Giving Our Church Away (5th Sunday of Easter; Acts 15:1-18; May 14, 2017)

Giving Our Church Away

5th Sunday of Easter
Acts 15:1-18
May 14, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Church is hard. It's no wonder so many people opt out of it. Most of us have heard that one of the fastest growing responses to polling that asks what religious body people belong to is the "Nones." These are folks who do not belong to a church or any other religious group. They may or may not have had much in the way of religious instruction in any tradition. They feel free--in the words of The Life of St. Anthony wrenched violently out of context--"to imitate a wise bee gathering nectar from many flowers." They pick up this idea from one tradition and another idea from another tradition and sew them together in a spiritual patchwork quilt.

Of course, there are problems with this approach to the spiritual life. Among the most important problems is the fact that ideas, values, and practices are rooted in their traditions. It's hard to make a garden by yanking flowers out of various other gardens, sticking them in ground, and hoping they will grow. But this is the age in which we can roll up corned beef, sauerkraut, some cheese, and Russian dressing in a tortilla and call it a Reuben burrito, so I suspect that this cafeteria-style of shopping for spiritual practices is going to continue.

The children of Nones are even less tethered to any tradition. Some of them--by way of reaction--are looking for Tradition with a capital "T". Some of them find themselves drawn to high liturgy with "smells and bells". Others are simply floundering in a sea of disconnected practices and ideas.

And then there is a relatively new group that has been named the "Dones". They have been members of churches, sometimes highly committed members, but for one reason or another they are "done", not just with a particular congregation, but with the whole idea of membership in any congregation. They are "done" with the Church. They are often not done with God nor, especially, with Jesus. His teachings are still central to their lives. They've just had it with the Church.

Polling people are interested in this group. They have a pretty good idea of why the Dones are a rapidly growing category in America today. These folks are done with being told what they have to believe. They are done with exclusionist preaching and teaching that tells them that their friends are outside the circle of God's love and acceptance. They are tired of the politics of intolerance. They are tired of being told that being a "real" Christian means voting for a particular candidate for President, or Senator, or Governor, or dog-catcher. They still want to follow Jesus. But they have come to believe that they will be better able to do that without the Church.

Church is hard. There is a kind of what I call "given-ness" about any congregation. A congregation always has the people it has. When we join ourselves to a congregation we get the people who are part of the congregation and get them "warts and all." This is usually okay, since they get us, too. And each of us comes with our own rough edges. I have said, and believe, that church, like family, is God's way of giving us a laboratory in which we can learn how to love people whom we sometimes don't like very well, and to do this as people who too often aren't very likable ourselves. That is hard work. But it is the hard work that--if we stick with it--nudges us along toward becoming the people that God has in mind for us to be. Church is a sort of rock polisher. In we go, all rough edges.
We come out as polished stones, showing an unsuspected beauty. But it's torture in between. being tumbled against each other, banged against each others' rough edges. Church is hard.

That's not new, of course, as we heard in this morning's reading. The context is a conflict in the early Church. As many of these conflicts were this one is about boundaries: Who is in the Church and who is not? What happens at the border of the Church? What are the credentials that anyone seeking entry needs to show?

The conflict had simmered for a while, but in the congregation at Antioch things came to a boil. The Antioch church was visited by those who had come "down" from Jerusalem. The visitors didn't like what they saw. There were people there calling themselves Christians who had never become Jews. The Judean visitors insisted that this was a requirement. There were 613 mitzvot, commands binding on ordinary Jewish men. People who wanted to become Christians had to obey them.

Paul and his co-workers insisted that it was not a requirement. They pointed to all that God was doing through the non-Jewish members of the congregation. The lives of non-Jewish followers of Jesus were being transformed. Their conversions were genuine. At least for those who had no Jewish background, being Torah-observant Jews had nothing to do with being followers of the Jewish Jesus.

Neither side could convince the other. What to do? Conflict is one of the hardest things about the hard thing we call church.

There are times when we have done conflict very badly. One of my favorite examples was supplied when Carol and I visited Scotland for the first time. I am fascinated by old things, even things that are only old by American standards. You can imagine how annoying I was in Scotland!

We visited the parish church in Stirling. The Church of the Holy Rude, that is, the Church of the Holy Cross, is old, built in 1129, destroyed by fire in 1405, and then rebuilt. It has seen a lot of history, including the coronation of the infant James VI of Scotland who later became James I of England. This was James of the King James Bible fame.

For our purposes, though, there is an instructive story. Some time after the Scottish Reformation there was a conflict in the congregation at Holy Rude. Some were Scots Kirk folks and others were Free Kirk people. They were both essentially what we would call Presbyterians, but they disagreed on how pastors should be called. Scots Kirk people argued that the local laird or, in their case, the City Council, had the duty to call the pastor. The Free Kirk folks said that the pastor should be called by the Presbytery, the regional governing body.

Scots are fond of fighting. Their resting state is DEFCON 4, so you can imagine that the dispute did not go well. The congregation was deadlocked. Their governing body, the Session, was deadlocked as well. They appealed to the City Council. But the Council was a divided as the congregation.

So, in the mid-1650s or so they did the only logical thing: they built a wall down the center of the nave, the sanctuary, and split the congregation into the West Church and the East Church. On Sundays each congregation could hear the muffled voice of the other pastor invoking God's wrath on the schismatics on the other side of the wall. Time passed. A long time passed. Centuries passed with the building "shared" by the two rival congregations.

The dividing issue was long since resolved as the Scots Kirk adopted the Free Kirk method of calling pastors. In the 1930s, the Great Depression and reduced attendance rendered supporting two congregations not just silly, but financially foolish. In 1936, the church was remodeled and the dividing wall removed, and the congregations merged, a mere 280 years after the dispute split them.

Fortunately for us, the dispute in Antioch was not handled in this way. The congregation chose Paul, Barnabas, and others to be delegates to the leaders of the church at Jerusalem that was, at this point, still considered to be the founding and leading church of the Christian movement. The delegates traveled from church to church on their way south, "up" to Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem leadership heard from the two sides of the dispute. Everyone had a chance to speak, though, and in the Jewish practice, the youngest were first. There is a reason for doing it this way. Rather than have the leaders speak first and inhibit the conversation, the junior members of the community could speak freely without having to contradict the elders. This was part of an informal leadership development strategy.

Peter was an important apostle so he spoke late in the process and reminded the community that he had himself played an important role in opening the doors to Gentiles becoming Christians. Barnabas and Paul, also apostles, spoke next. Last to speak was James, the brother of Jesus, the senior leader of the Jerusalem church. James rendered the decision, after having heard all the speakers.

James judged that non-Jews should be admitted to the fellowship of Jesus' followers on the same grounds that Jews were admitted: That they turn toward God and refrain from immorality. No special requirements were to be laid on them. From the story and from what he himself said, he seems to have taken this position for three reasons: 1) There had already been signs in the Church's story so far that this was the trajectory that they were on. Peter's experiences in the household of Cornelius were taken very seriously. 2) It was obvious that God was blessing the non-Jewish Christian community with what John Wesley would have identified as the "increase of love of God and humankind." 3) There were clear statements in the prophets that it had always been God's purpose, not only to choose a particular people, but through them to extend that choice to include all the peoples of the earth.

So the dispute was officially resolved. That did not mean that partisanship disappeared overnight and everyone was happy. If Acts is anything to go by, the question of how Jews and non-Jews would relate within the Jesus movement lingered for as long as the time covered by the book.

None of us should underestimate how difficult this decision was: difficult to make, difficult in its implementation. Church is hard, remember? Nor should we underestimate how far-reaching were the effects of this decision.

When we welcome a visitor, we hope to make them comfortable. We hope that they will feel at home among us. We also, well at least I also, secretly hope that they won't change things too much. Change is hard, too. I secretly hope that they'll fit in, that they won't demand that we change to meet their needs. But that is at best a thin version of hospitality.

What the leaders in Jerusalem did was something far more radical. Not requiring that non-Jewish converts to Jesus become Jews meant that these non-Jews would come into the Church without the long process of formation that all Jews had simply by being Jews. They would do the work of being Christians in a different culture, speaking a different language, and bringing different sensibilities to the task. They would not just be Christians but Gentile Christians. There were many more non-Jewish than Jewish folks in the Mediterranean region. The decision to allow non-Jews to become Christians without becoming Jews first meant that eventually the Church would no longer be a Jewish community with a few non-Jewish members, but a Gentile community with a few Jewish members.

They moved beyond tolerance of differences. They moved beyond diversity. James, the brother of Jesus, and the other leaders in Jerusalem did what few leaders have ever done and they led a community to do what very few communities have ever done. They gave away their power. They de-centered themselves. They led their community to abandon its own privilege within the Jesus movement.

Now, I don't know whether this "actually happened" or not. I do know that in telling the Church's story in this way, Acts sets before us a radically different way of conducting ourselves in the Church and in the world. This way is open to others. It is open to its own conversion for the sake of others. It is willing to give away its power and its status. It is willing to give up its own life so that others may experience God's love. It is, in short, Christ-like. Now that would be a new thing. Or at least a very old thing remembered and made new again. Yes, church is hard. But together we can do hard things and the world will become wonderful in new ways when we do.

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