Author: KPB Stevens

Acts 4:23-41 The Community Threatened

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No sooner has the community of the first church come together than it is threatened and afraid. All these early Christians really want to do is wander about the temple praying and helping out the people who ask them for help. Their actions are so inoffensive that it seems almost impossible that they should be threatened by the temple authorities, and yet they are. This is as much an indictment of the fragility of power as it is a tribute to the strength of the small and faithful community that power tries to quash. Yet the threat gives the community a chance to articulate its purposes. Why does it exist as a community, what is it for? Their answer: it’s for healing, for the revelation of signs and wonders, and for the shaking of the Holy Spirit.

This community is a little bewildered by the response to it – “why did the gentiles rage, and the peoples imagine vain things?” But it becomes clear early on that this community is so different from the rest of the world that its very difference is perceived as dangerous. The communities of the world, as a whole, don’t want to be shaken by grace. They don’t want to experience signs and wonders. And if these things are necessary to healing, they don’t really want to be healed. They don’t want to try to cultivate perfect love and look at the world through the eyes of God, because if they did they would have to surrender their understanding of self. They would have to become like the disciples, who seem to be mad with grace, doing nothing but wandering about, praying and healing.

“What is the ‘world,’ that Christ would not pray for, and of which He said that His disciples were in but not of it?” Thomas Merton asks. “The world,” Merton says, “is the unquiet city of those who live for themselves and are therefore divided against one another in a struggle that cannot end, for it will go on eternally in hell. It is the city of those who are fighting for possession of limited things and for the monopoly of good and pleasures that cannot be shared by all (1).” This is the world of the temple authorities, but if we’re honest, it’s also the world that most of us inhabit most of the time, whether we’re ordained or belong to churches or not.

It would be arrogant and untrue for me to claim that I belong to the Beloved Community more than I belong to the world. Sometimes I do, but most of the time I find myself living in the city of those who are fighting for possession of limited things. I am not quaking and quailing with the Holy Spirit. Yet the Beloved Community of my church is there to remind me that such quaking and quailing is possible. My participation in this community is always threatened, but usually it is my own hypocritical allegiance to the temple authorities, the powers and privileges that I hold to so tightly, that is doing the threatening. And when threatened in this way, I can only hope to do what the apostles did, to gather with those who share my hope for something better, and invite God into our gathering through our prayers, knowing that we, in ourselves, cannot be pure members of the beloved community that we long for.

(1) Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 78.

Acts 4:1-22 Uneducated and Ordinary Men

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From the first, Luke was more than aware of the kind of egotism and vanity that can arise in communities. As he traveled with Paul, he was often in small rooms, eating dinner with friends, sharing funny stories, listening patiently to the concerns and worries of his dinner companions, and treasuring the moment when the talk would turn from the general and superficial to the deep, timorous unveiling of the human heart. He was also more than aware of the petty arguments that were arising among the early Christian community, and the characters of those who insisted on being right. He was sensitive to any move to exclude or to try to control grace (after all, in his retelling, Jesus says that blaspheming against the Holy Spirit is the one unforgivable sin). He worried that the Way of Christ might be perverted into the same old religious and political structures that persecuted the disciples and crucified Jesus. So when the high priests and scribes come back into the story after the resurrection, we should prick up our ears and realize that he’s not only talking about the temple authorities, but about the general human tendency to claim power and prominence and exert control.

His worries were well founded. As soon as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it attracted all sorts of people who weren’t that interested in humility and selfless love, but who saw in the new religion an opportunity to advance their careers and establish dynasties for their families. These people were adept at turning innocent wondering into heresy and establishing their power through persecution and the exposition of ever finer points of doctrine. Fortunately, the Gospels had clear criticisms of this behavior written into them, for anyone who cared to really read them. For every Bishop polishing his crozier and considering his prestige, there was a saint, a contemplative, carefully daring to express that it was not possible to know and understand everything, that, indeed, knowing perfectly hardly mattered. Loving perfectly did.

All of this is laid out at the beginning of the fourth chapter of Acts. Here are the temple authorities, so similar to the prelates and inquisitors of later ages, who are worried about unauthorized miracles. Yet they can’t really take Peter and John seriously, because they are “uneducated and ordinary men.” But they’re worried. They don’t want this unsanctioned hope and faith to spread. It is notable that all of their learning and power can be so easily threatened. It’s almost as if faith that is built entirely on the ego and on control is fragile by its very nature.

Let’s not, however, focus entirely on them, but give a moment’s consideration to Peter and John, the models of faith that Luke presents to us. They are, indeed, ordinary and uneducated men. As I read Acts, I’m also reading Thomas A Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ, a 15th c. instruction manual written for a clergy class that had become too enamored with its own education and wit. The whole book reads like an extension of Peter’s words to the temple authorities. As I peruse it, looking for the perfect passage to end this post with, I find myself stymied by the fact that it all works to one degree or another, and that Thomas A Kempis doesn’t seem that interested in helping me prove my point. But let me offer a passage that balances a critique of the priests and scribes with lovely praise of people like Peter and John:

How swiftly it passes, worldly fame! If only their lives had matched their knowledge! Then they would have worthily studied and read. How many worldly folk are led through vain knowledge to perdition! Little they care for the service of God! And because they would rather be great than humble, therefore their plans come to nothing. He is truly great who has great charity. He is truly great who is little in himself and reckons as nothing the highest honors(1).

 

(1) Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.4

Acts 3:1-26 Charismatic Leadership

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There should be a word – one of those big, pretentious German words – for that joyous moment when you realize that you’re one of eleven billion people, and don’t have to be special. I first experienced this in my early thirties, and at first I was tempted to be depressed about it. Fortunately I had some preparation from the Gospels that helped me negotiate the ego blow of discovering that I was not, nor would ever be, the center of the world. I had been assured that God was counting every hair on my head, and even if I would never be known on television or in the world of literature, I would be intimately known to God. Just like everyone else.

Peter and John have more reason to think of themselves as special than I ever did. After all, they’re healing people in the temple and helping the lame to walk. And the crowds that surround them are amazed. Yet Peter refuses to take credit. His response is essentially egoless. It wasn’t me, he says, but Jesus. And in this simple encounter, he set the pattern for the church. He said, in effect, that the Beloved Community of the church had only one charismatic leader, and that leader is Jesus Christ, and the rest of us should be content to simply feel the hairs on our heads counted by the fingers of a gentle God.

Peter invites people to know Jesus, even those who rejected and crucified him. He does this because he realizes that God loves and knows them just as much as God loves and knows the disciples. All things, he says, all miracles, all history, all stories, point to Christ. We don’t need leaders who are sunk in their own egos, making choices and exerting power in order to keep those egos defended. We need leaders who want to become thin, almost transparent with grace, like saints in stained glass windows. We want to be able to see through our leaders and see the light of God shining both in them and outside of them. For Peter, and for the Beloved Community, a true leader is exactly the opposite of the Pharisee in the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. Instead of saying “I thank you God that I am not like other people,” a true leader says “I thank you God that I am exactly like other people, as full of trouble and grace as them, as silly and as wise.”

 

Acts 2:37-47 The Baptism of the Holy Spirit

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Now we come to one of the clearest parallels between Luke’s Gospel and his Acts of the Apostles. Both books have baptism scenes just a few pages in. In the Gospel, it’s John who baptizes, and his baptism is one of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. In Acts, it’s the apostles who baptize, and their baptism is for the reception of the Holy Spirit. Both John and the apostles baptize panicked crowds who are fretting about the direction of their current world and looking for a solution. Both John and the apostles follow-up on baptism with instructions for behavior and the formation of communities. For John, in Luke’s third chapter, the instructions are about loving generosity and the ability to hold things loosely (give away one of your shirts, don’t collect more money than you’re supposed to if you’re a tax collector, don’t extort money from people, if you’re a soldier). The instructions from the Apostles (not said, but described by the way they play out in community) are more radical, just like Jesus’ were – hold everything in common, sell all you own, rely entirely upon God and the Beloved Community.

These two pieces of scripture echo and speak to each other in myriad ways. These two baptisms have different focuses and different results. The presence of the Holy Spirit might be the result of repentance and forgiveness, but its also much more than the simple release of being shrived. It’s active, a filling of the empty places after an exorcism of guilt and shame. In a strange way, I feel that Jesus speaks to this baptism in Ch. 11, v. 24-26 of Luke’s Gospel, when he says:

When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to the house I left.” When it arrives, it finds the house swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first.

The high of forgiveness and repentance is not enough, if all it does is leave an empty space inside us that all our bad old behaviors can return to when the high is past. Instead, we need to be filled by the Holy Spirit. In Ephesians, Paul (who we’ll meet soon), gives a sense of what this looks like: “speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs of the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to God. Always give thanks to God for everything, in the name of Jesus Christ.” For him, a community that is full of the spirit is one that sings and speaks poetry, that reflects on holy things, and, above all, is thankful – so thankful that it always actively looks for things to give thanks for. In terms of the spirituality that we talked about in Luke’s Gospel, it’s a community that is full of joy and free of fear, and because of this it brims over with generosity. This was the Beloved Community of those early Christians who gathered around the apostles in the temple, and we must continually ask ourselves if this can be our community as well.

 

Acts 2:14-36 The First Retelling

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My grandmother often told the same stories over and over again, to such an extent that we made up a joking diagnosis for her, saying that she had RSS, Repetitive Story Syndrome. My daughter has begun to point out my own tendency to repeat stories, and has also begun noticing when she does this. All people repeat stories, and I first became aware of this fact years ago, when I was reading the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett. This simple passage from “The Farm House Kitchen” lodged in my mind:

The repetitions of the best stories are signal events, for ordinary circumstances do not inspire them. Affairs must rise to a certain level before a narration of some great crisis is suggested, and exactly as a city audience is well contented with hearing the plays of Shakespeare over and over again, so each man and woman of experience is permitted to deploy their well-known but always interesting stories upon the rustic stage.

I might have read more into this passage over the intervening years than is really there, but Jewett made it clear to me, for the first time, that its not the originality of a story that’s important, but the situation into which its told. Repetitive stories have a kind of liturgy about them. We all know them already, yet we retell them because they speak to the present moment and cast a new light on our current circumstances. My grandmother’s stories did this. I hope that my repeated stories do this, too. I’m sure that the repetition of Jesus’ story, told by different speakers at different moments in Acts, performs the same function. The circumstances that surround the retelling are important, and the purpose of the retelling shifts depending on the audience, the teller, and the place in which it’s told.

For this first retelling, it’s Peter who is the storyteller. Jesus told him that he would be the Rock of the Church. Jesus even changed his name from Simon to Peter, which means “Rocky.” But at the end of Luke’s Gospel Peter is anything but steadfast. This storytelling of Peter’s is the moment in which Jesus’ prediction begins to be realized. And Peter is not speaking to a group of believers, but to a crowd of strangers, some of whom are scoffers. They are an echo of the crowd that mocked and scourged Jesus on his way to the cross. Peter is speaking into a moment of miracle. Something powerful and overwhelming has happened – the rush of wind, the tongues of flame! – and now Peter sets out to make meaning out of it, something that we all have to do after important experiences. But it’s not personal meaning he’s making, although that’s certainly included in what he says. He’s making meaning in a way that will be of use to the community, to the church that is forming. By quoting the Hebrew scriptures, he is telling a story that his listeners already know. But he’s doing so in a new way, and drawing new conclusions from it. The repetitive story becomes the new story, due to the person who is speaking it, the people who are listening to it, and the moment of wonderment that has given rise to this retelling.

Mary Pierce Brosmer, who founded Women Writing for (a) Change in the 1990s, wrote a book about her organization that offered its transformative teachings to people at large. She begins the book by surveying the landscape, telling the story of how WWf(a)C came to be. But even this seemingly historical summary serves a purpose. She uses it to teach us that we should all survey our landscapes. That we should think about the communities we belong to, and try to tell their stories. Because in a very real sense, telling the stories of our communities means telling our own stories. In this telling, we will arrive at a degree of self-understanding. For my grandmother, many of her stories were about the village in Yugoslavia where she became a young wife and mother, and that she had to flee from at the end of World War II with my mother and uncle in tow. Many of my stories are about my teenage and college years, and I tell them to my daughter as she goes through her own adolescence as a kind of camaraderie, so she will know that she’s not alone in her experience. For the most part, these aren’t community stories, because we no longer live in the long settled communities of Jewett’s day. But the church is such a community, and the retelling of stories in Acts holds out the possibility that telling and retelling the story of a church is a way of talking about resurrection.