Session Notes

Opening Question

We opened with the question that Acts itself seems to keep asking: we are pointed, time and time again, to the gap between witnessing and understanding, to the shortcomings of people who are in the immediate presence of miracles and still somehow fail to perceive what’s right in front of them. So, is this a failure on the part of the witnesses, or is it something intrinsic to the nature of the miraculous itself?

We started with the examples that kept recurring in the text to set up this gap: the disciples staring at the sky after the ascension, and the angels essentially saying, “hey, snap out of it, why are you staring at the sky?”. The crowd marveling at the healed man outside the temple, and Peter saying, “why are you staring at him?” We are shown over and over again that the miracles people are looking at are perhaps merely signs. And then the inverse case: Peter knocking at the door after escaping prison, while inside, his community is actively praying for his return, and they cannot bring themselves to believe the maidservant who tells them he’s there. They hear without perceiving. Meanwhile Peter, an escaped convict on the lam is just outside int he night repeatedly knocking ont he door, calling attention to himself. The pattern (while comical) is relentless, and it points somewhere else.

It became clear to us pretty quickly that the sign is not the thing the angels and the disciples were hoping the audiences would see. The sign points toward the thing. And so the question of whether someone can “believe a sign” is complicated by whether they have any capacity to believe in the thing the sign is pointing toward. What came out of this was that belief might be structurally incompatible with direct, material confirmation. If something actually happens in front of you, you no longer believe it, you see it/hear it/smell it. You sense it. And perhaps sensing collapses the imaginative space that belief requires to live in. Miracles, in other words, might actually complicate faith rather than confirm it, because the manifested thing is always at least a few degrees off from the version that existed as interior belief, and suddenly the edges of your faith come into contact with the rough fact of reality. Since belief is rooted in a sense, outside of or external to sensing, maybe belief is closer to imagination than we usually admit.

We spent a good deal of time on interpretation as the key term. The disciples didn’t immediately understand what the ascension meant, and the angels had to intervene. Peter got the same dream three times before a visiting Roman inadvertently helped him understand it didn’t mean what he originally thought it meant. One reading of Acts is that the obstacle-overcoming is never really the miracle in and of itself, rather it’s the interpretive framework the witness brings. And that framework is shaped by what the person wants to be true, what they’ve invested in, what losing their current belief would cost them. The people who are most hostile to the early church aren’t stupid or faithless, they’re protecting something. The silversmith Demetrius is protecting his income. The Jewish elites are protecting their theological certainty, the status that comes with it, and, we have to imagine, the genuine devotion that earned it. This is where the phrase Stephen uses hit the group hard: “stiff-necked, uncircumcised in your hearts and ears.” And someone pointed out, for what may have been the first time, why circumcision carries the metaphorical weight it does. The foreskin is protective tissue. To be circumcised of heart is to be unprotected, bare, open to having whatever you’re feeling actually land, and even potentially do some sort of damage (setting aside any moral judements of “damage”). The rage of the Jewish people that follows Stephen’s speech to them isn’t evidence of his wrongness, in fact, it may be exactly the opposite. As Shakespeare says “Me thinks the lady doth pretest too much.” Perhaps the intensity of the defensive response betrays the accuracy of the claim. This gave us a new lens on a lot of the hostility in Acts.

Saul/Paul became the test case we kept returning to. Here is someone whose armor was complete, a Pharisee (one of the most rigorous sects of Judaism) educated at the highest levels, with every incentive to protect the system he’d mastered and a commission to actively destroy the movement threatening it. And yet, on the road to Damascus, surrounded by his own soldiers, he gets knocked flat by light and hears a voice asking why he’s persecuting it. One interesting element to Saul’s experience is that he doesn’t protest, he simply asks ‘who are you?’. We wondered whether the very intensity of his prior resistance, the sheer force of his prior conviction (he was, after all, in the process of hunting down and suppressing Christians), had something to do with the intensity of what it took to reach him.

We also wondered a bit about whether “raising the collective field of belief actually makes miracles more possible”. If wanting something to be true creates a kind of fertile soil, and refusing to want it is a kind of barrenness, does the act of spreading belief do something generative beyond the social? We were genuinely uncertain, and at least one person noted the discomfort of that idea, how easily it slides into manipulation. For example, the megachurch preacher asking you to believe harder (donate more) so the miracle can happen. But the more defensible version of the claim, the one we found ourselves returning to, is simpler: it is much harder to accomplish something if you don’t believe it can be done. Seeking, asking, and knocking might be the full extent of our agency…

The later half of the conversation moved toward two concepts, discernment (that is, proper discernment – i.e. not casting your pearls among the swine) and the things that might block us from witnessing a miracle. We returned to the concept of protection, and noted that everyone’s “armor” is different. For one person, protecting their money is an act of discernment. For someone genuinely attached to their money, the same behavior closes the heart. The armor is whatever you’re using to protect yourself from being changed by what’s right in front of you. And the tricky part, the part that requires real discernment, is that even “good” or “Godly” things can become “armor”. Take prayer for example, in Acts 12. Prayer is what keeps the disciples inside in disbelief while Peter is knocking. They’ve outsourced their wanting to a ritual, and the ritual prevents them from receiving the thing they’re asking for.

Although it doesn’t seem to be a pervasive theme in Acts, we ultimately organically landed on love as the ground beneath it all. Love as the substratum that makes everything else either matter or not matter, the thing that all the proxies are proxies for. The making art, the career, even the prayer, all of it, when you follow it far enough down, tends to bottom out at the same question: am I loved? The invitation that seems to run through Acts, if we’re reading it carefully and looking below the surface, is toward an openness that doesn’t need to resolve that question externally first. Humility, another common thread throughout, shares etymological roots with humus, earth, soil. You don’t have to go somewhere else to plant something. It’s already here, under your feet. The wood still needs chopping. The water still needs carrying. But the ground you’re doing it on becomes different when you don’t just see it, but perceive it for what it is.