Tag: Beloved Community

Acts 2:1-13 They are full of new wine

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

In a sense, the scoffers are right. The disciples are full of new wine. Without meaning to, they use Jesus’ own language, when he says that you cannot put new wine into old wine skins (Luke 5:33-39). Their very scoffing in the presence of the miracle of Pentecost shows that they are the old wine skins, bloated and contented with old wine that has never been tapped and drunk for the good of the world, too overfull to allow anything new to enter in. Yet the miracle is there, and what’s remarkable about this passage is that the scoffers get so little attention. Most people, Luke says, can see and at least wonder at the miraculous when it occurs, and they don’t have to be part of any special community to do so. For here are the disciples, holders of a fragile sense of community, recently broken at the crucifixion, gathering in a house with wide open windows instead of a room with locked doors. A rushing wind arrives, tongues of flames settle over them, and passerby on the street gather at the windows. The disciples make no attempt to close the shutters – they are not secretive, nor self-protective. Instead they welcome the interlopers, and their generosity is a translating force. Their words become comprehensible to everyone.

Let’s pause and reflect on how remarkable this is. The disciples have every reason to hate and to be afraid. Their new community has every reason to become a cult, full of secret knowledge and hidden rituals in dark rooms. Instead, from the very beginning, their community is wide open to the rest of the world, regardless of what that brings. Yes, there will be moments when persecution will cause them to gather in catacombs. But here in Acts the message is clear. Esoteric rituals known only to initiates will never be the norm. Instead there will be a widening, a generous invitation to any passerby, a willingness to expose the fragility of community to forces that might be cynical, cruel, and intending destruction. There is so much courage in this, so much willingness to love and to ignore the potential of hate.

There is also a startling willingness to set aside ideas of perfection. No one is asking the passerby who gather at the windows whether they’re worthy of witnessing the miracle. Some of them clearly aren’t. But, of course, the disciples aren’t particularly worthy, either. Throughout Luke’s Gospel we saw them as very flawed – frequently misunderstanding Jesus, arguing about status, running away from sorrow and pain. Their knowledge of their flaws must remain to them. The past isn’t erased by the resurrection, it’s redeemed. It lives inside of them, and makes them humble, and that humility makes them generous. Who are we, they ask themselves, to tell any of these people gathering at the windows that they’re unworthy? We’re unworthy, and yet we’re accepted. We’re unworthy, and yet we’re loved. If this is true even of us, surely it must be true of everyone else.

This will remain one of the most important features of this resurrection community. Again and again, they will be tempted to become insular, to exclude strangers because of  the slights, even the violence, of their enemies. Again and again they will turn away from this temptation and resolve to keep the windows open, which means that both people who scoff and people who wonder will look in. It doesn’t matter. They’ve decided to become a new wine skin, and full of new wine.

Acts 1:12-26 The Witnesses

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The first concern of the disciples after the resurrection is to heal their community.  They have several reasons to feel incomplete if there are only eleven of them. They are twelve because twelve is the number of Jacob’s sons, and thus of the original tribes of Israel. They are twelve because Jesus appointed twelve, and laid the structural basis of their community. And, most importantly, they need to be twelve because Judas wounded them in his betrayal, and they need that wound to be healed. And that’s what I want to think through today – the healing of community, and what a healed community, that is a resurrected community, looks like and acts like.

I have to admit that I feel unequal to this task, since I, unlike the disciples, have never lived completely within such a community. Most Christian communities, be they churches or young adult communities or convents, remain broken. They are, metaphorically, communities of eleven disciples, not twelve. Everyone is still smarting from little betrayals, bringing the betrayals and hurts inflicted on them in the past into the communities that they find themselves in, and bringing the shame and guilt from their own betrayals of others with them as well. Yet even these broken, incomplete communities are called to be witnesses of the resurrection. And they’re able to do so because, even when broken and incomplete, they can catch glimpses of what the resurrected community is really like.

A witnessing community is both honest about its own brokenness and able to envision what it would be like to be fully healed. Such communities, like the individuals who inhabit them, are both humble and idealistic. Because the ideal is so clearly articulated, people know when they’re falling short, but because their stance to themselves and one another is rooted in humility, they approach their failings with laughter and forgiveness, rather than punishment and scorn. They’re able to adapt to the needs of others, and delight in discoveries of new ways of doing things, while also honoring the old ways. And they’re always waiting for the moment when some quieter, shyer presence steps into the center and starts to lead. They’re always waiting for, and honoring, the Matthias’ and Josephs, and ready to accept their witness when the spirit is ready to speak through them.

All of that transformation that Jesus insists on in Luke’s Gospel now begins to express itself in community. The disciples are transformed people, and the church that begins to form around them is a transformed collective, a group of people who are able to live within the Kingdom of God. Like a contemplative state, the fullness of this community won’t last forever. They’ll fall from this state of grace back into their humanness, and sometimes squabble and wander off on their own paths. But they will remember and witness to these early days. And it’s through their witness that we come to understand the possibilities of our own communities, and to rejoice in them.

 

Acts 1:1-11 The Big Heart

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

At the end of Luke’s Gospel, it seems that Jesus ascends into heaven very soon after he appears to the frightened disciples in the Upper Room. But at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, Luke is willing to be more expansive, to linger over the time that Jesus was with his followers, those incredible forty days when they lived the resurrection life completely and without reserve. I’ve mentioned that Teresa of Avila thought that one could only stay in a state of suspended grace for about twenty minutes. But I imagine that the disciples were in that state for the entire forty days of Easter. This is perhaps an overstatement. They must have come down from their spiritual high enough to worry a little about current political concerns, because they asked him if this was the time when he would restore the kingdom of Israel. He refused to promise them political restoration. As with prayer, they weren’t offered the fulfillment of their temporal wishes. Instead, they were given the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And it is now that the Holy Spirit truly comes into its own. For the past two months, I have been meeting weekly with a wonderful group of parishioners at St. John’s in Worthington. They are the primary community with whom I’ve studied the Gospel of Luke. At our very first meeting, we held a Wisdom Circle (I’ll present a format for leading circles with a post in March) and I asked them what arose them when they heard the words “Holy Spirit.” Our collective answer became this beautiful prayer:

The still small voice asks for our attention –
the angelic, made present to us, invokes our thankfulness –
for a moment, we are the same played note that God plays –
an unknown note chiming, ceaselessly, within the ear –
we are guided by what we hear,
and the spirit listens when we cry for help.
We look, for a moment, through the spirit’s eyes,
eyes of compassion and change –
we feel the spirit like a ligament, linking us to each other,
bone to bone.
The spirit doesn’t mind if we rebel,
but will always remind us of what’s right.
It’s rightness is in the air, it’s an atmosphere
– calm all around us, love in our hearts,
we are guided, compelled to act,
to open our eyes to little moments of observed beauty,
to love.

As we read the Acts of the Apostles, my main focus will be community, because I believe that this is also Luke’s focus, that he, along with the Apostle Paul, his friend, is asking the question of community – how can it teach us, form us, and how can we serve it? Because after the resurrection, Christ becomes visible in the world through the work of community. And, like any individual person, community can reject Christ, even when it’s claiming to love Him.

As I think about and ask these questions of community, I will turn from the Spanish mystics who have so informed my reading of Luke, and invite other voices into the conversation (although I doubt that I’ll be able to keep from mentioning John and Teresa from time to time). I want to include contemporary creators of community processes, such as Parker Palmer and Mary Pierce Brosmer in our conversation. And, thanks to my spiritual director, who recommended Marilyn Sewell wonderful anthology “Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women’s Spirituality,” we will be joined by the voices of some amazing poets. In fact, let me end this post with one of those poets, Anne Sexton, whose poem The Big Heartis a kind of hymn to the spiritual gift of community to a person’s life.

The Big Heart
Anne Sexton

‘Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold.’ – From an essay by W. B. Yeats

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of conch shells,
they speak back with the wine of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in—
all in comes the fury of love.

Luke 24:36-53 The Resurrected Mind

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

I have not paid much attention to the mind while writing this blog about Luke’s Gospel, and now when I come to the end, I am struck by the fact that Jesus’ last teaching was not about ethics or seeing with spiritual eyes. Instead, “he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” Just as he healed the memories of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus (and did some scriptural teaching, as well), now he heals the intelligence. I write those words with some trepidation, because, ever since the enlightenment, we’ve had a tendency to idolize the intelligence, to become dry and didactic in our study of scripture, to repeat the necessary discoveries of German scholars and think that we’re wise. Or at least that’s the tendency of those of us who are seminary trained, because seminary is about educating the mind, rather than the soul. Maybe that’s appropriate, since the deep, spiritual education that Luke’s Gospel gives us is the result of following Christ out in the world, rather than sitting in academic cloisters. Still, I can’t help but feel that seminary can do a disservice in its approach, if it makes an idol of the mind and the intelligence.

Recently, I picked up Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and read these words:

God speaks in a variety of ways to all of us impartially. We are often too prying to profit from our reading of Scripture; we want to understand and argue when we ought simply to read on. If you want to draw benefit, read simply with humble faith; and never desire to be known for your cleverness. Be ready to ask, and listen in silence to the words of the Saints (1).

Read with humility, Thomas a Kempis says, and I take that to mean that we should try to read with healed minds. Because in cultures that prize and reward intelligence, the mind becomes the bedroom where the ego goes to tryst. You can study and learn out of a desire to dominate and control others, reading and writing out of a deep fear that people won’t find you intelligent, or clever. You can study and learn without ever experiencing moments of grace in which the mind, like the eyes, are opened to a deeper compassion and a greater love for all the world.

This might seem like a strange way to try and bask within the resurrection. Jesus is Risen! I hear you say, why are you spending time commenting on academia? My answer is that we’re only halfway through the story. Jesus is risen, and the disciples are called to form a resurrected community. In the weeks to come, my focus will shift to community, to practices that attempt to enact the kingdom, to the ways of learning and being transformed that arise when we learn to trust our communities and live in them humbly.  In these Beloved Communities, it is not individual wit or learning that matters so much. Or it matters only to the extent that it can be offered to others in service and love. The healed mind understands, as Thomas Merton puts it, that “God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone. We are members one of another and everything that is given to one member is given for the body.”

(1) Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.5