Tag: Beloved Community

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.

 

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 9:1-31 The Road to Damascus

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Paul’s story is probably one of the most important conversions in human history. It is the pivot point for the Book of Acts, the moment when the book’s true hero is introduced, the moment that will lead to the conversion of the gentiles and, hence, turn the followers of Jesus from a small community of Jews, living in Israel and worshipping at the temple, into a world religion. The import of this moment cannot be underestimated, but in this post I will only talk about two things – Saul’s vision, and the persecuted community that accepts him and renames him.

First, the vision. A light flashes, a voice is heard, God’s presence is announced. My guess is that, for Paul, a great deal happens as well. Teresa of Avila, whom I have mentioned many times and has been so fundamental to my reading of Luke/Acts, talks about those moments when “the soul sees into God himself.” She says that

all things can be seen in God because God has all things inside himself. Even though this vision passes in a moment, it engraves itself deeply in the memory and causes the most blessed confusion in the soul. This is a great favor. The soul becomes keenly aware of imperfect acts she has committed while inside of God. If only she had realized that she was dwelling inside the Beloved himself when she was doing those unconscious things!

For Paul, this feeling of imperfection must have been much worse than it is for most of us. When we see through the eyes of God, when we come to truly understand that we dwell within the divine, we can feel bad about all of our small failures that have ignored or taken for granted the great love that we’re swept up in. But Paul actively conspired against and tried to murder that love. His sin against the Holy Spirit was much greater than most other people’s. No wonder he was struck blind for three days. One can only imagine how he wrestled with his shame during that time, and how, in his blindness, his great vision remade him.

And yet there was a community that tried, always, to dwell within God, to align itself constantly to that great love. Ananias had a vision of his own, and this vision is as important to Paul’s story as his own. Love compelled him to go and find Paul, to heal him and take care of him. Then, when Paul escaped from Damascus and went to Jerusalem, it was Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement, whom he approached and who vouched for him with the community. Both Ananias and Barnabas understood that Paul, even when he was persecuting them, was also inside of God, to use Teresa’s metaphor. He was already united to them, even though he didn’t realize it and actively tried to resist it.

Which leaves me in awe of this early community, and of the potential of community in general. A community that realizes that it, and all things, are inside of God, is a community that can forgive more easily and love more easily. You can tell if you’re living within a community that sustains and cultivates this vision, because it will be a community that maximizes forgiveness and doesn’t worry much over slights. People still wrestle with their egos within such communities, but their egos don’t get final say. As Paul will later write in his second letter to the Corinthians, in such communities love doesn’t insist on having its own way.

(1) https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/288621/the-interior-castle-by-teresa-of-avila/9781594480058/

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 5:12-26 Peter’s Shadow

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The contemporary spiritual world is full of talk about shadows. This is due to the influence of Carl Jung, who talked about shadows as those parts of ourselves that we want to keep hidden, both from our neighbors and God, but most of all from ourselves. When we feel a strong dislike for someone and don’t know why, it’s because that person exhibits our shadow self. Maybe we claim that they’re selfish or weak, but it’s only because we blame them for bringing our own selfishness and weakness into the light. I first encountered shadow-talk in childhood, when I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. In that novel, Ged, a very gifted young wizard, full of pride and hubris, inadvertently summons his own shadow while trying to impress others with his magic. This shadow escapes from him, and he must spend the rest of the book hunting it, and growing in the humility that it takes to face a shadow. The book reveals what we all fear – that those parts of ourselves that we are most ashamed of will escape from our control and hurt others. But in spirituality, shadow work isn’t about getting better at repressing this shadow. It’s about learning to treat it gently, to forgive it, even to laugh at it, not in mockery, but in joy, when one can see how ridiculous our attempts to control it can be. Shadows can be redeemed. And a redeemed shadow can even be healing to other people.

Obviously, I think it’s significant that it’s Peter’s shadow that is healing people. People put themselves in the way of his shadow – they don’t run from it, but want to encounter it. This, truly, is what a redeemed shadow looks like. Peter doesn’t lose his shadow – a redeemed shadow is not, simply, vanquished. In Jungian terms, a shadow is anything outside of the light of consciousness, so Peter is probably not even aware of his shadow. That is, it’s still a shadow, not something he dwells on with his conscious mind. In a sense, it’s still beyond his control. But all of those traits are exactly what allow it to be redeemed. Our shadow selves can be seen as those parts of ourselves that are the well of our creativity – the unconscious parts of ourselves that can prompt us to thoughts and actions that our controlling conscious mind would never deem to think or undertake. A redeemed shadow like Peter’s is much closer to the unknowable, uncontrollable God, the understanding of God that Jesus tried to reveal to his disciples. The power of healing in Peter’s redeemed shadow might stem from exactly this – its a vision of a life that is released from fear and control, a life that doesn’t try to project its own disappointment and disregard onto other people, a life that is willing to stand exposed in the stark light of God, revealing all of its good and all of its bad and expecting to be loved, not judged.

Of course such a life is threatening to those who draw their power and prestige from judgment, from convincing others that they’re unworthy and in need of rules, rituals, life-hacks that can somehow restore them to grace, or at least make them better. This is why the temple authorities try so hard to put Peter and his friends in the darkness of a prison. They don’t want people to know that their shadows can be brought into the light.

Of course, most of us, myself included, have shadow selves that are not entirely redeemed, and when we try to bring them into the light, we are just as likely to hurt as to heal. Yet when we find ourselves living in Beloved Community, we are met with forgiveness, not scorn or judgment. We can cry in church, criticise our leaders, storm out of meetings, and find ourselves still loved, still accepted. We all have shadow work to do, but one of the great gifts of the community that the disciples founded is that it gives us a place in which to do it.