Author: KPB Stevens

Acts 5:1-11 Learning to Live Under Discipline

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Imagine this story being told around the table at one of the many meals that Paul presided over, Luke sitting to one side and noting everything. People are eating, dipping bread into olive oil, picking over fish, and as they eat they tell stories of Jesus and the disciples, engaging in the kind of deep spiritual conversation that is so life giving. The conversation lags for a moment, and then someone says, “I know another story, about what will happen to you if you’re a hypocrite and pretend to be better than you are.” Everyone feels a little guilty, and as the story is told they start searching their own consciences. What have they been holding back from their neighbors? Which of their own petty contrivances might become known? The story goes on, and it’s super harsh, and people are looking down at their sandals, or picking at their cuticles, not willing to meet each other’s eyes. They’re all at this dinner because they want to be a part of this new community, and they’ve been gaining a great deal from coming to dinners like this. But now the storyteller is telling them that there’s a cost. That by breaking bread together and singing and praying together, they have agreed to live under a kind of discipline. Their lives and their choices are no longer really their own. They belong to something greater than themselves, and for the most part it’s wonderful, but this community that is encouraging them to surrender their egos so that they can live within the deep beauty of the Kingdom of God really means it, and they’ll have to obey the wisdom of the group and give some things up if they want to grow in the spirit.

Tough stuff, without a doubt, and Ananias and Sapphira’s story is exaggerated to make a point.  But it’s a point that’s worth making. When we join a community, we agree to live by its norms, the way it seeks to make meaning, the way it understand the world, and the actions that stem from those norms and understanding. The classic Christian term for this is discipline. In the church, clergy live under the discipline of their bishops, which means that they understand that they might not be in a position to see the big picture, and they have to accept that there are some things going on behind the scenes in a diocese that they simply can’t be privy to. They can disagree with their bishop, and even kick against the goads a little, but they remain dedicated to the spirituality of being a person under discipline, willing to accept that they can’t and won’t always have their own way. This isn’t only true of clergy, but of every single Christian in the world, to greater and lesser degrees. Being part of a church means agreeing to its norms and practices. More than that, it means being willing to let those norms and practices shape you. By the very act of belonging, you are essentially saying to other people that they can change you, and you are trusting that the changes they wrought in you will draw you closer to God.

Everyone gathered at that table with Paul and Luke understood this after they heard the story of Ananias and Sapphira. They were left with a choice, of course. They could turn away from the discipline of the community and simply not come to its next gathering. They could stay with the community, and willingly allow it to shape and change them. The one thing they couldn’t do was act as hypocrites, and pretend that they were agreeing to the discipline of the community while finding ways to avoid it. They might not physically die if they did, but they would enter a kind of spiritual stasis that amounted to death, unable to grow and change under discipline, unable to accept the fruits of Beloved Community, because they were unable to contribute to those fruits in their turn.

 

Acts 4:32-37 Giving and Receiving

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It’s the generosity of the church that has always helped her to grow and give meaning to people’s lives. Long after the humble group of Jesus’ disciples had become the church of empire, long after Constantine and the great struggles over doctrine, long after the fall of the Roman empire in the west, it was the church’s willingness to give away wealth and take care of those in need that most impressed people, even during periods of deep corruption. The early church shared things in common. The expanding church took care of widows and orphans. The frontier church ransomed people who had been taken as slaves by barbarian warlords. This instinct of Barnabas the Son of Encouragement to sell things and spread the proceeds throughout the community was a mustard seed that sprouted and grew into an enormous plant, providing shade and sustenance to millions of people.

That instinct is still very much alive today, as people make bequests and give charitably to churches and many other institutions. The Biblical tithe is ten percent, though we should give more than that if we can, and probably avoid worrying too much about calculating the percentages. Giving is about trust – the trust that God and your community will take care of you. There’s a difference between giving to anonymous charities and giving to the communities that we belong to. Obviously, one wants to do both. My parish can’t do the work of Doctors Without Borders, and the world needs brave women and men to go and attend to sickness and injury in dangerous and impoverished places. But such giving does not help build a sense of the Beloved Community in my ordinary life, and I want to love and support the people whom I see weekly, as well as people whom I’ve never met and who live far away.

The important flip side of giving within community is a willingness to accept gifts within that same community. At the start of the last recession, I announced to my parish that if anyone lost a job or was in need, we would find a way to support them. I told them that I had a discretionary fund, and all they had to do was come to me and tell me what kind of help they needed. People did lose jobs and find themselves in dire straits, yet no one ever took me up on my offer. I think, in part, it’s because we sometimes get our rhetoric wrong. We emphasize giving but not receiving. But both have tremendous spiritual value. It takes a lot of humility to receive, and the mystics are all agreed that it is through humility that we draw close to God. It takes a lot of fearlessness and gratitude to give, and the mystics hold these up as spiritual values as well. The question for people living in our rich society, with its prosperity gospels and belief that wealth somehow equals goodness, is whether we can set aside such false understandings and give when we need to give and accept gifts when we need to accept them. Because the Beloved Community cannot exist without both giving and receiving.

 

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.”