Tag: Baptism

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 8:26-40 The Ethiopian Eunuch

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Ten years ago, I helped plan a campus ministry retreat that took its theme from the Ethiopian eunuch. We designed flyers and a very talented student, Marco Saavedra, gave us some beautiful art to print on t-shirts, and we all headed off to Turkey Run, Indiana to spend the weekend considering the eunuch’s words “How can I understand unless someone explains it to me.” We wanted to investigate learning in community, and how relationships make things understandable, but also makes them matter. Why do we care about the things we care about? Why do we get interested in a given topic and spend time investigating it? Usually it’s because some teacher is engaged in the same questions that bother us, and is passionate about finding good ways to ask those questions, sit with them, and seek answers. My life was changed by a class I took in college called Exile and Pilgrimage, because the professor, Don Rogan, was asking the exact same questions that I was, and even though it was a Religious Studies course, he was willing to go far outside the realm of religion while seeking answers. He had an openness to all sorts of people and voices, and the greatest thing he taught me was that such openness was possible, and that it was a gift.

I don’t remember the content of that weekend with students at Turkey Run. I know that we had multiple workshops, led by the different campus ministries, and that we were open to being taught by each other without seeking the expertise of an outside speaker. The thing I really remember, though, is a long hike through the ravines with my own community of students. I remember that we joked a lot, and laughed a lot. That it was a bright Spring day. That we didn’t worry about getting lost or being back by any particular time. We had left the depth of conversation behind, and were simply enjoying the pleasure of each other’s company.  It’s not surprising that this is what I remember, rather than the content of the workshops. It was the community that mattered, and the joy of community was the primary teacher.

I think that the very small, temporary community that developed between Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch had many of the same qualities. We know the eunuch’s question, and we know that Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus, but we don’t get the content of his teaching. This is a retelling of the story for the eunuch, but Luke doesn’t pause to retell it to us. His emphasis is different. He’s not interested in the content, but the mood of this retelling, the quality of the community that springs up between Philip and the eunuch. They seem to be having a jolly time, and their friendship is so spontaneous that it ends in baptism without much thought and no preplanning.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that we can emphasize the words in the eunuch’s question in all sorts of ways. We can put the emphasis on “understand,” or put it on “explains,” which would indicate that we care a lot about the content. But the story doesn’t give us the content, and seems to be putting the emphasis on “someone.” What’s important here is the person of Philip and the relationship that he has with the eunuch, the community that springs up between them during the retelling. The passage is more about a walk through a ravine then a workshop, more about joy and sunshine and laughter than about taking notes.

 

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.

 

Blessed Voyagers

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Mark’s story of Jesus’s baptism is like a storm front.  The brightness of the baptism and the descent of the dove is met, almost immediately, by the darkness of the temptation in the wilderness, and the whole story seems to exist in that liminal space where warm air meets cold air and a storm begins to brew.  It’s unsettling to have baptism and temptation so close together.  It seems to bring the very nature of baptism into question.  If baptism is meant to make us into new people, to free us from our sins and fill us with Christ, then what is it doing in such close proximity to temptation and emptiness?  It’s as if Mark is telling us to be wary of any pleasant theology of baptism, any belief that after baptism everything in life will be good and easy.

In Mark, baptism doesn’t automatically make the world anew.  And this is more true, I think, than any hope that we can become new people in one moment, through the completion of one act.  In the past week I’ve heard two people describe churches that seem to be happiness-centered.  These churches seem to believe that becoming a Christian should free one of all doubts and that baptism is a way out of sorrow.  Because of this, they get impatient with doubt, but more than that, they refuse to admit to their own occasional sorrows.  They believe that admitting to sorrow is the same thing as not trusting in God.

But in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus trusts God and is brought immediately into a wilderness of sorrow and temptation, as if the true sign of trusting God is a willingness to be sent anywhere, into any domain of loss or joy.  If that’s true, then what is God up to in baptism?  What is baptism supposed to be, or do?  How is it supposed to help us?  Again, it was my friend Laurie who provided the answer.  She suggested that baptism is a blessing – that God prepares us for life as a Christian, not by transforming us utterly, but by blessing us so that we can experience that full transformation in the minutiae of every day, in spiritual quests that can take years, if not lifetimes.  Baptism prepares us to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, to paraphrase Saint Paul.  It affirms that the wildernesses are navigable with the aid of God’s blessing.

And the truth is that the wildernesses are really amazing.  The Holy Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness as a kind of pioneer.  He’ll struggle with demons and defeat them, and reclaim the wilderness for human use.  This is what the desert fathers (Saint Anthony, Saint Symeon Stylites, Saint Martin of Tours)  were doing when they went into their own wildernesses.  They were reclaiming the spiritual landscape and making it fertile.  With the blessing of God, they didn’t hesitate to venture into any combat, and found their demons in odd and surprising places, but by finding and defeating them, reclaimed those places for us.

If anything, the proximity of Jesus’ baptism to his wilderness sojourn should be a clarion call to our own pioneering spirits.  Enter the wilderness, with God’s blessings, and transform it.  I had a moment of serendipity when I was thinking about the pioneering spirit this week.  I was listening to Radiolab (a terrific podcast which you can find here), and they had a story about Voyager 1 & 2, the two exploratory spacecraft that NASA launched in 1977.  For the past thirty-five years they have been moving through the solar system, photographing the planets and taking measurements.  Much of what we now know about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune is due to the work of these two little unmanned ships.  Their cameras were turned off on Valentine’s Day, 1990, but before they were, they turned back and took one last picture of earth, which from that distance was nothing but a pale blue dot against the backdrop of a band of solar light.  To quote Carl Sagan, that dot represents: “Everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved, ever superstar, every corrupt politician, everyone in all of history, everyone, the sum total.  Think of the rivers of blood that have run so that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination over a fraction of that pixel.”

That’s part of the wilderness that the Voyager spacecrafts have already reclaimed for us.  Against the immense backdrop of space, our petty ambitions are put in devastating perspective.  If we are to thrust ourselves into wildernesses of ambition, we will never be able to do so again in the full believe that we’re engaged in an important cosmic act.  We are small, the picture tells us.  We should act humbly.

Fourteen years after taking that picture, the two spacecraft reached the edge of the solar system.  The solar wind died away, but readings sent back to NASA revealed that the ships weren’t out of the solar system yet.  They were still caught in the magnetic fields of the sun.  So they are in a liminal place, not quite in the solar system and not quite out of it.  It’s like they are traveling through the shell of an egg.  Scientists call this place the “stagnation layer.”  Voyager 1 & 2 could move beyond it any day now.  When they do, they will be the first human made objects to leave the solar system, and move into the far greater wilderness of interstellar space.  Who knows what they will be able to reclaim from that wilderness, what they will show us and teach us as they move ever onward.

When we are in our own private wildernesses, it may feel like we’re trapped in stagnation layers.  Whatever lessons we have to learn, whatever tasks we have to complete, seem impossible, and sometimes even forgotten.  And we may feel like we’re in a storm front, buffeted about by spiritual combat, fighting our own demons and the demons of the world.  How do we live in stagnation layers and storm fronts?  That is largely up to us.  But God has given us a gift that will bring us through them.  As we sit, stagnate, waiting, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us.  As we battle, are wounded, and struggle within ourselves, we have the memories of our baptisms to uphold us.  We have been blessed and sent out as pioneers, reclaiming spiritual space in our souls and moral space in the world for God, and in those moments when the struggles of the wilderness might seem overwhelming, we only need to remember the descent of the dove.