| Acts chapter 3 Nothing like a powerful experience to make you behave like an idiot. At the conclusion of Acts 2, once the Holy Spirit has descended, the fired-up disciples decide to form a commune. All goods shall be held in common…the Lord is coming soon! This does not work out. I led a college fellowship called ‘Friday Night Fellowship’ when I was a double-major English and Philosophy student at the (not especially well-esteemed) Ohio University. 200 souls showed up every Friday Night for ‘Friday Night Fellowship’ at Trinity Lutheran Church…a parish offering remarkable hospitality. They were incredibly tolerant of these well-intended collegians, I now understand, granting us access to every niche and cranny of the property…and to the kitchen! Karen Schweigart – now Karen Potts, taught me how to make Noodle-Bake Casserole in that kitchen. I discovered the wiles of garlic, and I still make that recipe, which sustained me for years, on occasions of mis-placed nostalgia. Some of us decided Acts 2 implied a directive, and we moved into two houses on one property near the campus…thirteen of us in all. We would live like the first disciples! It would be wonderful! Meals would be made and had together. Differences in race and social-strata would be ignored. There would be care taken regarding intimate relationships. There were two married couples among us. One couple had a child. The fellow in that partnership had a bad habit of occasionally striking his wife. We tried to deal with this amongst ourselves. The wisdom on offer among 20 something folk regarding domestic abuse proved wanting. After two years, the communal experience, I’ll spare you more details, dissolved for the better. Nor, I’m afraid, as a template for ministry, does the experience of Peter and John, heading up to the Temple at the hour of prayer at three o’clock one afternoon, serve better. Bravo for Peter and John, who had extra-superlative-gifts, and the power of the Holy Spirit uniquely and recently and purposefully upon them. They raise a cripple from his begging-dish and restore him, in the Name of Jesus, to normal life. Normal is under-rated, I have often said. Let’s bring on ‘normal’ by any means possible. ‘Normal’ is not inclusive of regular signs, healings or acts of peculiar power. The Name of Jesus, a Sign and Act of Power in the theology and story of the Book of Acts, is not intended for replication. Signs reside where they have occurred. They grant hope and insight. It is a mistake to perceive a call to replication. Jed Smock, Jr. was a street preacher on my college campus. One day, as I crossed the quad, I heard him annoyingly summoning a crowd to a healing event. Jesus can heal! I joined the curious throng. So did a fellow student who was blind. As street-preacher Jed implored ever more insistently, the blind student stepped forward to be healed by the laying on of the idiot’s hands. This did not work out. Jed Smock was at least as abusive as my house-share companion, dealing domestic violence blows to the mother of his three year old. I promptly walked to the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd and spoke with Father Philip McNairy, my priest; and thereafter, not without complication, dissolved the commune, distanced myself for a bit from my overt spiritual journey, and opted for quiet and reflection. I remain annoyed by the story in Acts 3, which reveals the power of the Holy Spirit active in the first disciples entrusted with the Good News of Jesus. Yet, it seems also to invite the well-intended, the credible, the foolish, to acts of idiocy in the 21st Century. Here we are in times of COVID-19. Some churches are open. Can you believe that? Some claim a divine safety-net. I think of that humiliated blind student on my college campus, and hope fewer suffer humiliation and worse at the hands of self-anointed fools. As our overt Church-going spiritual journeys are on necessary hold, the avoidance of idiocy and the embrace of quiet and reflection aren’t the worst things on offer. Grace and peace, GFW+ A Prayer From the cowardice that shrinks from new truth, From the laziness content with half-truths, From the arrogance that thinks it is in possession of all truth, O God of Truth, deliver us. Amen. |
| St. Paul’s Anglican Church Calzada del Cardo, 6 Centro 37700, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico 415.121.3424 www.StPaulSMA.com |