Author: KPB Stevens

Acts 13:1-12 The Hierophant

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Mary Pierce Brosmer, in her book Women Writing for (a) Change, which describes the movement she started and continues to belong to, tells the story of her first poetry reading. She was asked to read after the poet May Sarton had to cancel her appearance due to an illness. Brosmer found herself standing in front of a room of about a hundred people, who responded enthusiastically to her reading. The one negative response came from her creative writing professor, who cornered her at the reception afterwards and remarked, “you really care about being understood, don’t you.” He then told her what he thought a poet should really be like. “I think of the poet as the hierophant above the people, inviting them to reach up toward me, upward toward some greater understanding.” Brosmer writes

Fortunately, having heard this enough in his contemporary American poetry class, where we studied only male poets, with the pleasant exception of Denise Levertov, I knew the meaning of the word hierophant: the prophet-priest. Yet I gaped at him stupidly, rendered mute by the arrogance of the image, and his invoking it at this particular moment (1).

Since then, Brosmer’s life has been lived in service of a very different understanding of the creative person, the person who lends their creativity, their insight, and their experience, to the communities they belong to. Women Writing for (a) Change creates these communities, and has developed practices for inviting and honoring the voices of every participant.

We see this contrast between the poet-hierophant and the poet who builds community played out in today’s passage from Acts, although here we are talking about religious leaders instead of poets. The community in Antioch doesn’t care about hierophants. We are clearly told that there are prophets and teachers, but none of them claims to be higher than other people, who must reach upwards in order to grasp their exalted understanding. When Paul and Barnabas are commissioned, when they have hands laid upon them and are sent off to extend the grace of the Beloved Community to the gentiles, it is because the Holy Spirit has prompted this action. We’re not told whose hands are laid on them, and as Justo Gonzalez points out, the greek is ambiguous and could imply that the entire church is blessing them (2).

It’s no accident that one of the first people that Paul and Barnabas encounter on their journey is someone who thinks of himself as a poet-hierophant, the false prophet Bar-Jesus. He’s threatened by Paul and Barnabas because hierophants can’t help but be threatened by the egalitarianism of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is more than willing to come down and dwell among the people, and seems disinterested in people who have put themselves on pedestals and think their role is to try to raise other people to their exalted understanding. As with many miracles, the physical blindness that afflicts Bar-Jesus is simply the outward and visible sign of his inward blindness, the blinkers that arrogance, insecurity, status, and a need to control have put over his eyes.

  1. Mary Pierce Brosmer, Women Writing for (a) Change, p. 66.
  2. Justo Gonzalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit.

Acts 12:20-25 Should we welcome humiliation?

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Poor Herod. Back in my post on Luke 23:1-25 I reflected on Herod’s character, how he was a kind of seeker, always wanting to talk to John and Jesus, but never really wanting to take their answers seriously. In fact, when he doesn’t get the answers he likes (or in his encounter with Jesus, any answer at all), he punishes his would-be gurus with torture and death. He is unhappy, discontented, hungry, but he can’t really believe that there’s anything but his own ego to be concerned with. Like most of us, he longs to draw close to divinity, but he is convinced that the best way to do this is by claiming that his ego is divine. In the end, he is so worshipful of himself that he doesn’t correct the people of Tyre and Sidon when they pretend to worship him.

Herod is not a humble man. He would never believe that humility is the answer to his discontent. And yet, as I often said in my commentary on Luke, the contemplative tradition prizes humility above any other human characteristic. Richard Rohr, one of the great contemplatives of our time, says that he prays that one humiliating thing will happen to him every day, so that he’ll always remember to be humble. Humility like Rohr’s is hard to cultivate, because most of us have been conditioned to respond to humiliation with a sense of shame. In fact, it might seem radical to say that we can have any response other than shame. Yet throughout the centuries, some Christians have deliberately sought out humiliation, just so that they can develop other responses to it. They’ve often done so in an attempt to imitate Christ’s humiliation on the way to the cross, but their methods might, to us, seem quite bizarre.

In his book The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau writes about such people as Simeon of Emesa and Mark the Mad who, in the 6th century, would make public displays of eating pastries on Holy Thursday and stealing food from the marketplace, not to mention hanging out in brothels and walking around naked in the streets. Some of the things they did are not at all admirable and should not be imitated, but ever since reading about them I’ve been fascinated by this idea of holy men going out of their way to attract shame and derision. It’s like they wanted to be constantly embarrassed, so that they could act without worrying about embarrassment. To me, that’s a kind of freedom. It’s the opposite of King Herod. Instead of worshipping their egos, these strange Christians sought to demean their egos in every way they could.

I wouldn’t act like them, or suggest that anyone else should, either. I think there are easier and more gentile ways to learn to take the ego less seriously. Yet I agree with Rohr that if we want to avoid being like Herod, we need to learn to welcome occasional humiliations. Not one of us can avoid acting silly and absurd from time to time. Can we come to see our absurdity itself as a gift from God, causing us to take ourselves less seriously, and our mistakes as a kind of introduction to grace?

As a brief addendum to this post, I should acknowledge that I presented this idea to my friend Di, and she very rightly pointed out that it might be good for white men like Rohr or myself to cultivate humiliation, but that there are a lot of people in the world who wake up every day in a state of humiliation because the cultures they belong to have a vested interest in humiliating them to keep them in their place. So I want to amend what I said above, and assert that humiliation is not always good, and that shame, in particular the kind of shame that is used to keep people down, can be just plain ugly. Obviously, I need to think more about this, and am so grateful to Di, a member of my own Beloved Community, for challenging me and remaining in deep and meaningful conversation with me about this and many other things as well.

 

Acts 12:1-19 Angels and Laughter

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As I have said, many of the stories that Luke relates must have been told around the communal table when the early church met to pray and break bread together. I find it easy to believe that this story must have been a popular favorite, one that people asked to hear again and again. It was full of wonder, but also contained the slapstick humor of the maid Rhoda slamming the door in Peter’s face and not reopening it until she had talked to the praying disciples. This is a daffy, charming description of how people act, and its inclusion here is vital to my understanding of Luke’s spirituality. Through this simple story, he seems to be telling us that it’s okay to laugh, to find amusement, even to experience joy in the midst of dark times. In fact, it’s more holy to do this than it is to insist on acknowledging nothing but misery and sorrow.

Some people get angry when they encounter such seeming frivolity in a serious moment. Yet Rhoda’s response is, to my mind, in keeping with the presence of angels in Luke’s story. This is the fifth time that angels have appeared in the Acts of the Apostles. Two men in white robes stand beside the disciples in chapter one as Jesus is ascending into heaven. An angel appears to Philip and sends him off to meet the Ethiopian eunuch. An angel appears to Cornelius and tells him to send men to Joppa to find Peter. And, in Acts 5, the angels are responsible for another jailbreak, letting the apostles out of prison so that they can keep preaching in the temple. Angels seem to be always coming and going, and their main task seems to be the expansion of the group of believers, the widening of community. In every instance, the people they appear to do what they say – there is no denial of angels in this story. Angels appear, and the only response to them, Luke tells us, is acceptance.

He seems to feel the same way about Rhoda, and about the other funny little anecdotes that he sometimes weaves into his narrative. Rather than trying to repress them as frivolous, Luke is happy to tell us about weird things happening and people responding to them in inappropriate ways. I think that he wants us to know these stories because he wants us to be forgiving when it comes to our own inappropriate responses. For him, a beloved community is not a community of censure. Things will happen in these communities that we don’t know how to react to, and because we’re confused our reactions will be off, and sometimes blatantly wrong. If anyone is truly hurt by our wrongness, we should apologize. But a better response is to laugh at our own capacity for mistakes, to take a kind of delight in them, since none of us is perfect, and we’re all going to find ourselves in Rhoda’s position at one moment or another. And isn’t it wonderful that this community no longer always reacts to angels with fear and trembling, which was the usual response to angelic appearances in Luke’s Gospel? Sometimes there’s terror, but just as often there’s wonder that leads to a kind of hinky, stumbling reaction, and instead of finding this inappropriate, the community finds it delightful, and wants to hear about it again and again.

Acts 11:19-30 The Son of Encouragement

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Luke likes Barnabas a lot, and for good reason. It was Barnabas who Paul went to when he returned to Jerusalem after his vision on the Road to Damascus, Barnabas who took Paul in and vouched for him to the apostles, and here we see him seeking out his friend in Tarsus and bringing him to Damascus. Although he doesn’t get a starring role, its safe to say that without Barnabas there’s no Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, and hence no expanding church, no epistles, no Christianity as we know it. Barnabas is key, but unsung. So let’s sing his praises now, and let him teach us something about the spirituality of encouragement.

True encouragement is nearly impossible when people are striving and jealous. As a young man, I wanted to be a famous writer, and consequently I found it impossible to read a book by an upcoming writer without looking for faults in it. “They’re not so great,” I’d mumble to myself as I turned the pages. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t get to be what I wanted to be that pleasure at anyone else’s achievement became impossible. Yet in my early thirties I came to the realization that I was never going to be famous, or even well known, that I was one of eleven billion people, and the chances of my achieving any kind of notoriety were incredible small. At first I was sad about this, and then I began to think about it with an incredible sense of relief. The pressure was off! My family and community loved me even though I wasn’t famous. God loved me. Next to the wonder of those loves, notoriety had very little meaning.

Once I was free (or at least partially, for who is entirely free) of this ego-driven lust for prominence, I found that I could really enjoy the writing of others. Novels became pleasurable to me again. So did many things that fell entirely outside of my talents. I was no longer comparing myself to other people, or trying to prove my worth. I was suddenly free to wholeheartedly embrace whatever was good in others. I found within myself the capacity to encourage.

This, obviously, is the capacity that Barnabas has in abundance. And I think he’s so encouraging because he’s humble. He’s more delighted in the gifts of others than he is in his own gifts. You can imagine him looking at Paul and seeing how remarkable Paul is, and not feeling a jot of jealousy. He doesn’t care what people think of him. And because of that, he can delight in them.

Encouragement like Barnabas’ is a sure-fire sign of the resurrection. How do you know that you’re living in a Beloved Community? Well, such a community will be full of the sons and daughters of encouragement, people who are actively looking for the gifts and talents of others, and promoting those gifts and talents without much thought for themselves. These people will, of course, feel flattered and loved if you acknowledge their own gifts and talents, but they don’t need you to acknowledge them. The sons and daughters of encouragement know that they’re loved, that God values them completely, so they have little need to seek validation. Hopefully all of our communities are full of these people, just like the community at Antioch.

 

Acts 11:1-18 The Baptism of the Holy Spirit

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Peter has just done a very surprising thing, and Luke is lavishing attention on it, as is Forward Movements calendar of readings and devotions, which we are borrowing for the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s Big Read. Slowing down like this, and spending four days on this single incident, is a way of acknowledging what a big deal Peter’s baptising of Cornelius’ household is. For Luke, it’s rhetorically huge. Luke was, after all, a buddy of Paul’s, and Paul became notorious for baptizing gentiles, for boldly and rapidly expanding the idea of who could belong to the Beloved Community of followers of Jesus Christ. We’ll hear, soon, about the many disputes that Paul got into with the other Jewish members of the movement. When Luke was with Paul, he probably found himself thinking “yeah, but Peter did it first,” whenever anyone accused his friend of being too open and inviting to those who, in their eyes, didn’t really belong. So this is Luke’s great “Peter did it first” story, a grand defense of Paul before Paul has become the main character of the story.

It is also a not-too-subtle hint to Paul’s detractors that they should be more generous and better behaved. After all, the community that Peter reports back to in Judea vocalize all the same complaints and worries as Paul’s critics, but once they’ve heard Peter’s story, they accept and even celebrate his actions. Luke is, in effect, saying to these detractors, “look, if the movement of the Holy Spirit was a good enough reason for baptising gentiles a few years ago, why isn’t it a good enough reason now?”

Throughout Christian history, many people have come up with rebuttals to Luke’s argument, without really saying that this is what they’re doing. These people aren’t misguided. In fact, their concerns are valid and should be taken seriously. After all, there have been times where people thought that the Holy Spirit was telling them to practice free love or murder their enemies. There have been charismatic leaders who seemed full of the Holy Spirit, and led their followers to tragic endings. Given this, the best rebuttal is to simply ask, how do we know that it’s the Holy Spirit that’s really at work, and not human vanity or power seeking vainglory? The best answer might be to ask who is being served by any perceived visitation of the Holy Spirit. If claims of the Holy Spirit’s presence create systems in which certain people accumulate power and privilege, they are false claims. If anyone says that they don’t have to listen to the wishes of their community because they’ve “received the Holy Spirit,” their claim is probably false. Of course, sometimes the Holy Spirit allows us to see injustices in the communities we belong to, so it’s best not to make a hard and fast rule. Perhaps the only true test is whether those who claim to have received the Holy Spirit are humble and full of love. If they are, then the Holy Spirit has probably baptised them.