When the Story Goes Silent

Acts 10:44-48
While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.

Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?”

So, he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.

I never thought of myself as a predator or as a terrorist. As a small female, I have spent much more time thinking about what I am afraid of than what or who might be afraid of me. 

In her book, “belonging: a culture of place,” bell hooks explains that as a young girl of color growing up in Kentucky she “inhabited a location where black folks associated whiteness with the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing.” Living in a segregated neighborhood, hooks writes that white people were strangers who showed up only to sell Bibles.

Packaged with the Bibles, hooks explains that these white salesman/evangelists brought terror to the black neighborhood. “Whatever their mission,” hooks writes, “they looked too much like unofficial white men who came to enact rituals or terror and torture…Did they understand at all how strange their whiteness appeared in our living rooms, how threatening?” 

If we are still holding onto the cotton candy conversion of last Saturday’s message, this week’s message represents the crash after the sugar high. 

Today our story begins where the Book of Acts story goes silent.

Before Christianity was Christianity, it was a movement among many in what would eventually be called, Judaism. Like many other extremist offshoots of mainline Judaism, Christianity emerged claiming to be the community of the chosen. Their movement, like many others, was organized around a revelation pertaining to the end of days that held the power to grant freedom from death and damnation. 

Although we might never know from reading the stories in Acts, the Judaic community in the first and second centuries were incredibly diverse and generally disinterested in eschatological theology. This disinterest meant that the majority of religious participants rejected the proclamation that Jesus was God’s last word to the chosen people. 

While everyone was invited to belong to this emerging church, belonging was only possible if one was to reject the Mosaic Torah as the hallmark of religious life and confess to the truth that salvation and God’s blessing were only possible for faith in Jesus. While Gentiles found this message empowering, those within the community would have felt it impossible. For an insider in the faith to convert would have required a rejection of the beliefs and practices that had held their community together for centuries. 

The failure to convert their own community and their success in converting outside communities would eventually lead to the full departure of Christianity from their community of origin. Over time the excluded became the excluding as the Passover and ritual bathing were appropriated into sacraments initiating members into an organized religion claiming their place as the true Israel. 

This transfer of religious authority gave birth to its own story. This is the silent story written by the excluded and co-opted by the excluding. 

The Book of Acts records a period before Christianity had claimed political and religious authority. Both those telling the story and those hearing the message lack agency in society. As good news for the poor, the message in the Book of Acts is revolutionary because it is told from and takes place in a system designed to exclude entire communities from belonging in religious participation. For the persecuted, oppressed, and suffering this message provided an effective way to affirm faith in a God whose justice was not apparent in the physical world. For the powerless, this message of salvation fostered endurance and made life livable in difficult times. 

As the audience changes, however, as the power transfers from one group to another group, the meaning of the message shifts. What once was read as empowering to oppressed communities is now heard as justification for the exploitation of the earth and systemic oppression. In “Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins,” George W. E. Nickelsburg writes, “Formulations created by the persecuted and the oppressed, as a means of coping with life and maintaining faith when they were unable to change their situation, have been employed by the rich and powerful oppressors in order to maintain and justify the status quo to their own advantage when they could have changed the situation. This adds up to bad theology, as well as opportunism.” 

The same stories celebrating inclusion in a just community for the powerless now function to support systems of corruption maintained by the powerful. 

I have spent a lot of time at The Land this week. Something about Spring makes the Prairie addictive. On Friday, I walked into the tent and found a small gray bunny laying in a low burrow. As I walked closer the bunny began to cower as if to make himself invisible. Stuck in pure panic, the bunny shook. His eyes rapidly darting this way and that, planning the best route of escape. To the bunny, I approached with the power of a predator. Regardless of my intention, I invoked terror for that bunny because, whether I choose to use it or not, I have the power to destroy it. Regardless of what I do or do not do with the power, my discernment over the worth of the bunny’s life dictates the bunny’s future. If the bunny is in my way, I can destroy its home. If I determine the bunny is overpopulating, I can eradicate a portion of the population. I can hunt the bunny for food or for pleasure. 

While we may identify with the converters or converts in the Book of Acts, this is not the role the world perceives us to play. We hold the power of white privilege, American citizenship, and institutional belonging in mainstream religion. 

As persons of privilege, we may not experience the silent stories as problematic but our experience doesn’t mean the problems of the powerless go away. The love we have for baptism doesn’t erase the Jewish tradition that was taken and changed by those claiming superiority. The attachment to one version of a sacrament, story or song, doesn’t erase the trauma experienced from the exclusion of an intolerant church. The connection and care we show for the Land, doesn’t erase the terror the animals here feel when we arrive. These stories of superiority may silence experiences of the powerless but our deafness to their cries makes their terror no less real. 

Jesus encountered all persons and challenged them to locate their placement in society and to surrender their shame from power or poverty so that a new egalitarian community might take form. We belong regardless of placement because it is through understanding our power that we contribute to the healing of creation.

This is the conversion promising salvation from the only story many of us have ever really known, the story of superiority. I may not be a terrorist but I can confess that I cause terror nonetheless. This is the story of silence Jesus initiates us into if we have faith that our story is never a story out all on its own.

And so together let the powerful pray:

May our silence confess our rising awareness of the exclusive framework we have been handed and the pain it continues to cause. 

May our conversion from the sin of superiority to the story of silence grant us the humility to befriend where once we bullied.

May our baptism initiate us into a life of listening presence and may this new life liberate us to let go and begin all over again.