Being the Church Then and Now: Issues from the Acts of the Apostles
William Loader
3. "These people are not drunk as you suppose" (Acts 2:15)
The language of spirituality and cultural monopolies
Introduction
Jesus had
instructed his disciples to remain in Jerusalem until they should receive
power, until they should receive the Holy Spirit. They were to be witnesses.
They had the vision of the kingdom as their agenda. But they were to be more
than visionaries and more than workers to erect the kingdom by their own
efforts. The one who promised the reign of God in peace and justice also
promised the enabling gift of the Spirit: John the Baptist’s prediction of a
baptism by the Holy Spirit would come about in their own day. In advance of the
day when the great vision would be fulfilled, God would already send the
Spirit, the gift traditionally expected in the last days according to Jewish
expectation.
The Spirit
belongs to the kingdom, as the breath of God also belongs to God’s being and
his reign. The Spirit, the breath, the wind of what is to come already blows.
The vision sets the agenda and by the Spirit, as it were, turns its pages and
brings it into reality. Today we look at Luke’s account of the coming of the
Spirit, which is the life of the kingdom to come and the life of the kingdom
now, the Church.
1. The Day of
Pentecost
Luke is
not the only New Testament writer to tell of the coming of the Spirit. In John’s
gospel on the evening of the day of resurrection Jesus breathes on his
disciples and commissions them: “As my Father has sent me; so I send you.” Paul
does not mention an event, but he does sometimes use a term for the Spirit,
which indicates its relation to the kingdom promise. He calls it arrabon,
advance instalment. Luke is different again. Those who passed on the tradition
to him had associated the coming of the Spirit with the first major pilgrim
festival after Jesus’ death and resurrection, namely the feast of Pentecost,
traditionally the festival of the gathering in of the harvest, associated also
with the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt Sinai. Jerusalem had been crowded
again. The scene was set for a mass gathering of people curious about the
continuing Jesus movement. Something of major importance happened in the
Christian community and Luke’s generation looked to it as the fulfilment of the
promise.
Luke’s
tradition probably told of an overwhelming awareness in the group of the
presence of the Spirit coming upon them in a way that led to ecstatic and joyous
praise, including glossalalia, speaking in tongues. Luke takes this tradition
and with the skill of an artist reshapes it so that its abiding significance is
there for all to see. The crowd has come together from all the nations around
about. All hear the gospel in their own language. Here the curse of the tower
of Babel is overcome. There human pride and ambition built a tower, only to see
it collapse and people come to be scattered and no longer able to understand
one another’s language. Here the barriers of language are broken down,
communication is restored. The Spirit creates the miracles of unity.
This may
have been in Luke’s mind as he wrote. We shall never know. He leaves no
particular clues in this direction. We are on surer ground however when we look
at other symbols of the story. Jewish tradition had it that at the giving of
the Law on Sinai a great flame came from heaven and divided into 70 parts, one
for each nation of the world and all heard and understood the Law in their own
language. Luke uses the imagery of this event to give profound symbolic
colouring to the event. Here is the Christian feast of Pentecost. Here the
tongues of flame alight on the 120 and the message of the Word of God is heard
by Jews from every land. It is folly to read the story literally and worry
about burnt hair or wonder why they didn’t simply use the language all the
visitors would have understood, namely Greek. Luke is saying that the coming of
the Spirit is as epoch making as the giving of the Law, the scripture on Sinai
and more. Here is the Word of God for God’s people Israel in every land
wherever they have been scattered and through them for all people everywhere to
the uttermost parts of the world. The Spirit will make all this possible.
These
symbols spoke more powerfully to Luke’s churches still grappling with their
Jewish roots than they do perhaps for us. They would have recognised the
imagery. They would have read of 40 days of appearances and thought of Israel’s
40 years in the wilderness. They would have immediately seen the symbolism in
the number 12 and the number 120. Here was the new turn in Israel’s destiny.
God’s people, Israel, was indeed to be Abraham’s seed in which all nations
would be blessed. Jesus was Israel’s Messiah. Peter makes this plain: by
raising him from the dead, “God has made him Lord and Christ or Messiah, this
Jesus whom you crucified.” Praise God for his promise to restore the kingdom to
Israel. Praise God that already now he has poured out this advance instalment,
the Spirit. These ecstatic men and women are not drunk as you might think. They
are full of the joy of the promised Spirit.
But this
is much more than the celebration of the earliest Jewish Christians at the
Pentecost festival. It is also the Church’s festival for Luke’s day and it is
our festival. In it we celebrate the coming of the Spirit, then and now and in
every age. The word Spirit has a fascinating range of meanings: breath, wind,
spirit, soul. The mighty rushing wind plays on this range of meaning. At the
creation the Spirit moved over the face of the waters. That may be a correct
translation. An alternative is to say: there was a tremendous storm over the
deep. Spirit is about power, force, energy, life giving power. Spirit may also
connote breath, life giving breath. God breathed into the human being; it
became a living person. In Ezekiel’s vision God’s breath blows upon the dry
bones and they live.
2. Speaking of the
Spirit and Idolatry
Spirit is
not ghost, not a spirit, like a good demon, a good angel. Talking about Spirit
is talking about God, God in power like the force of a wind, God in intimacy
like breath. Sometimes the power of divine presence overwhelms us; we may
shudder and shake quite literally; we may shout and cry aloud; we may sing for
joy; we may extol God in tongues of praise; sometimes the power of divine
presence brings to us a stillness, silences us, takes from us all forms of
speech. It doesn’t matter when or how we respond to the Spirit. It matters that
we respond to the Spirit. As the Spirit of creation produced a bewilderingly
diverse creation, so the Spirit who comes to us produces a rich diversity of
responses in human beings. The Spirit by which God drove Jesus into the
wilderness and then back into the poverty of Galilee, the Spirit that came upon
Jesus enabling him to announce the vision of the kingdom and to live out its
agenda during his ministry; this same Spirit takes us to the place of testing
and directs us to the world’s Galilee; this same Spirit lifts our eyes to the
vision and our hearts and hands to its agenda of love in the world. The fruit
of this same Spirit in Jesus and in the Church is love, is the living out of
the agenda of the kingdom.
Not the
how nor the when matters. The Spirit strikes us in many ways; and the time of
the Spirit is always. It is the what that matters: namely, that we live in
openness to the vision of the kingdom and to the power and intimacy of the
Spirit of the kingdom manifesting itself in love. Ultimately to talk of the
Spirit is to speak of God and to speak of being filled with the Spirit is to
talk of being filled with God. Or to put it in other words, to let God rule
fully now in our lives, to let the kingdom of God be what it needs to be now in
us and among us.
Paul said:
“Where the Spirit is, there is freedom.” Yet Paul also knew that where the
Spirit is, the flesh, the craving for human power and glory, the Babel tower
building, will reassert itself. There are a number of ways in which this may
happen and they were issues for the early Church as they are for the Church
today. Many of them will be familiar, but let us name them and by the power of
the gospel of Jesus exorcise them. They are all forms of idolatry and cover the
spectrum of theological persuasion.
The first
is to glory in the events or experiences related to the Spirit and not in the
Spirit, in God. I say "events and experiences related to the Spirit",
because this brings together both the genuine events and experiences which
people have as a result of the impact of the Spirit on their lives and the
phoney trumped up events and experiences sometimes associated with the Spirit.
In Matthew’s gospel we hear Jesus speaking to the Church: “Not every one who
says to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does
the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord,
Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and
perform many miracles in your name? And then I will confess to them, I never
knew you. Depart from me you workers of lawlessness.” And Jesus’ teaching
ministry concludes, according to Matthew, with the warning that only those
whose lives are marked by caring for the needy as if they were caring for him
shall be saved. Paul has similar stern warnings for the Christians at Corinth
for whom the gifts of the Spirit have become the centre, who count them and
crave them and glory in them, and do not have love. They’ve got religion and
they’ve got nothing.
Paul is
not attacking miracles or tongues or powerful manifestations in themselves. But
these manifestations, responses to the Spirit, can just as easily become sins.
Yes, he says, you can sin by speaking in tongues. Using an old law of ecstasy
he says: the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets. In other
words, you are in charge of your own religious experiences and abilities. Use
them to God’s glory, not for your own, nor in ways that are destructive of the
community. I can no more justify my action by appealing to the Spirit having
moved me than could Jim Jones in Guiana. I am responsible for my response to
the Spirit.
It would
be easy to launch a tirade here against massive abuses of Christianity by media
preachers, but that would not help us here. The form in which we face the issue
is when people have been told, and believe and peddle the notion that the
Spirit comes in certain packaging. Usually this is associated with a certain
range of feelings one should have, an ability to point to enough extraordinary
things having happened to you to assure yourself and others that you’re God’s.
Mostly Jesus, especially Jesus in Gethsemane, fails these criteria miserably. A
broken figure on the cross comes pretty well down in the super radiant
Christian stakes.
This
packaging of the Spirit not only prescribes very subtly how the human side
should look, but also develops theories about how the Spirit is marketed. The
Spirit is made to seem like a substance, which God dishes out piece by piece, a
little bit at baptism or conversion, a maxi second helping at some later stage,
and then, according to your theory larger doses or special doses on special
occasions. But God does not come to us in bits and pieces. The message of the
gospel is that God is fully there with all God’s love. God is not a commodity.
God is there in fullness. It is we who come to God in bits and pieces; it is we
who hold back. God does not hold back. Sometimes when we stop holding back we
are overwhelmed. Words fail us. We want to dance, shout, sing for joy in the
Spirit. The gospel is not about Jesus giving the first course and the Spirit
the second. Jesus is the bread of life. And the Spirit the Paraclete takes what
is already his and declares it to us. Luke describes the impact of the Spirit
upon people in a variety of ways. Sometimes the impact hits them after they
believe, sometimes as they believe, sometimes before baptism, sometimes after
baptism. Luke wasn’t interested in protocol. All that mattered was the break
through of the Spirit into people’s lives.
When we
stop putting God at the centre and start putting our experiences there, we are
putting ourselves in the place of God. When we put our experiences in the place
of God, we delude ourselves about our power. We have God under our control. We
manage God. We turn God on and off. We have made God in our own image; we have
descended to idolatry.
But
putting religious experiences at the centre is not the only way we practice the
ancient art of idolatry. It is equally idolatrous to imagine that we have
captured God in the structures of our institution. If the only time we talk of
the Spirit is in the words of the corporate liturgy, or in the words at baptism
or at ordinations, then we are in effect saying that the Spirit has become
locked into the Church. That, too, is a deluded power play. For we control the
institution; we control the doctrine and the practices. In the name of the
kingdom we keep the Spirit captive in the manageable. The Spirit of the kingdom
becomes the spirit of the church with a small “s”. “These people are not drunk as
you suppose.” This is a statement based on social and cultural norms. Cultural
norms are extraordinarily powerful, both as negative and as positive forces.
Tolerance, acceptance, let alone enjoyment, of culturally different forms of
worship from our own is difficult at the best of times. But the Church is beset
with cultural monopolies especially in the realm of spirituality and worship. I
speak here as a white middle class Australian male with a university education
and an aesthetic preference for c1 European music and art. What a
qualification! It’s not difficult to appreciate the worship of a completely
different and distant culture from my own. If the contrast is sufficiently
great I shall have few difficulties. We have majored in the Uniting Church on multiculturalism
and intercultural sensitivity.
But I
wonder how far we have considered the significance of subcultures within, for
instance, white Australian society. I fear that mono-culturalism is rampant
here. I see it in two directions. One is the tendency towards mono-culturalism
in our worship, in our liturgies, in their language, their style, even the fact
that they are printed or how they are. I am really looking forward to the
availability of Uniting in Worship and to the second phase of the Commission’s
work on contemporary worship. but what I am addressing is wider than this.
There is a
complex network of cultural norms operating in the world where I feel most at
home. Attitudes towards emotional display or self disclosure; group behaviour:
style of conversation; musical and artistic taste; the roles of men and women.
I find it almost impossible to transcend this my cultural norm and almost
inevitable that I become subtly imperialistic about it. Do I not shape
ordinands in this particular direction? Yet I can also recognise, sometimes to
my horror, how very relative my culture is, how very sick it is at some points
and strong at others. We may not face the problem as directly as my Anglican
friends who are at least aware of the struggle against being the outposts of
English better society; but I wonder if we ever face it at all. What an odd
thing it is that churches have organs, for instance. I love them. But what is
this cultural option doing? Is it any wonder that the other subcultures scream
out against the imperialism of our spirituality, my spirituality? Is it any
wonder that the Uniting Church in many regions is the Church which serves those
who are not quite Anglican and just a bit more than Baptist and Pentecostal? We
need to look over our subcultural fences and hear a voice from on high tell us:
these people might not be drunk as you suppose.
I do think
the charismatic or so called renewal movement also deserves mention here. It is
surely in part the fruit of protest against the staid mono-culturalism of
mainline protestantism. But so also are a range of other largely American
inspired adventures in greater freedom of group relationship and self
disclosure. The problem is that such groups can be just as mono-cultural and
imperialistic. The charismatic renewal has all the hallmarks of being a
legitimate cultural phenomenon responding to a strongly felt need. There is a
common way of speaking, behaving in public; a similar pattern in leadership and
organisation; preferred patterns of spirituality and music. When it becomes
imperialistic, at its worst, it wants everyone else to join it and be
enculturated into the same corporate and individual spirituality. It has in
reality no monopoly on spiritual growth and maturity; nor has any other of our
spiritual subcultures, including mine. All of them can be imperialistic and go
off the rails. All of them can coexist in the rich diversity of the kingdom.
Spiritual mono-culturalism is another idolatry and tackling it in the Church,
just in our own Church, is an enormous challenge and task. It is not that I can
ever really transcend my own cultural identity; but I can stop kidding myself I’m
somehow the norm and I can stop declaring others drunk.
The Church
of the Kingdom has to be the Church of the Spirit. A lively and diverse
spirituality is its life blood. This doesn’t mean anything goes. Corporate
worship is the occasion where people are led to focus on God, to respond to God
in openness, in confession, in pain, in hope, and to hear God through the
witness of scripture and tradition, to receive God’s blessing in fellowship and
communion, and to be sent by God out into the world in love with the agenda of
the kingdom and the power of the Spirit. This is a recognisable pattern. Where
it happens, there is worship; where it does not happen, something else is
taking place but it is not worship.
In the
Pentecost story Luke underlines for us what it means to be the Church. We are
the people called to live with the vision of the kingdom of God as our agenda.
But this is only possible as we are open to the breath of the Spirit.
Cultivating that openness is not searching for experiences: it is not confining
Spirit talk to the formal phraseology of the institution and assuming control;
it is not cultural monopoly and the imperialism of our aesthetics. It is
openness to the many languages of love. It is letting this love burn on our
heads and in our hearts. It is making our way to the temple courtyard and being
one with an odd assortment of pilgrims who we know are also praising God in
their own language. It is surrendering control and power to love. Ultimately it
is to face the Spirit and pray: your kingdom come.