Tag: Beloved Community

Acts 27:1-12 He allowed him to go to his friends and be cared for

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I wonder what Luke has been doing the entire time that Paul has been in prison. Obviously, he’s been nearby, waiting to accompany Paul to Rome, because now the pronoun switches from “he” to “we,” and there’s a sense that the old gang is back together again. What was this like to Paul, to move from his light imprisonment, where people, including governors, were free to join him, to a kind of floating imprisonment on the sea? I imagine that, although he had some chance to see his friends while imprisoned, he missed being immersed in the fullness of community. And that’s why, when I read this passage, I find myself focusing on the short lay over in Sidon, when Paul is allowed to go and stay with his friends. This re-immersion into community allows me to give some final thoughts about beloved community as a whole.

Way back in November I had a conversation with Amy Howton, the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s Becoming Beloved Community Coordinator, about how reading Luke and Acts fit in with the BBC initiative. You can read Amy’s write-up of that conversation here. In the course of our talk I said that “a community that has gone through a spiritual revolution is one in which people celebrate and take joy in each others’ efforts, ask humbly how they can add to them, and always ask whether the things they’re doing cultivate love.” As I think about that now, I realize that these communities are not at all unusual. My own church, St. John’s in Worthington, is just such a community. And because it is a transformed community, it has aided immeasurably to my own spiritual growth.

And yet, there is a great deal of spiritual work still to do within the institution of the church. We still sometimes work under oppressive hierarchies, make too much of being theologically right while ignoring the fact that we are spiritually lacking, and allow our traditions to dominate us, sometimes because we don’t recognize the blind traditionalism in our way of doing things. Leadership is necessary, but can it be a leadership that is self-emptying and humble? Theology is necessary, but can it arise from the joy of conversation and avoid the rigidity of dogmatism? Tradition is necessary (and, as an Episcopalian, I’m prone to say that it’s a positive joy), but can we set it aside when it interferes with the demands of love?

Even more than all of these things, we still have insiders and outsiders, high status people and low status people, a tendency to prize the spiritual gifts of some while ignoring the gifts of others. Can the people who are used to holding center stage move to the edge of the circle and sit quietly for awhile? Can the insiders choose to spend a season sitting with the outsiders and learning from them? Can we carefully pray over every person in our communities, and name the blessings of their gifts, and give ourselves space to wonder how those gifts might change us?

What is so powerful about Paul during his brief stay in Sidon is that he is open to being cared for. He, who was previously the leader, the teacher, who prided himself on his stamina and his ability to live with suffering, now falls back into the loving arms of his community, and places himself among those who must be cared for – among the widows and the orphans, whom Christian communities have always tending to with love. He trusts that the people whom he led will now lead him. And he is justified in that trust because this truly is a beloved community, full of joy, humility, and the cultivation of love.

 

Acts 18:1-28 Orthodoxy and orthopraxis

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I have to admit that this read through of Acts is constantly challenging my thinking about orthodoxy and heresy. In general I hold orthodoxy pretty lightly. I’m glad that generations of Christian thinkers have thought so hard and so deeply, and argued so well, but I tend to think that the variety of their ideas and arguments shows that many ways of thinking have validity, and that ultimate truth is always a little beyond our reach. I agree with some of the scholars I’ve read who tell the Christian story as one of disagreement and discussion, and note that a Christianity that’s based in love allows for this, while a Christianity that’s based in fear becomes intolerant and starts to persecute people. Such intolerance is gross and tragic, and lacking the essential humility that can actually draw us closer to God. I don’t think that Paul and his friends were intolerant. Just look at the end of this passage from Acts – Priscilla and Aquila pull Apollos aside and have a nice and loving conversation with him. They don’t attack him in public,which might make him retrench on the positions that they think are wrong. It’s a model for Christian theological discussion. If only the history of Christianity was full of people following this model, instead of holding inquisitions and burning heretics.

This model seems especially important now, because we’re living at a time when religious ideas are loosening. Some of the synagogues that we’re told about in Acts dealt with this same kind of loosening in a fairly admirable manner. They were laboratories for a new kind of Judaism, one that wasn’t dependant on the authority of the temple complex. As laboratories, they were trying to figure out what could be acceptable to that new Judaism and what couldn’t. Sometimes this process of experimentation and discovery went well, and sometimes it didn’t. But in general, they were very tolerant of new ideas, and probably had many people like Paul floating through, who would vociferously argue their point of view, convince some others, and then drift off to some other city in the Mediterranean world.

At this moment, many of our churches are also laboratories, trying to discover a new kind of Christianity in the midst of what is sometimes referred to as the Third Reformation. My own Episcopal church is pretty mellow when it comes to questions of orthodoxy. On any Sunday morning, you can be pretty sure that there are as many theological opinions present as there are people in the pews. And I hope that our Bible studies allow plenty of room for gentle and loving theological discussion, discussion that doesn’t insist on some “right” position and then try to force everyone else to adopt it. We are a little more intolerant when it comes to what’s called orthopraxis, that is, the right way of conducting worship. But even there, we have some looseness and freedom, as long as we’re preserving Sunday mornings as a time that’s free from too much experiment.

Do we lose something by this looseness? Probably so. Many people are exhausted by encountering and wrestling with questions, some of which have never been successfully answered. Many people, quite understandably, would like to just know the truth and be given a way of living that is aligned to that truth. But for me, more is gained than lost. If Jesus’ mission was to transform us individually and then transform the world through us, we need to be patient and not try to rush through these transformations. They’re hard, they take a lot of trust and humility, they lead to some sleepless nights. The Beloved Community is not a community that wants to tell you the answers and dictate how you live. It’s a community that can sit patiently and lovingly with you as you undergo transformation, listening seriously to your thoughts and feelings, not discounting them, but knowing, also, that some of those thoughts and feelings will change, or even fall away altogether, as you transform.

 

Acts 17:1-9 The Synagogue at Thessalonica

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Three things immediately stand out to me about the community that gathers in the synagogue in Thessalonica. The first is that they’re open to discussion and debate. Some of their leaders eventually reject Paul and try to stir up the civic authorities against him, but it’s notable that he’s allowed to show up and dispute with them on three consecutive sabbaths. I’m trying to imagine a stranger coming into my parish on three Sundays in a row and interrupting the sermon each time in order to draw me and everyone else into a long dispute. I think that at first I’d be bemused, then annoyed, and then angry. It would seem to me that this stranger wasn’t respecting the community of the parish and didn’t care about the rites and rituals we’d set-up. Some part of me would be mad on behalf of the community of the church, and another part of me would be mad on my own account because, after all, I carefully prepare my sermons and now I’m not being given the chance to deliver them. I have to admit that the synagogue in Thessalonica is as tolerant, if not more tolerant, than my own community.

The second thing that stands out is that there are a lot of insiders and outsiders in this synagogue, but it’s hard to draw any very strict conclusions about them. There are the members of the community who are Jewish, and then there are a lot of curious gentiles up in the balcony or leaning against the walls. Within these two groups there are further subdivisions, as the women seem to have a very different stance towards Paul than the men do. Even among the leaders there are divisions, as some are willing to go along with the gentiles when they’re convinced by Paul, and some are deeply hostile to Paul. It would be nice if this was a simple story about outsiders and insiders, but Luke seems to be telling us that, in any community, there are personality conflicts and histories of being excluded, even among the supposed insiders, and divisions of class and race and social standing. In preaching the message of Jesus, Paul is preaching an end to these divisions. But before we get high and mighty about our own communities, we should survey them in our minds and acknowledge that these divisions exist within us as well.

Finally, it’s striking to me that Paul’s opponents can’t leverage their own authority within the community in order to stop him, but must call on the outside authorities. I find myself wondering if I would do that. If someone came and disrupted Sunday worship for three weeks in a row, and kept showing up after I’d taken him aside and tried to have a kind and reasonable conversation about respecting the community’s norms, would I be tempted to call the cops? Probably. I would think of all sorts of justifications – the interloper wasn’t respecting the church’s property. As Americans, we have a right to say who comes into our spaces and who doesn’t. And the goodness and graces of my community are worth preserving, they’re something I deeply love, and it hurts to see them disrupted (even if they’re not as good and graceful as I thought). If it came to the test, my guess is that I’d be very much tempted to act like Paul’s opposition and go running to the civic authorities.

When I play this scenario out in my mind, I can find ways to feel justified. What if it was a homophobic, racist, Nazi-sympathizing preacher who kept showing up, week after week? Many Episcopal churches have been protested by far-right ministries, and I don’t think they’re wrong to ask the police to keep the protesters out of their Sunday morning services. But what if it was a young woman who kept showing up, a Somali refugee or an undocumented woman from Guatemala, and what if their message was for us to actually do what we purport to believe in? What if they pointed out my own hypocrisy of non-action week after week? My attitude would change. I wouldn’t think I was justified in calling the cops on them, even if the weekly Sunday attendance was plummeting. Or, to add just one more possible scenario, what if it was a Mormon who showed up, who wanted to tell us how we were misunderstanding Jesus, but did so in a polite and gentle way? Would I be justified then?

As a progressive clergy person, I obviously know my own answers to these questions, but I also don’t want to dismiss them too easily, because wrestling with them is important. This situation at Thessalonica has played itself out again and again throughout human history. In America alone, there have been instances when klansmen marched into churches to deposit money on the altar, the so-called klangeld, and through that action symbolically claimed that the church was on their side. There have been other instances where civil rights leaders and their followers poured out of churches and into public spaces (parks, buses, lunch counters, city squares) and disrupted everything in order to further the cause of justice. The story of the synagogue at Thessalonica asks us to imagine what kind of disruptions we’d be willing to tolerate, and why. It also asks us to consider what’s going on in our own communities. How united are we, really? Where do the divisions lie? And are those divisions sharp enough that they could lead to the community falling apart, if it was tested? These are useful questions to ask, because the potential for a synagogue at Thessalonica-like situation is always present in our lives.

 

Acts 15:36-41 The Falling Out

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This brief little story of Paul and Barnabas’ falling out makes me sad. Barnabas, the son of encouragement, just can’t keep himself from encouraging everyone he runs into, even if they sometimes let him down. No doubt Paul has heard people repeating the three stories of those who turned back on the way to Jerusalem, which Luke himself tells in chapter 9, v.57-62 of his Gospel. John, also called Mark, isn’t much of a disciple in Paul’s eyes. He’s too easily dissuaded from the task at hand. But the same spirit of generosity that led Barnabas to become Paul’s advocate leads him to forgive John Mark and invite him to try again.

I have to admit that I’m more of a Barnabas than a Paul, sometimes to my distress. People do, occasionally, let me down, and when they do I tend to trust them when they ask to try again. Sometimes this pays off and sometimes it doesn’t, but I keep doing it, and sometimes I wonder why. Maybe it’s because I believe in the beauty and benefit of belonging to a community so deeply that I can’t stand to block anyone’s access to it. But I’m settled in place, not on a dangerous mission to convert the Gentiles. There’s a kind of luxury in knowing that the churches that I serve are stable and probably won’t be damaged by someone not showing up to a potluck. Paul doesn’t have that luxury.

I agree with Paul that following the Way of the believer in Jesus Christ is the most important thing. I agree with Barnabas that most of us aren’t going to be very good at this, and that we need patience and forgiveness. I think that Luke holds both of these opinions, admiring both Paul’s rigor and Barnabas’ generosity. It’s sometimes hard and unsettling to hold both positions, to have to be careful and exercise judgement when encountering different people and different situations. But it feels, ultimately, more loving to do so. In this little passage, both Paul and Barnabas are exercising such judgement, it just leads them to different conclusions.

 

Acts 15:22-35 They rejoiced at the exhortation

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I’m writing this at the end of January, a few days after Nehemiah, Chapter 8 appeared in the Sunday lectionary. One of the things that struck me when studying and preaching on that passage was how happy the people were when Ezra read them the law of Moses, how much they rejoiced at being given some instructions on how to live their lives. The believers in Antioch express a similar joy when Silas and Barsabbas read them the Council in Jerusalem’s letter. Part of their joy is that it relieves a big anxiety. Some unappointed interlopers have come and told them that they’re practicing their faith wrong, that if they hope to be real followers of Jesus, they have to be circumcised. But their practice, the practice that Paul was formed in and his friend Barnabas supports, is to be pretty mellow about circumcision, and not teach it as a necessary entrance rite to the Beloved Community. So they’re grateful that the Council has solved the issue. But they’re also very grateful that the Council exhorts them, that it gives them four disciplines to live under. Don’t practice any form of idolatry, keep to two important food ways, and don’t fornicate.

In a way, the content of the exhortation isn’t that important. Most Christians today ignore the food ways entirely, eating meat that hasn’t been drained of blood and never questioning whether our meat was slaughtered by strangling. That said, many of us keep to the spirit of that strangulation rule, and try to avoid purchasing products that were created with processes that are cruel to animals. Yet we have accepted other disciplines over time, things that the Jewish followers of Jesus in Jerusalem never dreamt of. We abstain from certain vices during Lent, confess our sins, celebrate Jesus’ birth at a time of year that would have surprised early Christians, go on silent retreats…the list could go on. The point is that we have many practices that are important to us, and we’re happy to have them. We might even exult over them.

Sometimes the secular culture that we all live in, the culture that influences us whether we like it or not, seems antithetical to the very idea of discipline, although it probably isn’t. Even the most passionate advocates of personal freedom probably think that people should take care of their property, be prudent with money, or hold to some other discipline that seems so obvious that it doesn’t even need to be named. There is something in us that clearly needs some rules to follow. There is also something in us that can become rigid and ungenerous about those rules, and use them as a cudgel to pummel others. The rules can become idols in themselves. I think it’s important to look at the heart of the Council’s four exhortations, and understand their intent. When we do, we see that they’re all about trying to look through God’s eyes, trying to view everything with love. We can’t do that if we worship idols. But once we’re no longer worried about idols, we are exposed to a startling vision. Animals count, God loves them to, and they shouldn’t be treated with cruelty. Other people count, and we shouldn’t use them to satisfy our own desires.

We need these rules made plain to us so that we can be a community together. Any community could get lost in constant argument about which practices are the best. Such arguments can decrease love, increase suspicion and enmity, and break communities apart. That’s why simple, understandable disciplines can come as such a relief. We can stop fretting about the best ways to live our lives, and get on with living them. If the rules are simple enough, they leave room for more discovery, for finding new ways of expressing Christian love. Understanding this, we all might come to rejoice.