Its synod assembly season in the ELCA again. As you are probably already well aware, I am totally a synod assembly geek. Our’s is coming up and I am super excited. A week from today, Kim and Kwame Robinson, Laurie Swanson, and I will head to Lansing to reflect on three resolutions and to choose new synod council members. We don’t have a bishop election this year, but several synods do. ELCA bishop elections rarely make the news, but you may have heard about two that did last weekend, because last weekend for the first time in the history of our denomination, an African American woman was elected to the role of bishop in the ELCA. Actually two African American women were elected last weekend. The Reverend Patricia Davenport was elected by the southeastern Pennsylvania synod on Saturday, and then on Sunday, the South-Central Synod of Wisconsin elected the Reverend Viviane Thomas-Breitfeld.
Watching all the media hype coming out of what are usually totally ignored events to anyone not as geeky into church bureaucracy as myself, I found myself reflecting back on the barrier-breaking synod assembly I was a part of a few years ago, when the Southwest California Synod elected the Rev. Guy Eriwn, the first Native American and the openly gay person to be elected bishop. As the Acts text this week has us reflecting on the ascension of Jesus and the promised coming of the Holy Spirit, I want to tell you about what that felt like, because it was one of the most spirit-filled experiences I have ever been a part of.
The assembly started out normally enough, with a lot of inane bickering over the rules of procedure. A small group had been working for eighteen months to come up with the process we would follow to elect the new bishop. They had worked tirelessly to try and create the most fair and equitable system possible. So of course some rando from who knows where opened up his assembly booklet for the very first time that afternoon, decided he knew a better way to do it, and forced all of us into a long-drawn out discussion to rewrite one very small, completely unimportant portion. Fine, whatever, glad you felt heard, but this set us back two hours. Then we took the nominating ballot. The way bishop elections work is there are generally a few candidates identified ahead of time, but the first ballot is a nominating ballot where you can literally nominate anyone you want to. Those nominated then have a set amount of time to agree to the nomination, after which the actual process of voting begins. Because arguing over procedure took so long, we didn’t get to the nominating ballot until late in the day. And then, because the credential count had been taken at the beginning of the session, and we’d argued over procedure for two hours, more people had checked in, so there were more votes taken than there were reported at the credentials report. So we had to scrap the whole thing and start over again. Not the most auspicious beginning to what was supposed to be the work of the Spirit.
I came back the next day to the first electing ballot. Fourteen people had agreed to nomination. The process from here is the first person to get fifty percent of the vote wins. The fourteen were cut to ten, and then to six, and then five, then four, and so on, until someone gets over the fifty percent mark. And from that first electing vote, a different spirit started growing in the room. It was subtle at first, this sense that even as we were the ones doing the voting, the results were somehow out of our hands. The list cut from fourteen to ten, and then from ten to six, and then each of the six gave brief remarks. Then we went from six to five, answering a set of questions. Five to four, an open Q and A, four to three. A stillness started to fall over the room, the contention of the day before slipping away. We voted on the remaining names, but the result was already clear. The Reverend Guy Erwin broke the fifty-percent threshold, becoming the new bishop-elect of the Southwest California synod. For a moment, the entire assembly hall was silent. And then, like a rush of wind, it broke into raucous applause. The woman sitting next to me, whom I’d never met, hugged me, “I can’t believe that just happened.” The LA Times had a field day with the story, “ELCA elects first Native American, Openly Gay bishop in church’s history,” but anyone sitting in the room that day will tell you that was not the real story. The real story of that synod assembly was the way the Holy Spirit intervened in a fractious and chaotic group of individuals to bring to the forefront the person whom the Spirit had chosen to be the leader for that moment in the church’s history. Somehow, despite ourselves, the Spirit showed up and moved us beyond ourselves. I am always surprised by these in-breakings of the Spirit. But I shouldn’t be, showing up and moving us beyond ourselves is what the Spirit does.
In our Acts text for this morning, the writer described how “after his suffering [Jesus] presented himself alive to [the apostles] by many convincing proofs.” He then commanded them to stay in Jerusalem, where they would “be baptized with the Holy Spirit,” just as John the Baptist had said.
In verse six, the apostles asked Jesus, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” The apostles have been convinced by all that has happened that Jesus was in fact who he said he was; that God had indeed triumphed. But this question indicates they still did not understand what that meant. They were still expecting Jesus to come back in political and military power to restore the kingdom of Israel to its former glory. But Jesus wasn’t interested in restoring Israel to worldly power; Jesus knew the kingdom of God was much larger than that. Jesus answered them, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” Basically, don’t get caught up in the process or timeline, because you don’t get to know those things. That is super important for us to keep in mind especially today, when we are once again in a period of history where it has become trendy to predict the end times. If someone tells you they’ve decoded Revelation or Daniel, or whatever, I don’t have much time for that. Jesus himself said it is not for us to know. I prefer to focus on what I do know, what Jesus said I can and should know, the work set before me.
“It is not for you to know the times… but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses.” You will receive power. This word “power” is an interesting one. It means a powerful and robust force that is obvious and at work. The power the apostles receive, that we receive in the Spirit, is not authority, it is not a title, rather it is a new set of skills, new competencies and abilities we did not have before that empower us to do the task Jesus set before us, to be his “witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
What this means, dear friends in Christ, is that the coming kingdom of God is not something we wait for, it is something we are being sent to bring about. The followers of Jesus are no longer disciples, they are no longer students, they are now apostles, from the Greek apostello meaning to send. The restoration of Israel that the soon-to-be-minted apostles were asking about was in fact in the process of coming, not by some outside force like they had been expecting, but through them, in them. In their work, in their words and actions, in their preaching and teaching, healing and sharing, in their witnessing to their experience of the risen Christ, they would bring about the restoration for which they longed. That restoration spread across space and time “beginning from Jerusalem… to the ends of the earth,” from then and until today, that same Spirit now resides in us. We are the descendents of those apostles; we are the next generation of recipients of that power. We are the ones who are being sent to restore the kingdom of God from this place to the ends of the earth. We are the ones sent to continue “all that Jesus began to do and teach.” We are sent “to bring good news to the poor…to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” That power now rests on us!
“When Jesus had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from heaven, will come in the same way you saw him go into heaven.”
When we read that part of the first reading, we released a bunch of balloons up into the sanctuary. The balloons are white, because white is the color the church uses to symbolize the risen Christ alive and in our presence. That’s why white is the color of Easter, because it reminds us of Christ alive with us. We released balloons upward as a visual symbol of the risen Christ ascending into heaven. But guess what, the balloons are not going to do anything else interesting this morning. They’re just going to sit up there, being balloons on our ceiling. Now that the balloons have ascended, now that they are no longer sitting in front of us, blocking our entrance to the table, now the real work begins. Because now that the balloons have gone away, now that the colors are changing from white to red, now we are free to ask ourselves, People of Trinity, why are we standing looking up toward heaven? This Jesus who has been taken away from us will return, the kingdom of God will be, and in fact is being, reestablished. Not by some cosmic force from heaven, but by us, through us. We, us, our work, our vocation, our mission in the world is the force God is using to bring about the kingdom. This seems a daunting task, but as one who has sat through the inane unimportant procedural yammering of a bishop’s election only to experience the violent rush of the Spirit moving us forward, let me assure you dear people of God, the Spirit will not let our fears, our insecurities, our love of control, or even our inane need for detail keep us from the work which we have been empowered to do. Dear people of God, let us stop looking upward, and head out. Amen.
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