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Acts 11:1-18 The Baptism of the Holy Spirit

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Peter has just done a very surprising thing, and Luke is lavishing attention on it, as is Forward Movements calendar of readings and devotions, which we are borrowing for the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s Big Read. Slowing down like this, and spending four days on this single incident, is a way of acknowledging what a big deal Peter’s baptising of Cornelius’ household is. For Luke, it’s rhetorically huge. Luke was, after all, a buddy of Paul’s, and Paul became notorious for baptizing gentiles, for boldly and rapidly expanding the idea of who could belong to the Beloved Community of followers of Jesus Christ. We’ll hear, soon, about the many disputes that Paul got into with the other Jewish members of the movement. When Luke was with Paul, he probably found himself thinking “yeah, but Peter did it first,” whenever anyone accused his friend of being too open and inviting to those who, in their eyes, didn’t really belong. So this is Luke’s great “Peter did it first” story, a grand defense of Paul before Paul has become the main character of the story.

It is also a not-too-subtle hint to Paul’s detractors that they should be more generous and better behaved. After all, the community that Peter reports back to in Judea vocalize all the same complaints and worries as Paul’s critics, but once they’ve heard Peter’s story, they accept and even celebrate his actions. Luke is, in effect, saying to these detractors, “look, if the movement of the Holy Spirit was a good enough reason for baptising gentiles a few years ago, why isn’t it a good enough reason now?”

Throughout Christian history, many people have come up with rebuttals to Luke’s argument, without really saying that this is what they’re doing. These people aren’t misguided. In fact, their concerns are valid and should be taken seriously. After all, there have been times where people thought that the Holy Spirit was telling them to practice free love or murder their enemies. There have been charismatic leaders who seemed full of the Holy Spirit, and led their followers to tragic endings. Given this, the best rebuttal is to simply ask, how do we know that it’s the Holy Spirit that’s really at work, and not human vanity or power seeking vainglory? The best answer might be to ask who is being served by any perceived visitation of the Holy Spirit. If claims of the Holy Spirit’s presence create systems in which certain people accumulate power and privilege, they are false claims. If anyone says that they don’t have to listen to the wishes of their community because they’ve “received the Holy Spirit,” their claim is probably false. Of course, sometimes the Holy Spirit allows us to see injustices in the communities we belong to, so it’s best not to make a hard and fast rule. Perhaps the only true test is whether those who claim to have received the Holy Spirit are humble and full of love. If they are, then the Holy Spirit has probably baptised them.

Luke 10:34-48 The Third Retelling

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

We have now reached the third retelling of Jesus’ story in Acts, and in some ways it’s just as dangerous as the second retelling. You will remember that Stephen tells the story the second time when he’s on trial in front of the temple authorities. Peter’s retelling of the story to Cornelius and his household isn’t done with any threat of death hanging over him. But it is done in the face of a potential expansion of the little community of disciples that he’s been leading. And we’ve already seen that this community is fragile – it has internal disputes between the Hebrews and the Hellenists, it has members who have given lip service to the discipline of living in community without any intention of actually abiding under that discipline, and it’s recently borne the strain of welcoming Paul, its former persecutor, into its midst.

“How much more change can this community take?” I’ve heard that in the context of today’s churches, and you probably have as well. Change is hard, especially when well-beloved traditions are threatened. But it’s even hard in very recently established, very small groups. I’ve been in groups of three people that fell apart over the strain of trying to welcome a fourth person into our midst. Any time a new person joins a group, some of the intimacy of the old group naturally dissipates for awhile. And for those who rely on that intimacy, this is deeply disturbing. So there’s always a cost to newness and, although communities can weather change, they seldom really like it.

And what a change Peter is accepting for them! There he is, preaching to Cornelius’ household, retelling the story to a gentile audience for the first time, when the Holy Spirit whips through the room and everyone there shows signs of having received it. Suddenly everyone is speaking, all the voices clamoring, a chorus of prayers rising into the air. The members of Peter’s community of Jewish Christians are amazed. Peter quickly takes stock of what’s happening, and decides on a momentous change. Gentiles, the uncircumcised, who are so impure that they’d never be allowed admittance to the temple, are suddenly worthy of baptism. Within mere moments, they’re members of the community. Peter doesn’t hesitate, and he isn’t stopped by wondering what the believers back in Jerusalem are going to think of all of this.

Which should present us with a reflection on our own communities. Do we have enough spirit to weather change? Are we so fragile that we can’t accept the previously unacceptable? Dare we risk really listening to God and moving with the Holy Spirit wherever it takes us?

Acts 10:17-33 Capable of believing anything

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

As I said yesterday, Peter is able to go and visit Cornelius the Centurion because he’s willing to give up the purity that allows him to enter the temple. His understanding of God has moved beyond the controlled structure of temple worship. It’s also moved beyond any understanding of the divine that the Roman empire has, and it’s for this reason that the early Christians were often accused of being atheists. Something dangerous is going on here. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” The priests of the temple and the Roman authorities have good reason to suspect the kind of free thinking that Peter is showing himself capable of. It’s part of our human nature to take things too far, and there have been many false prophets and cult leaders who try to replace a belief in the old religious dispensation with nothing other than a belief in themselves and themselves alone. The ego desires to make a god of itself, and dangerous people have arisen throughout history, and are present now, who are happy to let others worship their egos.

Peter is not one of these people, and he refuses to let Cornelius and his household treat him as one of these people. We’ve just seen that he can do many of the things that Jesus did. He can heal the sick and raise the dead. Yet he doesn’t fall into the trap of thinking that this means that he is Jesus. Miracles can be wonderful, especially if they heal people. But miracles are not what this new religion, this nascent Christianity, is all about. Later, many of the mystics and saints of the Christian tradition will express some wariness about miracles. Miracles, they’ll say, are all well and good, but if you take them too seriously, and begin to think that you’re special just because you can perform them, you are essentially opening yourself up to evil. You are allowing that egoic self to feast on its own sense of importance, and doing more harm to your life with God than can be compensated for by any miracle. Anything that makes you forget your own powerlessness and reject grace is not worth thinking too much about.

Peter’s rejection of Cornelius’ worship points to what this new religion is all about – seeking union with the divine. Or, to put it in a way that doesn’t make it seem like we have much power to accomplish this, it’s about getting our egos out of the way so that divine love can reach out to us and embrace us. We can’t really do this on our own. Like Peter, the Holy Spirit will snap us up, lead and guide us, take us to unusual places, cause us to accept strange friendships, and heal us, but it won’t be because of our merits, and it certainly won’t be because we’re worthy of any kind of worship.

 

Acts 10:1-16 Shocking Visions and the Temple

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Cornelius is praying at 3:00 in the afternoon, which is the time of the temple sacrifice far away in Jerusalem. But divine presence doesn’t make itself felt in the temple. Instead an angel appears to Cornelius, who is a gentile, a centurion who has shown interest in Judaism and is generous in giving alms. But Cornelius has no proper right to divine visitation, at least in the minds of the temple authorities. And those authorities are unseen characters in this section. The temple laws and rules are still very much alive in the minds of Peter and the other disciples. They’ve been going to the temple a lot, and they can’t enter the temple unless they’re ritually pure. As L. William Countryman points out, “because worshipers were expected to be pure when entering the Temple, the implication is that the Christians maintained themselves in a state of constant purity.”

Unlike that other centurion in Luke 7:1-10, there is no urgency in Cornelius’ request. He doesn’t have a beloved servant who is dying. Peter, who’s been traveling wherever he’s needed, might have good reason to question whether Cornelius actually does need him. What is this summons all about?

But of course, he doesn’t receive the summons until he has a vision of his own. And the vision he gets is startling. That blanket full of food that descends from the sky isn’t just telling him to enjoy some pork and shellfish. It’s telling him that his time in the temple is over for now, that he won’t be able to return to the purity that allowed him entry. The fact that it descends three times during the vision (and, possibly accompanied by the same dialog with the heavenly voice each time) should remind us of Peter’s three denials of Christ. This eating of unclean things, this ending of any concern with purity, is now part of confessing Christ, of acknowledging Christ’s great prominence.

It is notable how slowly Peter and the other disciples are being weaned of dependence on the temple. It’s been the locus of spiritual power in their lives for so long that they have trouble imagining new ways of being faithful in their spirituality. This should stand as a reminder to us. We need to acknowledge our own temples – the norms and practices that are keeping us separated from other people – and remain open to new visions of faithfulness as they arrive. They might startle us. They might even shock us. Yet they will open our capacity for discovery, and hence for joy.

Acts 9:32-43 Discovery in the Holy Spirit

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Just as Paul is being blown hither and yon as he converts, learns, escapes, and hides, Peter, too, seems more than willing to go where he’s sent and accept whatever requests come to him. First he drifts down to Lydda, and then he follows a summons to Joppa, raises Tabitha from the dead, and then just stays there with Simon the Tanner until the next adventure comes along. He seems to have no agenda, no to-do list, no plan beyond following the prompting of the Holy Spirit. His actions are free in a way that few of ours are.

A few years ago I read Sam Wells’ book, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics. In it, Wells talks about the Acts of the Apostles, and the “improvisation at the beginnings of the church-the constant need to find ways of staying faithful in constantly changing circumstances and environments. Indeed,” Wells says, “Jeremy Begbie describes the whole of the Acts of the Apostles as ‘a stream of new, unpredictable, improvisations.’” I was intrigued by Wells’ book, and wanted to experience improvisation first hand, so I signed up for Second City weeklong intensive in Chicago, and from there took classes in Columbus, where I live. My improv career, such as it was, is now over, but I’m deeply grateful for the time I spent learning and performing, because I feel that it made me a better Christian, more able to imitate the wild improvisations of Peter and Paul.

One of the things that improv teaches is to always be open to new discoveries in a scene. We often think we know what to expect, and so we close down our senses and curiosity and simply fail to notice occurrences that don’t fit within the scripts of our lives. Discovery is about doing the opposite, opening your eyes and ears to everything happening around you and picking up all of the delightful, unscripted bits of human behavior so that you can respond to them joyfully. I learned this early on when a classmate misspoke and invented a word with the slip of the tongue. My instinct was to pass right over this, but my instructor stopped the scene and suggested that I use it, that I and my scene partner agree to live in a world where that word was used and made sense to everybody. Within minutes we were all laughing, caught up in the joy of discovery.

Thanks to this training I’m open to all sorts of things in my everyday life that I never really was before. This has been of great value within my church community. More than that, its filled my relationship with God with humor, delight, excitement, and silliness. In other words, its opened me up to joy.

I imagine that Peter, as he healed Aeneas and resurrected Tabitha, was full of joy. Yes, he was praying in Tabitha’s room, beside her dead body, and accompanied by the weeping of widows. Yet he must have been filled by the joy of the resurrection, his senses filled with the scents and sounds of the garden, as he reached out to raise her from the dead. He was open to the possibility of miracle and grace, and the Holy Spirit was thickening the air currents around him as he discovered that the practice of resurrection, in all its wonder, was part of his apostleship.