We are a people on a journey from the season of betrayal and crucifixion to the season of resurrection and Pentecost -- a time for receiving the Spirit that will revive, renew, and empower.
For me this is a breathing time -- a time for tapping into the open and free space of God's Spirit, where our despair is released into speech, our brokenness healed, our betrayals forgiven, and where there is deep movement from fear and denial toward a new vision of community.
The movement of the Spirit is never private, yet always personal. The power of God's Spirit touches our hearts and longs to be engaged with our bodies and voices in public witness. As you use this lectionary, I suggest the following:
· Center yourself in prayer -- "Let thy Spirit breathe through me."
· Engage in a time of meditation and reflection using the study questions.
· Engage in a time of action that flows out of your meditation.
May 2: Follow Christ's Footsteps
1 Peter 2:19-25, Acts 2:42-47, John 10:1-10, Psalm 23
The Holy Spirit confronts every person with a choice: Choose death or choose life; choose continuing oppression or choose liberation; choose selfishness or choose sacrifice. In the Acts 2:42-47 passage, the followers of Jesus Christ choose life.
In the face of unspoken threat, they refuse to be confined, rendered timid, or silent. They opt for a life of community and risk, marked by street presence, jail, preaching in court to the authorities, prayer and table gatherings and support, and then back to the streets. The new believers formed support groups where they could learn God's Word, pray, and mature in the faith. They broke bread together and shared all things in common so that all could benefit from God's gifts.
The early Christians were part of a new community formed out of the life, struggle, suffering, death, and new life of Jesus Christ. In John 10:1-10, Jesus is the Good Shepherd who offers a more abundant life by transcending the rules of authority. The system could not contain or domesticate him. In a world based on competence, possessions, and achievements, Jesus creates the new space of friendship, sharing, and service.
Samaritans, women, tax collectors, lepers, outcasts, and the poor gather around a common table and the whole body is discerned. Sisters and brothers experience a face-to-face encounter with themselves, one another, and with the spirit and power of the risen Christ. At this table a meal is shared, baptism is celebrated, and the community begins the journey of following Christ.
Reflection Questions: Are you in need of being invited to the table? Who needs to be invited to your table? How are you engaged in receiving, giving, and needing support?
May 9: Beyond Believing
Acts 7:55-60, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14, Psalm 31:1-8
The journey that we take from betrayal and death to resurrection and new life is a search for community, spiritual vision, and the reconstruction of a new humanity, our own included. To follow Christ is to recognize that we are not captive to the old order; that we are not surrogates of systems that are not working; and that we are not authored by credentials, achievements, or possessions. Rather, to follow Christ is to embrace the path that offers compassion, vulnerability, justice, covenants, and relationships.
In 1 Peter 2:9-10, we are affirmed as the daughters and sons of God, created and shaped in God's image. God's mark and spirit are upon us. We are not God's elite or God's favorite or pampered people, but are claimed by God for God's purposes. This is about obedience and faithfulness.
In Acts 7:55-60, Stephen is stoned for proclaiming that Jesus is the Messiah. The temple leaders, who had condemned Jesus to death for blasphemy, are willing to accept him as the son of Abraham but not as the Son of God. The temple leaders claimed to be believers, but they refused to become disciples.
Believers give lip service without obedience. Belief demands a radical break from life as we know it and live it. It is freedom from our limited perception of things and from the lifestyles and life agenda that those perceptions engender. If God's Spirit is to breathe through us, belief involves a radical break from the gods of militarism, nationalism, and materialism.
However, those who choose to follow in the way of the crucified and risen Sovereign will always be in trouble with the authorities.
Jesus creates a crisis with the authorities because he transcends the rules of the scribes who manage the tax system, the priests who manage the rituals, and the Pharisees who manage the morality. He lived in the world by different definitions. Jesus offers us a new and different notion of what it means to be a powerful person -- it is the power to serve but not to master, to die but not to kill, to bring order but not to dominate.
Reflection Questions: In what ways are you living in the world by different definitions? How do these definitions empower -- giving you breathing space and room to grow and move in new ways?
May 16: More Than Charity
Acts 17:22-31, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21, Psalm 66:8-20
Being loved is the most powerful motivation in the world. Our experience to love is often shaped by our experience of love. We usually love others as we have been loved.
In John 14:21, Jesus said that his followers show their love by obeying him. Love, however, is more than lovely words. It is commitment and conduct. The demand that we love is more than a call for charity or sloppy sentimentalism. It is to care so deeply that there are things we are simply not willing to live with.
This is a boundless love that reaches out to all. It is an active love -- not from a distance, but close at hand. It means opening ourselves up to each other, to be touched and to become vulnerable. It is weeping together, walking together, and witnessing together.
To speak to those living in poverty about the love of God, one must embody the words in action that give answers to the questions arising out of the life they are living now. To speak of the love of God and to act otherwise is to take God's name in vain. To preach good news to the poor is to say by word and deed that God will not leave them in the condition of poverty. Charity is not sufficient; the demand is for justice-based love in which the "first" are to take last place in our consideration, and the "last" first.
In the fourth gospel, when Jesus finishes instructing his disciples, he doesn't give them a law; he gives them a gift of new space, rooted in relationship and covenants. He says, "Love one another." Then he says that when you do so, you had better know that the world is going to hate you. The world cannot tolerate people freely loving each other, because it destroys all the barriers, definitions, and stereotypes that keep us captive and enslaved to the old world order.
Reflection Questions: What do you need to let go of in order to proclaim God's love? To risk loving is to experience vulnerability at deep levels. How can this vulnerability be celebrated rather than feared?
May 23: From Private to Public
Acts 1:6-14 , 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11, John 17:1-11, Psalm 68:1-10
Power from the Holy Spirit involved taking the resurrection to the streets. Before the Pentecost experience, the disciples were in the upper room. After, they were in the streets. The Spirit of God was breathing through them and moved them. Acts 1:8 describes an ever-widening circle. The gospel was to spread from the upper room to the streets of Jerusalem, into Judea and Samaria, and finally to the whole world.
The ministry of Jesus was clearly not private, confined to households or even temples. It was in the streets, on the hillsides, in the marketplaces, and all public places where people lived, moved, and had their being. For the most part, Jesus' public ministry was to the crowds and the multitudes of the society -- the poor, the diseased and afflicted, tax collectors, and sinners.
We are called to come out from behind our stain-glassed walls and dwell where mothers are struggling, children are hungry, and fathers are jobless. As long as innocent children continue to die in tenement fires; as long as families have to live in winter without heat, hot water, and food; as long as people are forced to live in poverty, the gospel must be heard in judgment against the inhumanity of society.
To be alive to the Spirit is to experience personal and public freedom.
Reflection Questions: How are you going public with your faith commitments? What streets are in need of your witness?
May 30: Standing Together
Acts 2:1-21, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 7:37-39, Psalm 104:24-34
Acts 2:1 states "that when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place." Significantly, the empowerment of the Holy Spirit took place only after the people were all together. This time the empowerment would not just be for a privileged few, but for all, so that they might then set about building a community of faith and justice.
A divided community undermines the credibility of a message that is to break the barriers of language and nation, gender and race, religion and social class to unify all of God's creation in one human family. However, it is also important to note that both unity and difference themes are built into the reality of Pentecost.
Standing together in one place did not mean that all were singing the same song or even from the same page. The Pentecost experience revealed that each spoke in their own language, maintaining individual linguistic identities and selfhood. What is important to note here is that they were able to understand each other. This is a partnership model, built upon the recognition that others also know and must be heard. It calls into existence a community where the contributions, capacities, gifts, and talents of all are woven into collective effort.
The presence of the Holy Spirit is an imperative to go out for the sake of inclusivity. We in the West have often reduced the cross and the Holy Spirit to introversion and exclusivity. Even when we have been extroverted in our missionary activity, we have not empowered people to understand the message and power of the gospel in their own languages, but forced them to speak our language as a precondition for their understanding.
Standing together in one place can be interpreted as people working together, speaking together, in order to understand and to be understood, and engaging in covenants for moving toward the city that God intends for all creation. This is truly the new space called forth by Jesus.
Reflection Questions: Listen for the different voices all around you. What are the gifts you bring and have to share with the collective whole? What does it mean to speak with the power of the Holy Spirit in your own language?
Yvonne V. Delk, a Sojourners contributing editor, was the executive director of the Community Renewal Society in Chicago when this article appeared.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!