What Now? Week 2: Expanding the Circle

So today is the second Sunday of this sermon series I’m calling “What Now?”, taking a look at how the early church community responded to meeting the resurrected Christ. They responded to the resurrection by creating a new kind of community, built around the values and the way of life they learned from Jesus.   

Like I said last week, I think it’s important to remember that when they began to create what we now know as the church, they didn’t have any instructions or template. They had their memories and stories of Jesus. But in all that Jesus taught them, he didn’t tell them anything about how to organize a new religion. In those early days, there was no formal Christian doctrine. There was no church structure because there was no church. There was no New Testament, because it hadn’t been written yet. So in those early years, the first Christians were making it up as they went. After they met the risen Christ, they knew they couldn’t go back to their normal lives. But how they would live differently, that was an open question.  

I think that question is more than just historically important. I think it’s important today, because in a way, the first Christians were asking the same question that all of us have to ask of ourselves: what does it mean to live a Christian life?  

Last week, we looked at one of the church’s early experiments: the idea of holding property in common. The author of the Biblical Book of Acts tells us that anyone who had land or a house sold them and pooled the money to support each other. Those first Christians were trying to show with their lives that in this new kind of community, this new thing called a church, no one was of higher or lower status than anyone else. Everyone was entitled to the basics of food, shelter, and clothing, and they shared what they had to provide them.  

I don’t think the point of that experiment was really about common property per se. That didn’t last long anyway. I think they were trying to create a new way of life where the hierarchies of power and status that defined Roman society were meaningless. And even though we don’t practice common property, that’s an idea that we can take to heart today as we grow this faith community. We can do the necessary inner and outer work to treat everyone we meet as the beloved of God.  

This morning I want to look at another practice those first Christians adopted. Almost from the beginning of the Christian movement, the Apostles who had known Jesus began to push the boundaries of who could join; who could be part of their new community.  

Remember, Christianity began as a Jewish movement. Jesus was a Jew. The apostles were Jews; the people he talked with and taught were almost all Jews. And when his followers met him alive again after his death, the Gospel of Luke says they were “continually in the temple praising God,” which is exactly where you would expect faithful Jews to be if they thought they had met the Messiah. In the first few years of Christianity, Christians understood themselves as Jews whose Messiah had brought their faith to its fullest expression.  

But very quickly, within those first few years, the leaders of this new movement began to welcome those who were not of Jewish background.   

Of course, in a way the Apostles were just following the example of Jesus. In the Gospel of John, the first person to whom Jesus identifies himself as the Messiah is a Samaritan woman whose own village would have judged her as a sinner beyond redemption. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke tell about the Roman soldier who asks Jesus to heal his servant. Jesus not only does it, but praises the Roman soldier by saying, “nowhere in all of Israel have I found such faith.” In Matthew, a Canaanite woman – one of the historic enemies of Jews – asks him to heal her daughter, and he does. This kind of thing happens throughout the Gospels: Jesus breaks down the barriers that divide people from one another.  

But it’s one thing to heal people, or even spend time with them, as Jesus did. The Apostles took it one step further: somehow, they decided that their leader’s teachings and resurrection meant that enemies or outcasts could be part of the circle. They should have full membership in the church – which was striving to be a community of radical equality, depending radically on God.  

Today, we heard two stories from the Book of Acts. The first tells about Philip, one of the Apostles leading the new movement, meeting an Ethiopian government official. There are two things about the Ethiopian’s story that stand out for me. First, he is deeply compelled by Jewish scripture and spiritual life. He would have to be. Ethiopia’s a long way from Jerusalem. Even though he’s wealthy and powerful, he’d have to travel for several weeks in his horse-drawn carriage just to get there. But for me, the really striking thing about his story is that once he gets to the temple for worship, after that long journey, he would not be allowed in. He has intentionally been disfigured. He can’t have children. In the first century, a person like that was not allowed to be in the temple at all. I can’t help but think that the Ethiopian knew that. He had to. He’s educated; he reads scripture; he must know Jewish law. But for whatever reason, driven by some deep spiritual need, he goes anyway. Maybe he hopes, prays, that someone in the temple will take pity on him. But there’s no indication anyone did. For all his wealth and power, the Ethiopian is still an outsider in Jerusalem.   

The second passage we heard from Acts comes from the 10th chapter. It’s part of a speech that Peter gives at the end of his visit to the home of a Roman military officer named Cornelius. Both Cornelius and Peter have had religious visions, almost at the same time. Cornelius sees an angel, who tells him about this man, named Peter, who he should summon to his home. Peter has a vision in which he hears a voice saying, “what God has made clean, you must not call unclean.” It’s a strange moment, and Peter doesn’t know what to think – until suddenly Cornelius’s messengers show up.  

I’m pretty sure Peter would not have been happy about this. Cornelius is a Roman military officer. He’s one of the commanders of the soldiers occupying the Holy Land. We’re told that he’s a righteous man, but to any Jew in the region, Cornelius is still the enemy.  

But Peter’s vision leads him to think differently. If he’s not supposed to call anything that God has made unclean…and if God has made each one of us, they maybe our divisions and our hatreds truly are ours, not God’s. So when he arrives at Cornelius’s home, Peter says to the small group who’ve gathered there, “I truly understand now that God shows no partiality, but in every nation everyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable.”  

At the end of his conversation with Philip, the Ethiopian court official says, “Here’s some water. What is to prevent me from being baptized right now?” Peter wraps up his little speech with a similar question: “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people?”  

I think maybe there are two lessons here for us. One is obvious and one I think we often tend to forget. The obvious one is we don’t get to decide who’s worthy of God’s grace. We don’t get to decide who can be part of the Kindom. So for us, just as for those first Christians, the question is not who should we let in. Maybe the question is, “can anyone withhold the water of baptism from these people?” In one of her books, Rachel Held Evans wrote, “The apostles remembered what many modern Christians tend to forget—that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out but who it lets in.” 

Like I said, that’s maybe the most obvious lesson. Those early Christians were welcoming anyone who wanted to pursue Christian life. We have no more right to keep people out than they did; maybe even less.  

But I think there’s another important lesson here. I think that for the first Christians, the baptism of Cornelius and his household and the Ethiopian eunuch; maybe  those weren’t such a radical break with Jewish tradition as we might imagine. Maybe those Christians had simply recalled an important part of their tradition. In Genesis, when God makes covenant with Abraham, God says, “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” 

So maybe those early Christians remembered that covenant. Maybe they took it seriously enough to believe that they were called to be part of extending the blessing that God promised – not to a narrow group of people, but to anyone who asked for it. 

In Acts, we’re told the eunuch is reading from the Prophet Isaiah, and Acts quotes the passage he’s reading. Just a little bit after that section of Isaiah, the prophet writes,  

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,  

‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’;
and do not let the eunuch say,
   ‘I am just a dry tree.’
For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
   who choose the things that please me
   and hold fast my covenant,
I will give, in my house and within my walls,
   a monument and a name
   better than sons and daughters…
 

And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord…
who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
   and hold fast my covenant—
these I will bring to my holy mountain,
   and make them joyful in my house of prayer… 

Thus says the Lord God,
   who gathers the outcasts of Israel…
 

See, I think that when those Jewish Apostles began to baptize gentiles and outcasts and people thought to be unclean into this new religious movement that we call Christianity, I think they were simply recalling what their own scriptures said: all the people of earth are called. All the people of the earth will be blessed. All the people of the earth are beloved by God. When we realize that, when we take that to heart, when we reach back into our tradition to recapture that insight, we will begin to grow a truly magnetic community – finding God where God always hangs out: among the outcasts. Among those who are told they don’t belong. There we will find God and become who we are truly called to be.