Sunday
05/06/18 Freeville/Homer Avenue UMC’s
Sermon Title: “One big crazy church!”
Old Testament
Scripture: Psalm 98
New Testament
Scripture: Acts 10:44-48
Gospel Lesson:
John 15:9-17
My friends, my sisters and brothers in Christ, welcome once
again on this our 6th Sunday in this our Season of Easter. Six
Sundays after Jesus conquered death, rose to new life, giving us hope, love,
healing, and offering us eternal life.
Next Sunday, we will have Mother’s Day, and also Ascension
Sunday. This Thursday in fact, is Ascension Day, which is the day that the church
celebrates Christ’s ascension or being raised into heaven. This is the day that
Christ leaves us physically, but promises to send us the Holy Spirit, and also promises
us that he will return one day in glory. Since we generally don’t have a
worship service on Ascension Day itself though, we call next Sunday, in
addition to Mother’s Day, Ascension Sunday.
Today however, my sermon is called “One big crazy church!”.
This title has nothing to do with this specific church, but is more a funny
title regarding the scripture that we are given for this morning from the Book
of Acts. The full title of this book of scripture that I will be preaching from
this morning, is the “Acts of the Apostles,” which is the book of scripture
that tells us about the early church (Acts 1:1, NRSV). In this book of
scripture, the apostles of Christ are now building and organizing the very
first Churches. In this book of scripture, we have the story of the conversion
of Saul of Tarsus, who we now call the Apostle Paul. We have the vision of
Peter that allows us to no longer be required to be “Kosher” anymore, like our
Jewish brothers and sisters. For example, as Christians we can eat bacon and
ham, and devout Jews and devout Muslims, cannot do this. This is a book of
scripture that tells us a lot about the earliest days of the Church, and how
the church started.
Interestingly enough though, “Christians” as many of us now
call ourselves, wasn’t the first name of the followers of Jesus Christ. Does
anyone here know what the first followers of Christ, (who were all Jews by the
way) were called? They weren’t called “Christians”.
The answer is, that the first followers of Christ (and we
are talking maybe only the first 20-30 years of the church), were called “The Way”.
There are many examples of this in the Book of Acts. For
example, in Acts 9:2, which discusses Saul of Tarsus, before he converted and
became the Apostle Paul. At this point in the narrative, Saul of Tarsus hates
the followers of Christ and wants to destroy them. This scripture says that
Paul asked the high priest:
“for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he
found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to
Jerusalem” (Acts 9:2, NRSV).
Now you will notice that this scripture doesn’t say the
“Christians,” instead it says “the Way”. I have seen some people that have Bibles
that are called “The Way” Bible. Has anyone ever seen one of those?
After Saul of Tarsus converts to the “The Way”, he laments
persecuting the first followers of Christ in Acts 22:4. In this scripture he
says:
“I persecuted this Way up to the point of death by binding
both men and women and putting them in prison,”
(Acts 22:4, NRSV).
So for the first roughly 20-30 years
of our faith, maybe a little more or less, “The Way” was solely for Jews and
Jews alone. In fact, all men who became Christ followers of member so of “The
Way” had to be circumcised, and were still Jews. The difference is, is that
these Jews believed that Jesus was the foretold Messiah or savior of the world.
So why are we called “Christians” and
not members of “The Way”. Here is why:
“Tradition holds that the first Gentile church was founded in Antioch, Acts
11:20-21, where it is recorded that the
disciples of Jesus Christ were first called Christians Acts
11:19-26. It was from Antioch that St. Paul
started on his missionary journeys” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Antioch).
In fact, the Book of Acts 11:26b it says:
“So it was that for an entire year they met
with the church and taught a great many people, and it was in Antioch that
the disciples were first called “Christians” (Acts
11:26b, NRSV).
So if you haven’t already figured it
out, the name “Christians” was given to gentiles that were followers of Christ.
A gentile of course is a non-Jew. If “The Way,” or the first followers of Jesus
Christ had to be Jewish, when the gentiles wanted to become part of the church,
we had a problem. This is what our scripture from the Book of Acts is talking
about this morning. Again, when Jesus called his twelve disciples, they were
all Jewish, and the first followers of Christ were all Jewish, but now we have
non-Jews wanting to follow Christ. How are we to respond to this?
Well, for example, how many of us here
by a show of hands were not born into Jewish families? We are then historically
called gentiles. There are some other definitions of gentiles, but non-Jews
tends to be the biggest definition.
My sermon title for this morning, once
again, is called “One big crazy church!”. As many of us know, Judaism has
always been a small religion, and therefore if “The Way” stayed just Jews it
would very likely be an extremely small religion today. The vast majority of
“Christians” today in fact, are non-Jews.
So how did this happen specifically?
Well let’s look again at our reading from the Book of Acts for this morning.
The subtitle that we have in our NRSV Bibles for this scripture says the “Gentiles receive the Holy Spirit” (Acts
10:44-48, NRSV). Once again, this is what it says:
“While Peter was still speaking,
the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who
had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been
poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and
extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing
these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered
them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay
for several days”
(Acts
10:44-48, NRSV).
In this scripture, it says that as the
Apostle Peter was speaking or maybe even preaching, that:
“the
Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word” (Acts 10:4a, NRSV).
The scripture
says the Apostle Peter was “astounded” that the Holy Spirit not only fell on
circumcised believers, or Jews, but also “even on the Gentiles”. In fact the
scripture says that they were:
“speaking
in tongues and extolling God” (Acts 10:46b, NRSV).
The Apostle
Peter then reasoned that these gentiles who have received the Holy Spirit
should be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as
followers of Jesus Christ. In fact, as we will see in Acts 11, they don’t even
need to be circumcised, just be baptized, receive Christ, be filled with the
Holy Spirit, and then learn the Christian faith.
This sounds
easy enough, but there was dissension over this. In my current favorite Bible
Commentary, the Africa Bible Commentary,
which includes multiple African scholars perspectives on the Bible, the scholar
who wrote about the Book of Acts, wrote of Acts 11:2-18 as being called “Peter defends the Gentiles inclusion”
(Africa Bible Commentary). This is the beginning of what many called the “First
Church Conference”. In chapter 11 of the Book of Acts the Apostle Peter defends
the right of gentiles to be valid Christians, even though they are neither
Jewish, nor circumcised. Eventually in chapter 15 of the Book of Acts this
becomes official. “The Way,” that was just Jews, now was expanded to include
gentiles. Gentile men no longer needed to be circumcised, and could now be
considered authentic followers of Christ.
From that
point, the Apostle Paul, often called “The Apostle to the Gentiles,” went out
evangelizing and planting churches. Many of the people that the Apostle Paul preached
to and that were converted to Christ, were not Jews, but were in fact gentiles.
Due to all of
this, our scripture from Acts 10:44-48 for this morning, is the beginning of
what my commentary calls the “Gentiles’
inclusion” (Africa Bible Commentary).
From very
early in the Christian movement then, the church included persons of various
ethnicities, races, and colors. They came from different cultures, had
different customs, which is why my sermon title says, “One big crazy church”.
For centuries
then, the Christian Church has included a variety of races, men and women, and
people of all different ethnicities. All of us might claim the title of
“Christian” for ourselves, but maybe we have come from different forms of the
Christian faith.
In our gospel
of John reading for this morning, Jesus tells us to love God, abide in Him who
is Jesus, to live sacrificially for others, and in general to love one another
(Jn. 15:9-17, NRSV). This means loving others that are different than us.
For example,
when I was getting ready to write this sermon, I was toying with showing a clip
from the movie, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. In this movie, the bride to be
father is very proud to be Greek. In fact, according the bride’s father
anything Greek is better. The bride’s father tells his soon to be son-in-law,
who was about to be baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church, that it was his
lucky day to get baptized into the Greek Orthodox Church. The groom to be, I believe
came from an Episcopalian background, and his family, to say the least, was
quite different than the bride to be Greek family. Yet they were all
Christians, and when we come together as all nations, races, and peoples, we
are one big crazy and diverse church.
This is why we
must be comfortable with some change. Don’t miss hear me, not changes to the
beliefs of Christianity, but changes in how we do certain things. In my
experience as a pastor every minister is different, but is called by God to serve,
love, heal, and forgives. We are “One big crazy church!” so let reach out to
our sisters and brothers of all Christian stripes, and everyone with the love
of Jesus Christ. May embrace our brothers and sisters as being part of “One big
crazy church!” Amen.
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