The whole
assembly kept silence, and listened to Barnabas and Paul as they told of all
the signs and wonders that God had done through them among the Gentiles. After
they finished speaking, James replied, “My brothers, listen to me. Simeon has
related how God first looked favorably on the Gentiles, to take from among them
a people for his name. This agrees with the words of the prophets, as it is
written, ‘After this I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David,
which has fallen; from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so
that all other peoples may seek the Lord— even all the Gentiles over whom my
name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things
known from long ago’...." [Acts 15:12-18]
It is a holy and dangerous thing to listen to one another... really to listen, and not simply to assume you know what the other will say.
This is the story of a time when the first generation of Christ-followers dared to listen, both to the Scriptures and to one another, and ended up being surprised by both.
When the early church wrestled with big questions like "Who belongs?" the early church committed to
listening to each other. The question at this moment in the book of Acts was whether Gentiles (non-Jewish people) were going to be allowed to belong in the church as they were, or if they would have to live within the rules of Judaism first. And so they gathered in Jerusalem to talk... to wrestle... and honestly, to listen.
But what exactly did they listen to each other
saying? This was clearly not a Quaker meeting where everyone sat in
silence until someone burst out with something to say. It seems from just
these verses that there are two things the Christian community kept its ears
open for--the Word of God in the Scriptures, and the ongoing activity of God in
the world. These two go together, and they cannot be separated, because
we cannot know how to identify what kinds of things God might be up to
without know from the Scriptures what God is like and who God is, but also
because we cannot leave the actions of God as fossils of the past, preserved in
the pages of the Bible only, as though God retired when the last chapter of
Revelation was written.
Pretty easily, we see how the Christian
community in Jerusalem
did both at the same time. James, who is probably the James we also know
as the brother of Jesus, puts the Scriptures and the ongoing work of God back
to back within two sentences. First, he reminds the gathered community
that "Simeon" (Simon Peter) has seen the stirrings of the Spirit to
lead him to welcome Gentile believers and to draw those Gentiles to meet him and
hear the Good News in the first place (this is back to the story of Cornelius
in Acts 10). The church, if it is to be faithful in any way, simply
cannot stick its head in the sand so it can ignore what the Holy Spirit has
continued to do. The church simply could not ignore or deny that the
Spirit has drawn non-Jews as non-Jews (that is, without having them keep
kosher or be circumcised) into faith in Christ and into the community of his
disciples, the same way that the church simply could not ignore the moving of
the Spirit on Pentecost. If they had, there would have been only twelve
members of the church, and their bones would still be huddled together in a
locked upper room in Jerusalem.
But because they were open to the leading of the Spirit, they walked out on
that Pentecost Day and let the Good News flow through them.
Well, here
they are again--the Spirit has been moving, and they have been mulling over
what it means. It's not as though the church instantly knew what to do
about these Gentile Christians they were seeing--the first disciples were
genuinely surprised about this turn of events, it seems. But once the
fact was out there--once they started to see Gentiles coming to faith in Jesus
without being circumcised and without keeping kosher--they had to deal with it,
and they had to deal with it as though the Spirit of God were a part of it.
That kind of facing the facts is scary
for us to do. We have a hard enough time getting a handle on how things
were or how things "used to be" in the nostalgia-tinted scenes from
our memory. So it's even harder to allow the possibility that God might
surprise us, too. It was scary for the church when, just a matter of
decades ago, a movement began that started asking whether women could be allowed
to be pastors, even though it had fallen out of practice and been forbidden for
centuries. But here were these women, who were convinced that the Spirit
was moving--yes, even moving in ways that paralleled the women's movement in
secular culture--and that they, too, had been led to be pastors in the
church. And for many Christian traditions--certainly not all, but some,
including my own Lutheran tradition--it was a scary time, but still Christian leaders found the
courage first to listen to one another rather than coming to the table
with eyes shut and arms crossed. And one of the things they listened for
was the word from people who could only say that they knew the Spirit of God
was moving among them. The church worked up the courage to ask, What
is God's Spirit doing in our situation? rather than to assume they
knew what God was allowed and not allowed to do. That kind of courageous
humility to let God be free to act led to new directions for women's leadership
in many churches, the same way it allowed the church to be open to surprise
with the inclusion of Gentiles.
And yet, there was more that happened
in that gathering in Jerusalem
in Acts 15. The disciples did not just voice their own experiences as
though they all knew what their experiences meant by themselves.
They did not merely pool their ignorance and decide something on their own,
only to rubber stamp their decision with God's approval in their minds.
They turn to the Scriptures to see whether there might have been hints and
surprises in those ancient, living words, to speak to their situation.
They risked allowing themselves--all of them--to be surprised by the
Scriptures, to see what the Word of God said, rather than assuming that one
side was the "Bible-believing" side and the other was the "Bible-rejecting"
side.
Both the Kosher-law-insisting Judean Christians and the
Gentile-welcoming traveling Christians, who clearly already had their opinions,
put themselves under the authority of the Scriptures, and both were willing to
be surprised by the Scriptures. And as James guides the
conversation, they do recall words that perhaps that had known for years,
memorizing in the synagogue as children, hearing read on the sabbath over the
course of their lives. There is this vision from the prophet Amos, a vision
of Gentiles being drawn into God's community and called by the name of
God. And if they had spent much more time on the subject, they might have
rattled off a long list of passages that pictured this kind of welcome into
God's community. The Scriptures had something to say to their situation,
and it was a surprising word.
That is scary for us to imagine, too,
because we would prefer to know that the Bible doesn't have any tricks up its
sleeve. We want to imagine that the Bible has no surprises left, and that
God has said all that there is to be said on every subject, so we need not even
bother reading the Scriptures a second time. But no, the early church
said--God continues to speak to us through the living Word of the Scriptures,
and that means that God may well surprise us in what we find there. Just
as the Spirit is not our possession, at our command and in our tight grasp, but
moves and works in a slippery way just outside of our grip, so the Scriptures,
too, are free to overturn our expectations. That was also, interestingly
enough, a part of the conversation in many churches as the question of women's
ordination came up--it was not simply a matter of deciding that something
"new" needed to be done. It was a matter of re-reading the Scriptures
and discovering again not only the claim that "there is no longer male and
female, for you are now one in Christ" in the New Testament, but also
rediscovering that there were apparently many women leaders in the Christian
church whose names and roles are mentioned in Acts and in Paul's letters.
It was not a matter of throwing out the Bible in favor of experience,
but of letting the Bible speak to us, even if it spoke something we were not
expecting, something that the Spirit was moving us to see again.
This is how the early church found
itself addressing the question of Gentiles--committing to listening, but in
particular, listening to the testimony of people who saw and witnessed the
action of the Holy Spirit, and listening to the Word of Scripture to find hints
of what the Spirit's motion would look like. In some ways, it seems far
too loose, far too risky, compared with our bureaucratic ways of making
decisions in the church, and the mountains of paperwork it involves. And
yet, the early church never lost its rootedness, never lost its secure
foundation, because it kept itself listening to the Word, spoken through the
Spirit in living brothers and sisters, and spoken through the words of
patriarchs and prophets in the Scriptures.
Are we willing to risk such reading
of the Scriptures together and to do the holy, dangerous work of listening for the moving of the Spirit today as
we ask what God is doing with us?
God of speech and silence, grant to us
the courage to listen, and beneath that, the foundational trust to know that
you have claimed us and will not let us go. From that position of trust,
let us risk hearing, discussing, and engaging each other as we seek to be your
people in this day and at this time.
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