Being the Church Then and Now: Issues from the Acts of the Apostles
William Loader
5. "In him we live and move and have our being,
even as some of your poets have said." (Acts 17:28)
The captivity of images and the creativity of imagination: on being open to the Spirit
Introduction
In this
study we shall look at two stories which illustrate one of the main themes of
Acts: being open to the Spirit. According to Luke’s story, well meaning human
beings inevitably turn in wrong directions, but God never abandons them. Time
and time again, God breaks through their limited understanding, their wrong
images, and opens before them new possibilities. The Spirit is, after all, the
Spirit of new beginnings, the Spirit of resurrection, the Spirit of creation
out of chaos. In every generation the Spirit renews, recreates, lifts the
imagination to new hope, new vision. For the Spirit is also the Spirit of the
kingdom, the Spirit of the kingdom now, that moves us along the agenda of the
kingdom of justice and peace. The Spirit empowers us to be the Church, to be
the kingdom for now, in the world.
1. Peter and
Cornelius
The first
episode is almost comic in the way Luke tells the story. Cornelius, a Gentile
centurion and a Jewish sympathiser, sees a vision at the ninth hour. Counting
from 6 am as the first hour, we see him having his afternoon snooze or a long
siesta. God moves him to seek out Peter in neighbouring Joppa. The next day
Peter, probably following the Jewish hours of prayer goes up onto the roof of
his house to pray at noonday. He is moved to ecstasy and sees a vision. The
reader with any Jewish background senses the impossible situation. Peter as a
Jew may have contact with a Gentile, but how far will be willing to go?
Contacts between Jews and non Jews were unavoidable, but the likely events to
come would confront Peter with the challenge of going beyond these norms. This
would offend the laws of piety.
At this
point Luke tells us that Peter has a dream. The dream seems at first only
indirectly related to the issue of going to Cornelius. It is about clean and
unclean food. The Old Testament designates some foods clean and some unclean,
some which may be eaten and others which may never be eaten. The Gentiles did
not observe such a distinction and usually ate meat slaughtered in association
with a pagan religious rite. Therefore to eat with them would inevitably lead
to a breaking of these scriptural prohibitions. This was one of the reasons why
close contact with Gentiles had to be forbidden. They and their food were
unclean. The commandments about clean and unclean food are there for all to
read in the scripture of the Old Testament and the Old Testament was the
scripture both for Jews and for Christians. It was Peter’s Bible. So the issue
in the dream is amongst other things about correct Bible interpretation.
In
response to the invitation to eat unclean food Peter refuses point blank. He
knew the scripture well and intends to keep it. But like the people Stephen was
attacking, Peter’s reverence for scripture was too much of the fundamentalist
mould and failed to read it from its centre. The theologian in the dream
confronts Peter: don’t call what God has created unclean! Peter might have
shown himself rather thick during the ministry of Jesus, but this time he twigs
to the reality immediately. At the very centre of scripture is the faith that
God is creator. Everything else should be seen in that light and when any
commandment stands against this central thrust, it is to give way. What a
scripture writing generation had to see as taboo might in another generation be
seen in quite a different light. In this category come a number of biblical
statements, including those about divorce, slavery, household order, monetary
interest, and sexuality, including much that is written about homosexuality.
Not to have the freedom at least to contemplate such issues in this light is
not to know the freedom which is the essence of the gospel. It is to range
oneself with those who stood against Jesus and the Spirit in the name of well
meaning religion.
Of course,
it was with this freedom of the Spirit that Jesus interpreted scripture. At the
heart was love. Whenever anything stood in the way of love’s way, whether it be
sabbath law, purity law, even the law of honouring father and mother, love
should always win. Jesus did not abandon the commandments, but he interpreted
them from the centre and so came to be in great conflict with the those
inclined to a fundamentalist approach which saw scripture not only as witness
but also as God’s infallible voice captured in human speech. In the scripture
Jesus heard God’s word; he recognised its melody; those who opposed him mostly
heard only the notes.
Peter’s
vision is like the ministry of Jesus in another respect as well. It appeals to
God as creator: do not call what God has made unclean. God loves what he has
made. God loves the apparently unlovely and God loves even those who have
turned their back on love and made a mess of their lives, because God is
creator and they are God’s creation. Jesus uses the same kind of simple
argument to appeal to people to understand what he was saying about love. The
father of the prodigal son runs down the road to embrace his son, long before
he has any idea of the son’s repentance and reform. He loves the son because he
is his son. If that is what any decent parent would do, why isn’t it the same
with God? Jesus’ parables were very homely and down to earth. This is the
message of the gospel, this is the recurrent theme in the symphony of
scripture, this is the word of the Lord.
So Peter
was being led back to the heart of the gospel again as he faced this new
situation. This gospel of love is the bread from heaven upon which the soul
feeds; it is the water of life that quenches our thirst; it is the sap of the
vine through which we are enabled to bear fruit. The discipline of prayer is
the discipline of returning again and again to that love. It is to hear those
words spoken over ourselves: call not that which God has made unclean. It is to
know and believe that we are clean, every part of us, everyone of us. No part
of us, no one of us, however unworthy, however fallen, however smeared, however
shamed, has been abandoned by God the creator. This is our life. This is our
hope. For this Jesus lived; for this he died; for this he rose again.
What Peter
learned in the vision was that this was not only true of himself; it was true
of all God’s creation and in the immediate setting: it was true of Gentiles,
“the others” who stood outside of Judaism. The outrageous grace of God. It was
outrageous for Jews. But it also outrageous for many Christians of the day. How
could they assume that God simply accepts Gentile sinners by sheer grace
without first insisting that they commit themselves to keeping the commands of
scripture. It was the old scripture interpretation debate again which nearly
split the Church.
Ranged on
one side were those who followed the consistent position that Gentiles should
be accepted into the community of faith on the same basis as Jews and that
meant following the scriptural injunction that they first be circumcised and
then commit themselves to live as Jews in total obedience to the commandments.
This was the strict fundamentalist line and the most traditionally respectable.
At the other end was Paul who had seen the light on the Damascus Road and knew
that it was by sheer grace that God offered a relationship of love to all, both
Jews and Gentiles alike, and that the essence of scripture was about living out
that relationship of love. He argued that this in effect fulfilled the Law more
than any pious and tedious obedience of individual prescriptions could ever do.
To be scriptural for Paul, too, meant to read scripture from its heart, not to
live by the letter. Paul’s position most consistently reflects the position of
Jesus.
We may be
disappointed to hear that Peter was not as consistent as Paul. Paul tells us
that once when conservative Jewish Christians from James of Jerusalem arrived
in Antioch, Peter wavered. Both Peter and Paul had been eating freely with
Gentile Christians, but Peter withdrew under conservative pressure. Acts,
itself, seems even a little confused about the outcome of the debates. Luke has
been led to believe that the solution was a compromise which demanded Gentiles
keep a certain selection of Old Testament laws, including those on meat and
marriage among kin. It was a long time before Paul’s view prevailed. There is
some indication that Paul and Peter had come to a common position by the time
they spent their last years in Rome and we may assume the gospel of Jesus
prevailed.
This is a
piece of early church history. But it equally reflects our own. Fundamentalisms
of the familiar still quench the Spirit. Within ourselves as individuals we
still need to hear the declaration of cleanness. And within our world the
Spirit declares God’s passion for all peoples without discrimination on the
basis of race, gender or creed. For the Spirit holds before us the vision of
the kingdom when all peoples shall come to love and praise God in justice and
peace, when all peoples from east and west and north and south will sit at
table with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The same Spirit feeds us with this
agenda at the eucharist and nourishes our souls with limitless love. The same
Spirit sends us out courageously to cross the boundaries which religion and
unfaith erect and to live out daily the heart of the scripture in true
obedience to its message.
2. Paul and Athens
Our second
episode presents Paul in Athens. He wanders among the images of various
deities, the gods in the market place. Quick fire gods who promise immediate
relief, gods for the greedy, gods of ecstatic indulgence, gods of nationalism,
gods with all the answers, gods of magic, gods of institutions, gods to
bolster the Roman political system, gods to keep the poor happily poor, gods
for the curious, all the gods we find in our own market places and sometimes in
our churches and more. Paul confronts the savage pluriformity of a cosmopolitan
world and stands up to its best philosophies. The ingredients are all there for
a characteristic Jewish tirade for monotheism, much as Paul had written in the
first chapter of the letter to the Romans.
But Luke’s
story moves differently. Paul notes the pluriform religiosity arid somewhat
playfully mentions that one image had been dedicated to an unknown God. Of this
God he speaks, the creator God who cannot be captured in temples made with
hands or poured into moulds of human images. This is the God of all peoples,
the God not distant from any of us, the divine being present to all. There
follows a quotation from Aratus, a pagan poet, from his poem Phaenomena,
written about 270 BC in Athens. “In, or perhaps through, whom we live and move
and have our being: for we are his family.” What an extraordinary thing for
Luke to have Paul say! He quotes a pagan poet. We find the same quotation also
used by very open minded Jews elsewhere. It is nonetheless very striking.
There, in
your culture, 300 years ago, the truth about God was expressed. The Spirit of
God was there before us. The sense of the divine which, distorted, produced
this wild array of idols also came to expression in the poets. They told of the
one who is not far from each of us; these pagan poets knew we belong to God and
we belong to a family; we are God’s family. What an extraordinary pattern Luke
lays down here.
And so in
this land the Spirit was also speaking 200, 300, 30000, 40000 years ago. And we
need to hear what the Spirit was saying to the Aboriginal people and what the
Spirit is saying through them to us. The same Spirit brooded in the Indian
subcontinent, in Arabia, and the same Spirit speaks in the language of the
poets and the artists, the novelists and the playwrights of every age. The
Spirit is free and our calling is to rejoice and to discover, to dialogue and
to enjoy the common life of the Spirit. We need to sit down and hold hands with
all who listen for the voice of the one who is not far away, who is the ground
of all life and being.
But Luke
does not leave it there. Paul does add his broadside now about the futility of
pagan fundamentalism, which thinks it captures deity not in parchment but in
silver and gold and stone. He then announces that God will judge the world by a
human being, Jesus Christ whom he raised from the dead. Is this consistent with
what has gone before? Yes it is. Luke is not suggesting that mission degenerate
into religious syncretism, where all religions are thrown together into an
amalgam of soft tolerance and truth is traded for shallow unity. On the
contrary, there is a criterion, a judge, and he is Jesus. It is by Jesus that
we can recognise the footprints of the Spirit. It is the love he made known
which helps us discover its past victories and its defeats in the cultures of
the world. This is not a Jesus imperialism of the kind that declared the world
abandoned by the Spirit and claimed a monopoly for the Church on the truth.
Such Christianity repeats all the arrogance of religious colonialism.
The Spirit
is none other than the Spirit who came upon Jesus of Galilee. The music of the
Spirit is heard in the groaning of creation for renewal, for peace, for
justice. For the Spirit breathes wherever the lungs are open, wherever the
heart pounds for the gospel of love. The incognito God of mercy and justice
still stands in the market place and in the Church. This God still hears the
cries of the people in the Egypts of today. This God still raises up the Moses,
the Elijah, the Peter, the Paul to join forces with the advance party, the
Spirit. This God still stands in the market place and in the Church beside the
well promoted competitors and their myriad followers.
Both
episodes today are about removing barriers, barriers constructed by religion
itself. Both are saying that the whole world is God’s creation, the playground
of the Spirit. The whole world is the object of God’s love, the love incarnate
in Jesus Christ. Every attempt by human beings to capture God in images, in a
book, in a temple, in a people or culture, in a religious experience or in an
institution, is a denial of the Spirit. It is a re-erection of Babel’s tower,
another futile assault on God’s power in the name of human power, another
desperate bid borne of fear, to define out the unknown, the unpredictable, the
unmanageable future God promises us. The serpent’s vision still entices us: we
want to be like God.
The vision
of the kingdom is our agenda. The Spirit of the kingdom is our enabling. The
grace which lived and died and rose for us in Jesus feeds our souls. We are the
Church, God’s risk of love in history, as mature and immature as the average of
its members, but God’s promise of the kingdom for now. Let us rejoice in the
freedom of the Spirit that knows no bounds, that leads us beyond our fears and
our barriers to the uttermost ends of the world, and that brings us back to the
centre, to the Word of God borne witness to by Holy Scripture: God in whom we
live and move and have our being and whose family we are.