Called Out and Called Up--June 15, 2023

Called Out and Called Up--June 15, 2023

"But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Judeans joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you, though I Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'" [Galatians 2:11-14]

We would like to believe that our faith journeys are marked out in straight lines--always forward, no steps back, and no detours or getting lost.  We'd like to tell ourselves that our life stories are framed entirely as progress, with no failures and no setbacks.  We're happy to sing those words from "Amazing Grace" that go, "I once was lost, but now am found... was blind, but now I see," if it lets us believe we can never get ourselves lost again and never have our vision clouded.  But it just ain't so.  We keep making mistakes, misunderstanding the truth, and messing up.  We need people who will pull us back on the track of Christ-like love, even when they have to confront us to do it.

That's true even for our heroes, including biblical heroes of the faith like Simon Peter.  This story, an episode we have from Paul's letter to the Galatians, is a reminder that even the hand-picked inner circle of Jesus sometimes gets it wrong and needs other voices to hold them accountable for the sake of love.  And as hard as it can be to see the ones we looked up to and respected can sometimes get it wrong, it's also good news to know that when they do, there is the hope for change, new beginnings, and a restart, even if it comes through a verbal smack-upside-the-head from another Christian.

So just to make sure we all know what's going on here, the person referred to as "Cephas" here is actually the apostle we know as Simon Peter, and yes, that's the same Simon Peter who was one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus.  (In case you're wondering about that name, you probably remember that Jesus gave Simon a new nickname that meant "rock" or "stone;" well, in Aramaic, the language Jesus actually spoke, that nickname was "Cephas," and in Greek, the language the New Testament was written in, that nickname got translated into the Greek word for "rock" or "stone," Petros--or Peter.)  So we've got THE Simon Peter, who became a central leader of the early church.  And this is the same Simon Peter we read about earlier in this week from the book of Acts in the story of Cornelius, who finally came to realize that God was including Gentiles (people who weren't Jewish) in the new community of Christ.  Peter even gave this really powerful speech back in Acts 10 about how he finally realized the truth that God shows no partiality, and that nobody was supposed to call profane what God had declared clean and good.  And now... here, sometime later, after the apostle Paul (whom we've also spent some time reflecting on this week) had begun his own ministry specifically welcoming Gentiles to faith in Jesus, the two have a run-in.  And it appears that good old Simon Peter-Cephas-"The Rock" the Apostle had forgotten what he said he believed.

Peter had apparently found himself waffling about whether or not he would actually share tables with the Gentile Christians.  It was fine to include everybody "in theory" if they were  a hypothetical group of people somewhere else.  And he was even OK, apparently, with sharing a table with Gentiles as long as none of the hard-liners who didn't want to include Gentiles as Gentiles (without making them be circumcised or keep kosher) were around.  But when some of those folks showed up (again, certain that THEY were on "God's side"), Simon "The Rock" Peter/Cephas went right back to the old ways of segregation.  All of a sudden the Gentile Christians were back to being second-class not-quite-members, and he wasn't going to be seen in public with them.  You can see why Paul, seeing all this play out, called this all out as "hypocrisy."

So, why do we have a story like this in our Bibles?  Why bring up this setback in Peter's life, and why tarnish his reputation with a memory of how Peter failed to live up to the ideals he had so nobly proclaimed back in the book of Acts?  Well, for starters, it's just honest--and whether they are biblical heroes, founding fathers of our country, or historical figures--to see them truthfully, even when that means acknowledging their clay feet, character flaws, and regrettable choices.  But we also need to face stories like this to remind us that our faith journey isn't always (or ever!) an ever-ascending rise to better and better heights.  We screw up. We get it wrong sometimes.  We make mistakes, and sometimes we even take a bunch of steps backward for everyone one step forward, closer to Jesus.  And in those moments, we need other people among the community of Jesus who can speak truth to us, both because they love us, and because they love the people affected by our missteps.

That's important to note in this story. Paul doesn't call Peter out just because he wants to be a know-it-all or a jerk (seriously, he doesn't).  Paul is thinking about all of those new believers, who were vulnerable and brave to step forward and risk joining the Christian community despite all the scorn they were sure would be directed at them.  Paul knows that it's not completely safe yet to be Gentile and a Christian. There were still factions trying to force Gentiles to change who they were and become practically Jewish first, and Paul saw that as a misunderstanding of what the Gospel really said.  Paul knew that if you start putting fine print or strings on the Gospel's free gift of grace through faith, you have lost the truth of the Gospel and just turned it into one more self-help program or another variation on Respectable Religion.  Paul calls Peter out because he's concerned about all the people who will have a target on their backs if the wider church follows Peter's lead and starts elbowing out Gentile Christians.  And Paul knows that if the Christian community only talks about God's welcome for ALL but doesn't truly practice that welcome, their message has ceased to be the Gospel, even if it ruffles feathers to include those who were on the margins, like those early Gentile Christians.  So for the sake of those who are most at risk, Paul speaks up, yes to Saint Peter himself, to say, "You can't dismiss these siblings in Christ just because the hard-liners have come to town and you're afraid to stand up to them."  That's a hard truth, but it comes from a place of deep love for the people who are most vulnerable.

But at the same time, this is also about love for Peter--the act of calling him out is meant to get him to wake up, to see the contradiction between his older stance and his newer refusal to eat with the Gentile Christians, and to make a course correction.  Paul wants Peter to be brought back on track, and to step back onto the pathway of Christ-like love.  Sometimes that's what it takes--the willingness of a few faithful voices, or even just one, to speak the Gospel with authenticity when the hierarchy of the church has fallen back into Respectable Religion, and to speak for those whose welcome is most fragile.  Seeing that something like this happened to Simon Peter, and that even he could get it wrong and need a refresher on the implications of the Gospel, means that we can be honest that we may need those voices among us, too.  We don't always get it right, and we are constantly tempted to turn the church into a social club for the like-minded and demographically-homogenous.  We are tempted, like Peter, to pay lip service to the idea that "all are welcome," as long as we don't have to really mean it when it comes to "those people" and actually sharing our tables with one another.  And so we need voices like Paul's to call us out and call us up to take the gospel's radical inclusion seriously once again.  Simon Peter needed that in the first century, and we still need it in the twenty-first.

If the history of the church tells us anything, it's that we keep messing up and need to keep being pulled back to the truly astounding depth of God's love in Christ.  We began as a movement where enslaved people were treated with dignity and enslavers were pressured to release their slaves to be regarded as siblings... and then after enough centuries, Christians were using their religion to justify owning other human beings.  We began as a movement that counted women among the earliest preachers, leaders, and apostles... and then over time took a step back and insisted that women couldn't be any of those things (and told people, untruthfully, that they never had been any of those things).  We began as a movement where the ones on the margins were told that they were accepted, as they were, because God had already accepted them... and yet we are back to fighting, fragmenting, and fleeing over the lines to be drawn for who can't belong.  We keep making Peter's mistake.  So we keep needing voices like Paul's to force us to see where we've been hypocrites, and where we've hamstrung the power of the gospel by making ourselves gatekeepers.

Maybe when one of those voices speaks up around you and me today, we should listen.  And maybe when you see a situation in need of such a voice and nobody else is stepping up, it's your turn to arise.

Lord Jesus, enable us both to hear your truth and to speak it in ways that welcome the lost, the least, and the left-out ones, just as you have always done.