Surprise!

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Surprise!

Scripture: Acts 10:44-48

We are familiar with the thought that controversy is part of church life in modern times. What we don’t always remember is that it has been there since the very beginning.

The first big controversy of the Christian church was about whether non-Jews (Gentiles) could join the church, become followers of Jesus and full participants in the community of faith and particularly whether they could join without converting to Judaism.

This hadn’t been a problem in Jesus’ own ministry. He mostly stuck to Jewish or sometimes Samaritan areas, although we know about him helping the Roman Centurion, the Syrophonecian woman, and the Gerasene demoniac (remember casting demons into a herd of pigs? Pigs were a serious clue that this wasn’t a Jewish area).

These Pagan people were helped by Jesus: they were not Jewish, which set the precedent that they were welcome, but they were also exceptional. Jesus made no effort to go outside of Jewish areas to preach and heal.

When preachers in the early days of the church started to go to synagogues out in the Turkish, Greek and Roman regions, they encountered Gentiles who hung out with the Jews, impressed by Jewish life, ethics, honesty and devotion but who were not prepared to convert.

There were several reasons for that: conversion was not encouraged; it really helped to have Abraham as an ancestor – converts were made to go through years of study; men would have to be circumcised – painful; so instead they could be on the edges of the community as people trying to be “righteous Gentiles”.

Jews themselves understood they had a special relationship with God – the Chosen People – a kind of privilege, I suppose, but not an easy relationship. The idea was that as the people of God, God expects more of you: to live a better life, a life that sets an example for everyone you meet and that often involves a lot of suffering.

With the teachings of Jesus about the first being last, the weak being strong, God being loving and accepting rather than fierce and judgmental, these Gentiles saw the chance to be in a good relationship with God without having to convert to Judaism first; and they were keen!

Jesus’ own disciples didn’t know what to do. This challenge was totally new to them and as Jews themselves, the thought that Gentiles could be welcomed by God without conversion was just baffling. It totally challenged the idea of a chosen people.

And as we can see in this lesson, it took a miracle, an actual sign from God in the gift of the Holy Spirit to unbaptized gentiles, right in front of the disciples to make them accept that this was alright.

Paul tells another version of this where he had to travel to Jerusalem and argue with James (brother of Jesus, head of the Jerusalem church) and Peter and the others to get them to change their policy. There is another incident in Acts where Peter is described as having a vision which was a clear message from God that Gentiles were acceptable.

Three different versions are recorded in our Bible which just shows how controversial this was. It took more than one dramatic event for the people to shift from their lifetime of assumptions.

As a descendant of the Heathen Danes I’m grateful that the church changed and that this new realization made its way through the community of faith. But this behaviour strikes me as typical of people; we grow up with ideas, with assumptions and it’s very hard to shift them. We like to talk about God being unchanging, which can justify our own refusal to change, but what we fail to remember is that God is unchangingly creative. God is always doing new things and challenging us in new ways.

Think about the changes we’ve had to understand over my lifetime:

to stop thinking about humans as the pinnacle of creation; to stop thinking that we have the right to abuse and destroy the world around us. That’s a change that we haven’t finished with yet.

Consider the relationship between God and LGBTQ+ people – another one we are still fighting about within Christianity. That’s a really good modern parallel to what happened with the Gentiles: where a group everyone assumed was rejected by God is actually welcome if we follow through on the principles of Jesus’ teachings.

We’re still working through the idea that women are equal to men. This is explicitly stated in one of Paul’s letters but how many churches still won’t ordain women? Let alone all the legal changes south of the border to take away women’s reproductive choice. We can’t think we’re safe in Canada. There are those who want to do the same thing here. It’s incredible that we have been struggling with basic gender equity for 2000 years!

Christianity has always been important to me for the way that our teachings challenge us to see other people as real people, just as valuable to God as we are, no matter how different they may be.

Trouble is, we end up having to wrestle with our assumptions, with teachings we grew up with, and it’s not always easy. But it is a vital part of our faith to face these challenges, to wrestle with them and particularly, to figure out how to take them seriously and apply our new learning to real life.

As we can see, this is not new. The very first disciples had to face it and that hasn’t changed since. When we learn the lessons it is most visible in the way we welcome people and even in the way we treat the environment. That’s where we can see new teachings taking life.

I wonder what’s next?