Tag: The Holy Spirit

Acts 21: 1-26 Does Paul ignore the Holy Spirit?

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This passage presents a real challenge to what I’ve been thinking and saying about blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. Ever since reading Luke 12, I’ve been assuming such blasphemy has something to do with ignoring the intuitive, improvisational urging of the Holy Spirit, and yet here Paul is, twice ignoring very clear indications that the Holy Spirit does not want him to go to Jerusalem. If my reading of Luke 12 is right (and now I’m really not sure that it is), then Paul is guilty of the one sin that Jesus names as entirely unforgivable.

I won’t argue that I’m somehow right regardless – that wouldn’t be humble. But this passage does make me wonder – can the Holy Spirit pull us in two ways at once? Paul, here, is split between two communities. He’s been with the gentiles of Europe for quite a while now, and although he occasionally gets visitors from the believers in Jerusalem, he’s far distant from them. Yet they’re a community that matters a great deal to him. He’s not interested in founding a radical new way of following Jesus that is completely separate from the old way. He’s not interested in creating a kind of splinter group out of the Gentile Christians. He’s a bridge between these two communities, and it’s important to him that they stay together.

So the Holy Spirit is speaking to the Gentile communities, and telling them very clearly that if Paul goes to Jerusalem, they’re going to lose him. Understandably, they’re not anxious to lose the person who has been both their leader and their friend. Yet the Holy Spirit is also speaking to Paul, and telling him that if these two communities that he loves draw too far apart, they’ll be lost both to each other and to Christ. The Holy Spirit is speaking to him and his friends, and he’s listening, but that doesn’t mean he can avoid making a hard choice.

Perhaps this passage is telling us that following the promptings of the Holy Spirit doesn’t mean surrendering our free will. The spirit can make things clear and teach us many things, but it can’t decide for us. We are not mere puppets of a crafty God who is trying to complete some kind of cosmic plan. God loves us so much that God will choose our freedom over any kind of divine plan every single time. The Holy Spirit isn’t here to dictate to us, only prompt us, nudge us, show us a variety of choices. Maybe the only real blasphemy is when we choose not to listen at all, so that we can avoid having to make a hard choice.

Acts 19 – 20.16 Sleep and Riots

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

This is a very long reading, the longest I think we’ve gotten in Forward Movement’s arrangement of Luke and Acts daily readings. The riot at Ephesus is the center of it, and the story of Eutychus dying from listening to a long sermon seems like a strange little coda. But I think that the two stories have something in common, and that even the story of the Sons of Sceva contributes to the theme. Each of these vignettes is about confusion. The Sons of Sceva don’t really know how to do the job of exorcist, the crowds don’t really know what they’re rioting about, and poor young Eutychus is so confused by the intricacy of Paul’s sermon that he falls asleep. Okay, maybe he falls asleep for some other reason. All I know is that theological intricacy sometimes makes me sleepy, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the same was happening to Eutychus. Every one of the characters in these stories lacks some vital form of understanding, and they react to their confusion differently, but still, I think, it is confusion that causes the reaction.

Consider the crowd in Ephesus. Luke tells us that “some were shouting one thing, some another; for the assembly was in confusion, and most of them did not know why they had come together.” People were just getting swept up in a mob mentality, and didn’t even know why they were there. After all, only a small number of them were silversmiths, and actually economically concerned with Paul’s preaching. These silversmiths sold souvenir models of the temple of Artemis, and they worried that Paul would lead people away from the worship of Artemis and harm their bottom lines. So they cynically stirred things up, and I imagine that they were gratified by the results. Clearly, confusion can be very dangerous, especially the confusion of the crowd.

But what about the Sons of Sceva? They were exorcists, so they were used to their jobs, and they must have been utterly bewildered when they fled the house, their clothes in tatters, their bodies bruised. The thing that had been working wasn’t working anymore. They experienced the confusion of the new, the way that changes in our society seem to ruin our old ways of doing things. The Holy Spirit is zooming around, altering the make-up of society and the inner beings of the people it touches, and suddenly everything is up for grabs. Unlike the crowd, their confusion was justified.

What about poor Eutychus? I said a long way back, at the beginning of this project, that Luke has a sense of humor, and here it is on full display. Imagine the uproarious laughter that would greet this story if it were told around the dinner table during a house church gathering. This story brings Paul down a peg or two. You can imagine people meeting each other’s eyes with a look that says, yes, he could resurrect the dead, but boy could that guy get carried away with the sound of his own voice. To me, Eutychus’ sleep is the result of Paul’s own temporary confusion about how to deliver the message effectively.

If we can say that there’s such a thing as a spirituality of confusion, these three stories help to flesh it out. Don’t contribute to confusion if you can avoid it, especially if it’s the confusion of the crowd. Don’t expect your methods of doing things to always work for you, and be prepared to encounter the new. And don’t get so lost in the intricacies of your own thoughts that you stop communicating clearly to other people. I know that I’ve been guilty of each of these three things, and that makes me very glad that Paul resurrects Eutychus. Confusion, even deadly confusion, is not a permanent state. Even it can be redeemed.

Acts 16:1-15 Lydia and the Holy Spirit

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

A friend recently asked me whether the Holy Spirit worked through nudges and intuition. I was quick to point out the moments when the Holy Spirit works through miracles, visions, and moments of ecstatic feeling in a group, mostly because I want to preserve the idea that such things are still possible. But my friend was basically right – in our lives today, we mostly sense the Holy Spirit through the feelings we have of the rightness or wrongness of something. Today’s passage from Acts makes it abundantly clear that Paul and his friends also relied on their intuitions to discern the will of the Holy Spirit, sometimes at some cost. At the beginning of the passage, they go from place to place in Phrygia and Galatia, and the Holy Spirit keeps preventing them from speaking. They’re listening closely to those nudges and intuitions, even if it means that their wanderings seem aimless. It must have come as a relief to Paul to experience an actual vision, a dream of a Macedonian man. Dreams might seem like filmy stuff, but they can be a lot clearer than intuitions.

When they get to Macedon, it’s not a man they meet, but a woman. There, at the river beside the gate, they meet Lydia, the first European convert to Christianity, and the leader of the first European church, there in her house in Philippi. The Holy Spirit, it seems, is not very literal about gender, or anything else, really. Its purpose isn’t to dictate events, but to push things along, to get people to places and into situations where new things can happen. In this passage it tells Paul and his friends what not to do – don’t preach in Asia – but it also tells them what to do – make disciples of the women washing clothes in the river. It also helps them to have a broad understanding of leadership. The Holy Spirit has rattled their understanding of the world and social convention, and given them the freedom to seek grace, talent, and wisdom in everyone they meet.

Recently I’ve been watching movies and TV shows about people who were never given a chance to exercise their full potential, young women of sharp intelligence and willpower who had to negotiate mine fields of abusive, cowardly, and angry men to get even the smallest modicum of respect. It makes me angry. Why should the world be this way? I find the patriarchal systems of power that deny and dominate them to be blasphemous, a sin against the Holy Spirit. There’s a passage in 1 Corinthians, ch. 14 that seems to support these patriarchal assumptions. Many scholars think that this passage wasn’t in Paul’s original letter, but was added later by a scribe who couldn’t see past his own cultural assumptions of male superiority. It’s hard to image that Paul, who converted Lydia and established the first European church in her house, could have said it. It’s hard to believe that Paul, who was so open to the Holy Spirit, could have blasphemed against the movement of the spirit in such a way.

Acts 11:1-18 The Baptism of the Holy Spirit

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Peter has just done a very surprising thing, and Luke is lavishing attention on it, as is Forward Movements calendar of readings and devotions, which we are borrowing for the Diocese of Southern Ohio’s Big Read. Slowing down like this, and spending four days on this single incident, is a way of acknowledging what a big deal Peter’s baptising of Cornelius’ household is. For Luke, it’s rhetorically huge. Luke was, after all, a buddy of Paul’s, and Paul became notorious for baptizing gentiles, for boldly and rapidly expanding the idea of who could belong to the Beloved Community of followers of Jesus Christ. We’ll hear, soon, about the many disputes that Paul got into with the other Jewish members of the movement. When Luke was with Paul, he probably found himself thinking “yeah, but Peter did it first,” whenever anyone accused his friend of being too open and inviting to those who, in their eyes, didn’t really belong. So this is Luke’s great “Peter did it first” story, a grand defense of Paul before Paul has become the main character of the story.

It is also a not-too-subtle hint to Paul’s detractors that they should be more generous and better behaved. After all, the community that Peter reports back to in Judea vocalize all the same complaints and worries as Paul’s critics, but once they’ve heard Peter’s story, they accept and even celebrate his actions. Luke is, in effect, saying to these detractors, “look, if the movement of the Holy Spirit was a good enough reason for baptising gentiles a few years ago, why isn’t it a good enough reason now?”

Throughout Christian history, many people have come up with rebuttals to Luke’s argument, without really saying that this is what they’re doing. These people aren’t misguided. In fact, their concerns are valid and should be taken seriously. After all, there have been times where people thought that the Holy Spirit was telling them to practice free love or murder their enemies. There have been charismatic leaders who seemed full of the Holy Spirit, and led their followers to tragic endings. Given this, the best rebuttal is to simply ask, how do we know that it’s the Holy Spirit that’s really at work, and not human vanity or power seeking vainglory? The best answer might be to ask who is being served by any perceived visitation of the Holy Spirit. If claims of the Holy Spirit’s presence create systems in which certain people accumulate power and privilege, they are false claims. If anyone says that they don’t have to listen to the wishes of their community because they’ve “received the Holy Spirit,” their claim is probably false. Of course, sometimes the Holy Spirit allows us to see injustices in the communities we belong to, so it’s best not to make a hard and fast rule. Perhaps the only true test is whether those who claim to have received the Holy Spirit are humble and full of love. If they are, then the Holy Spirit has probably baptised them.

Acts 8:9-25 Simon Magus

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Simon of Samaria, known to the Christian tradition as Simon Magus, is one of those rare characters in scripture who have a particular sin named after them, in this case, the sin of simony. Simony usually means the buying and selling of church offices, but here at the beginning it is nothing more than the belief that one can somehow buy the power to transmit the Holy Spirit. I have been talking, on this blog, about what it means to sin against the Holy Spirit, and here’s a clear example. Thinking that you can control the Holy Spirit because of your wealth is just such a sin. More than that, it’s in this story that the early church reveals something about itself. Despite the claims of its detractors, this group of worshipping, believing, and healing people is not a cult. They claim no secret knowledge which people have to pay to access. God’s love and the power of the Holy Spirit is available to anyone through grace. There’s no way to earn it, and there certainly isn’t any way to buy it.

One can imagine that Simon Magus felt justified in his request. After all, this Holy Spirit was doing a great deal of good for people, truly healing and transforming people as it descended. A person who genuinely wants to do good for the world can look for tools to use in that mission. The problem is that the Holy Spirit is not a tool. Grace is not a tool. It cannot be controlled or manipulated. And those who try usually have hidden motives that they might not even recognize within themselves. Yes, Simon wants to do good. But he’s also used to being known as the healer, the mystic, the guru. He wants to maintain that status, even as he embraces the apostles’ teaching.

Christianity has always been a syncretistic religion, and can be accused with some fairness of a kind of reverse simony. We Christians have often been fine with appropriating other cultures’ spiritual teachings. The very contemplative tradition that I have been interpreting Luke/Acts through was in conversation with Buddhism from a very early date, and you can tell. We tend to think that those who are not against us are for us, and that practices that help cultivate love are good, no matter where they came from. I don’t think that this is a bad thing, as long as it’s done with love and respect, citing our sources and crediting our teachers with what we’ve learned, regardless of their religious tradition. But we don’t own these practices, no matter what they are, and we can’t force the Holy Spirit to flow through them. If we find ourselves confusing these practices with grace, we are making a mistake.

So even at a time when the church has lost much of its secular and political power, and there’s little profit in buying or selling church offices, Simon Magus and the sin he’s named for should still make us cautious. We can go practice yoga, and matta, the Tibetan “mother as other” meditation, we can eat diets based on Leviticus and get really serious about our sabbath practice, we can make sure we’re praying at least five times a day and whirl like dervishes as we seek God, but God’s grace will come to us when God wills it, and we’ll never be able to control it.