The Apprentice Priest

The previous post I looked at Simon the Magician (Acts 8) as an example of an inadequate concept of conversion. If what is often called conversion is simply the inauguration of the conversion process, then Simon’s conversion told in that story was simply a small beginning. The attempts of many commentators to cast doubt on the authenticity of that beginning is not supported by the text and only reveals an assumption that the beginning is supposed to be the end. It is not. It is just the beginning.

Yet the distance between our beginning and our end – to show, unsullied, the character and person of Jesus through the lens of our unique personalities – is a long journey in which no part of our lives can be left unexamined. If that is a challenge to an individual Christian, it is a much greater one to a Christian community. The challenge becomes even more daunting because our cultural bias in the west leads us to grossly underestimate both the reality and the power of community.

There is much to say on that subject, but it will have to wait for another occasion. The short version is that while an individual may have some influence on a community, a community has a personality and a life that is not only greater than the sum of its parts, but is more capable of influencing us than we it.

From that assertion we move on to a community that struggled with conversion, the Christian community in the city of Corinth. At the time of Paul’s writing, Corinth was a thriving and prosperous port city. Like many commercial centers in our times it was an expensive place in which to live. Also, like many modern cities, there were wide disparities of wealth, status, and education. The first Christian communities were notable for the diversity of their members: Jews and gentiles, women and men, rich and poor, slaves and citizens of Rome. And yet…

In spite of a robust spiritual life, the Corinthian church had some significant problems. The culture of the city came into the church with its members. The city culture crops up in a number of issues that Paul addresses in his letters. There are factions around leaders. The eloquent Apollos and the blunt Paul are sharp contrasts and the congregation seems split between the educated who appreciates the oratory of Apollos and those who prefer the blunt directness of Paul. There is also religious division between those who are sophisticated enough to disregard the old gods and goddesses of the classic world and those who still find power, however sinister, in the old religion.

But the greatest evidence of a not quite converted community is in their “love feast” which is a common setting for observing the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper. The continuing separation based on wealth and privilege has some with nothing to eat at the feast and some who continue pagan patterns of overindulgence. Jew and gentile sharing a meal would be a radical thing for the Jewish believers in this new community. But rich and poor sharing a meal was equally radical – a sign of a new humanity in Christ. The separation experienced in the Corinthian meal (one cannot call it a common meal!) was a clear indicator that the life of Christ’s new community had not yet permeated the customs and expectations of the Corinthian church.

In spite of the fact that much of Paul’s first letter is devoted to corrections, this was not a failed community. It was simply a community in the early stages of conversion. There was enough awareness within that community that a delegation had come to Paul expressing their distress and concern. In one important regard, the situation of the Corinthian church was much more clear cut than that of churches in the West, and particularly in the US. The world of ancient Corinth was a pagan world with the values and expectations of that world. There was a Jewish presence in the city but the separation Jews maintained from the surrounding culture meant that the life of the Torah had little impact or influence. In our day, on the dying edge of Christendom, the distinctions are not quite as clear. The need of a community to experience ongoing conversion is masked by the assumption that Christianity is “normal,” even though its normalcy is under siege. The problem with “normal” is the question of whose norm we apply. Perhaps the ending of our former normal is a God-given moment where we can test that passing normal against the norms that Jesus and Paul set forth for the church.

What can help us get our communal conversion back on track is to explore the New Testament’s description and expectation of what a church is supposed to look like. Once we discover the disconnect between that description and expectation and the characteristics of “normal” church life, conversion can resume in earnest.

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.