counter-cultural ways that in themselves posed a threat to the status quo. Among the radical practices they adopted were to “hold all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:45). These communal practices were an enactment of Mary’s Spirit-inspired song at the outset of Luke’s Gospel, declaring that the coming of the Messiah meant that the hungry would be fed and the lowly lifted up (Luke 1:45-56).
The Spirit drove the disciples toward creating a world that they could not fully envision, not only in urging them toward this revolutionary common life, but also by summoning them to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles. Despite Jesus’ prediction that they would become his witnesses “to the ends of the earth,” the disciples could not imagine that the Good News of Jesus would be preached outside of Israel, and thus they were shocked and perplexed by this summons. As Willie James Jennings points out, the Spirit in Acts is constantly pushing the disciples to places they do not want to go and enlisting them in bringing about transformations that they do not understand.[i] The church, then and now, is always trying to make sense of and catch up to what the Spirit is doing. The Spirit goes ahead of the church, crossing boundaries and toppling taboos, and challenges Jesus’ followers to participate in this work.[ii]
What can we learn from Acts about the Spirit’s work that can guide us in these times? First, we learn that the Spirit gives us the authority and the courage to proclaim Jesus as Lord, which is the primary call of Christian disciples. To do this is to claim an authority that is greater than the political and imperial powers of our day, and thus to confront those powers. In this confrontation we can trust that, as in Acts, the Spirit will be with us, conferring a power that does not look like worldly power but often more like vulnerability and weakness, and yet is in surprising ways more potent than political or imperial forces. This Spirit-power will unsettle these worldly powers, thus exposing us to risk but also offering unexpected protection.
We also learn from Acts that the Spirit’s work is less about resistance and more about manifesting God’s new creation that is inaugurated by Jesus’ resurrection. The disciples were not resisting the empire; instead, they were bearing witness to the realm of God that was and is breaking into the world and upending its certainties. It is this proclamation of the new thing God is doing that is most threatening to the established powers. Resistance often merely highlights the power it is resisting; it tends to be parasitic on the very power it is trying to counter. On the other hand, declaring and enacting an alternative reality is the proclamation and instantiation of an entirely different power than the one that seems to be in charge. Governments bent on control do not fear resistance as much as they fear alternatives, new ideas, new ways of thinking and living. Moreover, a key difference between resistance and the creation of the new is that the former has the quality of a more or less desperate fight, whereas the latter is characterized by joy; indeed, joy is the predominant emotion of the apostles throughout Acts.
The early disciples manifested God’s new creation in the radically communal way they lived; in the boundary-crossing and taboo-toppling of their missionary preaching to the Gentiles; in the joy with which they undertook this mission. Likewise, we contemporary disciples are not primarily called upon to engage in resistance, but rather to bear witness to the new thing that God is doing. This might involve new ways to be community in the world, perhaps developing ways to live within and yet apart from capitalist economies. This might involve crossing boundaries for the sake of life: like the apostles, we may find ourselves driven by the Spirit to form community with people we would think of as beyond the pale, completely outside of our own familiar relationships. We may be drawn to places where we do not want to go, or toward people whom we resist knowing or loving, yet these are signs of the Spirit’s work, as is the joy we will discover in following this call.
Like the first disciples in Acts, we are challenged to trust and follow the Spirit without fully grasping where it is leading us. The Spirit in Acts was driving the apostles toward creating a community that they could not fully imagine and that often transgressed their notions of what was acceptable. They had to keep trusting and following the Spirit’s work without fully understanding it, and we are called to do the same—to listen and look attentively for the signs of God’s work, however unexpected they may be. Moment by moment, we are called to allow the Spirit to breathe in us and guide us, trusting that the Spirit is working in this time of crisis to draw us toward a new creation, a world we cannot yet envision.
[i] Willie James Jennings, Acts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017), 11.
[ii] Marilyn McCord Adams, “Hurricane Spirit, Toppling Taboos,” in Our Selves, Our Souls and Bodies: Sexuality and the Household of God, Charles Hefling, ed., (Boston: Cowley, 1996), 129-141.