Matters of Interpretation“Spirit of Power”
A sermon from Acts 1:1-14
“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you …” Jesus says. And then, he outlines what they’ll be able to do with that power: “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
People have often pointed out that this sentence works as an outline for the book of Acts, which begins in Jerusalem, with the waiting church, and then follows the members of the newly-empowered church, like Peter and then Philip the Evangelist, into Judea and Samaria, and then goes on to trace the missionary journeys of the last apostle, Paul, all around the Mediterranean and finally to Rome. And if it’s true that all roads lead to Rome, then it’s equally true that Rome leads to all roads, and so, on to the whole world. By the end of the book of Acts, that early church has gotten really active, successfully so, in fulfilling Jesus’ commission.
And they get the power for all that activity from the Holy Spirit.
Or maybe we ought to say “through” or “in,” since the power that the Holy Spirit provides to the believers isn’t anything other than the power of God, or the power of the risen Jesus Christ; and for that matter, it isn’t unrelated to the event we celebrate on the Feast of the Ascension, the event in which we affirm our trust regularly in the words of the Apostle’s Creed, when we say we believe that Jesus Christ our Lord “ascended to heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty …” Where, as the apostle Paul reminds us in Romans 8 [v34 to be precise], he reigns in power for us and also prays for us.
Christians, as members of the body of Christ, have been incorporated into the life and power of the risen and ascended Jesus Christ, communicated to us by the Holy Spirit, who as the apostle Paul also tells us [in his second letter to Timothy (2 Timothy 1:7)] is “a spirit of love and of power and of …” … of self-discipline, as the NRSV translates it. But a fuller translation of the Greek word there would be more like “of the developed wisdom and sound judgment that makes for well-balanced self-regulating virtuous people.” Sadly, we don’t have a single word in English for that, as they do in Greek.
In other words, the Spirit powers the Christian life – the life of the individual believer, as well as the collective life of the body of Christ, the church.
This is something we know by faith, and hopefully also from our experience of the Christian life. Which we hope to know more and more as we live this life.
But here again, as with so much of the language we learn in church, the New Testament’s language of “power” can confuse us, especially if we try to make it fit our customary 21st century and secular understanding of “power.”
Because, from that perspective, we often think of power as great force, that’s seen or felt dramatically; power is what lets people tell other people what to do, lets them win, get their way, get results. We often add to that the idea that we all know what kind of results we want: whatever feels better, less painful and more pleasant, at any given time …
And sometimes the power of the Holy Spirit does play right in to those images of power. Think about the dramatic manifestations of the Day of Pentecost, the gale force winds and the fireworks, along with the flamboyance of speaking in tongues, miraculous displays of healing or jailbreaks or death-defying feats of adventure – all of those things are recorded in the book of Acts. If the work of the Holy Spirit always took those forms we’d probably never wonder whether it was going on.
But we start to get confused about the kind of power Jesus is talking about, the kind of power the Holy Spirit more often exerts in believers’ lives, individually and collectively, when we forget that the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives isn’t always that spectacular. Sometimes we don’t even perceive it as “power” – much the way we barely register that we’re using plenty of electricity – right now, in fact; when all we’re doing is switching on the computer, or opening the refrigerator door, or glancing at the digital alarm clock that works away in obscurity literally all the time.
To add to our confusion, the work of the Holy Spirit doesn’t always make us feel better. We encourage each another to “rejoice in the power of the Holy Spirit,” as we should, but our Reformed tradition reminds us that it is the work of the Holy Spirit to convict us of our need for Jesus Christ, to wake us up to the presence of sin in our lives, and to move us to repent, to turn away from being “conformed to the world” and to turn towards being “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” (Romans 12:2)
That feeling of conviction isn’t known for being particularly comfortable. It’s a cliché that “God’s address is at the end of your rope,” but it’s a cliché for a reason. The 12-Step people often describe it as “hitting bottom,” which is about as painful as it sounds.
When people “hit bottom” they’ll often start to ask questions like … where is God and why is God letting me suffer all this misery? Can’t God do something about all this?
And sometimes the answer is … maybe this, whatever it is, is exactly what God is doing … bringing hope in a moment of desperation, convincing us that what seems impossible might just be possible, and also worth the pain and struggle it will take to … go to rehab, for instance, or restructure that crushing debt, or get the counseling we’ve resisted, or whatever hard practical steps we might need to take to, as people say, “turn our lives around.”
The Reformed tradition also tells us that the power of the Holy Spirit is manifested in what’s called, classically, “regeneration.” That’s something we’re more likely to hear about in stories from the mission field, where people make decisions for Jesus and the community of Christ’s followers that include giving up a former way of life or other religious commitments. Accepting baptism, trusting in the gracious mercy of God, turning from the ways of sin, renouncing evil and its power in the world, accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and savior, pledging to be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his word and showing his love … we can see that as empowering, and exhilarating.
In our culture and time and place that’s the stuff of receptions in the Fellowship Hall and congratulations all around. But in some contexts, historically and still in some places today, “regeneration” like that brings worldly peril along with its eternal joy. It exposes the believer to conflict with family members, friends, or colleagues; it closes off professional opportunities, and social connections; it can even invite state persecution. Then, the power of the Holy Spirit takes the form of sustaining believers through those hardships and trials – not removing them, but giving believes the strength to persevere through them.
Our Reformed Tradition most of all tells us that the power of the Holy Spirit shows up in the believer’s “sanctification” – that is, in the lifelong process through which a person’s life comes more and more to resemble that of Jesus’, to display more and more clearly that famous “fruit of the spirit,” (Galatians 5:22-23) as the person cultivates love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and gentleness and faithfulness and goodness and self-control – specifically, the kind that requires effortful self-restraint, on purpose – because we’re actively trying to do what Jesus says to do, and to stop doing what Jesus says not to do.
In other words, the practices that characterize regular Christians’ regular lives are works of the power of the Holy Spirit. When we get up earlier in the morning than is absolutely necessary and take some minutes to begin the day with prayer, to orient ourselves to the reality of God’s presence and claim in our lives – that’s the power of the Holy Spirit. When we set aside some portion of the day to read scripture, to listen for the message of that scripture and to let it roll around in our minds, sometimes seeing with a sudden flash of recognition that this really has some bearing on our lives – that Jesus’ warning about calling our brothers names, for instance, means right now at this intersection about that careless driver, for instance – that’s a manifestation of the power of the Holy Spirit.
When we turn some pressing concern over to God in prayer instead of trying to solve the problem all alone … that’s the Holy Spirit at work.
At work in power, that gives us cause for rejoicing. And yet, we may not even recognize all that work as power at all, because it seems so … ordinary, so everyday, so incremental and undramatic.
We might be able to see more clearly for what it is if we’d think about “power” the way it’s defined in physics and engineering, as “work accomplished” or “energy transferred” across a specified interval of time. When we do that, when we look back at the progress of our lives as Christians, we can see how much work God has accomplished in those lives, how much energy has been transferred to us, to help us grow in our love of neighbor, to empower us to undertake deeds of service, to enable us to loosen our grasp on the things of the world, and to move us away from our passionate commitment to having things our own way, and closer to passionate commitment to the welfare of others. We can begin to appreciate the kind of power the Spirit has been bringing, all along this way, to the transformation of our lives and characters.
When we start to recognize this energy in our lives for what it is, we might find ourselves rejoicing in it more.
And beyond that, we will find it easier to ask for more of it. Because the power of the Holy Spirit is not in short supply. We can always ask for, and we can always receive, more of that power in our daily lives, all the more once we know what it is we are asking for, and looking for.
One final note in this regard to take away from the beginning of the book of Acts is that Jesus tells the apostles and the other disciples to wait to receive this power.
And it must seem obvious to them that they need to wait together, because that’s what they do. They don’t wait passively, either, they wait actively: they devote themselves to prayer, they worship together, they share their stories about Jesus and about Jesus’ impact on their lives with each other. All in all, they are at work forming themselves into a community that – as it turns out – is capable of receiving the fullness of the Spirit that will be poured out so dramatically on the Day of Pentecost. A community that will not be shattered, but rather energized and mobilized, by that surge of power.
So, much as we want to cooperate with the Spirit in our individual lives, and to appreciate the work of the Spirit in all its forms individually, we too are urged not to stop there. If we are really to take the beginning of this Spirit-filled adventure story that is the book of Acts as a message to us, today, then we too will want to pursue the ways we have to invoke the Spirit together, in the life of our communities, confident that the risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ has work for us to do, and is eager to turn on the power we’ll need to do it.
Image: “Open book 1,” by Alina Daniker alinadaniker, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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