“In Common: Solidarity of the Spirit”
Acts 2:42-47
In the movie Pride, about striking coal workers in 1984 Wales, a union hall is transformed into a cafeteria in a great emblem of solidarity, which matters when workers and their families are holding a picket line. When nobody’s working, and nobody’s getting a paycheck, everybody still gets fed. How? Because there is a massive group effort to make sure nobody eats alone. Solidarity in the cafeteria! The miners called upon supporters, who called in more and more supporters, and the soup line was replenished every day. And some of those supporters were queer activists from London, which became its own delicious story of intersectional relational justice.
I want to look at today’s scripture, Acts 2:42-47, to highlight a modern-day parable of organizing. I want to connect this ancient text which distills “the marks of the church” to a story of solidarity unfolding in your midst – on this occasion of the 10th year anniversary of the Center for Sustainable Justice.
The scripture story takes place forty days after a risen Jesus began to speak “Peace,” and then was seen no more, but the gathered company in his name began to swell from a dozen to a hundred to more than a thousand people. What were they about? What did it look like – this “Christian” faith?
V 42 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching…
Later today, your pastors and United Theological Seminary graduates will celebrate the wonderful tradition of teaching and learning, dialogue with scripture and books and lectures and classes. But Christ’s Way is not just a school or a library.
… they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching – and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayers.
The first hallmark of the church may be teaching. But the second mark of the church is something called koinonia, fellowship, which is fleshed out in two parts as the “breaking of bread” and the “prayers.”
The radical part of breaking bread together imparts responsibility. Eating together forms care and community. Once you’ve eaten at somebody’s table, you can’t just write them off. Rev. Dr. Rebecca Voelkel has broken bread together with people from Standing Rock to El Salvador, from George Floyd Square to General Synod, from the Whipple Building to – well, to your worship right here. By her willingness to show up in movement spaces, her inner resources to engage risk and grief, and her ability to hang in there over time past conflict and pain, she has become not only a teacher, but an ambassador and a catalyst of social change through communion.
And the prayers! Liturgy that Rebecca writes unites the church, in all times and places, in the work of liberation. She insists there is no sharing of the bread just with the privileged, there is no Christian prayer and worship that is merely focused on the quote “First World.” She emphasizes God’s solidarity, bridging the Jesus tradition, to church lore and lived history. When all too often the church forgets the part about Jesus’ solidarity with the poor, Rebecca doesn’t forget that part!
I know this is a ten-year milestone for CSJ, but let me say, this communion thing is truly a ministry of generations. Rebecca’s parents kept it in view, when the United Church of Christ was choosing as a young denomination whether to activate koinonia just in an ethnic sense, like a club, or whether to activate koinonia for the least, the lost, the left out, and all creation. Rebecca’s father’s stories influenced her from his time with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Her mom’s stories shone out from the Inner City Parish model in Cleveland. Their shared theological inheritance was the breaking of bread and the prayers – across lines of division, across lines of poverty, across structural injustice. Bridging this distance is core to what it means to practice following Jesus.
When it came time for Rebecca to craft her direction in ministry, she chose not justice ministry, OR local church ministry, not just entrepreneurial ministry OR ecclesial ministry, but both – because one is core to the other. Opportunity for solidarity is also the heart of Christian faith: God, after all, shows up enfleshed to join the struggle of humankind. Rebecca chose a path toward a continually-reforming and ecstatic expression of the church as a Body deeply in love with ecological justice, seeking social justice, and rooted in racial justice. She chose a lived practice to go along with a teaching vocation. She chose relational organizing – together with Lyndale UCC.
V 43 Awe came upon everyone because wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.
Acts 2 does not credit individuals by name, and that’s important (even as I sing Rebecca’s praises). Signs and wonders (whatever those were) were being done THROUGH those early apostles, BY the Spirit! who was bringing something to life. The result was a growing movement. The result was awe and commitment. People were grasping what it meant to journey with Jesus, who paid the ultimate costs in his life, and people were moved by compassion and courage to get involved.
V 44-45 All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
Now we know what awesome signs they were doing. Solidarity!! They were enacting the miracle of a sharing economy! A way of being together not based on excess and exploitation, discretionary time and income for some, servitude and scavenging for others; rather, daily bread for everyone. Another mark of the church!
Possessions, goods, proceeds shared. Not just for an hour on Sunday, but everyday, somebody was arranging a cycle of stuff, turning stuff into resources, and distributing those resources. I know you recognize this pattern. Gas masks. Food and groceries. Coats and warm things. Bucket brigade. Arm in arm, showing up for neighbors, insisting we are all in this together!
The sustained nonviolent civil resistance of Minneapolis in the winter of ’26 required a prior, and largely out-of-sight, kind of relational organizing that Rebecca and others had been building for decades. I was one of those who came as part of the nationwide clergy call to witness a chapter of solidarity in Minneapolis. We’ll know more about it in the future, from the perspective of history. But already stories and songs from here have reached around the world like a beacon, where people in small and large places are dealing with authoritarian abuse and federal overreach.
Symbols and stories toward resurrection in a time of genocide are no small thing. As Daniel Maguire said, Minnesota showed us what was possible when “we changed our we.” The book of Acts is about a bunch of people responding to Spirit who changed our “we.”
—–
Solidarity.
Rebecca invited me to preach today as a transgender colleague, a trans man. I want to acknowledge in this moment the increased gender-based violence which we are seeing – at grassroots levels in school districts, legislatively across all 50 states, and in federal policy right up to the Pentagon. The green light on rape culture, the non-prosecution and pardoning of male crimes of violation. Often the weapon wielded for such gender-based violence is Christianity – is the Bible. But here we are, reading Acts 2 this morning, the marks of the Christian church. Anybody see theocracy in there? Rape culture? Book bans? Bathroom prohibitions? There is no connection.
Acts 2 is about resurrection living. Not necropolitics.
Trans and non-binary people are among those surviving locker rooms and prison cells, psych wards and low-paying jobs, detention centers and poor housing, while women in half the country have very few choices, and current conditions really aren’t good for men either. We who gather on Sundays to worship as Easter people must be clear: Inequity, poverty, structural violence, and phobia are not the calling of the church! Gender-based violence is the opposite of solidarity in the Spirit. It’s the opposite of ekklesia. Misogyny and transphobia and gender-policing have nothing to do with a re-telling of history within the irrevocable love of God: different people sharing “all things in common” and thereby overthrowing a hierarchy of free and slave, in-group and foreigner, male and female.
Christian white nationalists don’t know it, but they’re asking the wrong question. What did it look like for a group of religious outlaws to outlive and outlast and outlove the Roman Empire?
V 46 Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.
So that’s how they did it!
They ate together.
They prayed together.
They spent time in each other’s homes!
It might not be this simple. But then again, solidarity just might be this simple.
Eating together, and spending time in each other’s homes, across poor and rich, haves and have-nots? There is no bigger miracle, but there is no better recipe, to make sure “no one gets left behind this time – no one left behind.”
V 47 And day by day God added to their number those who were being saved.
These years ahead of us are undoubtedly years of strain and polycrisis. This decade is critical and we know it, amid ecological, economic, authoritarian and other emergencies! Being church – in any manner befitting ekklesia – on this continent will depend on embodied conversations, indigenous-led conversations, immigrant-allied conversations, interfaith conversations, and more. All of which will depend on the Spirit of God transforming us into part of a new community.
Solidarity is what it takes. As Willie James Jennings says (in his commentary on Acts): “One goal – life in God.”
Channeling the incarnate witness that Rebecca teaches, let us look for the Spirit’s ability to surprise us with miracles all around. Like joy, and friendship! A feminist/womanist eschatology of “praising God” and a liberation praxis based on “glad and generous hearts.” So that one day, maybe in another generation or two, there will come some version of us who can look back at history and say these words of salvation:
“We changed our we…”
Amen.
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