Author: KPB Stevens

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

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

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.

 

Acts 2:1-13 They are full of new wine

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In a sense, the scoffers are right. The disciples are full of new wine. Without meaning to, they use Jesus’ own language, when he says that you cannot put new wine into old wine skins (Luke 5:33-39). Their very scoffing in the presence of the miracle of Pentecost shows that they are the old wine skins, bloated and contented with old wine that has never been tapped and drunk for the good of the world, too overfull to allow anything new to enter in. Yet the miracle is there, and what’s remarkable about this passage is that the scoffers get so little attention. Most people, Luke says, can see and at least wonder at the miraculous when it occurs, and they don’t have to be part of any special community to do so. For here are the disciples, holders of a fragile sense of community, recently broken at the crucifixion, gathering in a house with wide open windows instead of a room with locked doors. A rushing wind arrives, tongues of flames settle over them, and passerby on the street gather at the windows. The disciples make no attempt to close the shutters – they are not secretive, nor self-protective. Instead they welcome the interlopers, and their generosity is a translating force. Their words become comprehensible to everyone.

Let’s pause and reflect on how remarkable this is. The disciples have every reason to hate and to be afraid. Their new community has every reason to become a cult, full of secret knowledge and hidden rituals in dark rooms. Instead, from the very beginning, their community is wide open to the rest of the world, regardless of what that brings. Yes, there will be moments when persecution will cause them to gather in catacombs. But here in Acts the message is clear. Esoteric rituals known only to initiates will never be the norm. Instead there will be a widening, a generous invitation to any passerby, a willingness to expose the fragility of community to forces that might be cynical, cruel, and intending destruction. There is so much courage in this, so much willingness to love and to ignore the potential of hate.

There is also a startling willingness to set aside ideas of perfection. No one is asking the passerby who gather at the windows whether they’re worthy of witnessing the miracle. Some of them clearly aren’t. But, of course, the disciples aren’t particularly worthy, either. Throughout Luke’s Gospel we saw them as very flawed – frequently misunderstanding Jesus, arguing about status, running away from sorrow and pain. Their knowledge of their flaws must remain to them. The past isn’t erased by the resurrection, it’s redeemed. It lives inside of them, and makes them humble, and that humility makes them generous. Who are we, they ask themselves, to tell any of these people gathering at the windows that they’re unworthy? We’re unworthy, and yet we’re accepted. We’re unworthy, and yet we’re loved. If this is true even of us, surely it must be true of everyone else.

This will remain one of the most important features of this resurrection community. Again and again, they will be tempted to become insular, to exclude strangers because of  the slights, even the violence, of their enemies. Again and again they will turn away from this temptation and resolve to keep the windows open, which means that both people who scoff and people who wonder will look in. It doesn’t matter. They’ve decided to become a new wine skin, and full of new wine.

Acts 1:12-26 The Witnesses

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The first concern of the disciples after the resurrection is to heal their community.  They have several reasons to feel incomplete if there are only eleven of them. They are twelve because twelve is the number of Jacob’s sons, and thus of the original tribes of Israel. They are twelve because Jesus appointed twelve, and laid the structural basis of their community. And, most importantly, they need to be twelve because Judas wounded them in his betrayal, and they need that wound to be healed. And that’s what I want to think through today – the healing of community, and what a healed community, that is a resurrected community, looks like and acts like.

I have to admit that I feel unequal to this task, since I, unlike the disciples, have never lived completely within such a community. Most Christian communities, be they churches or young adult communities or convents, remain broken. They are, metaphorically, communities of eleven disciples, not twelve. Everyone is still smarting from little betrayals, bringing the betrayals and hurts inflicted on them in the past into the communities that they find themselves in, and bringing the shame and guilt from their own betrayals of others with them as well. Yet even these broken, incomplete communities are called to be witnesses of the resurrection. And they’re able to do so because, even when broken and incomplete, they can catch glimpses of what the resurrected community is really like.

A witnessing community is both honest about its own brokenness and able to envision what it would be like to be fully healed. Such communities, like the individuals who inhabit them, are both humble and idealistic. Because the ideal is so clearly articulated, people know when they’re falling short, but because their stance to themselves and one another is rooted in humility, they approach their failings with laughter and forgiveness, rather than punishment and scorn. They’re able to adapt to the needs of others, and delight in discoveries of new ways of doing things, while also honoring the old ways. And they’re always waiting for the moment when some quieter, shyer presence steps into the center and starts to lead. They’re always waiting for, and honoring, the Matthias’ and Josephs, and ready to accept their witness when the spirit is ready to speak through them.

All of that transformation that Jesus insists on in Luke’s Gospel now begins to express itself in community. The disciples are transformed people, and the church that begins to form around them is a transformed collective, a group of people who are able to live within the Kingdom of God. Like a contemplative state, the fullness of this community won’t last forever. They’ll fall from this state of grace back into their humanness, and sometimes squabble and wander off on their own paths. But they will remember and witness to these early days. And it’s through their witness that we come to understand the possibilities of our own communities, and to rejoice in them.

 

Acts 1:1-11 The Big Heart

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

At the end of Luke’s Gospel, it seems that Jesus ascends into heaven very soon after he appears to the frightened disciples in the Upper Room. But at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke is willing to be more expansive, to linger over the time that Jesus was with his followers, those incredible forty days when they lived the resurrection life completely and without reserve. I’ve mentioned that Teresa of Avila thought that one could only stay in a state of suspended grace for about twenty minutes. But I imagine that the disciples were in that state for the entire forty days of Easter. This is perhaps an overstatement. They must have come down from their spiritual high enough to worry a little about current political concerns, because they asked him if this was the time when he would restore the kingdom of Israel. He refused to promise them political restoration. As with prayer, they weren’t offered the fulfillment of their temporal wishes. Instead, they were given the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And it is now that the Holy Spirit truly comes into its own. For the past two months, I have been meeting weekly with a wonderful group of parishioners at St. John’s in Worthington. They are the primary community with whom I’ve studied the Gospel of Luke. At our very first meeting, we held a Wisdom Circle (I’ll present a format for leading circles with a post in March) and I asked them what arose them when they heard the words “Holy Spirit.” Our collective answer became this beautiful prayer:

The still small voice asks for our attention –
the angelic, made present to us, invokes our thankfulness –
for a moment, we are the same played note that God plays –
an unknown note chiming, ceaselessly, within the ear –
we are guided by what we hear,
and the spirit listens when we cry for help.
We look, for a moment, through the spirit’s eyes,
eyes of compassion and change –
we feel the spirit like a ligament, linking us to each other,
bone to bone.
The spirit doesn’t mind if we rebel,
but will always remind us of what’s right.
It’s rightness is in the air, it’s an atmosphere
– calm all around us, love in our hearts,
we are guided, compelled to act,
to open our eyes to little moments of observed beauty,
to love.

As we read the Acts of the Apostles, my main focus will be community, because I believe that this is also Luke’s focus, that he, along with the Apostle Paul, his friend, is asking the question of community – how can it teach us, form us, and how can we serve it? Because after the resurrection, Christ becomes visible in the world through the work of community. And, like any individual person, community can reject Christ, even when it’s claiming to love Him.

As I think about and ask these questions of community, I will turn from the Spanish mystics who have so informed my reading of Luke, and invite other voices into the conversation (although I doubt that I’ll be able to keep from mentioning John and Teresa from time to time). I want to include contemporary creators of community processes, such as Parker Palmer and Mary Pierce Brosmer in our conversation. And, thanks to my spiritual director, who recommended Marilyn Sewell wonderful anthology “Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality,” we will be joined by the voices of some amazing poets. In fact, let me end this post with one of those poets, Anne Sexton, whose poem The Big Heartis a kind of hymn to the spiritual gift of community to a person’s life.

The Big Heart
Anne Sexton

‘Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.’ – From an essay by W. B. Yeats

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of conch shells,
they speak back with the wine of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in—
all in comes the fury of love.