Faithfully Rebellious--April 28, 2025

Faithfully Rebellious--April 28, 2025

"When the temple police had brought the apostles, they had them stand before the council. The high priest questioned them, saying, 'We gave you strict orders not to teach in this name [of Jesus], yet here you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and you are determined to bring this man's blood on us.' But Peter and the apostles answered, 'We must obey God rather than any human authority'." (Acts 5:27-29)

Sometimes the best way to love God and to love my neighbor is to follow directions.  Things like stopping at a stop sign to make sure I don't hit any pedestrians, or paying my school taxes because I want kids in my community to have a good education, or not watering my lawn if the local government issues a drought warning.  I may or may not like doing any of those actions, but I can accept that they are ways of loving my neighbors, and thereby loving God who cares about the common good.

Sometimes, however, the best way to love God and to love my neighbor is to defy directions, refuse to comply with the authorities, and to resist unjust rules or laws, not for the sake of being stubborn jerks, but because the rules or the rule-makers themselves are in opposition to the way of God.  

Faithful disciples discern the difference between those two kinds of scenarios and are willing to respond either way, depending on the situation.  And, to be very honest, it is often hard to do that well--both to known whether you are in an "obey" or a "disobey" situation, and then if it is the latter, to be brave enough to say NO to human authorities and to be willing to bear the consequences those authorities may inflict on you for defying them.

To be clear, the Bible is actually full of examples of people who knew when to say NO to the powers of the day, even if we tend to assume that most of the time, good or neutral rules are to be followed.  It's not just this one scene from the book of Acts, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, although this is very much a story about knowing when obedience to God means disobedience to government officials.  But stretching back to early in the Biblical record, it's the Hebrew midwives defying Pharaoh when he instructed them to kill the baby boys born to the Hebrew mothers (because Pharaoh was afraid that "those foreigners" were getting too numerous and might overpower his regime).  It was prophets like Nathan standing up to King David and calling him out for his abuse of power and his abuse of Bathsheba, or like Amos standing up to the priests and King of Israel when they were more interested in glorifying the nation's prosperity than in doing God's will or practicing justice.  It was Elijah getting into trouble with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, even when it meant fleeing for his life and becoming Public Enemy Number One.  And it was Daniel being willing to defy a royal law from King Nebuchadnezzar, even at the cost of being thrown into the lions' den, or Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refusing to bow down to a golden statue of the king, even though the penalty for disobedience was to be thrown into the fiery furnace.  All of this is to say that Peter's declaration, "We must obey God rather than any human authority!" is not an isolated outlier in the biblical witness, but stands in a long line of faithfully rebellious practitioners of what the late John Lewis used to call "good trouble."

We might add, today, that in the past two thousand years, that tradition of holy troublemaking has continued when faithful disciples of Jesus have been brave enough to say "No" to the powers of the day in order to say "Yes" to loving God and neighbor.  From early Christian converts from the Roman army who would no longer conquer or kill for Caesar and refused to obey orders from their commanding officers, to agents of the Underground Railroad whose faith led them to help the formerly enslaved to escape to freedom, to families like that of Corrie ten Boom who helped hide Jewish families when the secret police tried to round them up, to the marchers at Selma or the boycotters of Montgomery, there is still a longstanding tradition of Christians prayerfully discerning that there are times they must refuse to comply.  

In this particular scene from the book of Acts, Peter and the apostles had been healing the sick and casting out evil spirits, and that got them arrested (the charges would have been something like "disorderly conduct" or "disturbing the peace").  The temple police ordered the apostles to be silent and not to mention Jesus anymore (or the fact that the Religious Leaders had been partially responsible for helping the Romans to get rid of Jesus), but instead, Peter says, "We must obey God rather than any human authority," because in fact (see Acts 5:19-20) God had sent an angel to tell Peter and the gang precisely to continue speaking about Jesus and healing in his name.  Peter knew that faithfulness to God meant defiance of the authorities--even these ones who claimed to be speaking for God themselves.  Peter knew not only that it was an act of loving his neighbors to heal them of their sicknesses in Jesus' name, but also that it was an act of love to tell everyone about Jesus, including to call out the authorities who had conspired to make Jesus disappear after sham court proceedings and no due process. 

Like I say, though, the real challenge in the life of faith is discerning when it's a time to follow directions (stop signs and speed limits), when it's time to resist and defy them (worshipping golden statues or when the secret police come to make your neighbors disappear), and what to do about the times and situations that fall somewhere in between.  Part of our hope is that we do that discerning together, and nobody has to do it alone. Part of our hope, too, is that we believe the Spirit is moving among us and will prompt, prod, and provoke us.  But we can never quite let ourselves off the hook not to ask those difficult questions.  Living with those challenges, and finding the courage when we believe the Spirit is leading us to defy the powers of the day, is indeed a part of the Christian life, going all the way back to the first generation of disciples like in this story.  So maybe today it's worth simply asking, in prayer and in conversation with others we trust, what are the kinds of situations we need to be ready to say "No" to the powers of the day, and what we might be called to do, to endure, or to say, when that happens.

There's a line I've seen floating around the internet over the past several years; maybe you've seen it, too. It's a quote of Stephen Mattson, who points out that "Sometimes being a good Christian meant being a bad Roman" and therefore it is worth asking whose reign someone is living into if they find themselves in opposition to the orders of the day.  If we find ourselves asking that question in our own lives, it means we are in the good and brave company of Peter and the rest of the apostles, even if it isn't always easy to be there.

Lord Jesus, let your Spirit give us both the wisdom to know how to respond to the situations and directives we are given on this day, and the courage to listen to your voice even when it means rejecting the voices of other loud voices around us.