Author: KPB Stevens

Acts 17:10-34 To an unknown God

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In his speech to the Athenians, Paul begins to make the unknown God known. Beyond that, he makes the clearest statement of the purpose of human existence in all of scripture. Gerald May writes:

As far as I know, only one place in the Bible explains why God created human beings. The apostle Paul, preaching to the Greeks in Athens, says that God created us “so that we might seek God and find God”…According to this theology we are not only born with God at our center, but we are also born with a heart full of desire for God. This yearning is our fundamental motive force; it is the human spirit (1).

Being a spiritual seeker myself, it makes sense to me that this seeking is fundamental to my nature. But Paul says that we’re also created to find God, and that’s a little more challenging. History is full of people who have claimed that they have found God, that the unknown has become entirely known to them, and many of these people were violent, terrible, and oppressive. Once we’re sure that we know God, it’s easy for us to attack and vilify those who don’t agree with our certainties.

The problem lies with our modes of knowing. If we think that knowing God means assenting to a bunch of theological ideas, we can quickly become bigots and attack those who don’t hold share those ideas. But what if believing isn’t about assenting to certain ideas, but is, instead, about giving our hearts to God? What if belief is based on relationship, and not intellectual knowing? Fans of Marcus Borg will know that his book The Heart of Christianity is the source of this idea. In it, Borg takes apart a lot of our understandings of belief, showing that they stem from the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and intimating that they would have surprised Paul. Borg writes:

That Christian faith is about belief is a rather odd notion, when you think about it. It suggests that what God really cares about is the beliefs in our heads—as if “believing the right things” is what God is most looking for, as if having “correct beliefs” is what will save us. And if you have “incorrect beliefs,” you may be in trouble. It’s remarkable to think that God cares so much about “beliefs.” Moreover, when you think about it, faith as belief is relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage. You can believe all the right things and still be miserable. You can believe all the right things and still be relatively unchanged. Believing a set of claims to be true has very little transforming power (2).

Instead, Borg suggests, faith and belief have been about relationship instead of intellectual assent for most of Christian history. We find God by being in a steady, ongoing relationship with God in our lives, which doesn’t mean that we always “get it right” or understand everything perfectly. Paul knew this. The person who stands in front of the Areopagus in Athens is the same person who will tell the Corinthians that we see through a glass darkly. He is calling people into relationship with God, and that changes how we might think about judgment. He very clearly thinks that all of history is about calling the nations into this relationship, and we will be judged by the terms of the relationship. What matters isn’t that we get everything absolutely right, but that we foster relationship with God and allow it to transform us. In this understanding, seeking and finding become the same thing. If we are true to the purpose of our created nature, then what we must do is seek God. God is right there, so finding God is easy. Yet we must continue to find God as we grow in our relationship with the divine, day in and day out.

 

(1) Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul

(2) Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity

Acts 17:1-9 The Synagogue at Thessalonica

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Three things immediately stand out to me about the community that gathers in the synagogue in Thessalonica. The first is that they’re open to discussion and debate. Some of their leaders eventually reject Paul and try to stir up the civic authorities against him, but it’s notable that he’s allowed to show up and dispute with them on three consecutive sabbaths. I’m trying to imagine a stranger coming into my parish on three Sundays in a row and interrupting the sermon each time in order to draw me and everyone else into a long dispute. I think that at first I’d be bemused, then annoyed, and then angry. It would seem to me that this stranger wasn’t respecting the community of the parish and didn’t care about the rites and rituals we’d set-up. Some part of me would be mad on behalf of the community of the church, and another part of me would be mad on my own account because, after all, I carefully prepare my sermons and now I’m not being given the chance to deliver them. I have to admit that the synagogue in Thessalonica is as tolerant, if not more tolerant, than my own community.

The second thing that stands out is that there are a lot of insiders and outsiders in this synagogue, but it’s hard to draw any very strict conclusions about them. There are the members of the community who are Jewish, and then there are a lot of curious gentiles up in the balcony or leaning against the walls. Within these two groups there are further subdivisions, as the women seem to have a very different stance towards Paul than the men do. Even among the leaders there are divisions, as some are willing to go along with the gentiles when they’re convinced by Paul, and some are deeply hostile to Paul. It would be nice if this was a simple story about outsiders and insiders, but Luke seems to be telling us that, in any community, there are personality conflicts and histories of being excluded, even among the supposed insiders, and divisions of class and race and social standing. In preaching the message of Jesus, Paul is preaching an end to these divisions. But before we get high and mighty about our own communities, we should survey them in our minds and acknowledge that these divisions exist within us as well.

Finally, it’s striking to me that Paul’s opponents can’t leverage their own authority within the community in order to stop him, but must call on the outside authorities. I find myself wondering if I would do that. If someone came and disrupted Sunday worship for three weeks in a row, and kept showing up after I’d taken him aside and tried to have a kind and reasonable conversation about respecting the community’s norms, would I be tempted to call the cops? Probably. I would think of all sorts of justifications – the interloper wasn’t respecting the church’s property. As Americans, we have a right to say who comes into our spaces and who doesn’t. And the goodness and graces of my community are worth preserving, they’re something I deeply love, and it hurts to see them disrupted (even if they’re not as good and graceful as I thought). If it came to the test, my guess is that I’d be very much tempted to act like Paul’s opposition and go running to the civic authorities.

When I play this scenario out in my mind, I can find ways to feel justified. What if it was a homophobic, racist, Nazi-sympathizing preacher who kept showing up, week after week? Many Episcopal churches have been protested by far-right ministries, and I don’t think they’re wrong to ask the police to keep the protesters out of their Sunday morning services. But what if it was a young woman who kept showing up, a Somali refugee or an undocumented woman from Guatemala, and what if their message was for us to actually do what we purport to believe in? What if they pointed out my own hypocrisy of non-action week after week? My attitude would change. I wouldn’t think I was justified in calling the cops on them, even if the weekly Sunday attendance was plummeting. Or, to add just one more possible scenario, what if it was a Mormon who showed up, who wanted to tell us how we were misunderstanding Jesus, but did so in a polite and gentle way? Would I be justified then?

As a progressive clergy person, I obviously know my own answers to these questions, but I also don’t want to dismiss them too easily, because wrestling with them is important. This situation at Thessalonica has played itself out again and again throughout human history. In America alone, there have been instances when klansmen marched into churches to deposit money on the altar, the so-called klangeld, and through that action symbolically claimed that the church was on their side. There have been other instances where civil rights leaders and their followers poured out of churches and into public spaces (parks, buses, lunch counters, city squares) and disrupted everything in order to further the cause of justice. The story of the synagogue at Thessalonica asks us to imagine what kind of disruptions we’d be willing to tolerate, and why. It also asks us to consider what’s going on in our own communities. How united are we, really? Where do the divisions lie? And are those divisions sharp enough that they could lead to the community falling apart, if it was tested? These are useful questions to ask, because the potential for a synagogue at Thessalonica-like situation is always present in our lives.

 

Acts 16:16-40 Controlling the Message

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This is a very strange passage. At the beginning of it, Paul and Silas have what many people would no doubt like – someone who’s made it her job to run around after them announcing how great they are. The slave girl with the spirit of divination seems to be furthering their mission – saying who they are, saying that they serve the Most High God, saying that they’re proclaiming the way of salvation. In our current world, this would be considered pretty great publicity, but Paul not only rejects it, he puts a stop to it, and in so doing gets him and his friends into a lot of trouble. He seems to reject the status that the slave girl is trying to give them.

Yet by the end of the passage, he seems more than willing to accept the status of being a Roman citizen. In fact, he insists that the authorities come to the jail and acknowledged his privileged position. I have to admit that this passage might just undermine everything I’ve been taught about earned authority being better than received authority. Paul rejects the authority he’s earned through his mission, his teaching, his love for his community. And he insists on the authority that he received just by virtue of being born as a Roman citizen. What on earth am I to make of that?

I won’t try to be clever and reason my way out of this conundrum too easily. My mind keeps being drawn to that scene in the prison. There Paul and Silas sit, their bodies aching and raw from a beating, the walls shaken down around them, the door gaping open, and yet they don’t make a move to escape. They seem more concerned with the life of the jailer than they do with their own safety. And the jailer, in turn, is very impressed. They convert him and his household.

This seems like a rhetorical act. They’re saying something by sitting there in the open jail and refusing to run away. Their actions speak of fearlessness for themselves, love and concern for the jailer, and contempt for the authorities who imprisoned them. They want to make sure that only they are telling the story of themselves. If they had run away, people could have said all sorts of things about them. And perhaps that’s why they silence the slave girl, as well. They want to control the message, they want to make sure that what they’re saying is exact and understood.

I don’t know how I feel about this. As you’ve probably gathered if you’ve been reading this blog, I don’t care much for attempts to control or be controlling. I especially don’t care for them when they cause people to act in an unloving fashion. In this passage, it’s clear that Paul and Silas treat their jailer with love. But do they treat the slave girl with love? Perhaps, once rid of the spirit of divination, she’ll be of no use to her masters, and they’re free her. But that’s not usually the way things go. Those who are intent on using another human being will find some way to use her no matter what. Is this one of those moments when we shouldn’t make excuses for Paul, who we might admire in other circumstances, but who Luke often portrays as a flawed human being? Or can we sympathize with his desire to control the message, even if his actions seem questionable.

 

Acts 16:1-15 Lydia and the Holy Spirit

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A friend recently asked me whether the Holy Spirit worked through nudges and intuition. I was quick to point out the moments when the Holy Spirit works through miracles, visions, and moments of ecstatic feeling in a group, mostly because I want to preserve the idea that such things are still possible. But my friend was basically right – in our lives today, we mostly sense the Holy Spirit through the feelings we have of the rightness or wrongness of something. Today’s passage from Acts makes it abundantly clear that Paul and his friends also relied on their intuitions to discern the will of the Holy Spirit, sometimes at some cost. At the beginning of the passage, they go from place to place in Phrygia and Galatia, and the Holy Spirit keeps preventing them from speaking. They’re listening closely to those nudges and intuitions, even if it means that their wanderings seem aimless. It must have come as a relief to Paul to experience an actual vision, a dream of a Macedonian man. Dreams might seem like filmy stuff, but they can be a lot clearer than intuitions.

When they get to Macedon, it’s not a man they meet, but a woman. There, at the river beside the gate, they meet Lydia, the first European convert to Christianity, and the leader of the first European church, there in her house in Philippi. The Holy Spirit, it seems, is not very literal about gender, or anything else, really. Its purpose isn’t to dictate events, but to push things along, to get people to places and into situations where new things can happen. In this passage it tells Paul and his friends what not to do – don’t preach in Asia – but it also tells them what to do – make disciples of the women washing clothes in the river. It also helps them to have a broad understanding of leadership. The Holy Spirit has rattled their understanding of the world and social convention, and given them the freedom to seek grace, talent, and wisdom in everyone they meet.

Recently I’ve been watching movies and TV shows about people who were never given a chance to exercise their full potential, young women of sharp intelligence and willpower who had to negotiate mine fields of abusive, cowardly, and angry men to get even the smallest modicum of respect. It makes me angry. Why should the world be this way? I find the patriarchal systems of power that deny and dominate them to be blasphemous, a sin against the Holy Spirit. There’s a passage in 1 Corinthians, ch. 14 that seems to support these patriarchal assumptions. Many scholars think that this passage wasn’t in Paul’s original letter, but was added later by a scribe who couldn’t see past his own cultural assumptions of male superiority. It’s hard to image that Paul, who converted Lydia and established the first European church in her house, could have said it. It’s hard to believe that Paul, who was so open to the Holy Spirit, could have blasphemed against the movement of the spirit in such a way.

Acts 15:36-41 The Falling Out

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This brief little story of Paul and Barnabas’ falling out makes me sad. Barnabas, the son of encouragement, just can’t keep himself from encouraging everyone he runs into, even if they sometimes let him down. No doubt Paul has heard people repeating the three stories of those who turned back on the way to Jerusalem, which Luke himself tells in chapter 9, v.57-62 of his Gospel. John, also called Mark, isn’t much of a disciple in Paul’s eyes. He’s too easily dissuaded from the task at hand. But the same spirit of generosity that led Barnabas to become Paul’s advocate leads him to forgive John Mark and invite him to try again.

I have to admit that I’m more of a Barnabas than a Paul, sometimes to my distress. People do, occasionally, let me down, and when they do I tend to trust them when they ask to try again. Sometimes this pays off and sometimes it doesn’t, but I keep doing it, and sometimes I wonder why. Maybe it’s because I believe in the beauty and benefit of belonging to a community so deeply that I can’t stand to block anyone’s access to it. But I’m settled in place, not on a dangerous mission to convert the Gentiles. There’s a kind of luxury in knowing that the churches that I serve are stable and probably won’t be damaged by someone not showing up to a potluck. Paul doesn’t have that luxury.

I agree with Paul that following the Way of the believer in Jesus Christ is the most important thing. I agree with Barnabas that most of us aren’t going to be very good at this, and that we need patience and forgiveness. I think that Luke holds both of these opinions, admiring both Paul’s rigor and Barnabas’ generosity. It’s sometimes hard and unsettling to hold both positions, to have to be careful and exercise judgement when encountering different people and different situations. But it feels, ultimately, more loving to do so. In this little passage, both Paul and Barnabas are exercising such judgement, it just leads them to different conclusions.