Lectionary Reflection for Easter 6C on Acts 16:9-15

LED BY THE SPIRIT?

I have been a liturgist—a worship leader, if you will—since my late teens. Over the course of more than forty years of studying, crafting, and facilitating personal and public spiritual experiences, I have witnessed many trends come and go. But perhaps the one that has surprised me the most is how the Church’s understanding of the Spirit’s role in worship and life has changed.

I have always been a planner. Back in the nineties, when I was the worship director in a small, independent, Pentecostal church, I would often be told that I relied too heavily on my planning and not enough on the Spirit. I was always a little confused by these accusations. I would spend an entire day praying, reading the Scriptures, and crafting the order of service for Sunday’s worship. Then, on Sunday, I would seldom need to depart from what I had prepared. But in a community where the work of the Spirit was equated with spontaneity, my lack of unexpected changes was seen as unspiritual. I could never understand why people thought the Spirit could only work on Sunday, and not on Thursday, when I was preparing. And I couldn’t see how it could be spiritual to throw unexpected curveballs at the poor overhead projector operator who had to flip madly through a concertina file of acetates to find the words of the song which would finally be displayed just as the next surprising song began.

Fast forward to the new millennium, and suddenly the only truly spiritual version of any song was the one created by the original artist and heard on their latest album. You could visit almost any church and hear the song played (as far as possible) exactly as it sounded on the official recording—including all instrumental interludes and moments of ‘spontaneous’ singing ’in the Spirit’. Worship teams became little more than cover bands of the highly professional and well-produced megachurch musicians who created the latest worship ‘hits’. The role of the Spirit was reduced to ecstatic experiences, speaking in tongues, and euphoric feelings. The focus of the Church became growth, which meant filling ever-larger auditoriums and exerting greater control over how people think, behave, believe, and vote. In the last few years, this seems to have evolved further into a quest to create a theocracy for a God created in our own power-hungry, wealth-idolising, exclusive, and divisive image. It seems that the unpredictable, creative, all-inclusive, reign-of-God-building move of the Spirit has been forgotten.

Ken Wilber suggests that the human spiritual journey includes growth through various “stages” as well as transcendent experiences or “states”.^¹ These experiences can be transforming and life-giving, but they can also become problematic when we interpret them too rigidly or draw universal principles from them. All our states are interpreted through the stage of spiritual growth we are at. So, while spiritual experiences can sometimes lead us on to new stages of maturity, they also have the power to fixate us in less mature stages. When we interpret spiritual experiences as God’s approval of where we are in our journey, then there is no need to grow or change. A faith that depends on unquestioning loyalty to rigid understandings of God, rigid doctrines, and a rigid view of the world cannot easily integrate new information and ideas. When we embrace such faith, we feel no need to update our perspectives and experiences as the world evolves, and even the creative work of the Spirit becomes suspicious. When our primary experience of the Spirit is mediated through our personal feelings, we easily judge society and other people based on how they make us feel, which means that we close ourselves off to any possibility that the Spirit could lead us into uncharted (for us) territory. Mitzi J. Smith is right when she declares:

God’s Spirit is not submissive to our feelings. Our biases against others who worship, speak, look, or live different from ourselves, should not be taken as proof of the Spirit’s absence or presence.²

When we try to nail God down and define the Spirit’s work only in terms of our preferences, perspectives, and passed-down practices, when our need for control and conformity leads us to reject the creative, boundary-crossing work of Christ, we become blind to the evolutionary journey in the Scriptures. In our quest for clear biblical guidelines by which we can live and which we can impose on our world, we inevitably cling to the mistaken belief that the Bible has one consistent voice throughout and that every page is inerrant, infallible, and equally inspired and authoritative.³ This quest for certainty ultimately closes us off to the Spirit’s unpredictable promptings⁴ to evolve, grow, and become increasingly compassionate, connected, and creative, and it robs us and others of flourishing and life. But when we open ourselves to new understandings and experiences of God, when we engage our minds, hearts, and bodies in following the Spirit’s lead, we discover the wonderful adventure of participating with God in building God’s reign in our world.

SHATTERED EXPECTATIONS

Both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles include the presence and work of the Spirit as important themes.⁵ In the section immediately preceding the Lectionary reading for Easter 6C, we find Paul and his companions moving from place to place seeking somewhere to share the message of Christ, but in each instance they are blocked by the Spirit. Finally, they arrive at Troas, still with no plan on how to minister in the region. We have no details of how the Spirit kept the missionaries from doing their work; we just know that they were unable to do it and believed that the Spirit was the reason. Then comes Paul’s dream of a man from Macedonia begging him and his companions to cross the sea and do their work there. When Paul shared his dream, his friends agreed that it was the Spirit who was summoning them, and so they set sail, “crossing one of the great frontiers in the ancient, as in the modern world.”⁶ Following this call of the Spirit, the group made their way to Philippi, a significant town in the area and a Roman colony. Brian Peterson explains the significance of Philippi:

This is where the Empire was powerful and popular. This was the heart of the Empire’s project in this corner of the world, a place that lived like an extended section of Rome itself, intended to be an example of what Rome offers to the world.⁷