Between "Them" and "Us"--June 25, 2024

Between "Them" and "Us"--June 25, 2024

"But some believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees stood up and said, 'It is necessary for [Gentile believers] to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.' The apostles and the elders met together to consider this matter. After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, 'My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will'." [Acts 15:5-11]

In the end, the first disciples made decisions, not based on whose side had a bigger stack of Bible verses to use as weapons, but on where the Spirit was leading them--even if that meant a surprising new direction.

Now, I say that as someone who is antsy about change and who takes a good long while to get used to something new.  So this isn't about me and my "comfort zone." It's about finally paying attention to the story the Scriptures have been telling all along.  And when you actually read the story of the early church in the book of Acts, you find that at their best, they listened to the directing of the Spirit, even when it took some getting used, and even if it seemed like it meant overhauling their old understandings of "what the Bible says." As someone who has been committed to studying, learning, and wrestling with the Scriptures for decades, I find that they keep surprising me that way--pointing beyond themselves, and beyond the bad habit of weaponizing Bible verses to beat people up, and instead pointing me toward the living voice of the Spirit of God and the grace of Jesus.

Here's a case in point.  In case the backstory isn't immediately clear, the early church had its first Big Family Dinner Table Meeting (sometimes called the Council of Jerusalem) over the question of whether Gentiles (non-Jewish people) could become disciples of Jesus as they were, or if they had to become Jewish first.  In other words, the question was, did God accept Gentiles as Gentiles, or did they have to stop being Gentile and become converts to Judaism, which included circumcision for males, kosher laws for food, and the whole rest of the Mosaic Law (all 613 commandments, not just the most well-known Top Ten).  More broadly, the issue was whether welcome into the Christian community is a welcome "as you are" or whether you had to fit another set of cookie-cutter expectations that came with cultural, religious, and dietary baggage.

And for a while, in that early congregational meeting, there was quite a bit of debate.  You had people arguing, "But we've ALWAYS done it the old way--we've always insisted on every believer keeping the Mosaic law in order to follow Jesus!" which wasn't quite true on its face, since there had been a growing number of Gentile converts for some time who didn't have to keep kosher or be circumcised, and because as Peter said, even the Jewish members of the church had never perfectly kept the Law themself anyway! You also had people ready to trot out Bible verses insisting that all the people of God had to obey all the rules of the covenant--all insisting that "unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses you cannot be saved" (Acts 15:1).

And then eventually Peter gets up to speak.  Yep, good ol' Simon Peter, who had been with Jesus from the beginning.  Peter, who grew up Jewish and who had moments of great courage and also great recklessness, the same Simon Peter who was given the nickname that means "Rock" by the Lord himself, gets up and says, "The right question to ask is, Where is the Spirit pointing?"  He says that the Gentile believers in their budding church community had received the Holy Spirit without them having to keep the Laws, observe the kosher rules for food, or be circumcised.  In other words, Peter says, the Holy Spirit had been given to them as they were, without preconditions, without ceasing to be who they were before, and without watching to see how well they followed "the rules" first.  And then Peter puts the icing on the cake: he says that all of them, Judeans and Gentiles alike in the Christian community, "will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus."  And as far as God's verdict on the subject, Pete says that God "has made no distinction between them and us."  Peter's conclusion, then, is that if God no longer recognizes a difference between the ones we've been labeling "THEM" and the ones we label as "US," then maybe we should stop drawing lines between those groups, too.

Now, in a sense, this should not be controversial at all, since the question of accepting Gentiles as Gentiles has now been a settled matter for two thousand years.  We Christians might still fuss over everything from how much water you need to be baptized to the color of the carpet in the new church parlor, but the question of Gentile inclusion is a resolved issue. And for any of us who have come to faith from outside of a Jewish heritage or who have ever eaten a bacon cheeseburger, that decision is what assures us that WE belong, too.  But what is still scandalous and more than a little frightening to a lot of church folks is the implication of this story: that in the end, the right question to ask is, "Where is the Spirit of God leading us?" rather than, "Who has a bigger stack of Bible verses on their side for a fight?"  And it's worth recognizing how much courage it took for the first generation of Christians to be willing to erase the old lines that had been drawn between "Them" and "Us" because they recognized that the Spirit of God had already said it did not matter.

And that makes a huge difference about how we navigate the world as disciples of Jesus today.  All too often our default assumption is to keep old divisions, old bigotries, and old hates in place, using whatever "biblical" justification anybody ever used to prop them up.  And all too often, then, we close ourselves off from the possibility that the Spirit has been trying to tell us to erase the old dividing lines, to pull down the old walls, and to see that ALL of us are "US."  

When church bodies and denominations began asking in the last five or six decades about women's leadership in churches after centuries of inheriting the old assumption that women were not allowed to serve as pastors or leaders of any sort, there were plenty of wars lobbing Bible verses at "the other side" to win the argument for their side.  But in addition to re-examining the Scriptures and finding that, indeed, there was strong evidence of women's leadership in the first century church attested to in the Bible itself, there was Peter's question: Where is the Spirit pointing us?  If we could see that women had been raised up who had the Spirit-given gifts, skills, passions, and calling to serve as pastors, then who was to stand in the way of people who had been called by the Spirit?  In a similar way, a century earlier, many Christians in primarily White denominations of the church had to ask about why they had accepted the traditions that prohibited Black pastors and leaders, or which segregated churches along color lines, rather than asking, "Where is the Spirit leading us?"  Still today, we wrestle with questions of Who belongs?  and Does God accept people as they are, or do they have to fit some other mold or meet some litmus test first? And every time we let it devolve into a mere war of "Who can weaponize the Bible better?" we have already missed the lesson the early church learned here in Acts.  It's an abuse of the Bible to use it merely to prop up old divisions of acceptable and unacceptable. Instead, the question Peter himself dares us to ask is, "Where is the Spirit pointing?" And to hear Peter tell it, the Spirit is always moving us beyond the old fault line that we had allowed to come between "them" and "us."

So... where is the Spirit pointing us today?

Lord Jesus, direct us by your Spirit, and save us by your grace... all of us.