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.

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.

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.

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.