BECAUSE OF EASTER: COVENANT (VERSION 2.0)

(Preached on Sunday, May 2, 2004)

So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” -Acts 11:2-3

 

The early church was in crisis.

We often think, partly due to Luke himself, who wrote the Acts of the Apostles, that the first century church was fairly harmonious, with the gospel spreading steadily out from a unified community in Jerusalem.

But it just wasn’t so.  In Acts 10 we are told the story of Peter receiving a strange vision from God suggesting that he should take and eat what he had been raised to understand was impure food, stuff he wasn’t supposed to eat because it was bad for him.  The message was that he was not to call unclean what God called clean.

Now realize, we are talking about changing 2,000 year old teaching here, for according the Jewish tradition, they had received these guidelines for eating from God through Moses in the wilderness.

But immediately after this noon-time vision, Peter received a visit from some servants sent from a Roman centurion named Cornelius, and he went with them to the home of their master.

There he learned Cornelius had received a vision also, and as Peter shared with him and his household the story of Jesus, the Holy Spirit came upon them all and they began to praise God.

Peter took this as a sign that these people, Gentiles who did not follow the Law of Moses, the dietary guidelines, or any of the other guidelines for living in a way that Jews had always been taught pleased God, were truly beloved by God and included in the family of God.  So he baptized them and treated them as brothers and sisters in the faith.

 

However, when he got home, there was trouble.

His local Church and Ministry Committee, that set the standards and guidelines for acceptable behavior and teaching in the ministry met with him and wanted him to justify his behavior.

Why was he fraternizing with people outside the Jewish faith?

And in such a manner that seemed to disregard all they had held to be good and right and true and holy as Jews for some 2,000 years.

 

Luke only hints at it here, but this was a severe, major debate in the life of the early Church.

Just how new was this thing God was doing in Jesus.  Was it just a minor course correction within Judaism, a tweaking of the faith which had drifted off in an unhealthy direction, or was it a major, seismic shift in the way God was dealing with the world?

Were the earlier followers of Jesus just to be sharing Jesus’ teachings with other Jews, or with those outside of Judaism?  And if they did go to non-Jews, did those people need to first convert to Judaism before they could be treated as brothers and sisters in the faith?

 

In a later chapter of Acts, the 15^th, Luke will share more clues on this debate as he relates the story of the Jerusalem Biennial Meeting where representatives from the outlying Christian communities gathered in Jerusalem to debate the issue and a pronouncement was voted on and issued saying that the non-Jews who were embracing the teaching about Jesus would not have to first become Jews, but should be taught to follow some of the dietary guidelines, to stop worshiping other gods, and refrain from sexual immorality.

A good, congregational compromise position.

 

The truth is, like all compromises, not everyone liked it.

And the issue continued to boil and fester.

Paul describes an incident in Galatians where Peter was eating with non-Jewish Christians in Antioch until some of the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem showed up and then he stopped eating with them, and broke fellowship.

Paul said it became so hurtful and divisive in the community that he had to confront Peter face-to-face over his hypocritical behavior.

 

There are people today who say the Church is in crisis.

Funding for churches is becoming more and more difficult.

Local churches struggle to meet budgets.

They send less money to regional and national church bodies. 

The Florida Conference had to trim $200,000 from their original budget for this year and the national UCC offices in Cleveland are looking to cut $2 million dollars from the national budget by 2005 (out of a $13 million budget).  This financial crisis is happening to all the major denominations.  Some of this can be attributed to broader economic realities, but some of it is also due to internal strife.

For over 40 years now there has been a trend for mainline Protestant churches to be losing members.  This is happening through some local churches closing their doors, some local churches pulling out of denominations, some local churches losing members.

Some of this has been happening because of major debates and “fights” going on within denominations.  Most of them started in the 1960's: debates on Vietnam, on women in ministry, on desegregation, on acceptance of homosexuals, on abortion and death penalty views.

There have also been debates on how we understand scripture, how we understand Jesus, how we understand God, the Holy Spirit, the ministry.  All of these discussions have raised issues about just how accepting the church will be of diverse viewpoints, how inclusive will the church be of diverse people, diverse cultures, what will the church look like in the future?

 

This is scary business, for this story about the inclusion of the non-Jews into the family of faith without them first having to become Jews clearly set a scriptural precedent for the church changing its mind with regard to what (or, better, who) is acceptable to God.

It is a charismatic decision grounded in the obvious activity of the Spirit of God, but it is also a community decision, a church decision.

Peter stresses that he took six people with him who can also testify to what the Spirit is doing.  And, of course, the mere fact that he makes this report to the community in the first place demonstrates respect for the community as a whole.

It is also important to note that the issue is one of communion, of community, of being a part of the faith family and being welcomed as equal partners before God.  The non-Jews were not just running off doing their own thing — no one is ever a follower of Christ all by him or herself.  Rather to recognize the power of God at work in one’s life leads one to seek out others who are also experiencing the power of God at work in their lives and share that journey together — loving one another, serving one another, caring for each other.  We are always called in our life of faith to love God, but we are also always called to loved our neighbor, and our neighbor, first of all, is in the church.

 

For over 2,000 years the people of God thought that God was working in the world in a particular way, almost exclusively with one group of people — the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Then Jesus came and told them that God loved everybody, the whole world, and what those guidelines were all about was loving each other and everybody in the world.  Slowly, but surely, God’s people began to see that God was still speaking and doing a new thing, call it “Covenant (Version 2.0)” that was including more and more people.  It was such a dramatic change that the people worried if their faith and their communities of support could survive this new thing.  But they did.

For the past 2,000 years, God has continued to speak, continued to upgrade the Covenant.  God has taught us that loving one another means not enslaving anyone; it means gender equality; it means all people, of whatever color, race, culture or creed, are equal and beautiful in God’s sight; it means embracing and affirming gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.