Tag: Beloved Community

Acts 15:1-21 The tolerance of James the Less

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

It is strangely dangerous to write about the James who speaks at the Jerusalem council, because he could be one of two people, and the person you think he is reveals what you believe about Jesus, and especially about Mary. We know that he’s not James the Son of Zebedee, because that James, often known as the Greater, was killed by King Herod at the beginning of chapter 12. So that leaves the possibility that he is James the son of Alphaeus or James the Brother of Jesus, and there are some who think that he’s both. Let’s take each of these in turn, since I get confused trying to disentangle it all, and I’m sure that you do, too.

James the son of Alphaeus is named in Luke’s list of the apostles in chapter six of his Gospel, not to mention in similar lists in Matthew and Mark. That’s about all we know of him, although Jacobus Voragine tells us that Alphaus means wise, so maybe he’s called “son of Alphaeus” for the same reason that Barnabas is called “son of encouragement” and that James (the one whom Herod killed) and his brother John are called “sons of thunder.” As for his being James the brother of Jesus, there’s plenty of scriptural evidence that Jesus had brothers, but as early as the fourth century there were Christians who claimed that these brothers were really cousins, because they wanted to assert the perpetual virginity of Mary. James is named as one of Jesus’ brothers in Mark 6 and Matthew 13, and we can assume that he was among the brothers who came with Mary to see Jesus in Luke 8. So now we have a real dispute, one that causes a lot of anger. Was Mary a perpetual virgin or wasn’t she? If you say that James was really Jesus’ brother, you’re saying that she wasn’t. If you’re saying that James was a cousin and that Alphaeus was his dad, you’re saying she was. If you try to combine the two by saying that he was Joseph and Mary’s son (born after Jesus, of course) but also a “son of wisdom” you’re in the Mary had other kids camp. If you say that these two people, James the son of Alphaeus and James the Brother of Jesus were different people, you’re left not knowing which of them speaks up at the Jerusalem council.

Whew. The James of Acts, who responds to the pharisee followers of Jesus with a shrug, saying, in effect, that there are important characteristics that a follower of Jesus should try to cultivate, but circumcision is not one of them, creates long-standing and ongoing controversy by his very existence and the fact that we don’t know, really, who he is. Everyone seems intent on reading their own agendas into his person, and not listening to what he says. If we could, we might simply say that the perpetual virginity of Mary is more or less besides the point. What’s important is that we love well and treat each other with grace. We shouldn’t make idols of ourselves or of compulsions. We shouldn’t force other people to adopt our cultural norms. This is indeed wise.

Regardless of what we think of James, there’s plenty of agreement and historical evidence that he was the leader of the Jewish Christians. This group started out as the most prominent (everyone who followed Christ in his life and began to follow him soon after the resurrection was Jewish), but by the time that the second century rolled to an end they had become a tiny minority, and eventually disappeared. James himself died horribly, being thrown from a tower and clubbed to death by a mob in 62 ce. Yet for us, as we work to build a Beloved Community in our own day, he stands as a paragon of wisdom. He was among the powerful majority, yet opened his arms to a powerless minority, even if that meant allowing large changes to the community that he helped to lead. And to do that, he had to avoid getting too caught up in the kinds of controversies that later arose around his own identity.

 

Acts 14:21-28 They appointed elders and entrusted them to the Lord

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Paul and Barnabas are not going to stay and live in the communities that they have founded, communities that are already under siege in the cities and towns that they’re based in. In their travels, Paul and Barnabas have already made enemies who seem intent on following them from place to place, internet trolls of the first century who make it their business to mock, attack, and build an opposition. How terrifying it must be for the little nascent churches of Lystra, Iconium and Antioch of Pisidia to be left on their own in such circumstances. They’ve barely been introduced to following the Way of Jesus, and now they have to figure out how to follow in that way all on their own.

They were men and women who were mostly from the same social class that Jesus and the apostles had been from – laborers and artisans. Some of them were Jewish and some were gentiles. Paul had taught them, and would continue to teach them, in Thomas Cahill’s words, that “the life of the believer is to be — at least ideally — a series of acts of generosity toward others without regard to self-indulgence or self-seeking (1).” Paul left them to ponder the thought that, again in Cahill’s words, “all humanity is caught up in a great cosmic drama in which each one, however humble or ridiculous, has a significant part to play — and that we cannot do without one another.”

The leaders of these communities were not well educated in Christian doctrine or theology, because at this point theology was simply the conversations they had with their friends as they tried to follow the way of Jesus, and doctrine didn’t exist. Leadership wasn’t about preaching, and it wasn’t about academic teaching. It wasn’t about maintaining buildings, because they were still meeting in each other’s houses. It wasn’t about speaking up in the forum or trying to effect or change the ways of government. All of those things are important in our context, but in their context government was never going to listen to a word they said. Leadership for them was, simply, the art of keeping a frightened but very idealistic and hopeful community together. Making sure that everyone was welcomed and treated with love. And making sure that the community didn’t become inward looking, but operated secretly to help those non-believers whom they lived among. These early leaders were teachers, but what they were teaching was a way of being, not a way of thinking.

I have to admit that I prefer this method of leadership. At a clergy conference that I attended early in my ministry, I heard someone say that you could never go wrong by loving your people. Surely this is right. There are many things that leaders are asked to do today, but the main question we should be asking is whether we do those things with love. Paul will later have many things to say about love, but the one I always think of is that love does not insist on having its own way. If some program, some idea, some hope that a leader has meets with resistance, and that resistance plants a seed of scorn and anger in that leader’s heart, then that leader should probably let their particular scheme go, or let it lie fallow until it’s time for it to grow. The spiritual question of leadership must always be, “can I hold it lightly?” Those of us who are called to be leaders should ask this question of our planned projects and ambitions, but we should also ask it of our own leadership.

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 12:1-19 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.