Everyone is welcome, 7.7.13

Acts 13:1-5, 13-16, 42-52

Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. ²While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” ³Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off.

⁴So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia; and from there they sailed to Cyprus. ⁵When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews. And they had John also to assist them…¹³Then Paul and his companions set sail from Paphos and came to Perga in Pamphylia. John, however, left them and returned to Jerusalem; ¹⁴but they went on from Perga and came to Antioch in Pisidia.

And on the sabbath day they went into the synagogue and sat down. ¹⁵After the reading of the law and the prophets, the officials of the synagogue sent them a message, saying, “Brothers, if you have any word of exhortation for the people, give it.” ¹⁶So Paul stood up and with a gesture began to speak: “You Israelites, and others who fear God, listen…

⁴²As Paul and Barnabas were going out, the people urged them to speak about these things again the next sabbath. ⁴³When the meeting of the synagogue broke up, many Jews and devout converts to Judaism followed Paul and Barnabas, who spoke to them and urged them to continue in the grace of God. ⁴⁴The next sabbath almost the whole city gathered to hear the word of the Lord. ⁴⁵But when the Jews saw the crowds, they were filled with jealousy; and blaspheming, they contradicted what was spoken by Paul.

⁴⁶Then both Paul and Barnabas spoke out boldly, saying, “It was necessary that the word of God should be spoken first to you. Since you reject it and judge yourselves to be unworthy of eternal life, we are now turning to the Gentiles. ⁴⁷For so the Lord has commanded us, saying, ‘I have set you to be a light for the Gentiles, so that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.’”

⁴⁸When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and praised the word of the Lord; and as many as had been destined for eternal life became believers. ⁴⁹Thus the word of the Lord spread throughout the region. ⁵⁰But the Jews incited the devout women of high standing and the leading men of the city, and stirred up persecution against Paul and Barnabas, and drove them out of their region. ⁵¹So they shook the dust off their feet in protest against them, and went to Iconium. ⁵²And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

Romans 9:1-5, 11:13-14, 25-33

I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit— ²I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. ³For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. ⁴They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; ⁵to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.

¹³Now I am speaking to you Gentiles. Inasmuch then as I am an apostle to the Gentiles, I glorify my ministry ¹⁴in order to make my own people jealous, and thus save some of them…  ²⁵So that you may not claim to be wiser than you are, brothers and sisters, I want you to understand this mystery: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. ²⁶And so all Israel will be saved; as it is written, “Out of Zion will come the Deliverer; he will banish ungodliness from Jacob.” ²⁷“And this is my covenant with them, when I take away their sins.”

²⁸As regards the gospel they are enemies of God for your sake; but as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors; ²⁹for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. ³⁰Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience, ³¹so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy. ³²For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all. ³³O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

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            Jesus didn’t think of himself as the founder of a new religion. He was Jewish and he thought of his ministry as part of Judaism. Every now and then he would talk to Roman military officers or random folks on the street, but his focus was the people of Israel. As the apostles took over that mission, they saw it the same way. Like Jesus, their ministry was to the Jewish community.

            Before long, the Holy Spirit made it clear that the message was bigger than that. The Spirit led Peter and Cornelius, a Roman officer together and made it obvious that everyone is equal in God’s eyes. While Peter took the first step, Paul soon becomes the center of the church’s mission to the gentiles. It’s ironic that Paul’s main mission was to the gentiles, because his early life had been dedicated to strengthening Judaism against pollution from outside the community, but God is full of surprises.

While he is committed to that mission, he can’t escape a haunting question: Why does Israel reject Jesus? Time and time again, Paul goes to the synagogue to preach God’s good news; time and time again, the most religious, most observant, strongest leaders chase Paul off and even try to kill him. Why?

Paul really just has to look at his own life to see why this happens. He grew up in the synagogue and devoted his life to learning about God and about the traditions and teachings of Israel. He trusted that God had given the people the law and that following it was how one got closer to God. When Saul first heard about Jesus and the movement of people who followed him, he saw a threat to religious truth. Saul believed that Jesus was a false Messiah, so following him would lead people away from God’s truth.

Because he thought the Jesus movement was a threat to Israel’s faith, Saul persecuted the church. But then Jesus met Saul on the road to Damascus and convinced him that Jesus really was the Messiah, so now he promoted instead of persecuting the church. While he’s convinced, he shouldn’t be surprised that his former colleagues haven’t changed their minds, so they still believe Christianity is a dangerous heresy.

That’s why some of the most committed Jews oppose the message of Jesus Paul is preaching. It also makes sense that the gentiles Paul talks to are especially receptive. In this episode, Paul is at a synagogue and he’s preaching to everyone there. As he opens he addresses his words to “You Israelites and others who fear God.”

Most of the people in a synagogue were Jewish, but there were also gentiles there who were attracted to the teaching and tradition of Judaism. We can imagine that they would have been open-minded because they were exploring a faith they had not grown up with. There’s a lot about Judaism that is appealing, so it’s not surprising that some gentiles were interested, even though Judaism didn’t do much in the way of outreach.

At the same time, listening to the law and prophets could also be a difficult experience for gentiles because so much is about the people of Israel being chosen by God. The promise goes through Abraham, through Isaac (not Ishmael), through Jacob (not Esau). A lot of the story is about some people being chosen and others not. That means as a gentile in a synagogue you’d hear a lot about how you were not part of the chosen family. Even if the goal wasn’t to exclude you, it would be easy to feel excluded.

So when Paul comes in and tells the story they’ve been getting to know in a new way that reaches out to gentiles, it makes sense that they rejoice. They’ve been learning about promises they can sort of connect with. Now Paul is saying they can be adopted through Christ and be fully included in the family of faith. The walls are coming down. As that message becomes clearer throughout the church’s ministry many gentiles come to faith in Christ.

"Death to life" Easter, 2012

Luke 23:55-24:12

⁵⁵The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. ⁵⁶Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments. On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. ²They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, ³but when they went in, they did not find the body.

⁴While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. ⁵The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. ⁶Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, ⁷that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” ⁸Then they remembered his words, ⁹and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.

¹⁰Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. ¹¹But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. ¹²But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Romans 6:1-11

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? ²By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? ³Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

⁴Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. ⁵For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

⁶We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷For whoever has died is freed from sin. ⁸But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. ¹⁰The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

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            Jesus had been traveling for three years. He had healed and taught, welcomed outcasts and called sinners to repentance. Often huge crowds followed him to hear his comforting and challenging words.

Besides the crowds, Jesus had a core group of followers who went everywhere with him. Twelve leaders, called apostles were the most famous, but there were also others Jesus sent out in his name to teach and heal. Other disciples supported and cared for Jesus in his ministry, especially many women.

            Jesus and his followers started to make their way to Jerusalem, the capital of Jewish life and worship. Along the way, Jesus told his disciples that he would be killed in Jerusalem, but that he would rise again. The disciples knew enough to be sad about that prediction, but they didn’t really understand, even though Jesus repeated it three times.

            When they got to Jerusalem, a huge crowd welcomed them with shouts of praise and songs to crown a king. Israel hadn’t really had a king in 600 years, but the people’s hope for someone to trust and follow hadn’t died. A welcome like that must have been a high point for the disciples. All Jesus’ talk about the kingdom of God seemed to be coming true. On top of that, the excitement of the big city at festival time thrilled these small-town fishermen.

            Then things went horribly wrong. The religious leaders had never liked Jesus. They worried about his teachings and were downright terrified of the attention he might bring from the Roman rulers. They also worried that Jesus’ teachings could weaken their power. As Jesus’ ministry continued, the conflict with the religious leaders got more and more intense, until they finally decided to kill him.

            At the Passover supper, Jesus told his closest friends that one of them would betray him and the rest would run away. Despite their passionate denials, that’s exactly what happened on Thursday night when officers from the Temple came to arrest Jesus.

            A whirlwind of interrogation, trial and torture followed, and by Friday evening Jesus had died on a Roman cross and been buried. True to his prediction, the disciples ran away. A few women and a man named Joseph made sure Jesus was buried decently before sunset, and the women made plans to go back to the tomb on Sunday morning after the Sabbath was over.

            That morning, Jesus proved once again that he wasn’t interested in playing by the rules. He’d been surprising people since birth, and death wasn’t going to limit Jesus any more than tradition had. The women came expecting to find their teacher’s body, expecting to anoint him with spices as a sign of their love for him, a last expression of care. Instead, they found the rock door rolled away from the front of the tomb and no body to be found. 

            It’s a great story, but all that happened almost two thousand years ago, so what difference does it make for us today? That answer will be a bit different for everyone since faith is a bit different for each of us, but Paul’s words to the church in Rome ring true today: faith is about deep questions, life and death importance.

            Christian faith is about following Jesus. Like the first disciples, we never do it perfectly. We misunderstand and fall short of our calling. A lot has changed over the two thousand years since the women and Peter found Jesus’ tomb empty. The early church was surrounded by threats from religious leaders and the Roman Empire. Following Jesus was very obviously a matter of life and death.

In the US in the 21^st century, we face different threats. We’re free to worship or not, and we’re free to believe whatever we want to. I thank God for our freedom, but I worry that the Christian majority in this country makes it easy to follow Jesus halfway and easy to forget that following Jesus is still a matter of life and death.

When we choose to follow Jesus we aren’t picking a club or a team or a style. We are choosing to join Jesus in his death. We are choosing to leave our sin and selfishness behind, to die to the world and begin a new life with Jesus. We are choosing to put Jesus first, to make him the center of our existence.

Faith can seem complicated and confusing. There are so many churches, so many opinions, so many points of view. Christians think different things about the Bible, politics, organization, money, family and everything else.

At the same time, faith in Jesus is simple because it means choosing to trust and follow Jesus. All the complications are second, and very distantly second. The point is following Jesus; everything else falls into place when we put Jesus first.

Not conformed, transformed (8.21)

Exodus 1:8-2:10

⁸Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. ⁹He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. ¹⁰Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”

¹¹Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. ¹²But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. ¹³The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites. ¹⁴and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.

¹⁵The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, ¹⁶“When you act as midwives to the Hebrew women, and see them on the birthstool, if it is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, she shall live.”

¹⁷But the midwives feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. ¹⁸So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this, and allowed the boys to live?” ¹⁹The midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife comes to them.”

²⁰So God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied and became very strong. ²¹And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families. ²²Then Pharaoh commanded all his people, “Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live.”

¹Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman.²The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. ³When she could hide him no longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. ⁴His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him.

⁵The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. ⁶When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him, “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said.

⁷Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” ⁸Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. ⁹Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. ¹⁰When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.”

Romans 12:1-8

¹I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. ²Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God — what is good and acceptable and perfect.

³For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. ⁴For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, ⁵so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. ⁶We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ⁷ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; ⁸the exhorter, in exhortation; the giver, in generosity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.

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Living sacrifice

Spiritual worship

Discuss

What does it mean to be conformed to this world?

How does that look in your life?

What does it mean to be transformed by the renewing of your mind?

What kind of transformation might God be trying to work in you?

Pray for your partner during the week for God’s transforming power.

There are all kinds of forces in the world that shape us. The way we grow up, our family influences, the people we work and study with, all have an impact on who we are and what we value.

Some of the forces that shape us are obvious and others are much more subtle. Advertising, for instance, is obviously designed to get us to buy whatever is being advertised. The more important and subtle result of the constant stream of advertising is to make us want things in general.

It doesn’t make any difference for our souls if we buy Coke or Pepsi, but it does matter that we crave bottled sugar so much that we forget God’s gift of clean water. It does matter that we spend so much of our time and effort pursuing things that God and our neighbor get only leftovers of our time, energy and money. It does matter that we fret about having enough when eleven million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk of starvation.

There are forces in the world that want us to want things for ourselves and to fear other people. There are forces in the world that are happy about conflict and division. There are forces in our world that want us to believe that our rights, our possessions, our comfort, our desires are the most important things.

God calls us not to be conformed to this world. God calls us not to take the shape of the warped, deformed values around us. God calls us to stand apart, to be different, to take a different form, a different shape. God calls us to be transformed, to take a new shape.

Actually, it’s not such a new shape. In the beginning God made us in God’s image: in the image of love, community, compassion and mercy. Through greed and fear and sin we’ve been bent out of shape. God calls us back to our original shape through Jesus and his cross-shaped love. God calls us to be transformed; to be made new.

That transformation is about a change of mind and heart, a change God brings about inside us when we give up control. In that transformation we learn to discern and discover God’s will for our lives and for the world. It’s not usually an immediate change, but it takes place through prayer and community and ministry. We’re transformed by following God, especially when that’s not the easy thing to do.

Shiprah and Puah give us a great example of not being conformed to the world. Pharaoh gave them a direct order to help kill the Israelites. They could have been conformed to a society that taught them that Israel was a threat, that those foreigners living among them were dangerous and sub-human. They had probably been exposed to that message all their lives in different ways and now that message was reinforced by the command of the most powerful man in the world.

But they were not conformed. Instead of being afraid of Pharaoh, they trusted God. Instead of fitting into hatred, they were transformed by courage into instruments of salvation. They were renewed in love and a small corner of the world was changed for the better.

How is God trying to change you? How will the love of Christ renew your mind?

Thanks be to God.