Author: KPB Stevens

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

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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

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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.

Acts 9:32-43 Discovery in the Holy Spirit

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Just as Paul is being blown hither and yon as he converts, learns, escapes, and hides, Peter, too, seems more than willing to go where he’s sent and accept whatever requests come to him. First he drifts down to Lydda, and then he follows a summons to Joppa, raises Tabitha from the dead, and then just stays there with Simon the Tanner until the next adventure comes along. He seems to have no agenda, no to-do list, no plan beyond following the prompting of the Holy Spirit. His actions are free in a way that few of ours are.

A few years ago I read Sam Wells’ book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. In it, Wells talks about the Acts of the Apostles, and the “improvisation at the beginnings of the church-the constant need to find ways of staying faithful in constantly changing circumstances and environments. Indeed,” Wells says, “Jeremy Begbie describes the whole of the Acts of the Apostles as ‘a stream of new, unpredictable, improvisations.’” I was intrigued by Wells’ book, and wanted to experience improvisation first hand, so I signed up for Second City weeklong intensive in Chicago, and from there took classes in Columbus, where I live. My improv career, such as it was, is now over, but I’m deeply grateful for the time I spent learning and performing, because I feel that it made me a better Christian, more able to imitate the wild improvisations of Peter and Paul.

One of the things that improv teaches is to always be open to new discoveries in a scene. We often think we know what to expect, and so we close down our senses and curiosity and simply fail to notice occurrences that don’t fit within the scripts of our lives. Discovery is about doing the opposite, opening your eyes and ears to everything happening around you and picking up all of the delightful, unscripted bits of human behavior so that you can respond to them joyfully. I learned this early on when a classmate misspoke and invented a word with the slip of the tongue. My instinct was to pass right over this, but my instructor stopped the scene and suggested that I use it, that I and my scene partner agree to live in a world where that word was used and made sense to everybody. Within minutes we were all laughing, caught up in the joy of discovery.

Thanks to this training I’m open to all sorts of things in my everyday life that I never really was before. This has been of great value within my church community. More than that, its filled my relationship with God with humor, delight, excitement, and silliness. In other words, its opened me up to joy.

I imagine that Peter, as he healed Aeneas and resurrected Tabitha, was full of joy. Yes, he was praying in Tabitha’s room, beside her dead body, and accompanied by the weeping of widows. Yet he must have been filled by the joy of the resurrection, his senses filled with the scents and sounds of the garden, as he reached out to raise her from the dead. He was open to the possibility of miracle and grace, and the Holy Spirit was thickening the air currents around him as he discovered that the practice of resurrection, in all its wonder, was part of his apostleship.

 

Acts 9:1-31 The Road to Damascus

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Paul’s story is probably one of the most important conversions in human history. It is the pivot point for the Book of Acts, the moment when the book’s true hero is introduced, the moment that will lead to the conversion of the gentiles and, hence, turn the followers of Jesus from a small community of Jews, living in Israel and worshipping at the temple, into a world religion. The import of this moment cannot be underestimated, but in this post I will only talk about two things – Saul’s vision, and the persecuted community that accepts him and renames him.

First, the vision. A light flashes, a voice is heard, God’s presence is announced. My guess is that, for Paul, a great deal happens as well. Teresa of Avila, whom I have mentioned many times and has been so fundamental to my reading of Luke/Acts, talks about those moments when “the soul sees into God himself.” She says that

all things can be seen in God because God has all things inside himself. Even though this vision passes in a moment, it engraves itself deeply in the memory and causes the most blessed confusion in the soul. This is a great favor. The soul becomes keenly aware of imperfect acts she has committed while inside of God. If only she had realized that she was dwelling inside the Beloved himself when she was doing those unconscious things!

For Paul, this feeling of imperfection must have been much worse than it is for most of us. When we see through the eyes of God, when we come to truly understand that we dwell within the divine, we can feel bad about all of our small failures that have ignored or taken for granted the great love that we’re swept up in. But Paul actively conspired against and tried to murder that love. His sin against the Holy Spirit was much greater than most other people’s. No wonder he was struck blind for three days. One can only imagine how he wrestled with his shame during that time, and how, in his blindness, his great vision remade him.

And yet there was a community that tried, always, to dwell within God, to align itself constantly to that great love. Ananias had a vision of his own, and this vision is as important to Paul’s story as his own. Love compelled him to go and find Paul, to heal him and take care of him. Then, when Paul escaped from Damascus and went to Jerusalem, it was Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement, whom he approached and who vouched for him with the community. Both Ananias and Barnabas understood that Paul, even when he was persecuting them, was also inside of God, to use Teresa’s metaphor. He was already united to them, even though he didn’t realize it and actively tried to resist it.

Which leaves me in awe of this early community, and of the potential of community in general. A community that realizes that it, and all things, are inside of God, is a community that can forgive more easily and love more easily. You can tell if you’re living within a community that sustains and cultivates this vision, because it will be a community that maximizes forgiveness and doesn’t worry much over slights. People still wrestle with their egos within such communities, but their egos don’t get final say. As Paul will later write in his second letter to the Corinthians, in such communities love doesn’t insist on having its own way.

(1) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/288621/the-interior-castle-by-teresa-of-avila/9781594480058/