Author: KPB Stevens

Acts 8:26-40 The Ethiopian Eunuch

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Ten years ago, I helped plan a campus ministry retreat that took its theme from the Ethiopian eunuch. We designed flyers and a very talented student, Marco Saavedra, gave us some beautiful art to print on t-shirts, and we all headed off to Turkey Run, Indiana to spend the weekend considering the eunuch’s words “How can I understand unless someone explains it to me.” We wanted to investigate learning in community, and how relationships make things understandable, but also makes them matter. Why do we care about the things we care about? Why do we get interested in a given topic and spend time investigating it? Usually it’s because some teacher is engaged in the same questions that bother us, and is passionate about finding good ways to ask those questions, sit with them, and seek answers. My life was changed by a class I took in college called Exile and Pilgrimage, because the professor, Don Rogan, was asking the exact same questions that I was, and even though it was a Religious Studies course, he was willing to go far outside the realm of religion while seeking answers. He had an openness to all sorts of people and voices, and the greatest thing he taught me was that such openness was possible, and that it was a gift.

I don’t remember the content of that weekend with students at Turkey Run. I know that we had multiple workshops, led by the different campus ministries, and that we were open to being taught by each other without seeking the expertise of an outside speaker. The thing I really remember, though, is a long hike through the ravines with my own community of students. I remember that we joked a lot, and laughed a lot. That it was a bright Spring day. That we didn’t worry about getting lost or being back by any particular time. We had left the depth of conversation behind, and were simply enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company.  It’s not surprising that this is what I remember, rather than the content of the workshops. It was the community that mattered, and the joy of community was the primary teacher.

I think that the very small, temporary community that developed between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch had many of the same qualities. We know the eunuch’s question, and we know that Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus, but we don’t get the content of his teaching. This is a retelling of the story for the eunuch, but Luke doesn’t pause to retell it to us. His emphasis is different. He’s not interested in the content, but the mood of this retelling, the quality of the community that springs up between Philip and the eunuch. They seem to be having a jolly time, and their friendship is so spontaneous that it ends in baptism without much thought and no preplanning.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we can emphasize the words in the eunuch’s question in all sorts of ways. We can put the emphasis on “understand,” or put it on “explains,” which would indicate that we care a lot about the content. But the story doesn’t give us the content, and seems to be putting the emphasis on “someone.” What’s important here is the person of Philip and the relationship that he has with the eunuch, the community that springs up between them during the retelling. The passage is more about a walk through a ravine then a workshop, more about joy and sunshine and laughter than about taking notes.

 

Acts 8:9-25 Simon Magus

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Simon of Samaria, known to the Christian tradition as Simon Magus, is one of those rare characters in scripture who have a particular sin named after them, in this case, the sin of simony. Simony usually means the buying and selling of church offices, but here at the beginning it is nothing more than the belief that one can somehow buy the power to transmit the Holy Spirit. I have been talking, on this blog, about what it means to sin against the Holy Spirit, and here’s a clear example. Thinking that you can control the Holy Spirit because of your wealth is just such a sin. More than that, it’s in this story that the early church reveals something about itself. Despite the claims of its detractors, this group of worshipping, believing, and healing people is not a cult. They claim no secret knowledge which people have to pay to access. God’s love and the power of the Holy Spirit is available to anyone through grace. There’s no way to earn it, and there certainly isn’t any way to buy it.

One can imagine that Simon Magus felt justified in his request. After all, this Holy Spirit was doing a great deal of good for people, truly healing and transforming people as it descended. A person who genuinely wants to do good for the world can look for tools to use in that mission. The problem is that the Holy Spirit is not a tool. Grace is not a tool. It cannot be controlled or manipulated. And those who try usually have hidden motives that they might not even recognize within themselves. Yes, Simon wants to do good. But he’s also used to being known as the healer, the mystic, the guru. He wants to maintain that status, even as he embraces the apostles’ teaching.

Christianity has always been a syncretistic religion, and can be accused with some fairness of a kind of reverse simony. We Christians have often been fine with appropriating other cultures’ spiritual teachings. The very contemplative tradition that I have been interpreting Luke/Acts through was in conversation with Buddhism from a very early date, and you can tell. We tend to think that those who are not against us are for us, and that practices that help cultivate love are good, no matter where they came from. I don’t think that this is a bad thing, as long as it’s done with love and respect, citing our sources and crediting our teachers with what we’ve learned, regardless of their religious tradition. But we don’t own these practices, no matter what they are, and we can’t force the Holy Spirit to flow through them. If we find ourselves confusing these practices with grace, we are making a mistake.

So even at a time when the church has lost much of its secular and political power, and there’s little profit in buying or selling church offices, Simon Magus and the sin he’s named for should still make us cautious. We can go practice yoga, and matta, the Tibetan “mother as other” meditation, we can eat diets based on Leviticus and get really serious about our sabbath practice, we can make sure we’re praying at least five times a day and whirl like dervishes as we seek God, but God’s grace will come to us when God wills it, and we’ll never be able to control it.

Acts 8:1-8 And Saul approved of their killing him

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And Saul approved of their killing him. This single sentence is key to what Luke is trying to convey in Acts. People are redeemable. A single evil act, even a series of evil acts, does not define an entire human life.

Luke must have heard Saul, who by the time he knew him had changed his name to Paul, tell this story many times. It must have been part of Paul’s regular preaching. We know that it was part of his letter writing. It was his own great repetitive story, the thing he talked about again and again, and it was the right story to tell. Of course, we as readers don’t know the whole story yet. He didn’t talk about his time as a persecutor of Christians without also talking about how he was converted on the Road to Damascus. What’s curious is that Luke doesn’t rush into the whole story at this point. Paul probably told it as a whole narrative, but Luke interrupts it. I think he must have loved and respected Paul, traveling with him as he did, but he also saw all of Paul’s weaknesses as well (we’ll hear more about them as Acts continues), and he never treats Paul with too much respect. So he breaks up Paul’s story, and tells us about Philip instead. This isn’t a digression. Luke is making a point. The story is about the Beloved Community, not any one member of it. The only member of the Beloved Community who gets their own biography is Jesus himself.

So both Paul and Philip are equally important, and it’s Philip who first goes off on a mission to convert non-Jews. He heads off to Samaria, and starts converting Samaritans, those ancient cousins of the Jews who were left in Israel during the Babylonian exile. He provides the pattern that Paul will follow. Or, rather, he follows the pattern that Jesus set, preaching, healing, and confronting evil. Paul will learn from, and follow, this example, coming to say, in effect, that this story is his story.

Your story is my story. That is the sentence that follows conversion, because conversion is not just an act of individual redemption. It isn’t a kind of exorcism, where demons are cast from the mind and the mind is swept clean. In Luke 11:14-54 Jesus makes clear that this isn’t enough. Conversion fills the clean and empty mind with a new story, a new way of thinking about the self, a new way of acting in the world. The part of Paul that approves of the killing of his perceived enemies can’t simply be redirected, so that he starts to approve of the killing of a different set of enemies as he joins a new group. If he’s truly to be converted, then he must learn a new way of relating to the world. He must be inhabited by the story that was told by Stephen and that is enacted by Philip. It must turn from violence to love, from inciting to preaching, from condemnation to healing, from using evil for supposedly good ends to rejecting evil altogether.

 

Acts 7:1-60 The Second Retelling

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The first retelling of the story of Jesus and the disciples took place on the day of Pentecost, and Peter was the storyteller. This second retelling occurs before a much more hostile audience, and the storyteller is Stephen, who was unknown to us, though present, on Pentecost. The church has raised up new storytellers for its story’s retellings. Stephen doesn’t just repeat verbatim what Peter said. He greatly expands the narrative, adding new thoughts and plot lines, changing the story’s reach and its intention. This is the story retold for the authorities who are threatening the disciples, yet Stephen has no intention of placating them. He doubles down, claiming, in effect, that Jesus’ story is their story, even if they refuse to acknowledge it. Jesus is like Moses, who tries to defend the Hebrew slaves and expects to be credited for it, but is blamed instead. Jesus represents that long tradition in Judaism that worried about seeing all of the religious power in the land concentrated in the temple in Jerusalem, and Stephen quotes Amos and Isaiah to make the point that this worry is and has always been central to the Jewish story. So his retelling is an extension of, not a rejection of, the tradition that the disciples share with their fellow Jews, and that may be why they stone him. He presumes to have authority over the narrative, and their power and control comes, in part, from claiming the narrative for themselves.

This is, in part, why it’s never convincing to me when we try to excuse someone’s bad actions in the past by saying that they were simply a person of their time. A president who held slaves while espousing freedom, an otherwise charitable cleric who could not imagine that African people had the same souls as European people – these persons might be admired for the good things they did in their lives, but they should not be excused from the bad. Particularly when they were part of a community that told a story that, if they listened to it closely enough, would have shown where they were failing in their actions and imaginations. They were trying to live by a number of different stories, some cultural, some religious, some political, and they didn’t know which to prioritize, or how to get the mixture right.

We all do that, of course. These stories constitute the identities that I talked about when commenting on the parable of the great banquet in Luke 14:1-24. The stoning of Stephen presents us with a way of judging which identities we should cling to and which we should let go of, or at least hold lightly. The simple question is this: which of your identities are you willing to die for? It seems a little dangerous to write that, since extremism thrives when one identity takes over and banishes all the others, so I want to make it clear that I’m keeping my question plural, allowing for the possibility that we might have several worthy identities, and that I’m talking about self-sacrifice, and not the sacrifice of others. I’m not asking which identity you’d be willing to kill for. But which of the stories you live by are so important to you that you’d die for them? For me there are only two – my faith and my family. And because I know this, I also know that the stories of faith and family are the only ones I really want to tell and retell. There is remaining mystery in both stories. I’ll need to tell and retell them again and again, and I’ll never fully understand them. But they are the stories that intrigue, that keep me coming back, and they are the stories that give me courage when I’m afraid, strength when I’m weak, hope when the world as it is seems hopeless.

 

Acts 6:8-15 Changing the Customs

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Every group, every family, every community has traditions, many of which are unspoken, unacknowledged even by the group that adheres to them, especially if they’ve never been articulated. A friend of mine once used the example of a new spouse marrying into a family with several children. The tradition of the house on Christmas morning is for everyone to sit on the stairs and wait until everyone is assembled before going down to the living room to open presents. No one has told the new spouse this, because they’ve never realized that it was what they were doing, let alone thought of it as a tradition. So on Christmas morning she goes barreling down to the living room, enraging everyone for reasons that neither they nor she really understands. Norms and practices are important to us, and they’re unavoidable, but they must be held lightly, and with a spirit of generosity.

For the members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen, they can’t be held lightly, because they originated with Moses. Last year, as we were reading the Book of Exodus, I realized that all of those priestly rules in the last ten chapters or so must have come as quite a relief to those who had been inadvertently establishing traditions, and wanted other people to follow them. The way they were doing things was now sanctioned by God. And yes, I’m assuming that they were setting the tabernacle up and praying in a certain way before Moses received God’s instructions on Mt. Sinai. I assume this because of the ancient principle of lex credeni, lex orendi, which can be translated as belief following practice. We start to do a certain thing because it’s beautiful and it feels right, and then we come up with theological reasons for why we’re doing it. A good example of this might be the stoles that clergy wear. I’ve read spiritual and theological justifications for wearing them that claim that they symbolize the towel with which Jesus wiped the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper. Historically, that’s not true. Stoles were what officials wore to signify their authority in the Eastern Roman Empire, so when the church gained authority, church officials started wearing them, too. Given that, it would be hard to find anything sacrilegious in the choice not to wear them, but clergy continue to wear them because its traditional for them to do so.

The previous paragraph might seem like a long digression, but my point is that we should never get so wrapped up in our traditions that they get in the way of our capacity to love. That’s exactly what the members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen are doing, and what the Sanhedrin, the temple council, do as well when they call Stephen before them to answer charges. There he is, his face shining like that of an angel, and yet they’re willing to condemn and kill him because he went racing down the stairs on Christmas morning instead of sitting and waiting like everyone else. To me, this passage has instant applicability to everyday life. What traditions and customs are you living by, without even knowing that you’re living by them? A good way to tell is by watching your own annoyance, and seeing which actions by others cause it to flare. And once you notice it, and know which customs matter to you, can you practice holding them lightly? They can still be important to you, and it’s good to articulate their importance to yourself and others. But can you do so in a spirit of generosity, and even risk letting them go if they’re impinging on your ability to love?