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Acts 13:13-52 Spoken from the Bridge

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

By my count, this is the fourth big retelling of the scriptural narrative in the Acts of the Apostles. First, Peter retold the story on Pentecost. Then Stephen retold the story when he was brought before the temple authorities. The third retelling was Peter again, talking to Cornelius’ household. At each retelling the emphasis has shifted, and the audiences have expanded the circle of those who have a claim to this story. Now the storyteller is Paul, so recently known as Saul, and his retelling creates a bridge between the community of the synagogue and the gentiles who gather to hear him. It makes sense that it is Paul who does this because he is, as Justo Gonzalez points out, a bridge person in himself. He is both Jewish and a Roman citizen, both Saul and Paul. He belongs, effectively, to two cultures at once. His early life as a pharisee and persecutors of Christians feels like the attempt of a young person to deny one identity by overly claiming the other. Now he shows that he can stand comfortably astride both identities at once. Unlike the rejected guest at the Parable of the Great Banquet, he can put on the proper clothes to attend either party, that thrown by the Jews or that thrown by the gentiles, because he holds both identities lightly. His only real identity lies in Christ, and it’s not really an identity at all, but the awakened soul stretching itself and fluttering, sometimes awkwardly, through the world.

Justo Gonzalez invites us to realize that there are many bridge people like Saul/Paul living in our world, and that there are bridge communities as well. Gonzalez writes that

“Saul, who is also Paul,” reminds us of the situation of the millions of Hispanics living in the United States, a country whose Spanish-speaking population is now the fourth in size in the entire hemisphere (1). The fact itself of a name change happens every day. A boy whom his parents called “Jesus” is told by his teacher that he cannot have such a name and is immediately “rebaptized” as “Jesse.” Anyone entering as an immigrant from Latin America into the United States immediately finds it practically necessary to drop one of his or her two family names. However, all of this is a symptom of a greater reality: the Latino people in the United States live in two realities. As Virgil Elizondo would say, to be Latino in the United States is to be “mestizo.” The word “mestizo” originally referred to a person of mixed blood, and was used pejoratively. Elizondo uses it in the sense of the “in between-ness” in which Hispanics live in the United States. In that situation, they find that they are neither Latin Americans nor Americans, and are often discriminated against by both groups as also happened to Hellenistic Jews, discriminated against by Gentiles and Judean Jews. However, this very painful situation also allows Hispanics in the United States to serve as a bridge between the two main cultures that share the Western Hemisphere. Saul opened the way to the future because he was also Paul. Perhaps the Latino Church in the United States may open the way to the future precisely because it finds itself in the difficult space between two cultures – or, in other words, because it is a mestizo church.

I quote Gonzalez so extensively here because he is pointing to a hallmark of the Beloved Community that I have been thinking about and trying to describe as I write about Acts. Such a community is proudly, unapologetically, in-between. Like Saul/Paul, the members of this community carry many identities in their ordinary lives, some of which are accepted, some of which are scorned by the people they move among. And yet Beloved Community, which understands this, doesn’t try to impose on them a new identity. Instead, it tries to draw forth the shy souls of those who come to be a part of it, and reassures them that there is something much more important than identity. There is gratitude, and beauty, the inflowing of grace, the movement of the Holy Spirit through the world’s life, forgiveness, joy in each other’s gifts, patience with each other’s failures, and above all, the ability to catch glimpses, from time to time, of life as its seen through the eyes of God, to see the world with heart-breaking compassion and unending love.

Let me add another addendum here. I’m using this addendum space as a way of presenting my ongoing questions, and acknowledging that I might be hopelessly wrong in my assertions in any given post. I said above that there’s something much more important than identity, and I just want to acknowledge that, as I white man, that’s easy for me to say. I have rarely had to think about, let alone defend, my identity. For people who aren’t white, heterosexual men, both questions of identity and any kind of idealism about transcending identity take on a different light. I can’t presume to speak to those questions, and stand, in all humility, to be corrected by the ongoing conversation.

 

  1. Gonzalez was writing in 2001, so this number is now probably greater than it was even when he was writing.
  2. Justo L. Gonzalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit, pp. 156-157.

Acts 13:1-12 The Hierophant

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Mary Pierce Brosmer, in her book Women Writing for (a) Change, which describes the movement she started and continues to belong to, tells the story of her first poetry reading. She was asked to read after the poet May Sarton had to cancel her appearance due to an illness. Brosmer found herself standing in front of a room of about a hundred people, who responded enthusiastically to her reading. The one negative response came from her creative writing professor, who cornered her at the reception afterwards and remarked, “you really care about being understood, don’t you.” He then told her what he thought a poet should really be like. “I think of the poet as the hierophant above the people, inviting them to reach up toward me, upward toward some greater understanding.” Brosmer writes

Fortunately, having heard this enough in his contemporary American poetry class, where we studied only male poets, with the pleasant exception of Denise Levertov, I knew the meaning of the word hierophant: the prophet-priest. Yet I gaped at him stupidly, rendered mute by the arrogance of the image, and his invoking it at this particular moment (1).

Since then, Brosmer’s life has been lived in service of a very different understanding of the creative person, the person who lends their creativity, their insight, and their experience, to the communities they belong to. Women Writing for (a) Change creates these communities, and has developed practices for inviting and honoring the voices of every participant.

We see this contrast between the poet-hierophant and the poet who builds community played out in today’s passage from Acts, although here we are talking about religious leaders instead of poets. The community in Antioch doesn’t care about hierophants. We are clearly told that there are prophets and teachers, but none of them claims to be higher than other people, who must reach upwards in order to grasp their exalted understanding. When Paul and Barnabas are commissioned, when they have hands laid upon them and are sent off to extend the grace of the Beloved Community to the gentiles, it is because the Holy Spirit has prompted this action. We’re not told whose hands are laid on them, and as Justo Gonzalez points out, the greek is ambiguous and could imply that the entire church is blessing them (2).

It’s no accident that one of the first people that Paul and Barnabas encounter on their journey is someone who thinks of himself as a poet-hierophant, the false prophet Bar-Jesus. He’s threatened by Paul and Barnabas because hierophants can’t help but be threatened by the egalitarianism of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is more than willing to come down and dwell among the people, and seems disinterested in people who have put themselves on pedestals and think their role is to try to raise other people to their exalted understanding. As with many miracles, the physical blindness that afflicts Bar-Jesus is simply the outward and visible sign of his inward blindness, the blinkers that arrogance, insecurity, status, and a need to control have put over his eyes.

  1. Mary Pierce Brosmer, Women Writing for (a) Change, p. 66.
  2. Justo Gonzalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit.

Acts 12:20-25 Should we welcome humiliation?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Poor Herod. Back in my post on Luke 23:1-25 I reflected on Herod’s character, how he was a kind of seeker, always wanting to talk to John and Jesus, but never really wanting to take their answers seriously. In fact, when he doesn’t get the answers he likes (or in his encounter with Jesus, any answer at all), he punishes his would-be gurus with torture and death. He is unhappy, discontented, hungry, but he can’t really believe that there’s anything but his own ego to be concerned with. Like most of us, he longs to draw close to divinity, but he is convinced that the best way to do this is by claiming that his ego is divine. In the end, he is so worshipful of himself that he doesn’t correct the people of Tyre and Sidon when they pretend to worship him.

Herod is not a humble man. He would never believe that humility is the answer to his discontent. And yet, as I often said in my commentary on Luke, the contemplative tradition prizes humility above any other human characteristic. Richard Rohr, one of the great contemplatives of our time, says that he prays that one humiliating thing will happen to him every day, so that he’ll always remember to be humble. Humility like Rohr’s is hard to cultivate, because most of us have been conditioned to respond to humiliation with a sense of shame. In fact, it might seem radical to say that we can have any response other than shame. Yet throughout the centuries, some Christians have deliberately sought out humiliation, just so that they can develop other responses to it. They’ve often done so in an attempt to imitate Christ’s humiliation on the way to the cross, but their methods might, to us, seem quite bizarre.

In his book The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau writes about such people as Simeon of Emesa and Mark the Mad who, in the 6th century, would make public displays of eating pastries on Holy Thursday and stealing food from the marketplace, not to mention hanging out in brothels and walking around naked in the streets. Some of the things they did are not at all admirable and should not be imitated, but ever since reading about them I’ve been fascinated by this idea of holy men going out of their way to attract shame and derision. It’s like they wanted to be constantly embarrassed, so that they could act without worrying about embarrassment. To me, that’s a kind of freedom. It’s the opposite of King Herod. Instead of worshipping their egos, these strange Christians sought to demean their egos in every way they could.

I wouldn’t act like them, or suggest that anyone else should, either. I think there are easier and more gentile ways to learn to take the ego less seriously. Yet I agree with Rohr that if we want to avoid being like Herod, we need to learn to welcome occasional humiliations. Not one of us can avoid acting silly and absurd from time to time. Can we come to see our absurdity itself as a gift from God, causing us to take ourselves less seriously, and our mistakes as a kind of introduction to grace?

As a brief addendum to this post, I should acknowledge that I presented this idea to my friend Di, and she very rightly pointed out that it might be good for white men like Rohr or myself to cultivate humiliation, but that there are a lot of people in the world who wake up every day in a state of humiliation because the cultures they belong to have a vested interest in humiliating them to keep them in their place. So I want to amend what I said above, and assert that humiliation is not always good, and that shame, in particular the kind of shame that is used to keep people down, can be just plain ugly. Obviously, I need to think more about this, and am so grateful to Di, a member of my own Beloved Community, for challenging me and remaining in deep and meaningful conversation with me about this and many other things as well.

 

Acts 12:1-19 Angels and Laughter

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

As I have said, many of the stories that Luke relates must have been told around the communal table when the early church met to pray and break bread together. I find it easy to believe that this story must have been a popular favorite, one that people asked to hear again and again. It was full of wonder, but also contained the slapstick humor of the maid Rhoda slamming the door in Peter’s face and not reopening it until she had talked to the praying disciples. This is a daffy, charming description of how people act, and its inclusion here is vital to my understanding of Luke’s spirituality. Through this simple story, he seems to be telling us that it’s okay to laugh, to find amusement, even to experience joy in the midst of dark times. In fact, it’s more holy to do this than it is to insist on acknowledging nothing but misery and sorrow.

Some people get angry when they encounter such seeming frivolity in a serious moment. Yet Rhoda’s response is, to my mind, in keeping with the presence of angels in Luke’s story. This is the fifth time that angels have appeared in the Acts of the Apostles. Two men in white robes stand beside the disciples in chapter one as Jesus is ascending into heaven. An angel appears to Philip and sends him off to meet the Ethiopian eunuch. An angel appears to Cornelius and tells him to send men to Joppa to find Peter. And, in Acts 5, the angels are responsible for another jailbreak, letting the apostles out of prison so that they can keep preaching in the temple. Angels seem to be always coming and going, and their main task seems to be the expansion of the group of believers, the widening of community. In every instance, the people they appear to do what they say – there is no denial of angels in this story. Angels appear, and the only response to them, Luke tells us, is acceptance.

He seems to feel the same way about Rhoda, and about the other funny little anecdotes that he sometimes weaves into his narrative. Rather than trying to repress them as frivolous, Luke is happy to tell us about weird things happening and people responding to them in inappropriate ways. I think that he wants us to know these stories because he wants us to be forgiving when it comes to our own inappropriate responses. For him, a beloved community is not a community of censure. Things will happen in these communities that we don’t know how to react to, and because we’re confused our reactions will be off, and sometimes blatantly wrong. If anyone is truly hurt by our wrongness, we should apologize. But a better response is to laugh at our own capacity for mistakes, to take a kind of delight in them, since none of us is perfect, and we’re all going to find ourselves in Rhoda’s position at one moment or another. And isn’t it wonderful that this community no longer always reacts to angels with fear and trembling, which was the usual response to angelic appearances in Luke’s Gospel? Sometimes there’s terror, but just as often there’s wonder that leads to a kind of hinky, stumbling reaction, and instead of finding this inappropriate, the community finds it delightful, and wants to hear about it again and again.

Acts 11:19-30 The Son of Encouragement

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Luke likes Barnabas a lot, and for good reason. It was Barnabas who Paul went to when he returned to Jerusalem after his vision on the Road to Damascus, Barnabas who took Paul in and vouched for him to the apostles, and here we see him seeking out his friend in Tarsus and bringing him to Damascus. Although he doesn’t get a starring role, its safe to say that without Barnabas there’s no Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles, and hence no expanding church, no epistles, no Christianity as we know it. Barnabas is key, but unsung. So let’s sing his praises now, and let him teach us something about the spirituality of encouragement.

True encouragement is nearly impossible when people are striving and jealous. As a young man, I wanted to be a famous writer, and consequently I found it impossible to read a book by an upcoming writer without looking for faults in it. “They’re not so great,” I’d mumble to myself as I turned the pages. I was so afraid that I wouldn’t get to be what I wanted to be that pleasure at anyone else’s achievement became impossible. Yet in my early thirties I came to the realization that I was never going to be famous, or even well known, that I was one of eleven billion people, and the chances of my achieving any kind of notoriety were incredible small. At first I was sad about this, and then I began to think about it with an incredible sense of relief. The pressure was off! My family and community loved me even though I wasn’t famous. God loved me. Next to the wonder of those loves, notoriety had very little meaning.

Once I was free (or at least partially, for who is entirely free) of this ego-driven lust for prominence, I found that I could really enjoy the writing of others. Novels became pleasurable to me again. So did many things that fell entirely outside of my talents. I was no longer comparing myself to other people, or trying to prove my worth. I was suddenly free to wholeheartedly embrace whatever was good in others. I found within myself the capacity to encourage.

This, obviously, is the capacity that Barnabas has in abundance. And I think he’s so encouraging because he’s humble. He’s more delighted in the gifts of others than he is in his own gifts. You can imagine him looking at Paul and seeing how remarkable Paul is, and not feeling a jot of jealousy. He doesn’t care what people think of him. And because of that, he can delight in them.

Encouragement like Barnabas’ is a sure-fire sign of the resurrection. How do you know that you’re living in a Beloved Community? Well, such a community will be full of the sons and daughters of encouragement, people who are actively looking for the gifts and talents of others, and promoting those gifts and talents without much thought for themselves. These people will, of course, feel flattered and loved if you acknowledge their own gifts and talents, but they don’t need you to acknowledge them. The sons and daughters of encouragement know that they’re loved, that God values them completely, so they have little need to seek validation. Hopefully all of our communities are full of these people, just like the community at Antioch.