Powerful Communities

Acts 1:6-14

Part of what we confess about Jesus is that he gives us power.  After he was raised from the dead, and just before he ascended into heaven, he said to his followers, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (v. 8).  We have been given the Spirit, and with that Spirit we have been given power.  You are part of a powerful community.

We’re conflicted about power.  Often we're apologetic about power.  We know we have some, but we also know that it’s not socially graceful to talk about whatever power we have.  And we’re wary of power, because we know that power is often misused.  So we often hear it said that Jesus’ life was a life of giving up power, or a life of refusing to use power.  

At the other extreme, Christians are as Machiavellian as anyone else in using power to get whatever they want.  Being a religious person can make you arrogant and smug - the kind of person who automatically assumes that all of your biases and opinions and viewpoints are also shared by God.  And when we uncritically align God’s plans with our own agendas, we become blind to the dangerous ways that we use our own power.  The truth is that some Christians have simply never thought through the connections between the many ways they use power and their own faith in Jesus Christ.  Hence, it was commonplace two hundred years ago to mistreat your slaves and then go to church.  

For our purposes this morning, let’s define power as energy.  Power is just the ability to make things happen, the ability to affect change or move something.  We talk about power in all kinds of ways in our daily lives.  The world we’ve made depends on electrified buildings and fueled cars.  That requires power - oil and gas and coal.  We need energy and so we’re busy ripping the tops off mountains in Appalachia and fracking oil in North Dakota.  In the news every day are more questions about the way political power is used, about the power of large corporations, the balance of power of minorities and women as we’ve come through civil rights and feminist movement.  And on a personal level, there is no end to books offering to us tips and techniques about how to use our power effectively: in meetings and contract negotiations, in conflict resolution and in the way we dress.  There is such a thing as a “power tie.” 

What we need is a theological way of imagining power.  We need a biblical picture of what power is, how we get it, and how we use it well.  We’re going to focus on the connection between the Holy Spirit and power in just a minute.  But before we do, I want you to know that the classic Christian tradition provides us with resources for thinking about power.  The consistent view of the Christian tradition is that power is good.  Do you believe that?  Power is good.  You and I were created by God as people capable of exercising a vast bundle of powers.  The philosophical term for this is “agency.”  We’re agents - we’re doers.  We can adopt a course of action and exert ourselves towards making it happen.  Yes, we’re finite agents, limited in all kind of ways, and constrained by our own moods and our social context.  But we can act.

George Herbert’s poem The Elixir begins like this:

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in anything, 

To do it as for Thee.

One way we grow up into our faith is to learn to see God in everything.  That takes time.  And that’s what the first stanza is about.  But if that’s all there was to faith, it would look passive.  If we stopped there, our lives in the Spirit would lack energy.  So the second stanza is about us as “doers.”  We’re people who are active in the power of the Spirit, “doing” God’s will.

So we’re all created by God to be active centers of power - the kinds of people who can do more than just respond and suffer.  We can act.  We can live with energy and make new things happen in our lives and in the world around us.  But why is this good?  Let me use as an example the theology of Thomas Aquinas.  (One of my sub-sub goals for Incarnation is to be a Protestant church where you get lots of good Catholic theology!).  

Aquinas argues that God wants a world that is as God-like as it can be.  Of all the created realities that exist, each has their own proper way of imitating God.  But only human creatures imitate God actively.  Yes, God is pleased by swaying fescue and granite outcroppings, by the way the setting sun shines orange across a lake and by fierce, cracking thunderstorms, by ostriches and swordfish and panda bears.  Because all these created things are God-like in their own ways.  But God is active and powerful.  And God is imitated most intensely by human creatures who are active in extending love, active in making things happen, active in pursuing what’s good and true and beautiful.  So on this classical Christian picture: not only does God give us power, God’s gift of power is precisely the point.  It makes us active God-likenesses.  God’s goal for you is not just that you will do what’s right, but that you will eagerly desire it and choose it and work towards it and take delight in doing it.  That makes you very much like God.  

What I’ve tried to do so far is to convince you that power is a good thing.  God created you with a range of powers and celebrates when we use our powers well.  Now let’s add something to that - above and beyond our created powers as human beings, God pours out on us the Holy Spirit as a new kind of power.  And the Spirit comes as a new form of power meant to activate and rehabilitate and enhance the powers we’ve already been given as God’s creatures.

Right now, we are part of a community with an uncertain future.  We know that God has brought us a long way just to get here.  We know that many good things are happening in and among us.  And we know that we love and care for one another because of what Jesus has formed between us.  But we don’t know just yet how God will provide a way forward.  That fuzziness about our future is what we have to live with right now.  But we don’t have to let it rob us of our confidence and our boldness.  We don’t have to yield to paralyzing discouragement.  Our temptation will be for our energy to flag, for our hearts to become discouraged, to think of ourselves as powerless in the face of large forces.  With those real temptations in mind, let’s consider how the text we heard today can open up new possibilities for us, move us forward in the face of these real challenges.

Acts 1

Luke writes a two-volume work that gets split up in our Bibles.  Volume One was Luke’s gospel.  Volume Two was the book of Acts.  Volume 1 ends, and Volume 2 begins, with Jesus’ ascension into heaven.

Now notice something important.  The difference between the two volumes in NOT that Volume 1 is about Jesus and Volume 2 is about the early church.  The difference is rather that Volume 1 is about Jesus powerful ministry while present in earthly historical form.  And Volume 2 is about Jesus’ continued ministry through the Spirit that was poured out on his followers.  You have to get this if you’re ever going to realize the power you’ve been given: our lives together as Jesus’ followers is powerful because Jesus himself continues to work through us in the power of the Spirit.  

So when Luke writes that “Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (v. 9).  Luke’s point is NOT that Jesus is gone and now his followers will have to get along without him.  (This would be the Home Alone picture of the church: we’ve been abandoned, and we’re left alone, and we’re going to have to figure out how to fend for ourselves).  His point is that Jesus’ powerful ministry will continue through the outpouring of the Spirit, but now in a way no longer limited by his earthly body.  Now Jesus is powerfully present wherever his followers scatter and live.

The power we’ve been given is the power of God’s kingdom.

So now we have to think a little bit.  Jesus doesn’t celebrate any and all forms of power.  Some use power to abuse children, to secure their unfair access to privileges, or to manipulate others for their own benefit.  Clearly there are selfish and dehumanizing forms of power.  So while power is celebrated as God’s gift, not all power is the power of God’s kingdom.  Not all energy flows from God’s reign among us.

In the opening paragraph of Acts, Luke tells us that after Jesus was raised from the dead, “he presented himself alive to [his followers] by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God” (1:3).  Just like during his public ministry, so now too just before he ascends to heaven, his favorite topic is the same: God’s kingdom.  (Luckily he was a good storyteller and knew how to keep his listeners’ attention.)  But now he was saying something new to his followers.  He was telling them to stay in Jerusalem for the pouring out of the Holy Spirit promised by God the Father.

So the apostles are all ears, trying to fit the pieces together, and so they ask him a question, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (v. 6).  Now it turns out this is a misguided question, a bad question, but it wasn’t a crazy question.  They had rightly picked up on Jesus’ teaching that the arrival of God’s new kingdom would be marked by the pouring out of the Spirit.  Their bad question and Jesus’ response helps us see that the kind of power we’ve been given is the power of God’s kingdom.  (You may have wanted something else of course.  Yet growing up into the love of God often means leaving behind what you at first wanted because you’re offered something bigger, deeper, better).

a) They think that Jesus is establishing a political kingdom - are you now going to “restore” Israel’s kingdom.  Israel had at one time been a political power with its own land, in control of its own borders.  But for several hundred years Israel had been occupied by foreign governments.  They were asking if now is the time to overthrow the Roman occupation of Israel’s land.  But Jesus teaches us that the newly arriving kingdom is a kingdom of the Spirit.  So yes power is exercised in God’s kingdom.  And yes this power takes shape on earth, in our actual lives.  But it’s not the power of force or militaries or economies.  It spreads not by violence but by peaceful witnesses.

b) They think it will be a kingdom with national boundaries - “Lord, is this the time when you will will restore the kingdom to Israel”.  The scope of their vision extends only to their own national borders.  They have in mind Israel’s national independence.  But Jesus offers them a kind of power that is much bigger and broader.  “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (v. 8).  Jesus teaches us that the Spirit’s activity results in ever widening witness to all peoples.  This is a radically inclusive kingdom that gathers into itself all the different kinds of people who inhabit the earth.

c) They think the kingdom will appear immediately - “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  But Jesus teaches us that knowing God’s timing on the largest scale isn’t really our business.  The two angels say to the Apostles, “Why stare into the sky?  Jesus will come in the same way you’ve seen him go.”  Our lives are lived between the time of his first coming in the humility of Jesus of Nazareth and his second coming in his undisguised glory and authority.  This is the time marked off as the time of his ascended reign.  It is time for us as the church to do our work.  And the effect of our work won’t be flashy or instantaneous.  Rather it will be the gradual extending and widening of God’s kingdom in the lives of people who encounter his witnesses. 

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Here’s what I want you to leave with today.  The goal of following Jesus with others is not powerlessness, but a new kind of power.  The question is not: how can we avoid being contaminated by power.  But: how can use our God-given powers in ways that reflect God’s goodness?

But let’s pause to address a question you might have.  Are we really a powerful community?  We don’t seem to have that much clout.  Statistically speaking, churches in NYC don’t draw a large segment of the population on a given weekend.  Because we are all educated sociologically rather than theologically, we tend to think of the church in sociological terms.  There was a NYT article recently on the economic and educational status of religious groups - I think in economic terms you’d rather be a Reformed Jew than a Baptist.  (I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere).  We  think of the churches primarily in sociological framework:  how big or small, what economic bracket, what ethnic make-up, what style or tone, what political orientations, what forms of leadership and organizational dynamics, etc.  All of that is fine.  But we also have to learn to think theologically -- every congregation is a powerful continuation of Jesus’ earthly ministry.  The church may or may not be powerful sociologically.  But all Christian communities are powerful in theological terms.

So what should we do?  We should continue praying together.  The powers that God gives us become most clear in a life of prayer.  This is kind of odd or counter-intuitive.  Power is about “doing something,” effecting change.  Power is practical.  And yet praying, whether personally or together, seems so impractical.  It seems so un-active.  We think of monks and nuns and others who spend much time praying with puzzlement - well, isn’t that nice.  But in reality we become aware of our own power and agency only in prayer.  Try it this week.  Pray every day that God will give your power and the insight to use it well.  Then see if that focuses you throughout the day.  You will become more aware of the power of your words.  You will become more aware of the power of your daily work.  And prayerfully attuned to this power flowing through you, you will be offering yourself to God in an act of praise.

Did you notice in the text we read that the Apostles returned to Jerusalem and prayed together continually?  And as they pray together something new is happening in their lives.  When Luke listed these Apostles at the end of his gospel, he paired the biological brothers together: it was “Simon and Andrew, James and John”.  But now the order has changed - “Peter, John, James and Andrew” - suggesting that a new kind of brotherhood and family is emerging.  Mary, Jesus’ mother, along with other women, are given an important roles in a culture where women didn’t count.  And praying alongside the Apostles and the women were Jesus’ brothers.  During his ministry, they did not believe in him.  But now they are among his followers, probably because Jesus’ brother James had seen the risen Jesus.  As we pray together new forms of power will begin to emerge and take shape within and among us. 

God shares power with us in much the same way we raise our children.  We don’t raise our children with the goals of keeping power for ourselves.  We raise them to develop powers of their own.  When we’ve exercised our parental power well, they become active and capable adults who have their own range of skills and capacities.   

Henry spent the week away from us with the rest of his 5th grade at Nature’s Classroom in Connecticut.  When he got home, we asked him if he missed us.  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said.  “But not really.”  This is a foretaste of where he’s headed as a human being developing his own set of powers.  When he leaves us able to live his own life as a loving, sharing, working adult, we will have exercised our powers successfully.  And it had nothing to do with control.  It had everything to do with enabling him to become powerful in his own way.  That’s how God deals with us.

So let’s live like powerful people.  People given bodies and minds and desires that are God’s gifts of power.  Let’s live like people who’ve received God’s powerful Spirit poured out on us by Jesus himself.  This doesn’t mean that everything will go our way.  This doesn’t mean that we will not face disappointment and suffering.  It means that God gives us the power to move forward in life no matter what.

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things Thee to see,

And what I do in anything, 

To do it as for Thee.