A Courageous Companion--August 23, 2024

A Courageous Companion--August 23, 2024

"When James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. They only asked one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do. 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 Jews 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 a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'" [Galatians 2:9-14]

It takes courage to love.  More to the point, it takes courage to move beyond "love" as an empty platitude or abstract concept and to live it out when it could be costly.  Maybe hardest of all is to practice love as Jesus did, choosing to sit at tables with people others deem as "unacceptable" and risking that we'll upset people or offend them by breaking bread with them.

I think it took me a long time to learn that--longer, perhaps, than it should have. It takes a great deal of courage, and not simply warm, fuzzy feelings, to love people genuinely.  Honestly, I am still learning it, and I am still in need of people who can give me the courage to sit at the tables Jesus sat at, rather than safely scoffing at a distance.

Because I am among the chicken-hearts so often.

I don't just mean that the people you love can let you down or break your heart, although that is true. (And in those cases, yes, one has to find the courage to keep on loving even when one has been wounded, rejected, or betrayed.) I mean that, beyond the arena of romance, genuine love means taking the risk of being judged or condemned by others who are provoked by your daring to love. Genuine love calls for standing with those we love, in solidarity with them, sharing joys and tears with them, and that means being vulnerable. And it always takes courage to be knowingly vulnerable. Like James Baldwin writes, "One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself--that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving."

That is a lesson that even the pillars of Christian history have had to learn--and they usually learned it by seeing how they failed at it first. And it is a lesson that we will have to face, too. And, coward that I so often am, I do not want to have to come face to face with all the ways I have failed to love because I failed to have the courage enough to risk myself... the courage to be vulnerable. Somewhere along the way we confused "love" with "niceness," and so we have a hard time grasping that there are times when genuine love must be provocative to those who see it.

I know that today's verses from the letter Paul wrote to the Galatians hardly seem heart-warming, but they are, in truth, all about learning to have the courage to love in this kind of provocative, vulnerable way. This is Paul's version of the story of the time he had to chew out none other than Peter (here called by his nickname in Aramaic, "Cephas," which, just like the Greek name "Petros" is basically like being called "Rocky"). That's right--the Simon Peter, the one who was the de facto leader of the early church, the first to confess Jesus as the Messiah, the one who, tradition says, was willing to be crucified upside down because of his humble adoration of Jesus. That same Simon Peter... Paul had the chutzpah to tell him off to his face, because Peter had shown a failure of courage to love.

Here's the short version of the backstory: of course, historically, the first followers of Jesus--during his actual ministry before the cross--were all Jewish. There was diversity from the beginning, to be sure: men and women, ex-Zealots and former tax collectors side by side, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, with whom Jesus shared a table, but basically folks of Jewish background. As the early movement of Jesus-followers spread, they began to reach out to non-Jewish people, too (the shorthand for that was "Gentiles"). And for a while, there was uncertainty about whether this was OK or not with God. Were these outsiders from different nationalities, languages, and ethnicities acceptable? Were they going to affect the community of disciples negatively by bringing in different cultural practices, different attitudes, and different histories? Were they really coming to faith in Jesus... or were they coming to the church in hopes of getting free handouts from this community of people who shared their bread with one another freely? (You know how quick we are to assume such things about people we don't know...) Could they become followers of Jesus as they were, or did they have to adopt the cultural, and ritual laws of Judaism? Did they have to eat kosher? Did they have to be circumcised or keep the festivals? In other words, the early church wrestled with the question of whether you had to leave behind all of your old cultural attachments and take up all the ritual practices of the "in-group" people in order to really "belong" as a Christian?

Well, Simon Peter himself had been one of the early voices that had seen God's Spirit draw some of those Gentiles to faith in Jesus. And Peter himself would have admitted that he only got to that point kicking and screaming by having the Spirit smack him upside the head with a vision and a knock on the door from a Roman centurion's messenger. But Peter finally "got" it that the living God was drawing people from other nationalities, other cultures, other languages, and other skin complexion, to become followers of Jesus--and that God was doing it with or without the official permission or OK of the church leadership. The Spirit's gonna do what the Spirit's gonna do, after all.

Well, at some point, the church got around to making a decision that, yes, they were going to include Gentiles as Gentiles, and that they didn't have to convert to Judaism before they could become followers of Jesus, and they didn't have to follow the Jewish dietary laws or keep the old festivals or any of the rest. Nobody would have to "pray the Gentile away," and nobody would be told, "I don't mind Gentiles doing Gentile things in their own home, but I don't want to have to see it!" Inclusion of Gentile people, without making them stop being Gentile, became the official church policy in Acts 15, and the leaders of the early church all at least tacitly gave their OK.

So when Peter would be hanging out with Gentiles, he got used to eating with them, probably even eating food like they did (I mean, after all, bacon cheeseburgers are hard to resist--I'm just saying...). And Peter could do this, whenever he would travel away from the central church in Jerusalem on trips out to Gentile territory, because he had the official church policy to back him up, and because he really did seem to believe that God was welcoming anybody and everybody into the beloved community of Christ-followers. As long as nobody else from the main office was nearby watching him, that is.

This became the trouble... see, it's easy to do the right thing when you aren't afraid of having it upset anybody. It's easy to be friendly to someone deemed "questionable" or "other" if no one else knows about it. But it takes courage to love the ones labeled "unacceptable" all the time... because at some point, someone else will see. And someone else will be upset, or provoked, or stirred up, or decide that YOU are "unacceptable" too, for associating with "those people" as they are.

And in that moment, it is easy to be a chicken-heart. I know. I often am one.

So was Peter. The same Peter who had argued in Jerusalem (see Acts 15) that he had seen evidence that God's Spirit was drawing Gentiles-as-Gentiles to follow Jesus, alongside Jewish disciples, this same Peter who argued that Gentiles should NOT be treated as second-class Christians... the same Peter who knew it was hogwash to insist that Gentile believers should somehow "try not being Gentile" or that they could just adopt the cultural practices and language of the in-group, that same Peter got intimidated when some other Jerusalem-crowd folks caught him sharing a table with Gentile Christians... and they bullied him. They bullied him into separating from the Gentiles, and they even got some of Paul's other associates like Barnabas to do the same. It had been easy to be friends with these other nationalities of Christians and to break bread with them when no one else was upset about it... but it became hard to keep at it when they saw that it was rankling the Respectable Religious Crowd from Jerusalem.

And so, Peter folded. He wimped out. He was a coward and a chicken-heart.

There is another line of James Baldwin's that has been haunting me lately--he writes in The Fire Next Time that "a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people by wicked but only that they be spineless." That was where Simon Peter faltered. Not that he had suddenly become a mustache-twirling, black-hat-wearing cartoon villain... not that he had even suddenly become a hateful, racist or anti-Gentile xenophobic bigot himself... but that he had let himself stay quiet when other people provoked about his genuine acceptance of Gentile Christians as Gentiles. He had not been wicked, in Baldwin's words--he had only been spineless.

And when Paul saw this, he recognized that this wasn't just a faux pas, or a slip of social graces, and this wasn't just about Head-of-the-Church Peter needing to shore up support with his base of support from back in Jerusalem. This was about the heart of the gospel. Because at the center of the Good News is the radical claim that we are accepted by God, not on the basis of what we have done or not done, the rules we have followed or not followed, or even the categories of our demographics--but everything hangs on the free gift of God's grace through Christ. And if Peter was suddenly going to act like the Gentile Christians around him were second-class members of the kingdom of God, he was making a mockery of the gospel of grace. Paul saw that this wasn't just about alienating potential Gentile church members or a bit of bad PR. This was about whether the Gospel really is the Gospel. And if the message of God's mercy for all really were true, it would mean a whole new way of seeing people, a whole new set of eyes. It would mean being able to risk upsetting people... and provoking people... and even angering the people who were "like" Peter, in order to offer genuine love to those who were not "like" Peter.

Well, there is good news in this story. Even after Paul calls Peter out, there is change. Peter sees what he has done, and he changes. There is hope for cowards like Peter and me, that once we have had some faithful voice, some gracious saint, help us see that we have been acting like hypocrites and doing damage to the gospel by being quiet while others are pushed to the side, we can begin again, too. And there is the unshakable promise of God in Jesus that even when I am at my most cowardly, nothing can separate me from the love of Christ (the same Saint Paul told us that much, too). Once I know that, I can face the ways I have been a coward, and I can dare to change. I can dare to nurture the courage to love even when it is provocative. I can dare to let God give me the gift of bravery enough to be vulnerable. And I can dare to speak up when it would be easy to be quiet. These things are gifts of grace, given even to scaredy-cats like me.

I don't know how you see your own story, and I don't know how you have made choices in your own life. But I'm willing to bet there's at least a decent chance that you have been in moments like Peter, too--where you let silence win the day rather than courageously speaking love to people who were told they were unacceptable or unloved. I'm willing to bet there have been times when we have been shooed away from sharing the table with another because we were afraid of what someone else might think. I'm willing to bet that there have been moments when we were so afraid of ruffling someone's feathers that we were willing to keep quiet when someone else bad-mouthed another group of people who were not like you. I'm willing to bet we have all had times of spinelessness, figuring it was no big deal and at least didn't alienate people.  All in the name of "keeping the peace," you know...

And if you have ever been in any of those spots in your life, then here is grace for you and me. Here is mercy for chicken-hearts (though hopefully recovering chicken-hearts) like us. God raised up a Paul to get Peter back on track, and God kept on loving and forgiving and using Peter to reach others with the love of Jesus.  God used Paul's words and example (it surely was scary and costly for Jewish Paul to eat with Gentiles, too!) to help Peter to become a courageous companion--in the literal sense of that word, "someone who shares bread with you"--for the previously outcast.

Maybe this is a day to think about whose voices we have not wanted to listen to because they make us squirm, and to let them give us the courage to be vulnerable... the courage to be provocative if need be... the courage to open our tables... the courage to love.

Lord Jesus, put the people in our lives and awareness today that we need to wake us up out of complacency and to love others genuinely.