I am constantly amazed, irritated, confounded, and frustrated by the distance between the noisy professions of faith in, loyalty to, and promotion of Jesus Christ and the values and lifestyle he propounds in the Gospels. There is enough of that noise going on in our culture that it happily prevents me from contemplating that similar distance in my own life. In spite of a conscious acknowledgment that conversion is a process rather than an event, at a deeper level I still operate on the unbiblical myth of instant conversion.
It is true that a moment of conversion can be dramatic, even life-changing. Yet the change is not a complete transformation but the inauguration of a long journey. A dramatic “conversion experience” can act as a powerful boost along that path. It can also create an illusion that the beginning is actually the destination. While those observations may be accurate, they are hardly helpful as a map to the road of conversion. But before addressing that question, I want to examine three incomplete conversions found in the stories of the New Testament.
The first story is that of Simon the Magician found in Chapter 8:9-25 of the Acts of the Apostles. In this story the deacon Philip, fleeing the persecution in Jerusalem, ends up in Samaria and preaches there, with accompanying acts of power. In that town is a local wonder-worker, Simon, who had quite a following. However, Simon also becomes a believer and is baptized. When the leaders in Jerusalem hear what is happening, Peter and John are sent to follow up. They start praying for people to receive the Holy Spirit. Obviously something dramatic happened when they did that because when Simon saw it he offered to pay to learn how to do it himself. Peter’s reaction was sharp: “But Peter said to him, ‘May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money!’” The Complete Jewish Bible (paraphrase) gives it more literally: “But Kefa said to him, ‘Your silver go to ruin — and you with it, for thinking the free gift of God can be bought!’” My preference is from another paraphrase, The Message: “Peter said, ‘To hell with your money! And you along with it. Why, that’s unthinkable–trying to buy God’s gift!’”
Peter’s harsh words have left many readers and commentators on the text perplexed. The most common response that I’ve read has been that Simon’s conversion was false, a sort of “jumping on the bandwagon” response to the local positive response to Philip’s preaching. He couldn’t have been truly converted and still offered money for access to the power of God. Now I’ve come to believe that the problem isn’t so much Simon as it is our inadequate understanding of conversion.
Simon didn’t just get up one morning, decided to be a thaumaturge and start practicing on the streets of Samaria. He found a teacher or teachers, bought books, and paid for it all. That was normal life. That was standard operating procedure. Simon’s conversion did not erase all that he had learned, all that he had expected from life. His response to Philip’s preaching was an inauguration and perhaps, like many others, it might have gotten stuck there. Peter’s reaction probably came as quite a shock. It might also have helped him realize that maybe all he had assumed about the way life worked was dead wrong.
That, of course, is pure speculation on my part. However, so is the common belief that Simon’s conversion wasn’t real. Though I have too often failed to keep on track with my own conversion, Simon’s story mostly isn’t mine. I was taken to church (often kicking and screaming) as a child. I went through years of Sunday school and managed to absorb a great deal of Scripture before my mother finally surrendered and stopped dragging me along. Most of the “formation” of my life in terms of expectations of how the world worked did not come through that early church experience but through peers, through observing the adults in my life and most of all, through television and books. When I began my real conversion journey it was that formation and not the Scriptures that I brought to that new beginning. In the next posting, I’ll look at an implicit story from the New Testament. The story of a church found in Paul’s letters to the Corinthian community. Until then, let’s keep on the journey.
The Apprentice Priest 