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Acts 22:30 – 23:11 Paul and Jesus have a private chat

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The very last line of this passage might seem like an odd little coda, but to me it’s the whole point. This is the second meeting between Paul and Jesus that we’ve heard about in Acts. Their encounter on the Road to Damascus was much more dramatic and strange, and the low-key nature of this second encounter makes me wonder if Paul and Jesus haven’t been having little private chats all the time. Maybe this is just the one that Paul told Luke about, or told someone who visited him in prison about so that the story could find its way back to Luke. But it’s not surprising that Jesus shows up again now, standing beside Paul and saying “Keep up your courage! For just as you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also in Rome.” In this moment, Paul is going through the same thing that Jesus went through. He has been arrested, he is being tried, he is being threatened with death. In prison, he is alone and isolated from the community that has sustained him. He has been stripped of everything but his deep relationship with God.

He’s going through the same thing that Jesus went through, but Jesus, of course, did it better. Paul doesn’t acquit himself with noble silence and humble utterances. His testimony before the council flails around. He flares out at the High Priest, and then has to apologize. He tries to stir up trouble between the Sadducees and Pharisees. He’s using every tool that comes to mind in his defense, and it feels like he, unlike Jesus, isn’t really reconciled to his situation. He’s afraid of what might happen. “Keep up your courage,” Jesus tells him, because courage is what’s at stake here.

It’s significant to me that Jesus, during his own passion, didn’t lose his courage when he was tried before Pilate and Herod. His moment of wavering came when he was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he asked God to take this cup of suffering from him. His courage, like all courage, wasn’t about not being afraid. It was about accepting fear, but not being constrained by it.

In Paul’s case, courage comes after the fact, in reflection and solitude. In Jesus’ case, it’s anticipatory. He knows what’s about to happen and that he can’t change it, but he needs the courage to resign himself to it. His courage in the Garden is show by his deep willingness to set himself, and his fears, aside. Paul doesn’t know what’s going to happen until Jesus speaks to him after his appearance before the council. He’s been fumbling after some legal means of preserving his life, because he hasn’t accepted the possibilities of a frightening and disastrous future. He needs Jesus’ reassurance, and Jesus is there to reassure. Unlike Jesus, Paul still has some spiritual work to do. The next few years, as he languishes in different prisons, will lead him into a time of relinquishment, of letting go of himself and his mission. But he’s not there yet.

There is a kind of beautiful symmetry to these two meetings of Paul and Jesus in Acts. Paul’s experience on the Road to Damascus requires him to enter a time of learning and solitude before he answers his call as an apostle. Now solitude will be forced on him, as he prepares to surrender that call. It is within such solitude and powerlessness that most of us find the courage to face the future.

 

Acts 21:27-22:29 Fearless Integrity

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Arrested and manhandled by the mob, Paul doesn’t claim the safety of his Roman citizenship right away. How easy it would have been, after having been carried by the soldiers to the barracks, for him to say to the tribune “protect me, because I’m a citizen by birth, and therefore my person is inviolate throughout the entire reach of the Roman empire.” Instead Paul, who is never one to shy away from violent mobs, chooses to tell his story to the very people who are threatening him. He doesn’t use his story to make a case for his defense. Quite the opposite. As soon as he starts talking about his mission to the gentiles, the crowd, which has been relatively calm while listening to him, goes wild again. This storytelling is not meant as a defense, but as an example. It’s possible to live a different life, to undergo conversion from violence and learn love and benevolence towards strangers. He’s presenting his life as an example for others to follow.

As I’ve written in previous posts, I think that personal storytelling is deeply important but I also feel a little cautious about it. We are always part of the audience for the stories we tell about ourselves, and sometimes these stories make us believe certain things about ourselves that may or may not be true. I’m fairly clumsy, but if I only told stories about my clumsiness, that would ignore those moments where I’ve managed some small degree of physical grace, not to mention making me one-dimensional, a person entirely defined by his lack of agility. How much worse it is for people who can only talk of themselves as if they were paragons of virtue, or people who can only tell stories about their brokenness? We are many things and once, and limiting our stories to only one or two things seems a little like limiting grace.

I think that we should interrogate our stories from time to time. How true are they, really? Are they humble? Are they told with integrity? I’ve been thinking about humility and integrity today because I read this in Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation this morning:

In great saints you find that perfect humility and perfect integrity coincide. The two turn out to be practically the same thing. The saint is unlike everybody else precisely because he is humble. As far as the accidentals of this life are concerned, humility can be quite content with whatever satisfies the general run of men. But that does not mean that the essence of humility consists in being just like everybody else. On the contrary, humility consists in being precisely the person you actually are before God, and since no two people are alike, if you have the humility to be yourself you will not be like anyone else in the whole universe. But this individuality will not necessarily assert itself on the surface of everyday life. It will not be a matter of mere appearances, or opinions, or tastes, or ways of doing things. It is something deep in the soul (1).

Paul, in this retelling of his story, is acting out of both integrity and humility. He isn’t hiding his faults or trying to make them seem better than they are. Nor is he emphasizing them too strongly, making it seem like he’s entirely useless, or always the victim, or flawed in such a way that people should always take pity on him. Instead he stands before this crowd as he would stand before God, and the story he tells is deeply honest, because it is the story of how God has acted in his life, and he understands that God is his prime audience. He isn’t just telling his story, but the story of the church, and the God the church knows.

 

(1) Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation.

Acts 21: 1-26 Does Paul ignore the Holy Spirit?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This passage presents a real challenge to what I’ve been thinking and saying about blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. Ever since reading Luke 12, I’ve been assuming such blasphemy has something to do with ignoring the intuitive, improvisational urging of the Holy Spirit, and yet here Paul is, twice ignoring very clear indications that the Holy Spirit does not want him to go to Jerusalem. If my reading of Luke 12 is right (and now I’m really not sure that it is), then Paul is guilty of the one sin that Jesus names as entirely unforgivable.

I won’t argue that I’m somehow right regardless – that wouldn’t be humble. But this passage does make me wonder – can the Holy Spirit pull us in two ways at once? Paul, here, is split between two communities. He’s been with the gentiles of Europe for quite a while now, and although he occasionally gets visitors from the believers in Jerusalem, he’s far distant from them. Yet they’re a community that matters a great deal to him. He’s not interested in founding a radical new way of following Jesus that is completely separate from the old way. He’s not interested in creating a kind of splinter group out of the Gentile Christians. He’s a bridge between these two communities, and it’s important to him that they stay together.

So the Holy Spirit is speaking to the Gentile communities, and telling them very clearly that if Paul goes to Jerusalem, they’re going to lose him. Understandably, they’re not anxious to lose the person who has been both their leader and their friend. Yet the Holy Spirit is also speaking to Paul, and telling him that if these two communities that he loves draw too far apart, they’ll be lost both to each other and to Christ. The Holy Spirit is speaking to him and his friends, and he’s listening, but that doesn’t mean he can avoid making a hard choice.

Perhaps this passage is telling us that following the promptings of the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean surrendering our free will. The spirit can make things clear and teach us many things, but it can’t decide for us. We are not mere puppets of a crafty God who is trying to complete some kind of cosmic plan. God loves us so much that God will choose our freedom over any kind of divine plan every single time. The Holy Spirit isn’t here to dictate to us, only prompt us, nudge us, show us a variety of choices. Maybe the only real blasphemy is when we choose not to listen at all, so that we can avoid having to make a hard choice.

Acts 20:17-38 Saying Goodbye

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This is Paul’s farewell address, and I hear an echo of Jesus’ own farewell address in it. In the twenty-second chapter of Luke, Jesus also meets with his disciples in a room. He has more clarity about what’s going to happen to him than Paul does, who doesn’t know that the journey he’s undertaking will eventually end in his death. Still, Paul expresses that he’s worried when he meets with his friends in Miletus. Both Jesus and Paul understand the urgency of the situation – that they are leaving behind a community that will need to act with an ethic of love and servitude, and that will be tested. The disciples at the Last Supper will see Jesus again soon, although they don’t quite believe his assurances that this is so. The church of Ephesus will never see Paul again. Both of these scenes are full of weeping, fear, hope, and prayer.

Is it appropriate to speak of a spirituality of departing? I have left many places in my life. Sometimes I’ve departed well, and sometimes just slipped away. In those moments when I snuck away in the middle of the night, I told myself that I was doing so because I didn’t want a big deal to be made of my departure. It would’ve been truer to say that I didn’t want to be disappointed if people didn’t react to my leaving in the way that I wanted them to. So I didn’t giving them a chance to react at all. In those moments when people have made a big deal of my departing, I’ve been slightly embarrassed, but also grateful because I’ve had the opportunity to express my love of them and my sadness over the fact that I was going. Reflecting on this, it seems that my ego was more involved, and more fragile, in those moments when I just slipped away. I wish that I had imitated Paul, and treated a good departure as another gift of community.

Last summer, when I was just beginning to think about the spirituality of Luke and Acts, I talked to the children at church about joy. We explored together the different kinds of joy that one can experience – sad joy, happy joy, creative joy, silly joy, and many other varieties. I used the example of parents sending their kids off to college – not the best example for six year olds, but on my heart since my own daughter will be leaving for college within a few years. We can have joy in such moments, I suggested, because we’re proud of our loved ones and excited for the rest of their lives. At exactly the same moment, we can feel grief because something that’s been so important to us is coming to an end. This, too, must be part of the spirituality of departing. The willingness to let ourselves feel everything – love, sorrow, joy, worry for the future, nostalgia for a vanishing past.

To say that something has a spirituality is to say that the Holy Spirit is active in it. I think that the Holy Spirit is very active in this departure that Paul takes from the church in Ephesus. I think it’s also present in all of our departures, if we can set our own egos aside and pay attention to it. Such moments can teach a huge array of spiritual virtues, not in spite of, but because of their sadness. We learn what things mean to us when we let them go. And although we’re called to hold our positions and even our relationships lightly, even though we shouldn’t try to control them or insist on having our own way, that doesn’t mean that we’re not allowed to feel deep and authentic emotion when we come to the end of a time of sojourning together.

 

Acts 19 – 20.16 Sleep and Riots

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This is a very long reading, the longest I think we’ve gotten in Forward Movement’s arrangement of Luke and Acts daily readings. The riot at Ephesus is the center of it, and the story of Eutychus dying from listening to a long sermon seems like a strange little coda. But I think that the two stories have something in common, and that even the story of the Sons of Sceva contributes to the theme. Each of these vignettes is about confusion. The Sons of Sceva don’t really know how to do the job of exorcist, the crowds don’t really know what they’re rioting about, and poor young Eutychus is so confused by the intricacy of Paul’s sermon that he falls asleep. Okay, maybe he falls asleep for some other reason. All I know is that theological intricacy sometimes makes me sleepy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the same was happening to Eutychus. Every one of the characters in these stories lacks some vital form of understanding, and they react to their confusion differently, but still, I think, it is confusion that causes the reaction.

Consider the crowd in Ephesus. Luke tells us that “some were shouting one thing, some another; for the assembly was in confusion, and most of them did not know why they had come together.” People were just getting swept up in a mob mentality, and didn’t even know why they were there. After all, only a small number of them were silversmiths, and actually economically concerned with Paul’s preaching. These silversmiths sold souvenir models of the temple of Artemis, and they worried that Paul would lead people away from the worship of Artemis and harm their bottom lines. So they cynically stirred things up, and I imagine that they were gratified by the results. Clearly, confusion can be very dangerous, especially the confusion of the crowd.

But what about the Sons of Sceva? They were exorcists, so they were used to their jobs, and they must have been utterly bewildered when they fled the house, their clothes in tatters, their bodies bruised. The thing that had been working wasn’t working anymore. They experienced the confusion of the new, the way that changes in our society seem to ruin our old ways of doing things. The Holy Spirit is zooming around, altering the make-up of society and the inner beings of the people it touches, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. Unlike the crowd, their confusion was justified.

What about poor Eutychus? I said a long way back, at the beginning of this project, that Luke has a sense of humor, and here it is on full display. Imagine the uproarious laughter that would greet this story if it were told around the dinner table during a house church gathering. This story brings Paul down a peg or two. You can imagine people meeting each other’s eyes with a look that says, yes, he could resurrect the dead, but boy could that guy get carried away with the sound of his own voice. To me, Eutychus’ sleep is the result of Paul’s own temporary confusion about how to deliver the message effectively.

If we can say that there’s such a thing as a spirituality of confusion, these three stories help to flesh it out. Don’t contribute to confusion if you can avoid it, especially if it’s the confusion of the crowd. Don’t expect your methods of doing things to always work for you, and be prepared to encounter the new. And don’t get so lost in the intricacies of your own thoughts that you stop communicating clearly to other people. I know that I’ve been guilty of each of these three things, and that makes me very glad that Paul resurrects Eutychus. Confusion, even deadly confusion, is not a permanent state. Even it can be redeemed.