Don't Stand in God's Way

Transcript

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[0:00] All right, so our sermon text is from Acts chapter 11, verses 1 through 18. A little bit of introduction. Last week we preached from Acts. It was the story of Saul and his conversion. This week we're going a little further, a few chapters ahead now. And the life of the early church had some challenges in it, lots of challenges. If you all read through all this, there's all sorts of challenges for the early church. Jesus goes up into heaven. He sends the Holy Spirit down. And I think one of the challenges of the early church was racism, which is, to put it bluntly, but one of the early challenges of the church was racism. Or at least you could say ethnocentrism and separation by religious practices and other customs, but especially around food and clothing and morality. And there were a whole host of other things, too, that kind of kept people apart.

[0:51] And what's interesting then is we can look back in history and say, oh, that was so racist. But when? They didn't really think of it that way. They just thought of ethnocentrism really, they didn't think that that was bad. They thought that was good. They're like, if we're not going to stick up for ourselves, nobody's going to stick up for ourselves. Nobody else was going to do that for them. So the Roman Empire didn't have an awareness month for the Parthians. They didn't have that month, or the Persians or the Jews. That didn't exist. The Romans were like, we're for Rome. And if you get along with Rome, we'll leave you alone. And you pay your taxes and all that, that's fine. But if you're against Rome, there's going to be trouble. But we don't care who you are. We're not going to make a special day for you, you know. And so if you don't root for yourself, your culture will die out. So the only cultures that really survived this time were the ones that managed to keep their own customs and their own traditions and their own religion. And that wasn't seen as a bad thing. That was seen as a way of survival, a way of life, right? So that's a different world from ours. And I think we make a mistake if we impose our own customs.

[1:57] We impose our understanding of that back onto them. But you know what? Maybe our world now isn't so different than it was back then. We still have some of these differences, and some of them are growing perhaps, right? We'll talk a little bit about this later. What's the proper kind of understanding of how we maintain identity, whether it's ethnic identity or some other cultures? So we'll get to that a little bit later. The church inherited a huge problem that was created by the Romans. The Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Does that sound funny? The Holy Spirit created a huge problem for the church at Pentecost, right? Pentecost, Jews from all around the Roman Empire and even beyond came to Jerusalem. They heard the gospel in their own languages, miraculously, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Then they went back home and they started making disciples of those people in those far-flung countries. And at first it was just to other Jews, probably. They went back to their synagogue and like, what? We figured it out. This Jesus. This is the one, right? But they always had the command. Jesus said it. Go make disciples of all nations. That word for nations is ethne. That's where we get the word ethnicity. Go make disciples of all nations, right?

[3:11] All peoples. And so you can imagine that in the far-flung parts of Rome, not only were Jews converting into Christianity, but Gentiles were converting to Christianity too. And that was the problem that the church inherited, is that Gentiles were becoming Christians. And that became a problem for the early Jewish Christians, how to live with Gentiles that were now also Christians, right? So even in Jerusalem, the early Christians, they were all tasked with the job of sharing, not just with Jews, but with Gentiles as well. And I think it was much easier. All the apostles were Jewish. We understand that. It must have been so much easier for them to share the gospel with another Jewish person, right? Because we look alike. We talk alike. We talk the same language. We have the same cultures. We have the same scriptures that I can point you to, that point to Jesus. And you go, oh, I see it now, right? It's a lot harder for the apostles to proselytize or to witness to non-Jewish people, right? That was harder. And there was a problem was there was this dislike, and that's putting it mildly. There was dislike or hatred between Jews and Gentiles in Jerusalem and all around the world. And so the problem was, how did the new Christians who have been Jewish all their lives respond

[4:31] to the idea of Gentiles becoming Christians as well? And they didn't like it, as we see in our reading. Victoria talked about it. It was a real problem. And it's a problem that reappears in scriptures. And it lasted for over a century. It did eventually, this problem did eventually go away, but it lasted for quite a while. And so our reading paints a picture of what that looks like, where Peter is called to task. For fraternizing with Gentiles. Peter got yelled at by other believers because he had table fellowship with the Gentile. So let's go to our reading. That's a little bit of the background of Acts 11. We'll start at verse 1.

[5:10] 1 Soon the news reached the apostles and other believers in Judea that the Gentiles had received the word of God. But when Peter arrived back in Jerusalem, the Jewish believers criticized him. You entered the home of Gentiles. 2. You entered the house of the Gentiles and even ate with them, they said. Then Peter told them exactly what had happened. 3. I was in the town of Joppa, he said. And while I was praying, I went into a trance and saw a vision. Something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners from the sky, and it came right down to me. 4. When I looked inside the sheet, I saw all sorts of tame and wild animals, reptiles and birds. 5. And I heard a voice say, Get up, Peter. Kill and eat them. 6. No, Lord, I replied. I have never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure or unclean. 7. But the voice from heaven spoke again, Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean. 8. This happened three times before the sheet and all it contained was pulled back up to heaven. 9. Just then three men who had been sent from Caesarea arrived at the house where we were staying. 10. The Holy Spirit told them, 11. He told me to go with them and not to worry that they were Gentiles. 12. These six brothers here accompanied me, and we soon entered the home of the man who had

[6:34] sent for us. 13. He told us how an angel had appeared to him in his home and had told him, Send messengers to Joppa and summon a man named Simon Peter. 14. He will tell you how you and everyone in your household can be saved. 15. As I began to speak, Peter continued, the Holy Spirit fell on them. 16. Just as he fell on us at the beginning. 17. Then I thought of the Lord's words when he said, John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. 18. And since God gave these Gentiles the same gift he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in God's way? 19. When the others heard this, they stopped objecting and began praising God. 20. They said, We can see that God has also given the Gentiles the privilege of repenting of their sins and receiving eternal life. Let's pray.

[7:34] Father thank you. Thank you for this word and we ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I want to start real quick by looking at the text. This is a story that's told twice in Acts. You know, if you read this part of Acts, you're like, why is the story being repeated? Right? Because once it happens to Peter and almost all the dialogue is the same, and then Peter gets asked about it and he explains everything that happened and it's almost a mirror image of what was already said before. And you wonder why the narration just doesn't say, well, then Peter told them about his vision and oh, okay, you know. But I think when the scriptures repeat something, it might be important, right? And even then the vision, this thing that Peter was told happened three times. So repetition can be a clue to us. That something's important. So the sheet with all these objectionable animals is lowered three times and Peter's implored three times to eat them. And then this story is told two times. So that's six if you want to count two times six is whatever. So I'm not going to do any math here. It's not a math. This is not math arithmetic day. This is something else. So actually this is one of the most important parts of the New Testament.

[8:46] I like to, have you noticed I like to rank things and I need to be careful because something's always going to fall off the list. Like is Easter the most important day? Is Christmas the most important day? Well, they're all important. This is one of the most important passages in the New Testament. It's in the top 10. Okay. I'm not going to put it at number one by any stretch, but this is really important because God is doing something really important in the lives of people who grew up Jewish, but became Christians. And he's changing a major part of their culture right in front of their own eyes and of the laws that they've been obeying all their lives. Right? And so it, let's see, how did that come? Oh, I got to flip this one over here. So yes.

[9:34] So what was the one major, I think we kind of alluded to this, this major impediment to Jewish Christians and the new Gentile Christians getting along? Why didn't they, why could they not get along? Why were, why was there an objection? It even says the objection to Peter. You went into a Gentile. Gentile's house. That's bad enough.

[9:55] And you ate with them, right? This is dangerous. This is bad. They didn't, they did not like the idea that Peter had eaten with the Gentile. So it was a problem that the early church between Jews who are Christians who had become Christians and Gentiles who had become Christians was a problem of what we call table fellowship. Table fellowship was the problem. Over and over again in the scriptures, we see that table fellowship is where important things happen. It's where agreements are made. It's the social backbone of the culture. Table fellowship is like when your, your, your son marries somebody else's daughter, there's a, there's a feast first and there's an agreement. There's all sorts of things that kind of hold this society together. And when people eat together back then, especially when they break bread together, they're signifying very publicly that they're equals in the, in the social hierarchy. You know? You don't share a table with somebody much lower than you in honor or much higher than than you in honor. So if you get invited to a person's house to share a meal with them and their honor is slightly higher than you, some of their honor actually kind of falls off on top of you in a way. It's kind of, and this, we don't think that way anymore, but that's how the culture was

[11:10] structured back then is, is table fellowship implied equality between people. And wouldn't believers all have to be in equality with each other for the church to work? But if they couldn't eat together, right? If the Gentiles were down here, we can't eat with them because they are, they're nowhere near us. That's a problem in the early church, right?

[11:32] So if we eat together, we can be friends. There can be relationship. But from birth, a good Jewish person like Peter would never share a meal with a Gentile. He would not do it. And the reason was the dietary, there are other reasons. They wouldn't go in each other's houses. They didn't like each other. But there was the dietary laws, right? What you can and cannot eat. How food is prepared. There's a lot of dietary laws in the Old Testament.

[11:55] Are you going to say a blessing over the food before you eat it? Are you going to say a blessing over the food as you prepare it? There's all sorts of sort of cultural things going on. And I think it was really good to remember that these dietary laws, these are good laws. There's nothing wrong with them. God made these laws, you know, and they were for the life and flourishing of his people because there were actually some animals that if you ate them and you didn't cook them right, they could really make you sick, right? They could be really dangerous. They were really dangerous to eat.

[12:23] And thank goodness today, you know, bacon is so delicious, but you better cook it. You know, you better cook it right because if you eat raw bacon, you're in trouble, right? So, but I have to, I love bacon and I just feel bad for all the people who've never had bacon. I don't know what to say to them. So, God gave the dietary laws to protect his people. But, you know, if God can give a law, God can rescind the law, right? God can. So, God had to rescind the dietary laws. This is the part to remember. He rescinded the dietary laws so that Gentiles could be welcomed into the faith and so that relationships could flourish between believers. The dietary laws were in the way. I'm going to say that again. God rescinded the dietary restrictions so that Gentiles could be welcomed into the faith and so that relationships could flourish between believers. So, God gave the law for life, but God took the law back for relationships. And for faith. Okay? And God can do what God wants. It's God's law. He can do whatever he wants, right? So, and this is not without precedent in the New Testament, right? Jesus points forward to this in Mark chapter 7 because some people ask him whether eating unclean food makes a person unclean, which is what the law had said.

[13:41] What does Jesus say? This is from Mark 7. Jesus says, don't you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? But the law says, if you eat unclean food, you will not be unclean. For it doesn't go into their heart, but into their stomach and then out of the body. Now here's a parenthetical statement in the scripture itself. It says, in saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. So this was, the ground was being prepared for this long before this, some years before this when Jesus declared all foods clean. And Jesus goes on, he says, what comes out of a person is what defiles them, not what goes into them. For it is from within, out of a person's heart, that evil thoughts come. Sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, I'm getting tired, slander, arrogance, and folly. Okay, we're finally done. All right, this is a long list. All these evils come from inside and defile a person. It's not what you eat that makes you unclean. It's what comes out of your heart. It's not what goes into your stomach, but what comes out of your heart. And by doing this, Jesus had declared all foods clean. Now, God is doing it officially with Jesus. So in Peter's vision, which he retells to other Jewish believers, Jesus is making this

[14:58] statement complete. Basically, Jesus is saying, I really meant it, and now it's really, now I'm saying it's like legal. You can eat any of these things. You can share a table with a Gentile who is a believer. And you know what else? You can share a table with a Gentile who's not yet a believer, right?

[15:17] In friendship, in community, in relationship. So this was done so that Gentiles could be brought into the faith. Now the response, I think, was good from Peter, right? It's a little like the dynamic we saw last week when Gamaliel told the Jewish leaders that they should not get in the way of what God was doing. Peter had this vision that the food was clean, and now he could go out and get that bacon cheeseburger that he'd been secretly longing for all his life, you know? But also that if God wanted to bring the Gentiles into the fold by rescinding the disciples, by breaking the dietary laws, then Peter needed to go along with it. Peter didn't need to stop it. So if we look at verse 15, and you don't have to put it up again, I'll just read it out loud. It says, Verse 15 As I began to speak, Peter continued, the Holy Spirit fell on them. The Holy Spirit came without, you know, just the Holy Spirit does what the Holy Spirit wants. It blows where it wants. It does what it wants. This is from John chapter 3. The Holy Spirit fell on them just as He fell on us at the beginning. Verse 15. Peter came out of the Lord's words when He said, John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. And since God gave these Gentiles the same gift He gave us when we believed in the Lord

[16:31] Jesus Christ, who was I to stand in His way? Who was I to stand in God's way? And that's what Gamaliel said, right? If this is from the Lord, it'll flourish. You should not get in the way of it. If it's not from the Lord, it'll disappear. Don't stand in the way of what God's doing. So Peter, despite all of his challenges. Growing up and he really did not want to eat what was coming down in this sheet or blanket that came from heaven. He had the right response. He's like, I've never eaten that stuff and I'm never going to eat that stuff. And Jesus had to say, look, it's okay. You can eat it. I'm telling you that it's clean.

[17:07] So he had to get over that challenge. And then he had to say, who am I to stand in the way of God? We have to let the Gentiles in. So God created this problem for them. The Holy Spirit did. The Holy Spirit created this problem for them. The problem of Jews and Gentiles sharing a table. But God was also going to solve the problem for that. So there's kind of a bit of book ending going on here, which I think is nice. Now we can say this.

[17:33] Oh, okay. Let's just let the, let's just have table fellowship with the Gentiles. Isn't that going to be easy? Well, no, I don't think so. I don't think it's going to be very easy at all because people hold onto their customs pretty tightly. You know, we have customs. You have, you have customs. You have customs. And if I go up to you and tell you to drop one of your cherished customs or the, or something that really kind of is who you are, like the thing we do is kind of like the thing we are, our identity kind of derived from our practices and our choices and our customs. And I say that has to go. And this is what Jesus is saying to Peter. That's going to be hard. People don't like change and this is who I am. So I'm going to be chipping away a little bit of the identity that I made for myself. Right?

[18:19] And I think it really depended on how they understood the dietary laws. If God says, I'm giving you this law so that you can flourish and have life and be safe from dangerous foods, that's fine. But if they think, oh, God gave us this law so we can exclude people who aren't like us, that's a very different thing. God gave us this law so we know who we are.

[18:45] That's a very different thing. Right? And God's kind of saying, you know what? I'm telling you a different way to be who you are in me. And you can let go of this thing because this was always for your flourishing, but now it's safe to eat these things. You can cook them better. You can eat with them. You know, you can eat other people's food. It's okay now. Right? And I think from the time that the laws were given to the time that they were rescinded, I imagine that culinary practice is probably the best way to do it. Right? I would say that the culture would have probably had improved a little bit so that some foods were safer to eat and people had kitchens and ovens and stoves and things like that, where if the people were out in the wilderness, they didn't have access to all those things. Right?

[19:30] So it's kind of a difference between a Bronze Age culture and an Iron Age culture, which I'm going to get into in a future sermon someday about the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age and what happened to the people of God during that time. It's actually very interesting. Anyways, that's for another day. Okay, so, but nonetheless, it's hard to let go of a cultural tradition that you have without giving up some of your identity, right? And so, for the Jews, we don't, it was like, we don't mix with them. We don't eat their food.

[20:04] So, what about us, right? We kind of always have to ask the question, what about us? Well, we don't have a problem eating these foods, so you're not going to say, well, we have, we don't need to be told that some, by God, that some food is clean.

[20:20] Except for, like, kimchi. I just, I don't know. I'm sorry, I'm kidding. No, actually, it's okay, it's okay. I'm thinking of other things, too. Do you like kimchi? You do? Okay. But it smells pretty strong, doesn't it? Maybe somebody here likes Limburger cheese, you know? You're like, okay, stay away from me with that stuff.

[20:39] So, I mean, if God told me to go eat kimchi, I'll eat kimchi, it's fine, you know? But, or Limburger, I don't know. I don't know, not the Limburger. Lutefisk. Okay, so, yeah, and I don't like lutefisk. So, there's almost something like that. There's sort of this lutefisk, which is this Norwegian codfish that's been soaked in lye to preserve it, and then they somehow get the lye out so that it's not poisonous. I don't know how, but lye is poisoned by itself. So, we preserve the fish with this poison. And then we kind of wash the poison out. And I'm like, sounds like a good idea. And my cousin in Minnesota once, he made it, and I hope he's not listening, but he, I've never seen somebody mess up lutefisk so badly. And it was nauseating. It was really bad. But then I went to a luncheon at a little Lutheran church on the plains of Minnesota for their lutefisk dinner. And somebody had done it right. And it was actually edible. And I'll tell you this. This is what kind of gets to it. There was a little old lady sitting across from me. And she was about 95 pounds. I mean, she was tiny.

[21:47] And she came with a giant plate of lutefisk. And she just ate the whole thing. And then she went back for seconds and brought just the biggest plate. And she ate the whole thing. And I'm like, where is she putting it? But you know what? It was touching something inside her. Like, this is what she grew up with. This is my culture. This is my culture. This reminds me of family. This reminds me of home. And when you're in a good mood, you have a really good appetite. You know what I mean? So I thought, this is good.

[22:16] But here God is saying, we're going to take some of that away. We're going to take some of that away. We're going to take some of that tradition away for the sake of the gospel. And that's where this lands for us. And we're not talking about lutefisk, et cetera. But what cultures, what traditions, things that we have, it could be the Lucia Festival. It could be other things. That we're doing that get in the way.

[22:40] Of meeting other people who don't have the same culture as us. Now, and the Lucia Festival, it's about light. It's about beauty. It's about trusting God. And if it's just about that, there's nothing wrong with it. But if the Lucia Festival was about how we know who's in and who's out, then we got to get rid of Lucia Festival. You see what I'm saying? So you take traditions with a little bit of critical thinking. And you go, what's happening in this, when we're practicing this tradition? Are we putting up boundaries with it? Or are we celebrating something that's really life-giving? And it's not. Is that something we can invite somebody else into? So we apply this scripture in kind of a more nuanced way. And we say, we have to be open to losing some of our own identity for the sake of spreading the gospel. And God can replace it with some other identity that really comes from him. And that's a much better identity to have in the first place.

[23:30] So that's for us. Now, I want us to think about that for a while. Maybe in the next week, think about what, in what ways, can I reach the culture around me in a way that I'm not losing myself, but I'm not sticking so much to my own cultural views that I can't even have table fellowship with somebody. Now, one last thing I want to say about Peter. I wish I could say that Peter got this all right. And in this case, he did. He stood up to the people who didn't like that he'd gone into the house of a Gentile. But later on, he lost his nerve. And we read in Galatians that Paul had to rebuke him for not continuing down this path. Because Peter actually, came under the sway of some other people who went back to the thinking that they, that there were some Jewish traditions that could not be given up. And that one would happen to be circumcision.

[24:18] And Paul had to rebuke him in front of everybody and say, you can't require the Gentiles to become circumcised before they become Christians. In other words, you're saying to the Gentiles, if you want to become a Christian, you have to become Jewish first. And Paul said, no, there's no, there's no in between stops. You go from anything to being a Christian straight there. It's like going to jail in Monopoly. You can't pass gophers. You just got to go straight there. So to his credit, Peter came around. Peter took the rebuke, but that just goes to show that relationships matter. Paul was able to correct a fellow believer and the church was brought back onto track, which is good. So in the end, as I mentioned, this problem went away more or less by itself. The Jews who became believers probably kept all sorts of ethnic and cultural traditions, but they didn't impose them on the new Gentile believers. And over time, there are actually more Gentiles in the Roman Empire than there were Jews. So the church became more and more and more Gentile. And even Jews who became Christians were more or less declared to be Gentiles by the Jews who never converted. And about 100 years after the life of Jesus, this kind of had just sort of gone away.

[25:26] But the movement of God is still there. He wants us to navigate these cultural barriers to the gospel being spread to people who haven't heard it yet. And that's sort of the call to us today. Is we are aware of our own culture. We're hopefully thinking critically about which ones of these cultural things that we're doing are life-giving and for our flourishing and relational. And which of them are just for us to kind of put up barriers to entry for other people. And we want to be able to get rid of those and enjoy those. And then, but in just a very general sense, welcome anybody into the faith. Let's pray.

[26:04] Father, thank you again for your word. And we thank you that this happened. And Lord, we pray as we go out into the world this week that we're mindful of our own cultures, our own identities, and are willing to give up what you ask us to give up for the sake of the gospel. And we ask it in Jesus name. Amen.