[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Welcome to the Collective Table where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy.
This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties Scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation and even the podcast. So we're glad your here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: I want to jump back into our teaching series which is called the Spirit of Action.
We have been reading through passages mostly in the Book of Acts, to have a look at how the Spirit of God is leading in Acts and ask ourselves how we can learn or what we can learn from from those passages about what it means to follow where the Spirit is going today. Our passage today is from Acts, chapter 15, verses 22 through 29. So let me read that with you. If you have your Bible, you're welcome to turn there of course, otherwise we'll put the words up on the screen and then I want to share a few things that I'm taking away from this this week.
Acts chapter 15, verse 22 says this. The apostles and the elders, with the consent of the whole church, decided to choose men from among their members and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas. And they sent Judas, called Barsabbas and Silas, leaders among the brothers, with the following letter. The letter said this the brothers, both the apostles and the elders, and the believers of Gentile Gentile origin in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia.
Greetings.
Since we've heard that certain persons who have gone out from us, though with no instructions from us, have said things to disturb you and have unsettled your minds, we have decided unanimously to choose representatives and send them to you along with our beloved Barnabas and Paul, who have risked their lives for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have therefore sent Judas and Silas, who themselves will tell you the same things by word of mouth. For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden than these essentials that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and from blood and from what is strangled and from fornication.
If you keep yourselves from these things, you will do well.
Farewell.
So I want to share with you what I'm taking away from this. I don't know if any part of that passage made any sense to you or maybe triggered you a little bit. That would be common.
So I want to chat about that a little bit. But first, would you just pray with me?
God, we thank you again for today for this opportunity for us to Gather here to sing our songs and to pray our prayers, to greet each other, to encourage each other, and to come together and make decisions together. To discern what you might be doing in this church in the coming year and to interpret how you might be leading us. We pray that you would sharpen our eyes and ears, that you would touch tune our senses.
To recognize how your spirit is at work in the world around us so that we can join you.
We ask that you would strengthen that discernment in us.
We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: I shared this passage with somebody at the church this week, is involved in putting the service together. I won't share who it was, but I shared it because they were like, what are you teaching on this week? And I shared the passage with them, and they read it, and they texted me back and said, I have no idea what to do with this passage. All I hear is, quit sinning, you filthy sinners.
Quit. Abstain. Abstain from sexual immorality.
And I think what's interesting about that response to this passage is it's completely understandable because it's hard to, like, open the news feed in your phone or turn on the television if you still watch news on the television and not find some Christian somewhere, either behind a pulpit or in an elected position of office, claiming that Jesus has endorsed their hatred or bigotry towards people who have LGBTQ sexualities or genders. And so the church has not only been so incredibly obsessed with what you and I do in the bedroom on our own, with consenting adults, not only now, but for all of church history, that it's hard not to hear that at the end of that passage.
But I'd like to maybe just suggest to you that the simple instruction to abstain from sexual immorality might actually be a good thing. Like, I don't know, maybe it's just me, but maybe if more Christians took the admonition to abstain from sexual harm and sexual violence, fewer pastors would be having sex with their secretaries, fewer priests would be raping children, fewer elected officials would be railing against LGBTQ people while engaging in the very same behavior in the closet, unbeknownst to everybody else.
It's possible that the Christian admonition to not use your sexuality to hurt and harm and abuse and harass and rape others might be a good idea.
And it has nothing to do with whether or not the person you are making love with is of the same sex or not.
It's simply a question of whether or not you are doing harm with your sexuality. And this is not a sermon about sex. Don't worry. You can all, like, unclench. I'm gonna get past this in just a moment.
But listen, there is just. There are few things in human history that we have used to harm more than sex.
It's an incredibly powerful thing that happens between people, and it's also, for that reason, an incredibly powerful way to shame and control you.
And so when you read passages like this and that bit at the end jumps out at you, it. It's no wonder that it does.
But it also may be that the early disciples, the early followers of Jesus in Jerusalem were actually sharing some instructions that, when understood rightly, could make some sense. So what in the world is going on in Acts chapter 15? We've jumped into a story already in progress, and so let's back up a little bit and understand what's happening here.
Actually, on Pride Sunday, I shared with you the passage that was sort of the root of what's happening here in Acts 15, and that is Acts chapter 10, when Peter is called by the Spirit of God to visit a Roman soldier named Cornelius. You guys remember this story? Peter is. Receives a vision from heaven. God tells him in this vision to eat, like, shrimp and all the things, you know, bacon, all the things that are really good, that good Jewish people are not supposed to eat. Peter says, oh, no, absolutely not, Lord. I'm a good Jew. I don't eat things like that. And God says with a booming voice from heaven, three times, do not call unclean what I have made clean. Peter scratches his head. I have no idea what this means. A messenger comes and says, hey, Roman soldier. Cornelius has sent for me because he wants to hear the Gospel. Peter goes off to share the gospel. He gets there, and lo and behold, the Spirit of God has already baptized Cornelius in his household. And Peter's like, oh, the vision wasn't around about shrimp. It was about Gentiles.
Get it? It's a metaphor. I'm paraphrasing.
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: The lesson From Acts chapter 10 is the spirit of God gets to include whoever the Spirit of God wants to include. It's not up to you. It's not up to me. Whether we like it or not, those dirty, filthy Gentiles get to be a part of God's kingdom. And that's good, because I think we're all dirty, filthy Gentiles.
So that's the lesson. The lesson is the Spirit gets to decide who's in and who's out. The problem is when the Spirit of God makes Major changes like that. We all tend to get upset when God wants to include people that we don't like, who we judge, who we find disgusting or repulsive or maybe a little less than human. Because of their gender or their sexuality or their race or their economic class, we tend to get our feathers ruffled. And that is what happens in acts. People start to get frustrated that the movement of Jesus followers who are Jewish now includes non Jews.
And so some folks took it upon themselves.
Many of you know, people who are likely to take these sorts of things upon themselves, who will go out into the world and tell you that you do or don't belong. But some people from Jerusalem, which was the center of the followers of Jesus at that time, they said, well, if we're going to include these filthy, dirty Gentiles, we should at least go and tell them how to be, how it's right and good and proper to be in the world. And so they go to Antioch, which is in modern day Turkey. This is sort of the home church of the original Gentiles.
This is where Paul and Barnabas are. Paul and Barnabas are there ministering in Antioch, and it's a church full of Gentiles, just like you and me. And a group of people come from Jerusalem, Jewish followers of Jesus. And they show up in Antioch and they say, hey, welcome, welcome to the family. There are a few rules you need to obey if you're going to be a part of this Jesus thing.
And, you know, they're conveniently written right here in the first, first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, otherwise known as the Torah, also called the Law.
The Torah. The Law contains, it has been estimated up to 613 commandments that make one Jewish. And these folks showed up in Antioch and said, hey, we need you guys to obey these rules. And several people in Antioch were like, oh, right, we believe in this Jesus guy. He was Jewish. He's teaching about Judaism. I suppose we should become Jewish.
What's this circumcision thing again?
No, really, I have to have what cut off of my what?
I can't eat bacon anymore or shrimp anymore.
I have to celebrate the Feast of Booths. What is that?
These are Jewish cultural practices.
And so these Jewish followers of Jesus showed up in Antioch and basically were teaching these Greek followers and Roman followers of Jesus. Here's how you become Jewish.
All the men have to get circumcised. You now need to eat kosher. You now need to celebrate the Jewish festivals. You now need to follow all of these burdensome 613 commandments. And no, we don't totally know what all these commandments mean either. But now you get to argue with us about what those commandments mean.
Doesn't that sound like good news?
This makes Paul and Barnabas very angry.
And so they show up back in Jerusalem, and they come to Jerusalem and they say to James, who is the brother of Jesus, and sort of like the first pope at that time, hey, we've got a problem.
We have all of these Gentiles who have become followers of Jesus. And now people have come from Jerusalem and said that they have to become Jewish, they have to follow all of these rules, they have to observe these festivals, they have to get circumcised. And that creates a bit of a controversy.
And that is exactly what is happening when we jump into Acts 15.
Now, here's the little summary of that. You have to look this up, but I'll just read it to you. Acts 15:1 says this. Then certain individuals came down from Judea, and we're teaching the brothers, unless you're circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved. Right? So I just unpacked all of that, hopefully for you in a way that made some sense. Skip Forward to verse 6. The apostles and the elders met together to consider this matter. So what we have here in verse six is really sort of the first Christian conference, like the first council, where there is a controversy of some kind and they're trying to make a decision about what to do.
So the apostles and the elders met together to consider this matter.
And after there had been much debate, Peter stood up and he said to them, my brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. This is Peter, who visited Cornelius in Acts chapter 10 and had that whole experience.
And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them, I.e. the Gentiles, by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us.
And in cleansing their hearts by faith, he has made no distinction between them, the dirty, filthy Gentiles, and us righteous, clean Jewish people.
Now, therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of those disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to to bear.
In other words, listen, none of us has ever been able to keep these 613 commandments. None of us has been able to fulfill the requirements of the Torah. This is a burden that our ancestors couldn't bear. It's a burden that we can't bear. So why are we making these poor Greeks and Romans bear this burden? Burden?
On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, just as they will.
What's happening here is pretty significant change in what it meant to be a follower of Jesus.
And the dilemma is this, like, it's easy, I think, for somebody like me to stand up here and say, oh, you know those dumb disciples, they wanted to make these Gentiles, these Romans, these Greek people follow all of these rules. That's just ridiculous.
But I think we don't appreciate just how hard it might be for people of one culture to be in fellowship with people from another culture when those two cultural practices often offend each other.
This is what's exactly going on.
You have a couple thousand Jewish followers of Jesus who suddenly have this influx of Greeks and Romans in their midst, and they are being asked to include those new Greeks and Romans in their community of worship.
But there are all kinds of things that Greeks and Romans do that Jewish people consider to be offensive, like truly morally repugnant.
So how do we share a place of fellowship? How do we become family to each other? How do we love people whose practices offend us?
I think this is a difficult question. If you've ever traveled to a culture other than your own and seen, for example, what people in another culture eat, sometimes it's wonderful, right?
Like, you'll never have a better street taco than you will in Mexico City. I promise you.
It's amazing. You might come back here and be offended by what we normally eat after you've had a street taco in Mexico City.
But there are other cultures that eat things that you and I might consider to be gross or disgusting.
There is a delicacy in Southeast Asia called balut.
Anybody know what balut is?
Balut is a fermented gestated duck embryo in the egg.
And it is considered a salty, briny, delicious delicacy.
But white Westerners are not accustomed to cracking their eggs open and peeling them back and finding a fully formed duck embryo inside that you then spoon out with a spoon, bones and all, and crunch.
Some of you are feeling a little grossed out right now, but it's considered a delicacy in that culture.
But offensive to people who are not accustomed to that.
A lot of what's going on here in Acts 15 is just that. It's just cultural differences.
Some of those cultural differences might be Innocuous, they might be nothing more than taste, the difference between a lager and an ipa.
There's no accounting for taste.
Others of those practices might be genuinely harmful, genuinely difficult. It was common practice in the ancient Greek world for worship of other gods to involve visiting a temple where you would engage in sex with somebody who had been forced into prostitution in that temple. And I want to suggest to you the possibility that forcing anybody into prostitution might not just be a cultural difference, it might be harmful sexual violence.
And understanding that context helps us understand why in Romans chapter one, Paul might admonish people to not engage in sexual immorality.
And so this is the hard work of rubbing shoulders with people who are different than we are, who are, whose cultures are different than we are. And the problem of course, is because Christianity is a religion of change, we are constantly being thrust into relationships with people who are different than we are.
People whose genders and sexualities and sensibilities and practices are different than our own practices that we have just assumed were good if we practice them and have assumed that they're bad if you do.
So this is the dilemma.
What do they do with all these dirty, filthy Gentiles who have all of these cultural practices that Jewish people find to be just as disgusting and repulsive as eating balut?
I give these people a lot of credit in this first council in Jerusalem back in the first century who recognized that however much Gentiles might offend them, however much Gentiles culture might disgust them, it did not discuss the spirit of God.
Because whether they liked it or not, the spirit of God was moving on the lives of people whose cultures were very different.
And so at that council where they all discussed and argued and discerned what the spirit of God was doing, they came up with a new set of rules.
Instead of telling the Gentiles they needed to obey the law, the first five books of the Bible, the 613 commandments contained therein, they said, that doesn't make any sense, you're not Jewish.
So how about this?
Three rules. Number one, don't eat food sacrificed to other gods.
Monotheism was really important to the early disciples. It's still important to Christians today. So don't involve yourself in worship of other gods. Number two, don't eat animals who had been killed cruelly.
I think it's really helpful to understand ancient Jewish kosher laws as not just an expression of cleanliness, but also an expression of compassion.
When you kill an animal according to kosher rules, you're sure to use a Knife that is so sharp that when you slit that animal's throat quickly and painlessly, they bleed out fast.
That is as much an act of compassion as it is an act of cleanliness.
And what I see here is that James has sent a letter to say, don't drink the blood of animals who have been strangled to death.
And what I hear in that rule, compassion, that's a terrible way to die.
That's the second rule. And the third rule is, don't commit sexual violence.
These aren't bad rules. These are pretty good rules. But they're an enormous change to what it meant to be a person of God. An enormous. They've taken all of the Jewish cultural rules and thrown them out and said, how about you don't become Jewish. You just try to be a decent human being.
Don't worship false gods, don't eat food that's been killed with cruelty, and don't commit sexual violence.
Paul, by the way, later throws out rule number one in First Corinthians, chapter eight, and 1 Corinthians, chapter 10. Paul says, I know, I know James said not to eat food sacrificed to idols, but you and I both know that there's really no such thing as all these other gods, so go ahead and eat the food that's sacrificed to idols. And the reason Paul says this is because it's a burden for them to not be able to go to the marketplace and buy meat. Literally, all the meat in the marketplace has been sacrificed to Greek idols, so they can't eat.
So Paul says, yeah, you're right. This kind of sucks.
Here's the deal. We know that those gods aren't real. It doesn't really matter. Eat whatever you like.
But this is super interesting. First Corinthians, chapter 10. He says, but if you're with somebody and they're not mature enough, they haven't realized yet that there's no such thing as those false gods.
Don't eat that meat in front of them because it will cause them to stumble.
Here's what I love about this.
It highlights something that we learn from Jesus, and that is this.
We don't exist for the rules.
The rules exist for us.
I don't know. Like, you guys aren't freaking out. So I don't know if you fully understood what I just said.
You weren't made for the rules.
You weren't made for your moral or ethical laws. You weren't made for the rules of ancient Judaism. You weren't made for the rules or the laws of 21st century United States of America. You were not made for the rules. You are not a slave to the rules. The rules, the laws, the morality, the ethics, the. These are made for you to help you thrive and live and grow and be healthy and free.
And as soon as the rules get in the way of you being healthy and free and alive, the rules should
[00:26:06] Speaker A: go,
[00:26:08] Speaker B: because they're not serving you anymore.
This is what Jesus meant when he said man was not made for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was made for man.
Quit obsessively, slavishly following rules that make no sense anymore.
So Paul whittles those three new rules down to just two.
This is, I think, fascinating little study in how we exist in the world as people who are trying to be good and righteous.
And I think what we learn from this is that we aren't the ones who really decide what is good and right and true.
The Spirit of God does.
So These are my four takeaways from this passage. Number 1.
The Spirit Decides who's in and who's out. The Spirit decides what's right and what's wrong.
The Spirit decided that Cornelius belonged. The Spirit decided that the Gentiles in Antioch belonged. The Spirit decides who is included in God's goodness. And we know that because we observe. Number two, the evidence of the Spirit in people's lives. And you know what that evidence is? It's love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, meekness, self control. If you observe those things in anybody's life, they have the spirit of God.
I don't care what culture they are, I don't care what sexuality they represent. I don't care what their gender is. I don't care what their religion is. I don't care what their citizenship is. Anybody's life who exhibits the evidence of love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, meekness, and self control is a person whose life reflects the Spirit of God.
Number three, we adjust our rules to include them.
Any rule that we have that's getting in the way, including love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and meekness and self control, should go, period.
That's hard because we come to, like, cherish our little rules, don't we?
We like to admire them and polish them and put them on a shelf and brag about them to others.
We like to use them to exclude some people and include others.
We like to use them to justify our.
And then the last thing I notice about this is that we do this.
We interpret what the Spirit of God is doing together in community.
That's what the early disciples did. They got together and they argued about it, they thought about it, they made their case.
And then James said when he sent his letter, we have all agreed you guys are in.
It's not up to us. The Spirit of God has included you. We just ask that you do these three things so that we can be in relationship together.
I think we don't take that seriously enough. That work of interpreting and discerning together, of arguing together about it, making our case, and having enough care and concern to listen to each other and recognize what the Spirit of God is doing.
And I'm preaching this sermon today because this is the day that we discern together what our budget will be for next year or who our board members will be next year. And this is so boring.
But I don't think there's any such thing as, like, insignificant decisions that we make together.
And I think all of those decisions should be made by the Spirit of God. Amen.
Would you pray with me? God, we thank you again for today. We ask that you would bear with us as we learn how to catch up to the changes that you instigate by your spirit.
We ask that you be patient with us as you continue to include people in our midst who we might normally judge.
We pray that you would, as I asked earlier, sharpen our eyes and our ears to recognize how your spirit is bringing good fruit to our lives, to our families, to our communities, and that we would recognize it and have the courage to join with it, to stand with your spirit as you bring love and liberation into the lives of others.
We pray that we would be a part of that. In Jesus name, Amen.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in.
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