“In the first book,
Theophilus,” begins Acts. The first book was the Gospel of Luke, also addressed
to Theophilus, so as we turn toward Acts we should know that this is the
setting and Luke, again, is the author. The Gospel account is over, Jesus needs
to get off the stage, and we are left with the after-effects of the
resurrection, which is why the book of Acts is about the community of faith and
the earliest church. But, interestingly, Acts begins with Jesus still in the
picture. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Gospel of Luke actually ends with
Jesus ascending into heaven so it’s interesting that Luke wrote this twice.
Apparently, Jesus had something important to say before leaving the scene.
These few words that Jesus offers between verses 4 and 8
are, therefore, very important for framing the focus of the book of Acts.
He
says, "This is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water,
but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." And
then, following the disciples asking him, "Lord, is this the time when you
will restore the kingdom to Israel?" He replied, "It is not for you
to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But
you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be
my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."
Then,
poof, he ascends into heaven in what is one of the strangest moments in human
history, emphasizing all the more those few verses he said before heading off.
The disciples want to move immediately to the restoration of Israel—they want
the resurrection to announce a political victory—but Jesus turns it around on
them with the promise of something different, something we know as the Holy
Spirit.
We tend to assume that these blockheads that were the
disciples didn’t understand when Jesus talked about needing to die and rise
again in his life, but the general assumption is that after he does die and
rises from the dead they pretty much figure it out. Yet, here we see that’s not
really the case. They really haven’t changed at all. If anything, their desire
for the restoration of Israel, a political movement, only gains traction with
the knowledge that their Lord was dead and now alive. They are people of the
small picture.
So, when Jesus responds by talking not about political
victories but about the Holy Spirit you can imagine their disappointment.
Jesus, even the resurrected Jesus, doesn’t always give us what we want, and
little do the disciples know the future that awaits them. It’s persecution. And
more persecution. Eleven of the twelve are on the path to dying for their faith
in Jesus. None of them see the restoration of Israel. In fact, some of them may
live to see the temple destroyed for the final time, while the land, which is
already occupied by Rome, would not become a Jewish state until 1948, nearly
two millennia later.
The resurrection is no political victory. Instead, it’s a
victory of a different sort. What Jesus promises is not that life will be good
or easy but that the Holy Spirit is among us, moving through us, and that, when
all is said and done, God wins. The deaths that we experience here are defeated
on the cross and laid bare in the resurrection. The assurance of the Holy
Spirit means that we are united by something deeper than our politics and wider
than our personal ambitions. We are united in Christ by something deeply
mysterious. The Holy Spirit is the way we know God in all God’s self—Father and
Son—today.
The disciples ask for power to rule. Jesus gave them
power to witness. As usual, Jesus knows exactly what our motivations are and
exactly what we need. Nothing about the two thousand years that have followed
since Jesus’ death and resurrection suggest that Christians are fit to rule any
better than non-Christians. We aren’t. We kill people just like non-Christians.
We strive for power and fail to tend to the powerless and the marginalized. We
don’t need more Christian rulers; we need more Christian witnesses. That’s what
the Holy Spirit equips us to do, and that’s all we will ever be good at.
And how do we witness in the year 2016, you might ask?
When everybody can go to Wikipedia for an answer themselves and it’s deemed
insensitive to others’ times to ask a question you can’t Google? How do we talk
about Jesus when everyone has an opinion or a trigger set off by that name?
Here’s how: It starts with the church, which is after all what Acts is all
about, and the church starts at home. It’s tempting to say it starts with
baptism, but before that, especially with children, is a family who makes that
baptismal decision. But it can’t stop there. Instead, the Holy Spirit which is
present in baptism both in killing our sinful selves and raising us as a new
creation, also works through those who make promises at our baptism—promises
they intend to keep and promises they don’t. The Holy Spirit works first and
foremost through families, so this magical idea that the church is going to
teach your children the Christian faith if you don’t is just that—magical… and
very unlikely. Instead, the Holy Spirit moves through us in our actions and our
words to tell our children how to behave, yes, that they are beloved children
of God, absolutely, and finally that they are saved by grace apart from
anything that they do. That’s the work of the Holy Spirit.
The problem we run into is that parents no longer feel
equipped to talk about this with their children. Once upon a time, with the
best of intentions, the church made a political move to take over faith
formation from parents. You should know by now that our programs we create
often have unintended consequences. In the late nineteenth, early twentieth
century, the church, with the best of stated intentions instituted Sunday
School to teach underprivileged children about Jesus. The understanding was
that every child who had an intact nuclear family would already know what they
needed to know about the Christian faith because they had a family to teach it
to them. As with many good things, Sunday School soon had unintended
consequences, and over time it replaced the family as the primary means of teaching
the faith. From that time on, faith formation has slowly gone down the tubes.
Sunday School teachers now have an impossible task, because they are being
charged with doing something they cannot do on their own. The Holy Spirit
cannot be limited to the programs of the church.
When we limit the work of the Holy Spirit we hinder our
ability to be church. Today, the structures we have made suggest that only I,
or the other church professionals, know enough to talk about Jesus. That’s not
how the Holy Spirit works. But we are so easily shamed that we think that if we
say anything slightly incorrect we have done some terrible disservice to the
church. This fear of saying something, of doing something not the way it should be done, hurts us as much as
anything else.
We have to have families that share the faith, but to
have that we need an atmosphere that encourages one another to talk through
what it is that we believe without fear of judgement. This is hard! It’s really hard. But that’s what it means to be
part of a church, because the Holy Spirit will place us in uncomfortable
situations. It’s much easier to not have anything to do with the Holy Spirit,
because the Spirit invites discomfort. You can’t watch a baptism and not be a
little surprised, or even offended, that we are not just talking about putting
this child to death but quite literally saying, “Today, the Holy Spirit puts
you to death.” This baby. You’ve got to be kidding me. That should be fervor
for discussions on end, but we can only do this if we overcome our fears.
Otherwise it’s just words; it’s just traditions; just ceremonies. There’s a
reason Jesus left the disciples with these words: He knew us. We still want
control. The Holy Spirit says, “Nuh uh.”
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