Acts 19:1-7
1/11/09 – Bethel and KUMC
Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD
Ever a pragmatic middle child, my third child, Jordan, rarely hesitates to let you know where she stands on the issues. She’s currently in India studying during her college January term. Her first email, which we got January 2nd, three days after we dropped her off at the Knoxville airport, was brief and to the point: “Just letting you know I’m alive; more later.” The second, arriving during her four day stay at an Ashram, which is a kind of spiritual retreat center, mentioned the experience of mediation and yoga taught by some “awesome Swamis” the Swamis being her Hindu masters or religious teachers. That new experience of yoga led to a mild complaint regarding a “sore back” but a feeling of calm and serenity. By the third email, which preceded departure after four days of yoga and meditation, she gave voice to her true, inner feelings: “all’s going well, but I’m sick of meditation!” And then a fourth, as they left the Ashram for a ten hour bus ride that included seeing a tiger reserve and the hope of seeing tigers out in the wild, she wrote: “it’s bittersweet to leave the Ashram, they have been so nice to us, but meditation is just so dang hard and the food isn’t very good here.”
The next stop for her group was a pilgrimage destination called Hardiwar, there dipping hands and feet into the sacred waters of the Ganges. As she is discovering, India is a land of stark contrasts --great wealth yet the reality of many, many beggars; Hinduism, Islam, Christianity existing alongside raw, primitive expressions of spirituality; even the contrasting smells of perfumes and the stench of the city have grabbed her attention.
I suspect that, given my daughter’s experience of the everyday reality of sacred cows, holy rivers, Swamis and representations of Hindu gods and goddesses most everywhere, that her own sense of the religious and the spiritual will never be quite the same.
Even though India may strike us, first, as an exotic, crowded land where ancient religious practices prevail, it’s a nation that has also taken its place among the world’s leaders. I recall reading several years ago Thomas Friedman’s book The Earth is Flat and his thesis about how globalization has made India and China the two new economic superpowers of our day. The earth is flat in the sense that the world is fast becoming a smaller place. So, for example, when I call for help to fix my computer, there’s a good chance I actually am speaking to a worker in India where Microsoft has outsourced its help line; there are, of course, any other number of business have set up shop in India and other markets to save costs in the technological revolution of our day and time.
I speak of India because maybe, if we stretch our minds a bit, there are some parallels between this paradoxically modern, ancient land and the First Century city of Ephesus where Paul’s missionary travels took him.
Like India’s new position as a leader in global economics, in its day, Ephesus was a leading city of the empire – a wealthy cosmopolitan seaport crossroads, as well as site of the imperial cult. This cult of the emperor employed thousands of priests and priestesses in the daily worship of the Roman goddess Artemis. Religion in Ephesus permeated everyday life and drove daily commerce.
Paul stayed and did the work of a missionary in Ephesus for two years, and if we read ahead in the 19th chapter of Acts, we see how local entrepreneurs felt threatened by his message. The monotheism Paul preached jeopardized the local trade guilds, and a silversmith named Demetrius protests that devotion at the shrine to Artemis will suffer grave economic loss if Paul’s message gains traction.
In fact, at one point, in chapter 19, shopkeepers and artisans opposed to the Christian movement drag friends of Paul to the Roman theatre, a structure still standing today, and a riot almost ensues. Such commotion occurred because Christianity seriously threatened the official, public religion of Ephesus and at its most tender point: the pocketbook.
But Ephesus was not just a place with one, official religion nor just a place bent on economic prosperity. Apparently, it was one of those unique places that was like a magnet and attracted a veritable smorgasbord of religious teachers, mystics, exorcists of evil spirits, magicians and wonder-workers from all sorts of backgrounds. I imagine that Ephesus was like some of the ancient pilgrimage sites in India that my daughter is visiting, or holy places in other lands where a palpable spirituality can almost overwhelm the senses.
This same chapter of Acts describes how, in Ephesus, it came to be that if a handkerchief or apron simply touched the skin of Paul, that the material itself became charged with miraculous healing powers. I have personally, several years ago, received a small healing cloth, anointed by members of an apostolic, Pentecostal church, and in those church traditions, such a use of the material to convey the power of the Spirit or of the divine is not uncommon at all. It all goes back to chapter 19 of Acts. Who knows what power rests beyond the ordinary when it is blessed and consecrated for some sacred purpose? Most everyone knows how the desire the healing beats deep and strong at the heart of human experience, and who can know the depths of faith’s mystery communicated through an anointed cloth?
When Paul walked into Ephesus, it was more than a city with an official temple dedicated to the Roman pantheon. It was also a city that gathered disciples with various masters, who desired to tap into the powerhouse of the divine energy to perform miracles.
As he comes to this new place, Paul seeks hospitality, a connection with other believers, if for no other reason than that he’ll need lodging, introductions, and provision of daily needs. Maybe, for us, its like being a newcomer at a political event in Washington DC, or attending for the first time a big denomination-wide church event, trying to figure out who we’re going to be comfortable hanging out with.
Paul finds some other disciples of Jesus, and he questions them: Did you receive the Holy Spirit? In whose name were you baptized? In other words, is your belief system up to speed, and to whom are you loyal? In these early days, Christianity grew in a fluid, spontaneous context with no written sources, no set beliefs, no church buildings or organizational structure.
These disciples indicate their initiation through John’s baptism, but Paul clarifies that John’s mission was only to point to the one coming after him. Paul re-baptizes them, this time in the name of the Lord Jesus. Even here, by the mid-first century, there is no set baptismal formula of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Then, through the laying on of hands, the extraordinary power of the Holy Spirit gets released, and these disciples speak in tongues and engage in prophetic language or truth-telling.
One thing made clear by this scripture and by Paul’s visit to Ephesus is that baptism mattered. It mattered because Christians were not of the empire and its gods; baptism mattered as a way of gauging correct belief; it mattered as a way to identify followers of Jesus versus the followers of John or other groups of spiritual seekers and mystics.
A cave near Ephesus, in modern-day Turkey, discovered in 1906, contains a 6th century Byzantine fresco painted on the grotto of the cave wall – a depiction of Paul and a woman named Thecla, a virgin whom Christian legend understood to be a follower of Paul and devout believer. In the eastern tradition of Christianity, this painting served as a kind of icon. The juxtaposition of the two figures and their being depicted on a level plane, both with right hand uplifted in the gesture of making a blessing, meant that the two figures, one male and the other female, were to be regarded as having equal prominence and church standing. Some years later, however, someone had defaced this picture of Thecla, leaving Paul’s figure undisturbed. Her eyes have been gouged out and her uplifted hand has been burned and scratched off.
Why one disfigured, the other not? The eyes, particularly in eastern iconography, are the entrance into the soul and window for the divine light. The uplifted hand communicates apostolic authority. Here is a striking clash of theology, where the male is apostolic and authoritative and the female has been blinded and silenced. Presumably, both female leadership and the egalitarian impulse of early Christianity is being contested here in quite visible fashion. (In Search of Paul, Crossan and Reed)
I share this fresco of Thecla and Paul because it’s a good reminder of how the Church has always had a kind of competing impulse – a radical egalitarianism found in the words Paul associated with baptism in his Galatians Letter: “In Jesus Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female,” versus the church ordering is inner life and values according to hierarchical models, ultimately defining itself by insiders and outsiders, winners and losers, applying tests of orthodoxy and restricting who can lead.
Each era of the Church faces a new version of this ancient challenge – just how inclusive can we be, and how will we define our mission and presence in the world? How will we honor and act upon our baptism?
Paul’s encounter with these 12 followers and their rebaptism meant that the Holy Spirit was now being released in them and through them in a new way, and they were given the Spirit, something they’d never had before.
So, what do we do with a passage of scripture like this? What can it teach us? How can our own faith be strengthened and encouraged as we reflect on the experience of Paul and these 12 disciples in Ephesus?
When the early church preserved this little story in Acts about Paul’s meeting these 12 disciples, I suspect it wanted to affirm that the particular words used in baptism mattered tremendously and with that, correct belief and later, the words of the creeds, holding to certain truths, mattered a great deal. Many of us, including myself, came to faith and love the Church because of the beliefs we value and hold dear. Baptism can symbolize entrance into that belief system; it gives us identity, defining what faith is and what faith is not, giving our faith structure and something to hold onto.
Yet, given the complexity and diversity of the world’s religion in our post 9/11 reality, given the sometimes violent and demeaning misuse of religion, perhaps our baptism calls us to think about our spirituality in new ways.
Instead of faith that weighs truth by drawing lines and boundaries, we should consider that our time calls for a new spirituality, one that respects the pursuit of the sacred in all traditions, that honors a reverence for all life and justice and love for all human beings.
The same amazing process that has turned internet, outsourcing, and globalization into household words also has given us an unprecedented opportunity to learn about other people, to appreciate their sacred search, to read the written sources of their spirituality, to travel and exchange ideas as never before. Our world has shrunk; we have contact with others as never before; we must seek spiritual healing for the harm and pain we have brought to one another. Certainly, we can pray for peace, whatever be our loyalty, and we can seek the dignity and good of each person.
A new spirituality goes hand-in-hand with a new ecological awareness. Whatever be our faith tradition, we know we must care for the earth or we face the destruction of entrusted to our care. We need look no farther than our own backyard and the recent break in the levee and spill, to realize just how devastating and painful it can be when our water and air become polluted, when safety and health are threatened. Care for the earth has a spiritual imperative that transcends even the economy.
I believe we are called, as the theologian Abraham Hershel puts it, to the spiritual practice of “radical amazement,” that is to “open our eyes to the commonplace yet incredible things that surround us every day. . . to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things” (“A New Routine, A New Me, 159)
While it will not be the case for all Christians, perhaps, with theologians like Thomas Merton, Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Berry and many others, we will finally come to see that “interfaith dialogue is the spiritual journey of our time,” (Ursula King) listening, stretching, even praying that all spiritual seekers will have God’s light in the darkness of injustice, greed, ignorance, and violence.
I believe the church gets called to certain tasks in certain ages and epochs. The Church of my children’s generation will survive into the future by claiming the promise of baptism, yes, and the hope in Christ that promise represents, yes. But we must also begin the corporate search for that new spirituality that make faith meaningful and relevant.
I was also struck in this Acts passage about how baptism involves the human touch. Laying on hands was integral to the experience of baptism and the release of those spiritual gifts. I recently spoke about my cancer with a family member, and our conversation was about non-conventional paths towards healing. I have always been pretty grounded in the church’s creeds, our language and symbols to the virtual exclusion of all other forms of spiritual experience and healing. Thus, so-called alternative healing techniques have been mostly outside my radar. But she and I were talking about New Age spirituality and so-called energy healing, and she reminded me that the laying on of hands is nothing more than the release of divine energy from one person into another, seeking the well-being and health of the other.
Maybe we can think of the intimate, holy connection promised between people and to a community in baptism as the flip side of the universal spirituality I earlier described. A deep aspect of spirituality is a longing to belong and the need to be held up when we’re weak or afraid, to know we’re not alone in our struggles, suffering, or questions.
When I was meditating recently on healing, the familiar gospel story flashed into my consciousness – the story of a sick man on a stretcher who couldn’t get inside the house where Jesus was because the crowd was so great. It came to me that if it weren’t for his loved ones, his friends, taking him onto the roof and figuring out an innovative way to get him into the physical presence of Jesus, that is, by making a hole and lowering him down, that he otherwise would not have entered the aura of the divine, healing energy. That, to me, is the power and promise of our baptism, that others will do what we can’t do ourselves.
If we are alive, we know the pain of crisis and “spiritual gridlock,” times when we feel resigned to being victims, when sadness or fear overwhelms, when we’ve lost a zeal and zest for life. It’s then we can boldly claim the release of the divine Spirit to illumine the darkness.
I close with this little poem about seeking healing for cancer and the power of friendship as we make the spiritual journey. The poet writes:
Still it is next to impossible to do this alone.
We need the loving truth of others to be well.
Inevitably when one is thrust into life, into crisis,
Into transformation without notice or instruction,
Some come with us and are forever changed
While others watch as we are forced out to sea.
It is the power of love that enables those who come along
And in truth,
A language of experience is unearthed
That cannot be translated to those who stay behind. (Mark Nepo)
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
