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speaks of the willingness of God to invade our every day and our every moment. This God of Israel waits no more for the perfect time to be revealed. Now is the time, and here is the place. There is only one central character in this story of Acts. It is God, the Holy Spirit.
Although it is the story of the Spirit of God, Luke does not play off human agency against divine agency. God moves and we respond. We move and God responds. Nevertheless this is God’s drama, God’s complete exposure. Cards are on the table and the curtain is drawn back, and God acts plainly, clearly, and in ways that are irrevocable.
The book of Acts takes place in empire—the Roman Empire—and this is not a fact that we should ever let escape our attention. The goal of the Roman Empire was to shape the world in its own image.
leading. The Spirit always confronts our fear in order to free faith to live in its true home in God. But this is not easy. Indeed the context of Acts is struggle. The content of Acts is also struggle. It is struggle in two senses. It is the struggle against the powers and principalities that exploit the emotional currents of diaspora and empire, seeking to drive people to kill, steal, or destroy for the sake of securing diaspora or empire’s futures. The second sense of struggle is the struggle to yield to the Spirit, following God into the new that God imagines and is bringing about for the
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Where the Spirit of God is, there is divine desire not simply for God but for one another and not simply for one another but for those to whom we are sent by the Spirit, to those already being drawn into communion with God and sensing the desire of God for the expansion of their lives into the lives of others.
The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. Indeed the Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those to whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God.
Paul yields to the Spirit. This is the sum total of his story in the book of Acts, but inside that story is the story of a God who desires us and all of creation and will not release us to isolations, social, economic, cultural, religious, gendered, and geographic.
It is about a God whose weapon of choice is the divine desire placed in us by the Spirit. That desire has the power to press through centuries of animosity and hatred and beckon people to want one another and envision lives woven together. Such a life never asks people to forget their past or deny their present, but to step together into a future that will not yield to the given order of isolations, but yields to the Spirit that is poured out on all flesh.
His rationality demands his vision of justice. But what Saul does not yet know is that the road to Damascus has changed. It is space now inhabited by the wayfaring Spirit of the Lord. Saul pursues, but he is being pursued.
Discipleship is principled direction taken flight by the Holy Spirit. It is the “you have heard it said, but I say to you”—the continued speaking of God bound up in disruption and redirection.
The mystery of God is found in human flesh, moving in and with the disciples who are a communion of suffering and a witness to life. Saul is meeting a God in Jesus who is no alien to time, but one who lives the everyday with us. The shared life of Jesus continues with his disciples as he takes hold of their horrors and they participate in his hopes. Yet just as he confronted Saul, this God is no passive participant in the suffering of the faithful, but one who has reconciled the world and will bring all of us to the day of Jesus Christ. Saul has entered that new day.
The coming is a calling, a drawing, an awakening of our life to its giver and lover.
Who this God speaks to and where this God will appear we cannot control. All we can do is watch and wait for God to speak to us.
The visions that God gives are less about what we can capture in sight and sound and more about being captured, being drawn into the guiding hand of the Holy Spirit.
The scales of knowledge are never balanced for disciples who have heard God say, “Go to that person.” They often have a better sense of another’s future in God than their own immediate future. Yet this is where discipleship, truly being a follower of Jesus, presses us to reorder our knowledge. The truth we know of a person or people must move to the background, and what we know of God’s desire for them must move to the foreground. The danger we imagine inscribed on their bodies must be read against the delight we know God takes in their life. That same divine delight covers us.
The meeting with Saul is beautifully rendered by Luke. Ananias touches him, saying, “Brother Saul.”
Yet Ananias was there for the crucial time of blindness when someone could not see their way and did not know their future. Luke makes sure we see the courageous actions of this disciple, even if Saul does not. Such actions add another distinguishing mark to discipleship as those who will go even or especially to killers.
In this regard, there is a loneliness slowly appearing now that will accompany Saul. He is moving toward a liminal space where he will always need help, always need friends, and always look for community. He is moving toward church.
Peter’s presence declares an unmistakable truth: women matter. This woman matters, and the work she does for widows matters to God.
It is no accident that the first disciple to have this little taste of the resurrection is a woman, because it was a woman who gave birth to the resurrection.
These are times being made strange by the fulfillment of divine promise, and at the heart of that strangeness will be a meeting orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. Cornelius must search for and find Peter. The powerful self-sufficient man must find the disciple. This is strange.
The searching is already a breaking open.
God comes to Peter inside of Israel’s first and deepest gesture—in the moment of prayer. God comes to Peter inside the creature’s deepest truth—in the moment of his hunger. Prayer and hunger, hunger and prayer—these will be the pillars on which God will build the future of the creature. These are the pillars on which God will constitute the new order. Hunger and prayer go together, completing each other in God. God wills the creature to pray, and God wills the creature to hunger. God wills Israel to pray, and God wills Israel to know itself in its hunger.
Hunger needs prayer, but prayer needs hunger. Hunger sets the stage for prayer, and prayer sets the table for hunger. God works through prayer, but God works on the site of hunger. God glories in our hungers and speaks to us in the precisely ordained reality of it. Indeed nothing that God will now say to Peter makes sense unless we remember that the divine word came to a hungry creature. Prayer and hunger are the inner realities of a disciple of Jesus.
God is simply, beautifully interrupting conventional and normal structures of relating by mapping God’s own relational logic across their bodies. Peter is now in the strange position of listening where he would have normally been speaking of the directing of the Lord. Rather than reciting the words of angels given to him, Peter hears of divine visitation with another, a Gentile no less. The world is turning over, and Peter turns with it. He invites Gentiles into the house that is not his own; the house belongs to Simon the Tanner. Both Peter and these sent from Cornelius are guests in the
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Peter listens and hears the word of God in new and unanticipated places. Before Peter will offer his truth he must listen.
Listening for the word of God in others who are not imagined with God, not imagined as involved with God, but whom God has sought out and is bringing near to the divine life and to our lives.
Through Israel God announces desire for the creature and embodies that desire through concrete relationships. We might call this an inverted exceptionalism. Unlike American or other forms of nationalistic exceptionalism, this form of exceptionalism turns people outward not inward.
The waters of baptism signify the joining of Jew and Gentile, not simply the acceptance of the gospel message. Yet both are miracle. Both are grace in the raw. The Spirit confronts the disciples of Jesus with an irrepressible truth: God overcomes boundary and border. God touches first. God does not wait to be touched by us.
