Author: KPB Stevens

Acts 21:27-22:29 Fearless Integrity

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Arrested and manhandled by the mob, Paul doesn’t claim the safety of his Roman citizenship right away. How easy it would have been, after having been carried by the soldiers to the barracks, for him to say to the tribune “protect me, because I’m a citizen by birth, and therefore my person is inviolate throughout the entire reach of the Roman empire.” Instead Paul, who is never one to shy away from violent mobs, chooses to tell his story to the very people who are threatening him. He doesn’t use his story to make a case for his defense. Quite the opposite. As soon as he starts talking about his mission to the gentiles, the crowd, which has been relatively calm while listening to him, goes wild again. This storytelling is not meant as a defense, but as an example. It’s possible to live a different life, to undergo conversion from violence and learn love and benevolence towards strangers. He’s presenting his life as an example for others to follow.

As I’ve written in previous posts, I think that personal storytelling is deeply important but I also feel a little cautious about it. We are always part of the audience for the stories we tell about ourselves, and sometimes these stories make us believe certain things about ourselves that may or may not be true. I’m fairly clumsy, but if I only told stories about my clumsiness, that would ignore those moments where I’ve managed some small degree of physical grace, not to mention making me one-dimensional, a person entirely defined by his lack of agility. How much worse it is for people who can only talk of themselves as if they were paragons of virtue, or people who can only tell stories about their brokenness? We are many things and once, and limiting our stories to only one or two things seems a little like limiting grace.

I think that we should interrogate our stories from time to time. How true are they, really? Are they humble? Are they told with integrity? I’ve been thinking about humility and integrity today because I read this in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation this morning:

In great saints you find that perfect humility and perfect integrity coincide. The two turn out to be practically the same thing. The saint is unlike everybody else precisely because he is humble. As far as the accidentals of this life are concerned, humility can be quite content with whatever satisfies the general run of men. But that does not mean that the essence of humility consists in being just like everybody else. On the contrary, humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God, and since no two people are alike, if you have the humility to be yourself you will not be like anyone else in the whole universe. But this individuality will not necessarily assert itself on the surface of everyday life. It will not be a matter of mere appearances, or opinions, or tastes, or ways of doing things. It is something deep in the soul (1).

Paul, in this retelling of his story, is acting out of both integrity and humility. He isn’t hiding his faults or trying to make them seem better than they are. Nor is he emphasizing them too strongly, making it seem like he’s entirely useless, or always the victim, or flawed in such a way that people should always take pity on him. Instead he stands before this crowd as he would stand before God, and the story he tells is deeply honest, because it is the story of how God has acted in his life, and he understands that God is his prime audience. He isn’t just telling his story, but the story of the church, and the God the church knows.

 

(1) Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation.

Acts 21: 1-26 Does Paul ignore the Holy Spirit?

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This passage presents a real challenge to what I’ve been thinking and saying about blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. Ever since reading Luke 12, I’ve been assuming such blasphemy has something to do with ignoring the intuitive, improvisational urging of the Holy Spirit, and yet here Paul is, twice ignoring very clear indications that the Holy Spirit does not want him to go to Jerusalem. If my reading of Luke 12 is right (and now I’m really not sure that it is), then Paul is guilty of the one sin that Jesus names as entirely unforgivable.

I won’t argue that I’m somehow right regardless – that wouldn’t be humble. But this passage does make me wonder – can the Holy Spirit pull us in two ways at once? Paul, here, is split between two communities. He’s been with the gentiles of Europe for quite a while now, and although he occasionally gets visitors from the believers in Jerusalem, he’s far distant from them. Yet they’re a community that matters a great deal to him. He’s not interested in founding a radical new way of following Jesus that is completely separate from the old way. He’s not interested in creating a kind of splinter group out of the Gentile Christians. He’s a bridge between these two communities, and it’s important to him that they stay together.

So the Holy Spirit is speaking to the Gentile communities, and telling them very clearly that if Paul goes to Jerusalem, they’re going to lose him. Understandably, they’re not anxious to lose the person who has been both their leader and their friend. Yet the Holy Spirit is also speaking to Paul, and telling him that if these two communities that he loves draw too far apart, they’ll be lost both to each other and to Christ. The Holy Spirit is speaking to him and his friends, and he’s listening, but that doesn’t mean he can avoid making a hard choice.

Perhaps this passage is telling us that following the promptings of the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean surrendering our free will. The spirit can make things clear and teach us many things, but it can’t decide for us. We are not mere puppets of a crafty God who is trying to complete some kind of cosmic plan. God loves us so much that God will choose our freedom over any kind of divine plan every single time. The Holy Spirit isn’t here to dictate to us, only prompt us, nudge us, show us a variety of choices. Maybe the only real blasphemy is when we choose not to listen at all, so that we can avoid having to make a hard choice.

Acts 20:17-38 Saying Goodbye

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This is Paul’s farewell address, and I hear an echo of Jesus’ own farewell address in it. In the twenty-second chapter of Luke, Jesus also meets with his disciples in a room. He has more clarity about what’s going to happen to him than Paul does, who doesn’t know that the journey he’s undertaking will eventually end in his death. Still, Paul expresses that he’s worried when he meets with his friends in Miletus. Both Jesus and Paul understand the urgency of the situation – that they are leaving behind a community that will need to act with an ethic of love and servitude, and that will be tested. The disciples at the Last Supper will see Jesus again soon, although they don’t quite believe his assurances that this is so. The church of Ephesus will never see Paul again. Both of these scenes are full of weeping, fear, hope, and prayer.

Is it appropriate to speak of a spirituality of departing? I have left many places in my life. Sometimes I’ve departed well, and sometimes just slipped away. In those moments when I snuck away in the middle of the night, I told myself that I was doing so because I didn’t want a big deal to be made of my departure. It would’ve been truer to say that I didn’t want to be disappointed if people didn’t react to my leaving in the way that I wanted them to. So I didn’t giving them a chance to react at all. In those moments when people have made a big deal of my departing, I’ve been slightly embarrassed, but also grateful because I’ve had the opportunity to express my love of them and my sadness over the fact that I was going. Reflecting on this, it seems that my ego was more involved, and more fragile, in those moments when I just slipped away. I wish that I had imitated Paul, and treated a good departure as another gift of community.

Last summer, when I was just beginning to think about the spirituality of Luke and Acts, I talked to the children at church about joy. We explored together the different kinds of joy that one can experience – sad joy, happy joy, creative joy, silly joy, and many other varieties. I used the example of parents sending their kids off to college – not the best example for six year olds, but on my heart since my own daughter will be leaving for college within a few years. We can have joy in such moments, I suggested, because we’re proud of our loved ones and excited for the rest of their lives. At exactly the same moment, we can feel grief because something that’s been so important to us is coming to an end. This, too, must be part of the spirituality of departing. The willingness to let ourselves feel everything – love, sorrow, joy, worry for the future, nostalgia for a vanishing past.

To say that something has a spirituality is to say that the Holy Spirit is active in it. I think that the Holy Spirit is very active in this departure that Paul takes from the church in Ephesus. I think it’s also present in all of our departures, if we can set our own egos aside and pay attention to it. Such moments can teach a huge array of spiritual virtues, not in spite of, but because of their sadness. We learn what things mean to us when we let them go. And although we’re called to hold our positions and even our relationships lightly, even though we shouldn’t try to control them or insist on having our own way, that doesn’t mean that we’re not allowed to feel deep and authentic emotion when we come to the end of a time of sojourning together.

 

Acts 19 – 20.16 Sleep and Riots

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This is a very long reading, the longest I think we’ve gotten in Forward Movement’s arrangement of Luke and Acts daily readings. The riot at Ephesus is the center of it, and the story of Eutychus dying from listening to a long sermon seems like a strange little coda. But I think that the two stories have something in common, and that even the story of the Sons of Sceva contributes to the theme. Each of these vignettes is about confusion. The Sons of Sceva don’t really know how to do the job of exorcist, the crowds don’t really know what they’re rioting about, and poor young Eutychus is so confused by the intricacy of Paul’s sermon that he falls asleep. Okay, maybe he falls asleep for some other reason. All I know is that theological intricacy sometimes makes me sleepy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the same was happening to Eutychus. Every one of the characters in these stories lacks some vital form of understanding, and they react to their confusion differently, but still, I think, it is confusion that causes the reaction.

Consider the crowd in Ephesus. Luke tells us that “some were shouting one thing, some another; for the assembly was in confusion, and most of them did not know why they had come together.” People were just getting swept up in a mob mentality, and didn’t even know why they were there. After all, only a small number of them were silversmiths, and actually economically concerned with Paul’s preaching. These silversmiths sold souvenir models of the temple of Artemis, and they worried that Paul would lead people away from the worship of Artemis and harm their bottom lines. So they cynically stirred things up, and I imagine that they were gratified by the results. Clearly, confusion can be very dangerous, especially the confusion of the crowd.

But what about the Sons of Sceva? They were exorcists, so they were used to their jobs, and they must have been utterly bewildered when they fled the house, their clothes in tatters, their bodies bruised. The thing that had been working wasn’t working anymore. They experienced the confusion of the new, the way that changes in our society seem to ruin our old ways of doing things. The Holy Spirit is zooming around, altering the make-up of society and the inner beings of the people it touches, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. Unlike the crowd, their confusion was justified.

What about poor Eutychus? I said a long way back, at the beginning of this project, that Luke has a sense of humor, and here it is on full display. Imagine the uproarious laughter that would greet this story if it were told around the dinner table during a house church gathering. This story brings Paul down a peg or two. You can imagine people meeting each other’s eyes with a look that says, yes, he could resurrect the dead, but boy could that guy get carried away with the sound of his own voice. To me, Eutychus’ sleep is the result of Paul’s own temporary confusion about how to deliver the message effectively.

If we can say that there’s such a thing as a spirituality of confusion, these three stories help to flesh it out. Don’t contribute to confusion if you can avoid it, especially if it’s the confusion of the crowd. Don’t expect your methods of doing things to always work for you, and be prepared to encounter the new. And don’t get so lost in the intricacies of your own thoughts that you stop communicating clearly to other people. I know that I’ve been guilty of each of these three things, and that makes me very glad that Paul resurrects Eutychus. Confusion, even deadly confusion, is not a permanent state. Even it can be redeemed.

Acts 18:1-28 Orthodoxy and orthopraxis

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I have to admit that this read through of Acts is constantly challenging my thinking about orthodoxy and heresy. In general I hold orthodoxy pretty lightly. I’m glad that generations of Christian thinkers have thought so hard and so deeply, and argued so well, but I tend to think that the variety of their ideas and arguments shows that many ways of thinking have validity, and that ultimate truth is always a little beyond our reach. I agree with some of the scholars I’ve read who tell the Christian story as one of disagreement and discussion, and note that a Christianity that’s based in love allows for this, while a Christianity that’s based in fear becomes intolerant and starts to persecute people. Such intolerance is gross and tragic, and lacking the essential humility that can actually draw us closer to God. I don’t think that Paul and his friends were intolerant. Just look at the end of this passage from Acts – Priscilla and Aquila pull Apollos aside and have a nice and loving conversation with him. They don’t attack him in public,which might make him retrench on the positions that they think are wrong. It’s a model for Christian theological discussion. If only the history of Christianity was full of people following this model, instead of holding inquisitions and burning heretics.

This model seems especially important now, because we’re living at a time when religious ideas are loosening. Some of the synagogues that we’re told about in Acts dealt with this same kind of loosening in a fairly admirable manner. They were laboratories for a new kind of Judaism, one that wasn’t dependant on the authority of the temple complex. As laboratories, they were trying to figure out what could be acceptable to that new Judaism and what couldn’t. Sometimes this process of experimentation and discovery went well, and sometimes it didn’t. But in general, they were very tolerant of new ideas, and probably had many people like Paul floating through, who would vociferously argue their point of view, convince some others, and then drift off to some other city in the Mediterranean world.

At this moment, many of our churches are also laboratories, trying to discover a new kind of Christianity in the midst of what is sometimes referred to as the Third Reformation. My own Episcopal church is pretty mellow when it comes to questions of orthodoxy. On any Sunday morning, you can be pretty sure that there are as many theological opinions present as there are people in the pews. And I hope that our Bible studies allow plenty of room for gentle and loving theological discussion, discussion that doesn’t insist on some “right” position and then try to force everyone else to adopt it. We are a little more intolerant when it comes to what’s called orthopraxis, that is, the right way of conducting worship. But even there, we have some looseness and freedom, as long as we’re preserving Sunday mornings as a time that’s free from too much experiment.

Do we lose something by this looseness? Probably so. Many people are exhausted by encountering and wrestling with questions, some of which have never been successfully answered. Many people, quite understandably, would like to just know the truth and be given a way of living that is aligned to that truth. But for me, more is gained than lost. If Jesus’ mission was to transform us individually and then transform the world through us, we need to be patient and not try to rush through these transformations. They’re hard, they take a lot of trust and humility, they lead to some sleepless nights. The Beloved Community is not a community that wants to tell you the answers and dictate how you live. It’s a community that can sit patiently and lovingly with you as you undergo transformation, listening seriously to your thoughts and feelings, not discounting them, but knowing, also, that some of those thoughts and feelings will change, or even fall away altogether, as you transform.