The Bond of Spiritual Community (Acts 13:1-4)
The Bond of Spiritual Community
May 10, 2026
Acts 13:1-4
By Pastor Mike Conner
***
There is a story in the Gospels about Jesus’ family coming to visit him early in his public ministry. That may seem rather ordinary, but Jesus had a way of turning simple moments into deep and memorable teachings. He used the visit of Mary, James, and his other brothers to begin remolding the meaning of family for those who followed him.
Here’s how Mark tells the story: “Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him. They stood outside and sent word for him to come out and talk with them. There was a crowd sitting around Jesus, and someone said, Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you. Jesus replied, Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Then he looked at those around him and said, Look, these are my mother and brothers. Anyone who does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother” (3:32-35 NLT).
Reflecting on this passage, a Catholic writer named Rose Mary Doughery says, “[Here] Jesus is suggesting that the bond of spiritual community is a common wanting to do the will of God. Those who gather with him in this seeking are his family.”
The bond of spiritual community—the thing that ties us together more than external likenesses, cultural affinities, common ideas, or even language—is shared desire. When we come together and ask God, the living God, to meet us, speak to us, and use us, we become the family of Christ. Spiritual community transcends the artificial divisions we give it. It can happen anywhere and with anyone. And it cannot be taken for granted. It has to be enacted.
The church in Antioch, described by Luke in the book of Acts, was an example of true spiritual community. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians from many different backgrounds worshipped together. There was Barnabas, whose name means “Son of Encouragement, who was a Jew from a priestly family with roots in the Gentile island of Cyprus. There was Simeon, nicknamed Niger, a Latin word meaning “black,” likely referring to the dark hue of his skin. There was Lucius from Cyrene, a Mediterranean port city on the coast of northern Africa, in present-day Libya. And there was a Manaen, a politically privileged childhood friend of Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee who executed John the Baptist and conferred with Pontius Pilate on the crucifixion of Jesus. Finally, there was Saul, a scholar of Jewish law with Roman citizenship with a connection to Tarsus, a city in present-day Turkey.
These were just five of the leaders of the Antiochian community, five of the prophets and teachers. Surely they represent an even more diverse community of faith. They were all together, worshipping, fasting, and praying. There is a contemporary Japanese German writer named Yoko Tawada who has written that “Nothing good can come from a predetermined sense of community,” and I think there might be something to her insight. After all, these Christians in Antioch, who, apart from the grace of God, could never have imagined being together in the vulnerability of worship, fasting, and prayer, receive a direct word from the Holy Spirit. The Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
And they did it. The community heard and the community responded. Barnabas and Saul had already partnered together in ministry in Antioch, and they had been the two entrusted to carry those financial offerings for famine relief from Antioch to Jerusalem. Now they will partner together in missionary journeys that will transform Christianity into a global religious movement. They will do this together, just as Jesus sent out his original apostles two by two, and they will do it as an extension of their praying and sending community. Though it is the work appointed by the Spirit for them, it has a communal character any way you look at it.
How did they know the Spirit had spoken to them? Did they hear a direct, disembodied voice, like Saul on the Damascus road, Jesus in the waters of the Jordan River, Moses at the burning bush? Was it a word received and relayed by one of the aforementioned prophets—Lucius, or Simeon, or Manaen? Or did Barnabas and Saul feel their pulse quicken as some deep inner knowing came to wondrous expression—“I think God is calling me to go”—and was this followed by the affirmation of the community?
We don’t know. And it’s good we don’t know, because the infinite God speaks to us in many ways, and we wouldn’t want to fixate on just one of them. What we do know is the container in which the Holy Spirit’s voice reverberates: the shared worship, prayer, and fasting of people from different walks of life, who all long to serve God with sincere hearts, who are open to the new thing that God is going to ask of them.
The archetypal call story in the Bible is the call of Abraham in Genesis chapter 12. God calls this older man to leave his ‘country, kindred, and father’s house’ to journey to a land that would be revealed only as he started to walk down the road. Abraham would only come to perceive the destination after stepping forward in faith. This is how Jesus called his disciples, too. He simply said, “Follow me.” He did not tell them where his footsteps would lead them until much later, after they had been humbled and transformed by trusting him and listening to him along the way. That inscrutable element of call is present here, too, with Saul and Barnabas. The Holy Spirit doesn’t give a lot of detail, but simply says: “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
“The work.” I suppose they’ll discover what that means along the way, as the Spirit sees fit to reveal it to them! And yet everything hangs on those two little words: “Set apart for me.” Saul and Barnabas will belong to God. They will be kept in the Spirit’s care and guided toward the Spirit’s goals. So long as they want it. So long as they say Yes to it. So long as the community helps them to say Yes.
Like this ancient moment of genuine spiritual community in Antioch, the sacrament of baptism also condenses these enduring characteristics of life with God. Baptism is a form of initiation. Through these waters, we are released into the story of God, into the flow of the Holy Spirit.
Today we celebrate the baptisms of three little children. When we give our children in baptism, there is a very real sense in which they are no longer our own. They belong to God. This has always been true, but now that truth is made explicit, and we commit to bear it as a joyful responsibility. For many years yet our primary tasks might still be to protect and provide for our children, but we carry with us now a perennial question: “How is God going to use this person, and how am I going to help them hear and respond to the Spirit’s call? When it comes time for them to be set apart, to follow the waters of their baptism to its source in the living God whose thoughts are higher than my thoughts and whose ways are higher than my ways, will I bless them and send them?”
Baptism opens a window in the soul. The Spirit, the breath of God, blows gently in, tickles our curiosity, draws us to the window ledge to look out upon the infinite and the unknown. Our children will think thoughts, dream dreams, and enact community in ways that defy our expectations and that, hopefully, expand our own hearts and horizons. That’s the hope of baptism, not some weird byproduct.
Paradoxically, baptism is an initiation into something—the death and resurrection of Christ, the tradition of the Church, the family of God—which has centrifugal force, the need to open its embrace, to press outward. Just like the universe, which, the physicists tell us, is not only expanding in every moment but accelerating in its expansion.
“Train up a child in the way he should go,” says the voice of Wisdom in the book of Proverbs; and yet that training is not in how to be settled but in how to pay attention, how to love every facet of the reconciled cosmos, and how to live in joyful obedience to the free Spirit.
It is very hard to offer that training to our children if we have not honored the call of baptism for ourselves. So even though we are baptizing children this morning, we all are called to examine ourselves:
Am I awake to the movement of the Spirit in my own life and in the lives of others?
Am I participating in a community that helps me to hear what the Spirit wants to do with me, and am I helping others to hear and say Yes in their own way?
Is my life a prayerful life—joined to others, receptive to the voice of the living God?
What I’m trying to say is that life with God should have the flavor of an adventure. God will give us to one another in ways that surprise us. God will set apart us and our children in ways that surprise us. God’s voice will be heard in the context of community, where very different people share a common desires to magnify the love of God in the world. In this way, it is especially fitting to baptize a child, whose love is already indiscriminate and whose wonder knows no bounds. Jesus tells us that we must become like little children again to enter the kingdom of God.
Our world desperately needs communities who are not afraid of diversity and difference. It needs people whose hearts and minds and hands and homes are open to the many. May God use us all to share great love with the world, whether we, in any given moment, are the ones who send or are the ones being sent.
Thanks be to God. Amen.