Author: KPB Stevens

Acts 11:19-30 The Son of Encouragement

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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.

Luke 10:34-48 The Third Retelling

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

We have now reached the third retelling of Jesus’ story in Acts, and in some ways it’s just as dangerous as the second retelling. You will remember that Stephen tells the story the second time when he’s on trial in front of the temple authorities. Peter’s retelling of the story to Cornelius and his household isn’t done with any threat of death hanging over him. But it is done in the face of a potential expansion of the little community of disciples that he’s been leading. And we’ve already seen that this community is fragile – it has internal disputes between the Hebrews and the Hellenists, it has members who have given lip service to the discipline of living in community without any intention of actually abiding under that discipline, and it’s recently borne the strain of welcoming Paul, its former persecutor, into its midst.

“How much more change can this community take?” I’ve heard that in the context of today’s churches, and you probably have as well. Change is hard, especially when well-beloved traditions are threatened. But it’s even hard in very recently established, very small groups. I’ve been in groups of three people that fell apart over the strain of trying to welcome a fourth person into our midst. Any time a new person joins a group, some of the intimacy of the old group naturally dissipates for awhile. And for those who rely on that intimacy, this is deeply disturbing. So there’s always a cost to newness and, although communities can weather change, they seldom really like it.

And what a change Peter is accepting for them! There he is, preaching to Cornelius’ household, retelling the story to a gentile audience for the first time, when the Holy Spirit whips through the room and everyone there shows signs of having received it. Suddenly everyone is speaking, all the voices clamoring, a chorus of prayers rising into the air. The members of Peter’s community of Jewish Christians are amazed. Peter quickly takes stock of what’s happening, and decides on a momentous change. Gentiles, the uncircumcised, who are so impure that they’d never be allowed admittance to the temple, are suddenly worthy of baptism. Within mere moments, they’re members of the community. Peter doesn’t hesitate, and he isn’t stopped by wondering what the believers back in Jerusalem are going to think of all of this.

Which should present us with a reflection on our own communities. Do we have enough spirit to weather change? Are we so fragile that we can’t accept the previously unacceptable? Dare we risk really listening to God and moving with the Holy Spirit wherever it takes us?

Acts 10:17-33 Capable of believing anything

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

As I said yesterday, Peter is able to go and visit Cornelius the Centurion because he’s willing to give up the purity that allows him to enter the temple. His understanding of God has moved beyond the controlled structure of temple worship. It’s also moved beyond any understanding of the divine that the Roman empire has, and it’s for this reason that the early Christians were often accused of being atheists. Something dangerous is going on here. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” The priests of the temple and the Roman authorities have good reason to suspect the kind of free thinking that Peter is showing himself capable of. It’s part of our human nature to take things too far, and there have been many false prophets and cult leaders who try to replace a belief in the old religious dispensation with nothing other than a belief in themselves and themselves alone. The ego desires to make a god of itself, and dangerous people have arisen throughout history, and are present now, who are happy to let others worship their egos.

Peter is not one of these people, and he refuses to let Cornelius and his household treat him as one of these people. We’ve just seen that he can do many of the things that Jesus did. He can heal the sick and raise the dead. Yet he doesn’t fall into the trap of thinking that this means that he is Jesus. Miracles can be wonderful, especially if they heal people. But miracles are not what this new religion, this nascent Christianity, is all about. Later, many of the mystics and saints of the Christian tradition will express some wariness about miracles. Miracles, they’ll say, are all well and good, but if you take them too seriously, and begin to think that you’re special just because you can perform them, you are essentially opening yourself up to evil. You are allowing that egoic self to feast on its own sense of importance, and doing more harm to your life with God than can be compensated for by any miracle. Anything that makes you forget your own powerlessness and reject grace is not worth thinking too much about.

Peter’s rejection of Cornelius’ worship points to what this new religion is all about – seeking union with the divine. Or, to put it in a way that doesn’t make it seem like we have much power to accomplish this, it’s about getting our egos out of the way so that divine love can reach out to us and embrace us. We can’t really do this on our own. Like Peter, the Holy Spirit will snap us up, lead and guide us, take us to unusual places, cause us to accept strange friendships, and heal us, but it won’t be because of our merits, and it certainly won’t be because we’re worthy of any kind of worship.

 

Acts 10:1-16 Shocking Visions and the Temple

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Cornelius is praying at 3:00 in the afternoon, which is the time of the temple sacrifice far away in Jerusalem. But divine presence doesn’t make itself felt in the temple. Instead an angel appears to Cornelius, who is a gentile, a centurion who has shown interest in Judaism and is generous in giving alms. But Cornelius has no proper right to divine visitation, at least in the minds of the temple authorities. And those authorities are unseen characters in this section. The temple laws and rules are still very much alive in the minds of Peter and the other disciples. They’ve been going to the temple a lot, and they can’t enter the temple unless they’re ritually pure. As L. William Countryman points out, “because worshipers were expected to be pure when entering the Temple, the implication is that the Christians maintained themselves in a state of constant purity.”

Unlike that other centurion in Luke 7:1-10, there is no urgency in Cornelius’ request. He doesn’t have a beloved servant who is dying. Peter, who’s been traveling wherever he’s needed, might have good reason to question whether Cornelius actually does need him. What is this summons all about?

But of course, he doesn’t receive the summons until he has a vision of his own. And the vision he gets is startling. That blanket full of food that descends from the sky isn’t just telling him to enjoy some pork and shellfish. It’s telling him that his time in the temple is over for now, that he won’t be able to return to the purity that allowed him entry. The fact that it descends three times during the vision (and, possibly accompanied by the same dialog with the heavenly voice each time) should remind us of Peter’s three denials of Christ. This eating of unclean things, this ending of any concern with purity, is now part of confessing Christ, of acknowledging Christ’s great prominence.

It is notable how slowly Peter and the other disciples are being weaned of dependence on the temple. It’s been the locus of spiritual power in their lives for so long that they have trouble imagining new ways of being faithful in their spirituality. This should stand as a reminder to us. We need to acknowledge our own temples – the norms and practices that are keeping us separated from other people – and remain open to new visions of faithfulness as they arrive. They might startle us. They might even shock us. Yet they will open our capacity for discovery, and hence for joy.