Tag: Transformation and Conventionality

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 10:1-16 Shocking Visions and the Temple

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Cornelius is praying at 3:00 in the afternoon, which is the time of the temple sacrifice far away in Jerusalem. But divine presence doesn’t make itself felt in the temple. Instead an angel appears to Cornelius, who is a gentile, a centurion who has shown interest in Judaism and is generous in giving alms. But Cornelius has no proper right to divine visitation, at least in the minds of the temple authorities. And those authorities are unseen characters in this section. The temple laws and rules are still very much alive in the minds of Peter and the other disciples. They’ve been going to the temple a lot, and they can’t enter the temple unless they’re ritually pure. As L. William Countryman points out, “because worshipers were expected to be pure when entering the Temple, the implication is that the Christians maintained themselves in a state of constant purity.”

Unlike that other centurion in Luke 7:1-10, there is no urgency in Cornelius’ request. He doesn’t have a beloved servant who is dying. Peter, who’s been traveling wherever he’s needed, might have good reason to question whether Cornelius actually does need him. What is this summons all about?

But of course, he doesn’t receive the summons until he has a vision of his own. And the vision he gets is startling. That blanket full of food that descends from the sky isn’t just telling him to enjoy some pork and shellfish. It’s telling him that his time in the temple is over for now, that he won’t be able to return to the purity that allowed him entry. The fact that it descends three times during the vision (and, possibly accompanied by the same dialog with the heavenly voice each time) should remind us of Peter’s three denials of Christ. This eating of unclean things, this ending of any concern with purity, is now part of confessing Christ, of acknowledging Christ’s great prominence.

It is notable how slowly Peter and the other disciples are being weaned of dependence on the temple. It’s been the locus of spiritual power in their lives for so long that they have trouble imagining new ways of being faithful in their spirituality. This should stand as a reminder to us. We need to acknowledge our own temples – the norms and practices that are keeping us separated from other people – and remain open to new visions of faithfulness as they arrive. They might startle us. They might even shock us. Yet they will open our capacity for discovery, and hence for joy.

Luke 8:1-25 Being the Good Soil

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

Enlight206 2The Parable of the Sower is the first parable in Luke’s Gospel, and includes a handy teaching on the very nature of parables and what we can expect from them in v. 10.  Richard Rohr compares parables to Zen koans. They’re meant to split apart our normal ways of thinking about things and help us see with different eyes and hear with different ears.  Which is why Jesus tells the disciples that the meaning of parables are hidden from most people. In order to truly engage with them, you must be committed to setting aside your current ways of thinking about and doing things, and head off into the numinous but sometimes very frightening unknown.  The disciples, who have given up a great deal to follow Jesus, have already taken the first steps. They contain the good soil that Jesus is talking about, and will allow themselves to be challenged by the rest of the parables as he tells them.

Rohr points out that the Parable of the Sower is about exactly such spiritual readiness:

The seed fell on several different types of soil.  Some just aren’t ready for the Word. They’re not there yet.  It’s not their fault; when the student is ready the teacher will arrive.  Normally we let God in the way we let everything else in. We meet God at our present level of relational maturity: preoccupied, closed, struck, or ready.  Most spiritual work is readying the student. Both soil and soul have to be a bit unsettled and loosened up a bit. As long as we’re too comfortable, too opinionated, too sure we have the whole truth, we’re just rock and thorns.  Anybody throwing us seed is just wasting time.

This is a reversal of how the Parable of the Sower is sometimes read, with the assumption that the good soil is the orthodox soil, all loamy with received wisdom and intellectual obedience.  But there’s a second, shocking parable that’s buried in this section from Luke, one that overthrows many of our orthodox assumptions of a proper Christian life. Jesus’ mother and brothers appear, and he’s told about it with the suggestion that maybe he should help them negotiate their way through the crowd so that they can be by his side.He seems strangely indifferent to helping them, saying that “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Everything we’ve been taught about the central role of family is overthrown. Jesus wants us to extend the love and care we might have for our families to everyone, to break the boundary of family so that we might be more like God.  

Because God, as Ronald Rolheiser points out, is also subverting our expectations in this parable.  God is acting like a foolish, profligate farmer. “Who would waste seed on soil that can never produce a harvest?” Rolheiser asks.  “God, it seems, doesn’t ask that question but simply keeps scattering his seed everywhere, over generously, without calculating whether it is a good investment or not in terms of return.  And, it seems, God has an infinite number of seeds to scatter, perpetually, everywhere. God is prodigious beyond imagination.” This parable, like all the other parables, is meant to jolt us out of any understanding that would limit God’s love to the good or the worthy.  

In fact, our very insistence that God reward our assumed worthiness will make us into bad or rocky soil.  It will destroy our capacity to see and to hear. Again, Jesus shocks us in this remarkable passage when he says “For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. Then pay attention to how you listen; for to those who have, more will be given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to have will be taken away.”  He is not talking about material wealth here, but to our capacity to listen, to be plowed up by what we hear so that we can nurture the seeds of divinity when we encounter them. If we resist being unsettled and loosened and turned into good soil, then the religiosity that has gotten us this far will begin to slip away. We will abandon the spiritual life and say that it was doing nothing for us.  But if we accept our discomfort and truly listen with open ears, even knowing that what we hear might change and disrupt us, we will begin to grow, and find our capacity to see and hear expanding day by day.

 

Quotes come from Richard Rohr’s Everything Belongs and Ronald Rolheiser’s Wrestling with God

Luke 1:1-56 Suddenly the Spirit is Talking to Everybody

~ KPB Stevens ~ Leave a comment

The Holy Spirit pours into the beginning of Luke’s Gospel, embodied by angels and the singing, leaping responses that human beings make to them.  When the angels arrive its with a wildness and strangeness that has mutating effects on the people who encounter them. An old man falls silent, an old woman becomes pregnant, a virgin conceives and sings a song that anticipates the reordering of the entire world.  Luke is telling us that encounters with the divine will transform our lives, and that people with transformed lives eventually end up participating in the transformation of existence itself. This is the opening trumpet blast announcing Luke’s spirituality, which is about divine encounter, surrendered conventionality, and the remaking of human existence.

Elizabeth and Zechariah are both old when an angel appears with its revelations.  They are both Levites, descendants of Aaron, born into the priestly cast, their position in society assured since birth. They do their duty, get along with their neighbors, and act rightly in all circumstances. The only thing about them that could cause anyone to talk behind their backs is the fact that they have no children. Elizabeth feels this keenly. She refers to it as a disgrace, and maybe she thinks about Sarah, that great matriarch of her people, who also reached old age in a childless condition.

So where is the note of unconventionality that could lead them to raise an iconoclast like John the Baptist?  Maybe there is some wildness inside of them, carefully repressed through all their long years. But I suspect that John’s wildness is the result of Zechariah’s encounter with the angel. It’s hard to find a good image of this encounter. Baroque and Rococo paintings show very human looking angels, naked and floating suspended in swaths of cloth, descending on a startled looking old man who is, somehow, surrounded by onlookers, even though the Gospel tells us that Zechariah was alone in the Holy of Holies. Angels in art are rarely weird enough for the story that’s being conveyed in scripture. Contemporary art does a better job at capturing their essence. In paintings by Alexander Roitburd and Wassily Kandinsky they are riots of color, deeply abstract, and there’s nothing quiet or restful about looking at them. The angel of the Lord who appears to Zechariah is terrifying, and not very patient.  Poor Zechariah gets struck dumb for voicing only the tiniest of doubts, and really its a doubt that’s more about his own unsuitability than it is about God’s intentions.

We’re not told if Elizabeth learns about her husband’s encounter with the angel. He certainly can’t tell her about it. But she gets pregnant pretty quickly, and she has no trouble believing that its happening. In fact, both women in this first chapter of Luke’s Gospel fare better than the men. When the Angel Gabriel appears to Mary, she questions divine revelation, just like Zechariah did. But Gabriel is a more patient divine messenger, explains things more thoroughly, and doesn’t strike her dumb. Instead, she gets to sing, and gives us the words of the lovely and challenging Magnificat, which we can sing, also. It’s through the words of this hymn that we come to understand that a transformation is about to take place, that the world is about to be remade.