Jennings Reading Questions
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Preface and Introduction: Why Acts? Why Now? | p. 1-13
What are some of the implications of history being a creature whose creator is God? How does God the Holy Spirit as the main character in Acts shape how we engage the stories?
What are some dangers that could arise out of “monument thinking” or “ecclesial museum” mindsets? Are you tempted to think of the Bible as an artifact?
Jennings writes, “Faith is always caught between diaspora and empire.” How would you use those words to describe where we find ourselves today?
Prayerfully reflect on this passage, “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.” Where might you be being called to follow the Spirit? Where might St. Mary’s be being called to follow the Spirit?
1/2 - The Death of Nationalist Fantasy | p.13-24
What words do you notice on pages 13-16 insisting we engage with the resurrected Christ in new and embodied ways?
What are the allures of nationalism? What are the dangers? What might be especially dangerous in the mixture of nationalism and faith?
What are some implications of Jennings’ phrase the revolution of the intimate (p18)?
What invitations into a different kind of power can be found in this section?
1/9 - Grasping for the New | p. 24-27
Have you experienced the normalized unconventional gathering ways of the Holy Spirit? If so, did you feel in control? If not, would you like to?
Jennings writes about how the resurrection of Jesus means that last words no longer belong to us; in addition, he discusses the implications of Peter as storyteller in Acts. What emotions do you feel when you contemplate the freedom from having the last word and the limits of our storytelling?
This section ends with a paragraph about every common thing, from administrative acts to bureaucratic gestures, being dependent on waiting in prayer in the shadows of the Spirit. Is there a mundane place in your life, some administrative act or even bureaucratic gesture you might consider offering as a place of prayer and opportunity for God’s Spirit to bring newness?
1/16 - The Sound of Intimacy | p. 27-33
How does joining as described by Jennings convert our fantasies of power and control into embodying God’s desire for humanity?
Have you ever loved learning another language? Have you ever tried to learn another language with your own grit? How might these memories guide us in joining ourselves to others in God’s desire and power?
How does Jennings’ description of the modern problem of language being linguistic imperialism strike you? How do we repent for times we have loved a people’s language while hating a people?
1/23 - Speaking in the Spirit | p. 33-36
Much of this section includes Jennings repetitive reminders that Peter is speaking to Israel in this sermon. Does that reminder impact how you hear and feel the passage?
How does Jennings’ commentary on preaching mesh with your own experiences with preaching and preachers?
Jennings writes, “Only from within the declaration of a God who was crucified will any words about God in this world, the real world, make sense.” Sit and pray with that sentence. What inspires you in it? What challenges you? What actions might you be called to as you contemplate?
1/30 - A New Response | p.36-38
Can you remember moments or seasons of the spirit’s work in your life that prompted the question, “What should we do?”
Has your theology of baptism leaned more toward “restriction and limitation” or “expansion and openness?” What do these pairings say about God’s desire in the work of the church?
How do practices like teaching, communion, meals and prayers help us remember we were not being called into something “utopian or unrealistic?” How might these practices create a “contrast society” around Jesus’ body?
2/6 - A New Reality of Giving | p.38-40
Jennings contrasts offering up possessions to a religious cause with a community viewing their possessions communally. What is at stake in that contrast?
Would you be compelled to join a movement that renounced private ownership and held all things in common? Have you associated that practice with the beginnings of the church?
What possession might the Spirit call us to imagine being for the community instead of ourselves?
2/13 - A New Gaze | p. 40-42
What does the phrase “it is time to see with the eyes of Jesus” prompt in your imagination?
Have you contemplated the economic realities of the man healed at the temple? How could our imaginations and bodies heal if we included economic implications in our understanding of these narratives from scripture?
Contrast the “sitting and begging” to the “leaping and shouting” in the story. What prayers might emerge from you in this contrast for your own life and for lives surrounding you?
2/20 - History in the Making | p. 42-45
1. Reflect on this passage - “We need not be mystified by the crowd or frustrated by their failures to act for the common good; Jesus has acted for them and offers his body as a way out and a way to be together.”
What emotion does this sentence evoke in you? What does it cause you to grieve? What does it cause you to celebrate? What actions might it call you to take?
2. Reflect on this passage - “All peoples may have a new future in Jesus, and each one of us have a new story to tell that changes the end we previously expected.”
Are there people you perceive to be outside of this new future offered in Jesus? Are there new stories in your own life, or in the life of others, that could be calling you to new expectations?
2/27 - The Criminal-Disciple Emerges | p. 45-51
Do you equate Jesus and his crucifixion, along with the acts of the apostles in Acts with criticizing the “prevailing social, cultural, political, economic, and academic logics that support or are at ease with the status quo of grotesquely differentiated wealth and poverty, uneven access to the necessary resources for life and health, and forms of sublimely stubborn oppression masked inside social conventions?” How do these criticisms and challenges connect to the apostles and Jesus being judged by the judges of religious and political society?
Jennings quotes Karl Barth - “It is our basic sin to take the place of the judge, to try to judge ourselves and others. All our other sins, both small and great, derive ultimately from this source.” Are you aware of places in your life where judging yourself or others is taking away the joy of salvation and your experience of community?
Jennings writes of boldness not coming from within, as we are so often taught, but from the intensification of the common and a boldness that comes from togetherness, joining, and intimacy. In what ways have you experienced common boldness in the church?
3/6 - The Death of the Sovereign Couple | p. 52-61
Name ways Jennings challenges the “couple” as the ultimate expression of Christian life together. Have you been wounded by elevation of the married couple as an ultimate value in the church? What are ways to break this cycle within community?
Reflect on this sentence from Jennings: “The community of Jesus confronts the couple with a new truth: you belong to us. We do not belong to you.”
What are ways couples must sacrifice in order for the health and strength of the whole community? How does Jennings connect this sacrifice to money? In what ways does the elevation of the couple actually harm the couple itself?
Contemplate this sentence and see what questions arise for yourself: “Our obsession with coupling has served as a way to avoid the ecclesial work of forming intimate community, and it has drained the church from its deep riches of its erotic and intimate life born at a table where the body and blood of Jesus calls us continually to partake."
3/13 - The Unity of Suffering | p. 61-64
How do Jennings’ words of the prison “claiming divine right to exist” speak to the prison system in our country? How might a new order speak to the old order we live in?
Instead of the religious leaders meeting the apostles words with “joyful relief or curiosity” they were met with the “intoxication of violence.” What warnings does this passage offer to those of us who might consider ourselves religious leaders?
How does the education and class of Gamaliel offer distance between himself and the violence of the world? How does the distance lead to watching suffering as a “site of sensation” concert to “mobilization” in cooperation with the Holy Spirit?
3/20 - The Pain of Diaspora | p. 64-68
Do Jennings’ words of diaspora remind you of the current situation of Christians in America? Why or why not?
How might care for the most vulnerable provide a place for belonging in this diaspora?
What are ways in which Stephen was a threat to the old order? After engaging with Jennings’ commentary for three months, how might you place their opposition in spaces beyond doctrine?
3/27 - A New Storyteller | p. 68-75
Stephen begins his storytelling with God as the central actor in the story of Israel rather than with faithful ancestors. In what ways does beginning our stories with God shift how we live and tell stories about ourselves and others?
Reflect on this passage: “Imagine a people created only by a promise from God and who will live only in and through that very promise. This promised people would carry the vulnerability and fragility that comes with waiting. The waiting is everything.”
Where do you connect with this passage? Where do you feel disconnected? Is
there a waiting place of vulnerability and fragility you find yourself in? How could
being part of a group of people also waiting in the promise of God comfort you
in your own waiting?
Jennings writes of Stephen’s forgiveness at his death being “a witness that cannot die.” In what ways have you seen or experienced forgiveness as eternal life?
Reflect on this passage: “There were no doubt evil people in Israel worthy of death, but there was no one, without doubt, innocent enough to kill them.” How might this statement invite people into a new order instead of the violent old one?
4/3 - The Scattering and the Serving | p. 75-81
How does Saul’s approval of the killing of Stephen speak to our understandings of the dangers of triumphalism? Reflect on Jennings’ words describing Saul as offering : “the comfort of an illusory triumphalism that does not take seriously the struggles of faith.” Where do you find yourself in relation to these words?
How have you been impacted by the “poor mapping” Jennings describes of attributing the “strange” to the demonic in the world? How might Simon the Sorcerer’s ”addiction to power” be a better understanding of the demonic in the world?
Reflect prayerfully on this paragraph: “Simon mistakes God for power, and many who will come after him will make this same mistake. But this one is an easy one to make because having some measure of control over people and being able to draw a crowd is the closest thing to being with God without God’s help. Having power and attention, influence and regard is the closest thing to sensing God’s will without knowing the divine will. Simon is not the quintessential prideful person. He is the ordinary power-broker in this world who has learned to live in the substitutes for life with God.”
Can you name spheres within your own life, personal or communal, where you are aware of this substituted self-sufficiency as an imposter for life with God?
4/10 - A New Sight of Love | p. 81-90
Jennings writes about the imprecise direction and clear obedience that is being normalized in the book of Acts. Have you experienced God’s leading in ways that have put you on roads of which you couldn’t seen the end? How does Jesus’ “comfort with roads” as in-between spaces comfort and challenge you?
Have you experienced what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “borderland moments” where people of profound difference enter a new possibility of life together in a shared intimate space and a new shared identity? How do you see the interaction between an Ethiopian eunuch and Philip as a “borderland” moment? What does the abrupt ending to their encounter signify for God’s willingness to allow the Spirit to form people?
Jennings insists we are not able to escape the colonizing legacies of western Christianity, but suggests a way to end its trajectories is to as ourselves: “Who are the people nearest me that the Spirit is pressing me to get to know, come to appreciate, and ultimately join?” Do you have a sense of the Spirit doing this work in your own life or in the life of our community?
How does community willing to celebrate differences move us into a greater appreciation of the mystery of creation? How can institutions help or harm this movement?
4/17 - Disrupting Life | p. 90-95
“Violence, in order to be smooth, elegant, and seemingly natural, needs people who are in closed circles.”
“Paul moves from an abstract obedience to a concrete one, from the Lord he aims to pleasure to the One who will direct him according to divine pleasure. 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.”
“Saul turns from defending the name of the Lord to serving Jesus, and for this he will soon suffer.”
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 agains the delight we know God takes in their life. the same divine delight covers us.”
4/24 - The Diaspora and Fear | p. 95-98
“Make no mistake, faith in Jesus must make us potential traitors to our peoples because we will turn their story toward Jesus, draw their destiny into his life, and say he alone is the answer they seek. The turning of our people’s stories is not eradication, but redirection toward the God who we believe created them.”
“He (Paul) escapes in the solitude of a basket, a person dangling in the air between life and death, between his people’ s hope and his people’s hatred. 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.”
5/1 - The Repetition of Jesus | p. 98-101
What might shift in your imagination as you consider the incarnate and resurrected Christ as “holiness that will last, not be episodic, and constitute a new space for living life and knowing ourselves.”?
Jennings describes Paul as being “with Jesus” as he moved into spaces and relationships with people he had perceived as outsiders. He adds language of God’s desire to “touch us, hold us, and announce victory over death.” What do these descriptions open or close in your own desires?
Reflect on this passage and consider where you individually and St. Mary’s corporately might be invited into communion with Christ. “We know that death imagines a special claim to the bodies of women. Their deaths are normalized and naturalized in social orders that value men’s body far above all others. It will not be so among the disciples. It is no accident that the first disciple to have this little taste of resurrection is a woman, because it was a woman who gave birth to the resurrection.”
5/8 - The Revolution Comes to Us | p. 102-109
Reflect on this introduction to this section: "God’s desire in us makes us holy, and it will be the foundation on which God creates the new. Prayer and hunger, hunger and prayer - these will be the pillars on which God will build the future of the creature."
What language would you give to the idea of God’s desire within us? What does God want? How does that implanted desire within us make us holy? What is the relationship between hunger and prayer in your own life?
Jennings writes, “Luke’s narrative from this point forward will strain under the weight of the obsessive love of God.” Have you experienced the strain of God’s obsessive love? If yes, where? If no, would you like to?
Reflect on these words about Peter’s experience with the Roman solider.
“This is a risky time, second only to Good Friday and Holy Saturday, in which God risks with Peter and Peter risks with God. Will Peter hear this new word from God, and will Peter believe this is a new word from God? This is the condition of risk in which Christianity comes to exist and without which authentic Christianity does not exist. This is the risk of faith that comes to each of us, but none of us carries it alone. The risk here is found not in believing in new revelations but in new relationships. The new word that God continues to speak to us is to accept new people, different people that we had not imagined that God would send across our paths and into our lives.”
5/15 - Is This What Intimacy Sounds Like | p. 109-115
Trace the movement of Peter with Cornelius from the beginning where two people who are not supposed to be together end up spending extra time together while enjoying themselves in the presence of God. What do you notice about the details of that movement?
Jennings writes, “God will draw Jew and Gentile together, not moving past the one to get to the other, not choosing one and rejecting the other, but precisely bringing together, drawing close what was far apart. This meeting is the new order - Jew and Gentile will share one spirit.” Where have you encountered this movement of the Spirit?
Jennings writes of “inverted exceptionalism” in God’s order being an exceptionalism that turns us outward rather than inward. Where might God be calling you and St. Mary’s to an inverted exceptionalism?
5/22 - The Transgressing God | p. 115-121
Have you ever had an experience like Peter requiring you to give an account of spending time with someone religious people believe you shouldn’t spend time with? How does this section speak to you in the experience?
Jennings says Peter had to “explain the inexplicable” in hopes of building a bridge and writes about Peter using his experience instead of scripture for the bridge building. How do you experience this story? Does this feel like freedom? Does it make you afraid? What other emotion do you sense in engaging with this section?
How does Jennings suggest we stay tethered to history and tradition as we listen for new words from God?
5/29 - The World According to Antioch | p. 121-125
Jennings connects the Freedom Rides of the 1960’s to this section of Acts. He quotes Raymond Arsenault: “In 1961 … more than four hundred Americans participated in the dangerous experiment designed to awaken the conscience of a complacent nation.” He goes on to describe Barnabas as a man who risked friendship with Paul “a killer of disciples” and says Paul and Barnabas spent “a year teaching what they did not yet fully understand.” We are at a strange moment in our history as a church and a nation where we again need our consciences awakened and our complacency disturbed. What does Barnabas’ risk of friendship offer us in design for this awakening and disturbing?
When Barnabas heard of others coming to faith in Christ who were considered outside the norm “he rejoiced.” Jennings writes, “There is work to be done, people to be taught to live in the way of Jesus, and there will be many questions about ways of life, of merging and mixing, of adding and taking away aspects of culture and practice. But the first response must be joy, the joy of joining, and the happiness of new life together.” Have you been formed to experience the joy of joining in ways that have disrupted perceived norms?
The mysterious joining community was called Christians. Jennings says “Christian in its plural form always equals a strange new future.” Can you remember a time when being named as a Christian with another has presented you with a strange experience?
Jennings connects the famine relief and care for the suffering with this quote: “The church is marked by the Spirit with an inescapable action and an irrefutable demand-we must do what we can to address the particular needs the Holy One confronts us with.” How does this section speak to how me might discern as a community what the action and demands we are being called to are?
6/5 - The Prison Returns | p. 125-132
Jennings insists the church must never hide itself from the prison and must always remember speaking truth to power will keep us in locked doors. How have you experienced the church’s role in relationship to the prison system? Have you asked that question before? What is at stake when Christianity desensitizes itself from the prison, prisoners, and guards while accepting a “Christianity that goes hand in glove with the pseudo-morality of our judicial and penal systems?”
Jennings offers a wondering question on Peter’s reluctance to re-enter the community by asking if Peter had to deal with the stigma of being a former prisoner. How can churches grow in ways that could stop stigmatizing those who might most desperately need the advocacy of a community?
Jennings writes, “Luke performs the majesty of biblical narrative by once again reminding us that we should never be intimidated by those in power, no matter what power they wield.” Is speaking truth to power and pushing back against state powers that claim the power of life and death part of your Christian imagination? If so, how did that form? If not, why did it not form in that way?
6/12 - The Unambiguous Spirit | p. 132-134
Spend time with this passage: “At Antioch, we find people who know how to listen to the Spirit. This kind of cooperation may in fact be rare for us, but it never had to be. Wherever women and men give themselves to the disciplines that attune the body to its hunger for the Spirit they will find themselves receptive to the voice of God, and they will hear the Spirit speaking and offering guidance. Luke destroys the bad image, the sick fantasy of a silent Spirit who only occasionally whispers to a still heart. Rather we have a communion-bearing, community-forming God who speaks in the midst of the multitude and makes known where we must go to follow the Spirit’s movement.”
What does it challenge in your understanding of listening and cooperating with the Spirit?
Jennings offers three usual suspects to opposition to the Spirit - those within the household of faith, the political elite, and the economic elite - and suggests, “It would be good for Christians to remember these primary sites of Spirit resistance and the Spirit’s power to triumph even over them.”
How have you experienced these spaces of “Spirit resistance” in your own life and in the life of a community?
6/19 - Between Diaspora and Antioch | p. 134-136
There is a repetition in this commentary of reminding the reader of the Gentile inclusion into salvation being an indicator of God’s desire for all of the world rather than a rejection of Israel … “Jew and Gentile together—this is the will of the Spirit.” Have this longing of the Spirit been a focus of your life as a Christian? How could this kind of togetherness be lived? How might the Spirit desire Jew and Gentile to work together today?
Jennings describes Paul’s words as “sometimes brutish, sometimes elegiac, and sometimes elegant” as he elaborates on Paul being a habitation for the Spirit’s longings. Can you recall times you’ve felt like Paul in the clumsiness of allowing the Spirit’s desires to dwell in you?
6/26 - The Threat of Loss and the Promise of New Life | p. 136-138
Jennings offers a warning to his readers of the temptation to reduce those who opposed Paul and Barnabas proclamation of life as pure reprobates with the reminder they were dealing with “the anxieties of diaspora, the loss of identity, and the confusion of peoples?” Does that reminder help you find mercy and grace for someone you might need help in trying to forgive or understand?
He writes that a common Gentile mistake is to mistake “our presence for God’s presence.” What freedom might you encounter and experience in naming a place where you’ve succumbed to that mistake? Have you seen this individually? Communally?
7/3 - The Victory Over Violence | p. 138-140
Prayerfully reflect on this paragraph: “Violence is in the world God never ceases to love, and the disciples are placed between that violence and those subject to its pull. We who follow Jesus announce the corralling of violence, the drawing down of its range of influence, and its shrinking of power, not by our ability to handle violence in its ‘proper use’ but by our refusal to live subject to its power, or persuaded by its effectiveness.”
Do any specific tensions come to your mind as you reflect? Where have you been tempted to trust the effectiveness of violence or desire to place it in a category of “proper use?” How do the words of Jennings challenge or inspire you?
Jennings writes, “Disciples are those who surround people left for dead.” Does anyone come to mind when you think of those left for dead? Are the ones that come to mind sufferers of physical violence or violence of another kind? Jennings continues, “Disciples get hurt. Disciples carry wounds and before we make them metaphysical, drawing them into a spiritual alchemy, we must keep them real?” How have you experienced the rush to the spiritual and metaphysical when considering the wounds received for refusing to collaborate with the violence inflicted on bodies?
In describing the wounds received for solidarity with the wounded as “wounds of Christ that we share for his sake” and “marks of rejections and shame carried for the sake of the world.” How might our community carry the wounds with more solidarity and less isolation?
7/10 - The Antiochene Body and the Jewish Body | p. 140-149
In this section, Jennings discusses the proclivity to separate and categorize, as well as the way groups tend to prioritize conformity. How is this tendency displayed and challenged in this week’s Acts reading?
How does Jennings use the metaphor of quilting? Does it resonate with you? What fabrics might we join together as we seek to live into the new?
In the “Further Reflections” section of this chapter, Jennings writes, “We have been unable to imagine and enact a together life that flows inside the subtleties and intricacies of peoples’ differences, of such things as language, story, land, and animals. It has been easier to imagine either loss or resistance—loss of difference through assimilation or its control through conquest, or resistance to its loss through active segregation.”
He then asks a key question: “How can peoples be joined together, truly joined together without loss, without the death of one (people’s ways) for the sake of the other?" What do you think? Are there other stories that embody this? Lessons from sacred text, history, or the natural world?
7/17 - The Risk of Trust | p. 149-151
After reading Acts 15:35-41 and this section’s commentary, you may like to reflect on a time when you took a different path, either in ministry or in another part of your life. What was that like? Was there risk involved in that choice?
Jennings says that Barnabas “always seems to be ahead of Paul, drawing Paul to where he should be.” Can you think of someone in your life (could be a friend, a theologian, a teacher, for example) who is like a bridge for you between the old and the new? Are you that person for someone else?
Toward the end of the chapter, Jennings writes, “Barnabas took Mark and disappeared from Luke’s narrative, but he entered our future marking the path for those who would be the disciples of Jesus.” What do you imagine happened with Barnabas and Mark?
7/23 - The In-between Disciple | p. 152-157
In the very beginning of this section, Jennings writes, “This is the inner logic of a Christian—to perform multiple loves in loving Jesus.” How does he expound upon that statement in this chapter? What is the power of that kind of love?
How do we live in the in-between? Do we see ourselves as people - as the Body of Christ - that exists in complexity? What can we learn from that space of in-betweenness?
Pray with and reflect on this passage: “humanity and divinity are not ideas that we must find ways to fit Jesus into, rather Jesus defines for us both humanity and divinity. His life does not simply hold them together; his life shows us what they are, and who we are in God. Jesus turns the question we might bring to him regarding how he is the God-human into a question for us: Will we join him on a life journey woven in God and bound to eternity?”
7/30 - A Tale of Two Women | p. 157-161
Lydia uses her economic power to challenge the old order through participation in the new order. Do her actions provide imagination for you to find ways to use your own economic power for God’s new order of divine desire for the world?
Jennings uses the phrase “captivity to the economic order.” Does your imagination for how to use economic power ever shut down in what feels like a captivity to the old order? How might we experience a freedom from that captivity together in community?
Have you considered the idea that our addiction to the economic norms might be a binding of the economic and demonic? Jennings uses the slavery of the young girl in the story to uncover the demonic connection. Where might we be called to work with God’s Spirit to be unbound from this binding in our own lives and in the lives of others?
8/7 - Ownership and Discipleship | p. 161-163
Before reading the passage titled "Ownership and Discipleship," spend a few moments with those words and ask yourself what possible tensions might be present? How do they contradict each other? What does possession have to do with the kingdom of God?
Jennings writes, “Ownership and discipleship are never easily aligned.” He continues, “Only those willing to open their lives, their homes, and their possessions to use for the sake of the gospel can escape the seduction of ownership.” How might the weekly practice of receiving the Eucharist form this kind of healed imagination around ownership and discipleship?
Jennings ties the ownership described in this section as being connected to incarceration. He writes, “Incarceration is a process at the disposal of the rich and powerful, and here we see it unleashed against the servants of Jesus.” Spend time in prayer with this passage and ask the Spirit what kind of demands and freedoms might come from this statement?
8/14 - Shaking the Prison Foundations | p. 163-169
I was convicted and moved by every paragraph of this section. For this week, I’m simply going to offer a few of the passages and invite you to prayerfully consider what Jennings offers in these words.
“Praying and singing are acts of joining that weave our voices and words with the desperate of this world who cry out to God day and night. Each time we gather in the name of Jesus and lift our voices, this point of reference should shape our reverence and drive us to see and learn and know and change the situations of those who suffer especially in that holy name.”
In reference to an earthquake opening the doors of a prison, Jennings writes: “For those of us in the prison-drenched West conditioned to believe our safety is directly tied to bodies locked behind doors and prisoners chained, the sheer idea of prison doors wide open and chains loosened strike many people with stark terror. In this regard, we have become one with the jailer, one whose sense of well-being is shattered if people are set free.”
“Disciples are positioned against this political power of the secret. That power seeks to isolate and individuate injustices done, turning them into singular, episodic events that do not point to systemic, structural, and serial realities of oppression and the misuse of power… The disciple is a citizen who has had their citizenship tightly bound to the body of Jesus and ordered by the Spirit of God toward one purpose—to expose the concealed architecture of oppression and violence and to set the captives free.”
8/21 - The Struggle Between Text and Life | p. 169-175
Jennings warns about the temptation to celebrate conversions of powerful people more than conversions of the powerless. Have you witnessed this kind of celebration within Christian circles? How might this occurrence impact an entire tradition or movement?
Jennings continues the theme of ownership being redefined by the movement of the Spirit and states that Jason’s “actual crime was hospitality” while writing, “By divine decree, not the emperor’s, the house must become the church and this is what the church today seems to have forgotten. Homes must be invaded by the Spirit in order to overturn all social spaces.” How might the homes of our community enter into this kind of revolution of hospitality?
8/28 - A Rhetoric of Desire | p. 175-178
Jennings offers this observation: “For centuries Christians have wanted to 'get back to the Greeks' and capture the supposed cultural genius of the modern West’s imagined intellectual ancestors and even progenitors of modern thought.” He suggest this has created a “site of a European fetish, that is idealized Greek culture.” What correction or warning might this passage possess for a group of Christians drawn to the Anglican tradition and practices? What might we make an idol in this temptation?
Jennings asks, “What do you say to those radically outside yourself, radically different from you? What do you say to those whose religions and rituals you have been trained to loath?” As you read the passage of Paul speaking to those outside of Israel, bringing the Gentile marketplace into contact with the body of Jesus, what freedoms and challenges arise in how you interact with those Jennings asks us to consider?
Finally reflect prayerfully (and I hope joyfully) on this passage: “Paul will not turn Gentile ignorance toward God’s condemnation, but toward God’s condescension.”
“All religious speech, no matter how carefully stated, no matter how ecumenical and affirming, no matter how polite, shatters at the resurrected body of Jesus. Because to speak of the resurrection of Jesus is no longer religious speech, but speech that challenges reality, reorients how we see earth and sky, water and dirt, land and animals, and even our own bodies. This is speech that evokes a decision: either laugh at it or listen to it, either leave or draw near to this body. It is his body or your stones.”
What stones might we be able to put down by joining Jesus body in resurrected reality?
9/4 - A Community in a Double Bind | p. 178-181
Jennings begins this section with this statement: “To be within the prophetic is to be for a moment in synergy with God, sharing in the full measure of the temptation to lose patience with God’s people, yet intoxicated with the divine longing for the creature.” Have you experienced this prophetic synergy in your relationship with God? How do you remember that space? What were some outcomes?
The prophetic space makes Paul want to give up as his energy collapses. Jennings concludes that paragraph about Paul wanting to give up with these words: “Love will sometimes threaten to abandon, but it never does. Paul is caught in the threat of an action that God will not follow. God does not follow abandonment, because God has brought abandonment into the divine life. The abandoned now have a home in God if they want it.” Have you seen God refuse to abandon people? Have you been the recipient of that refusal? Does God’s refusal to abandon anyone challenge aspects of your own faith and experience?
The movement in the chapter is away from Paul and toward the world. Jennings writes, “We press for the flourishing of the world and not for the flourishing of the church. God will see to the latter.” How does this statement move you? Is this a vision for the church you share? Why or why not?
9/11 - A New Kind of Couple | p. 181-183
Jennings observes Priscilla and Aquila’s marriage by saying, “They are not consumed with self-preservation, but with a shared life that yields to the Spirit. Indeed, Luke does not give us a domestic order or even a vision of gender complimentary, but disciples together. This is by far the best working definition of a Christian couple.” What does this passage do to your own vision and convictions on Christian coupling? Where is it challenging? Where is it inviting? What might it inspire?
There are two passages in this section, one about Paul and one about Priscilla & Aquila, that I found especially inspiring. Spend time reflecting on them and prayerfully ask what these words might unleash in your own life in the Spirit:
“Christian life is, at its very heart, a freeing movement between worlds that weaves together that which others never imagine together. This is the Spirit’s doing who always uses the in-between spaces to create the new, a space of redemption where we can together strain to touch the fullness of Jesus’ body.“
“Luke shows us what a couple joined to Jesus can do. They can speak truth to power and instruct the powerful. This is a reality of the couple that the church has never grasped in its fullness, that is, to be a microcell of insurgency, an intimate event a revolution that might draw others to a deeper understanding of the life of God in the flesh.”
9/18 - By Water and Touch | p. 183-188
Throughout the commentary Jennings repeats the phrases “we must always remember” and “we must never forget.” In the spirit of always remembering our baptism, contemplate this sentence: “Baptism in Jesus’ name signifies bodies that become the new day.”
As you read this passage, what memories or observations come to your mind as you contemplate your own experiences in the church…
“Touch matters to God because we are God’s creatures, created to be touched repeatedly by God. Touching is often intercepted by economic utility and isolating pleasure, yet here we see a glimpse of an Eros in which touching marks a divine yearning for a pleasure that heals and sets free and that will reach into eternity.”
The section closes by stating life in the Spirit will contain a recurring need to renounce practices that become a substitute for relationship with God rather than the actual touch of God. Instead of willingly renouncing old ways, many have other’s practice imposed upon them leading to “self-hatred” and “constant policing.” Jennings writes, “Such forms of faith deny and destroy much more than they affirm and build up, and thus they undermine the holy work of renunciation.” Are there practices you sense a desire to renounce in order to experience the touch of God? Are there practices that have been imposed upon you that seem to contradict the freedom that is offered in Christ?
9/25 - The City is Shaken | p. 188-190
This section aims directly at the structures that protect wealth by combining religious institutions with the “financial arrangements of the city.” As you read, what arrangements came to your mind?
Prayerfully contemplate this quote:
“If you want people to hate deeply, hate down to the bone, then suggest that someone or something threatens their financial stability and their theological beliefs. If you want people to be willing to kill without hesitation, suggest that these same enemies will weaken the social and political standing of a place and a people by their disrupting actions. Ephesus will diminish in glory as the temple of Artemis diminishes in glory as our businesses diminish in productivity and sales. Once this logic is unleashed on a people, no people has the power to resist its powerful impulse, because it conjures the spirt of fear, and failure, and reminds people of their vulnerability as creatures in the world.”
What warning does it possess for the city we live in where so much is built and tied to Christian industry?
Jennings writes, “The volume of a crowd is never an indication of its strength of their faith, but always their vulnerability and oftentimes their fear. The crowd needs faith. A crowd that gains faith shrinks in size and becomes a congregation. The crowd that becomes the congregation happens ‘one by one,’ as those who have found the narrow way to life join together.” Have you experienced this movement from crowd to congregation? Why do you think Jennings calls this the narrow way?
10/2 - The Journey of Jesus, Again | p. 190-191
Reflect on Jennings’ use of the sleep and falling out of a window by Eutychus as a way for us to seek out young people among us who could be put in dangerous proximity because of the proclamation of our words about God. What comes to mind as you see this application of this brief section of scripture?
10/9 - Communion or Counterfeit | p. 191-196
Jennings writes about the difference of being the Lamb of God and being invited into the suffering of the Lamb of God. He elaborates, “The church has been and continues to be guilty of this ideological use of sacrifice as a way to feed an addiction for the control of bodies.” Have you seen or experienced this addiction to the control of bodies? Where or how so?
Jennings describes the counterfeit overseers as being caught in the “powerful habits of old ways.” The old ways he names are: lust for power, desire for the control of others, the fear of diaspora, fear of cultic loss, cultural death, and theological uncertainty. How have you seen these old ways serve as false senses of security and safety in the church? Jennings insists giving into these old ways reduce us to “mere shadows of the gospel.” Why is it so easy to settle for the shadows the old ways preserve?
Jennings moves the conversation of the old ways to the economic system they create and sustain. He writes, “We fail to see the circuit at work all around us and in us and thereby reduce this revolutionary word of Paul to a sentimental gesture of almsgiving, or worse, to an apologetic for economic self-suffiency. An economic circuit must be overturned in us, and it begins with the overseers.” How can pastors of churches resist the circuit of the old powers?
10/16 - A Jerusalem State of Mind | p. 196-197
Reflect on Jennings’ description of this passage consisting of Paul’s future suffering in Jerusalem being like the blues: “There is a tension in this text that echoes a blues refrain. Something beyond anyone’s control is going on, and all must speak of it, worry about it, cry and plead together about it, but ultimately there is little anyone can do.” Where have you encountered this kind of circumstances beyond control because of the Spirit’s lead?
Jennings uses several phrases in this passage that inspire me with beauty and truth. I’ll share a few and invite you to ponder them in prayer and (hopefully) hope:
“Why do we need to see a life that appears to be trapped by fate? Jerusalem is the reason. It is the place the prophets suffer, which means it is the place that resists the Spirit.”
“This is about the Spirit’s striving in Israel, among the people created by God’s own hand. Paul has joined his body to the Spirit’s burden.”
“God journeys again into rejection and suffering, and Paul is the companion of God. The prophetic voice here is a disclosing voice, brining us into an intimate space—the inner life and anguish of God.”
Is there an action, or multiple actions, you might feel invited into through these words?
10/23 - The Anguish of Diaspora | p. 198-202
This section describes the anxiety religious people feel when the Spirit adds unexpected members to a community. Have you experienced anxiety around God adding to the body of Christ in ways that challenge your identity as a Christian? Jennings suggests the proper reaction to this new creation is praise, but the reaction is usually “a concern that polices that praise.” Why is praise difficult in the presence of anxiety and policing religious identity?
Jennings writes, “We who live on the other side of Christian colonialism have watched the emergence of a soul-killing, people-destroying expansionism that forced peoples into a Christian sameness, and orthodoxy of body and dress, comportment and character that has numbed the minds of many and presented the faith as exquisite subjugation.” He offers a way out of this knot by seeing the Spirit “joining peoples without destroying peoples” and insists we must end our “segregationist thinking.” How can we as a community and as individuals practice this kind of escape from these traps of our anxieties?
The final paragraphs of this section point to the insatiable demands of the anxious crowd afraid of losing identity by being in community with those free from identity by law. It is an energy that always leads to violence. Jennings writes, “It is the personification of the human in pain, fear, and desperation, and the crowd turns on Paul’s body, as they had turned on Jesus’ body. Paul is beaten without mercy.” Contemplate the violence in our own religious institutions. How do you see connections between the violence and anxiety, concern for identity, and segregationist thinking?
10/30 - Dangerous Speech | p. 203-206
Jennings writes, “Paul speaks inside of misperception. The crowd does not see him through the truth of his own words. They only see him through the lies born of diaspora fear.” In the context of all of the fears encircling us based in the loss of identity through communion with those who are different from us, how does Paul’s witness attune us to the truth of joining instead of the anxieties of loss of identity?
Contemplate this passage: “The disciple of Jesus is a desperate citizen because she knows lives are at stake in the operations of the state, her own life, and others. This kind of citizenship depends wholly on one’s level of vulnerability in this world. The vulnerable enter citizenship with a purpose different from the elites, for whom citizenship is only an embroidery to their existence. It only adds to their strength and aids the accomplishing of their desires. Vulnerable people reach for citizenship to stave off death. Paul is a Roman citizen by birth, but at this moment he has joined the hope of the weak, to turn the law in their favor and draw down the power of the state to harm.”
Has your citizenship been more centered in a kind of elitist embroidery or a staving off of death? What would be necessary to give up to join those who are part of the church as vulnerable citizens? How can we join Paul in joining to the “hope of the weak” in relation to the power that comes through being US citizens?
11/6 - Between Rocks and Hard Places | p. 206-212
This section spends ample time in the tendency of religious and political powers to use violence to shut down voices that would speak truth before everyone is ready for truth. How do the tendencies for control lead to this violence and silencing?
Jennings insists intimacy with Jesus—being joined to Christ’s body—will provide the strength and energy for Paul to speak to the powers of his day. Specifically he writes, “Paul and Jesus will be like two musicians who have become one in song, each leaning in to hear the other and expressing a sound that speaks the one sound they want heard.” How does this sentence move you? What song might you and Jesus desire to sing together?
Jennings states, “Paul is a site of joining, and joining always has deep political consequences.” How does this challenge your faith? How does it offer freedom for it?
11/13 - The Political is the Theological | p. 212-215
How does the title of this section strike you? Do you agree or disagree? What formation has led you to that stance? How does the content of the passage challenge or strengthen your opinion?
Jennings writes about the use and brilliance of oration as a means to collude with death or expand life. How does Paul’s use of oration differ from Tertullus?
How does resurrection move situations into hope and life in ways that empire always moves toward death and violence? Why is the resurrection foolish in the eyes of empire?
11/20 - The Assimilated Couple | p. 215-219
This is the third section of the commentary dealing with couples being together for the sake of themselves or for the sake of the fidelity of creation. How does the assimilation spoken of in this section—an assimilation that benefits the politics of Rome and the political economy of empire—resist God’s kingdom and economy?
This section demands the virtue of self-control be formed within the bookends of justice and judgment. Has your Christian imagination placed self-control in this space? If not, what shifts with the new anchor?
Paul is imprisoned and his imprisonment is a witness to the gospel. Jennings invites the reader to see imprisoned humans as exposing a system that exists “inside the economic and political desire and the flow of money.” He continues, “The prison has always been inside the market as much as it is inside the state.” Have you connected economic and political to the prison system? Where do your curiosity, desire, and anxiety move with this question?
11/27 - The Citizen Disciple | p. 219-226
Prayerfully engage with this passage … “Paul represented an alternative vision of joining in which Jew and Gentile found each other at the resurrected body of Jesus. This is not assimilation but joining, and the church has always struggled to know the difference. The former means loss, but the latter means gain. The former destroys the voices and histories of people and imposes an alternative story that imparts to peoples a derogatory gaze of their own people and culture in light of glory of the conquering culture. The latter invites peoples to share in each other’s way of life and come to know each other through the Spirit, who imparts the desire to love and the desire to be together in the love of God made known in Jesus. The former is Rome and the latter is Pentecost, and the church has too often chosen Roman-like assimilation instead of Pentecost-forming joining.”
What shifts in your imagination if this paragraph is true? Is there more space for the gospel to be good news in this casting of gospel vision?
Why do empires consistently see this kind of joining, rather than assimilation, as a threat?
12/4 - The King and I | p. 226- 233
Jennings writes, “Christian theology took a terrible turn when they decided that our way, the creaturely way of knowing ourselves and God, had to be defended and defined much more than it needed to be discerned and articulated.” How would you describe these differences and what practical examples of the different approaches have you noticed within the church?
Prayerfully contemplate this passage: “The darkness of which Paul speaks cannot be seen but only known in the light of Jesus Christ. This is darkness, not of the creation, but against the creation. The darkness conceals and is concealed amidst aimless existence that moves away from God. No creaturely body could ever be this darkness, but all of us have been subjected to it.” And… “We did not know of our blindness in darkness and of our captivity to the demonic until the revealing of light and deliverance in Jesus of Nazareth. We can now see what we were incapable of overcoming until the overcomer appeared, telling us to fear neither the darkness nor Satan, because God has claimed the beloved creature.” What new arises for you in these words? What actions might these claims invite you to relationally with others?
12/11 - A Common Journey and a Singular Faith | p. 233-239
How does Paul’s treatment as an imprisoned person - being allowed to spend time with friends impact your own understanding or acceptance of prison? What part does vengeance play in the ideas of prisons without space for human dignity?
Jennings describes Paul’s words to those who carried him on the prison ship as appropriate hubris and elaborates: “It is the hubris of a mission filled with hope and guided by faith that announces our life within the life of God. It is a hubris that dares speak at the site of despair and chaos, saying God lives and so too shall we live.” How does the word hubris strike you in this usage?
Reflect on this passage: “Even in our time no one’s feet are on solid ground. This is not an allegory, but reality. We are always on this ship, and the question for the church is not whether we will eat but when and where we will offer food and under what conditions will we invite those fear laden and troubled to eat.” Where do you find joy in these words?
12/18 - The Gift of Hospitality | p. 239-242
How does Paul’s shipwreck and vulnerability change how he shared the gospel in a shared need for one another rather than a place of power? What might shift in our own methods of evangelism with vulnerability and need present rather than supremacy of any kind?
Jennings describes the joining of Paul to the Maltese with these words offering a desired pattern of: help given, hospitality offered and received, and God present to heal.” Are there places in your own life where you meet those outside of the Christian faith with these realities present? What prevents or allows such patterns? What vulnerability might we need in order to be in such spaces?
Jennings ends the passage with this sentence about Paul discovering a truth on Malta: “God is everywhere waiting for us to arrive.” Try to remember and live into this truth today. At the end of your day, revisit the sentence to see where you encountered God in unexpected places.
12/25 - The Calling of Hospitality | p. 242-253
Contemplate these words in light of the incarnation and Christmas … “It is the story of an urgently longing God who has bound the divine life to the frailty of flesh. Once again we see what is in fact inexplicable—God who is everywhere comes to Rome with a fresh word. How can the God who is present be said to arrive at a place and a time? In truth, it is only because God has shown Godself to be present in the precise and specific urgency of the moment that we can being to see a Holy presence without measure and without limitation.”
What awareness or action might this passage open before you during the Christmas season?
Jennings focuses on Paul’s location in prison as the site of God’s urgent longing being made known in a specific time and place. Have you contemplated the place of the imprisoned in your own faith journey? Jennings writes, “…we remember those in prison as though we were with them, because our faith grew in such places (Hebrews 13:3). What action and awareness might this invite us to this Christmas season?
As you reflect on your experience in this commentary consider Jennings words that follow Paul’s imprisoned location being one that “will not yield to diaspora fear or the lust for empire.” He writes, “This new space welcomes all to a faith that desires and joins.” Where have you seen God’s desire for different groups of people to be joined together through the resurrected body of Christ as you’ve engaged with this book?
Postscript - A Place to Be Free | p. 253-257
Reflect on this sentence and ask how you have experienced this as a recipient or giver of hospitality: “Sometimes being seen as a friend or an enemy of people depends on whether you listen to their story and live your life as though their story matters to you.” Does your faith allow you to listen to the stories of others without the need to control how it matters to you? Why would the need to control create enemies?
Jennings refers as the need to control as “protectionism” and contrasts it to the “ Spirit-filled action of joining” that is the desire of God. Why do communities so often settle for protectionism instead of doing the action of joining? Why is “protectionism” useful to the imperial versions of Christianity?
Reflect on this passage: “Disciples allow themselves to be assimilated for the sake of love; they do not demand or request others assimilate to them. This is a message that Christians have rarely heard or understood but desperately need to live into today.” What challenges you in these words? What compels you?