How many times has someone said, “Stop me if you’ve heard this.” Usually it’s a joke, but sometimes it’s a story. We all know people who tell the same story or set of stories nearly every time we see them. Reruns are fine up to a certain point, but just how many times can a person watch an episode of “I Love Lucy” or “Cheers”? It’s the same with scripture. Do we have to read that psalm again? How many times have I heard this parable? I know it by heart.
Or do we? There is the story of the new preacher who arrived and preached her first sermon. Everyone said how good it was. The next Sunday she preached the same sermon. Most everyone cut her some slack, saying that she’d been too busy getting settled to write a new sermon. On the third Sunday she preached the same sermon. The chair of the pastor nominating committee decided that he ought to check into this. “You’ve preached the same sermon three weeks running. Is there a problem?” “No,” she said, “when you
hear what I’m saying in this first sermon, I’ll preach my second sermon.”
We think we know most everything about a certain passage of scripture and that there’s nothing more to be gained from it. Scripture isn’t that simple. You remember the story of the four blind people who encountered an elephant. One felt the trunk and thought it was a big snake. Another felt the tail and thought it was a rope. The third felt a leg and thought it was a tree and the fourth felt the side and thought it was a barn. We are all sightless individuals when it comes to meeting up with scripture and we all encounter it differently. There is more to scripture than meets the eye or ear.
The story of Cornelius in today’s reading from Acts is a familiar story. Luke has this habit of telling things several times in order to get a point across. Peter’s vision is first told in Acts 10. Peter was praying on the roof of his house in Joppa and had his visionary experience. Just then the messenger from the Italian Company centurion, Cornelius, delivered the invitation to go to Caesarea, meet with Cornelius and his household, and tell the Good News of Jesus. Peter went to the Gentile home and realized that God had purposefully sent him there not only to preach the gospel of the risen Christ, but to expand Peter’s understanding of what is supposed to be done with the Good News.
Of course the leaders of the Christ community in Jerusalem get word of what Peter did and they were more than a little upset with Peter. “Good old Peter, you never know what he is going to do.”
So the next time Peter came to Jerusalem they demanded an explanation from him. That’s when Luke repeats all the salient details from the original telling. The telling irony is that the criticism by the Jerusalem leaders was the very same disbelief and hesitancy that Peter expressed when he received his vision. He had to see the vision three times before he began to get its drift. And it was only after he got to Cornelius’ house that it dawned on him what it was all about.
We can’t dismiss out of hand the response of the church leaders in Jerusalem. They began their faith journeys as traditional Jews. Every Jew knew that it was not permitted to eat with non-Jews. Their deepest anxiety was that they would become like the Gentiles if they had table fellowship with them. The only way to ease their fears was for Gentiles to be circumcised and to go through all the ritual purification rites.
Now the issue has become deeper. It is more than rubbing shoulders with Gentiles or eating out of the same bowls. The issue is whether the Christians of Jewish heritage can share the Holy Spirit with Gentiles. Most Jewish believers thought that God offered salvation only to the Jews because God had given his law to them. A group in Jerusalem believed that Gentiles could be saved, but only if they followed all the Jewish laws and traditions—in essence, if they became Jews before they became Christians.
The meeting between the Jerusalem leaders and Peter didn’t put and end to this internal debate. It would be the topic of discussion at the Jerusalem council which Luke will detail in chapter 15. Both groups were mistaken. God chose the Jews and taught them his laws so they could bring the message of salvation to the whole world. God had told Abram that all families of earth would be blessed because of him (Genesis 12:3). Isaiah’s second song had God saying, “I will also appoint you [my servant] as light to the nations so that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Isaiah 49:6).
As is often the case, the critics criticized first and gathered their information later. Before Peter arrived back in Jerusalem, the news reached the apostles and other believers in Judea that the Gentiles had received the word of God. Instead of rejoicing, some of the Jewish believers criticized him. The criticism of Peter was not that he had gone to Caesarea or that he had preached to Gentiles but rather that he had eaten with them.
Thankfully, Peter didn’t let his temper run away with him. He patiently explained step by step what had happened to him, how he had reacted, how he had responded to the invitation to tell the Good News, and what God accomplished through Peter’s acceptance of a new dimension in ministry. Peter’s careful retelling of the story wiped out many of the Jerusalem leaders’ misconceptions about what he had done and filled in the gaps in their knowledge. It was like having instant replay and the referees saw that the call had to be reversed. Peter hadn’t fouled. He had done right.
The leaders in Jerusalem had been too busy keeping tabs on who Peter ate with and not paying a lot of attention to what he was accomplishing. We love to keep score, don’t we? “I did better than you did.” “That’s an error, you lose.”
Church growth maven Bill Easum writes that churches are always keeping score. How many people did we have in worship? Did we meet the budget? Were the chairs and tables left they way they were found? Jesus said nothing about things like that. He gave the believers only one metric for scoring the church’s work: “Go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).
While attendance and income are important, Easum suggests some different measures:
- How many new disciples do we have this year?
- How many of our people are being mentored for ministry in their neighborhoods?
- How many of our people are we sending out to connect with lost people? It doesn’t matter what you send them out to do as long as it results in four things: (1) blesses those being served; (2) blesses those serving; (3) creates visibility for the church; and (4) grows the Kingdom of God.(1)
Easum continues:
“The primary mission of the local church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ. If I believe that, then everything my church does should be pointed toward that goal. If I believe that, then I must also believe that making disciples doesn’t begin inside the church, it begins out in the community with non-Christians.”(2)After Peter’s meeting in Jerusalem, Luke reports that believers who had fled from Jerusalem after Stephen’s martyrdom went to a variety of places, including Antioch, where large numbers of people became believers. Easum argues that the Jerusalem church tried hard to keep the movement within the Jewish race. And when the Jerusalem church finally, reluctantly allowed the Gospel to go to the Gentiles, it hunkered down and was comfortable merely taking care of itself to the point that Paul had to raise money to keep the church afloat. Not a very good example for us today.
In contrast, the Antioch church is the mother of most, if not all, the Gentile churches in the world today. It was the Antioch church that caught the spirit of Matthew 28:18-19 where Jesus instructed us to “make disciples of all nations [people groups].” It was the Antioch church that sent church-planter missionaries out to the far corners of the known world. The Antioch Church is the example for us today.
When we talk about the New Testament church we usually think of the Holy Spirit coming on believers in Jerusalem. But if it had been left to that Jerusalem church, would any of us be Christians today?
Shall we be the Jerusalem Church or the Antioch Church? It was the Antioch church that, like Peter, dared to be obedient to God and reach beyond itself. That’s what this table is all about. We receive in spirit the bread and juice remembering Christ’s sacrifice wasn’t just for us, but for the world – past, present, and future. As we often say at the end of the Great Thanksgiving at this table, “As this bread is Christ’s body for us, send us out to be the body of Christ in the world.”
Be fed at this table. Be food for the neighborhood and the world. Be an Antioch church and reach out.
(1) Bill Easum, https://exponential.org/new-scorecard/
(2) Bill Easum, http://churchgrowtharticles.com/why-i-prefer-antioch-over-jerusalem-church/
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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