Acts 15:3-9 "Moving Out of Scare City - Draw the Circle Wide

         There is nothing like a good church fight!  Sides drawn!  Cloak and dagger! Below the belt!  It is an experience that has the potential to bring out the very worst in people.  And I know if you go back far enough in the history of our little church, you will find that this congregation has its share of “church fight” skeletons in the closet and knows firsthand how gut wrenching those conflictive times can be. 

         They begin with a few people who are increasingly displeased or feeling slighted over something.  Sometimes that “something” is – face it - peripheral – like how the altar is arranged or where people sit or what new songs are being sung. 

         Sometimes, however, the source of the conflict deeply jolts our understanding of the Gospel message and its inclusive nature – like who we welcome and who we do not exactly snub but make to feel they are not like the rest of us and would be happier worshipping elsewhere – maybe an African-American man or a lesbian couple or someone in a wheelchair. 

         First there are the parking lot conversations and backroom grumbling. 

Then, under the radar, with a bit of nattering here and “pick a little, talk a little” there, the lines are drawn, and sides are taken.  And there the disagreement may smolder – sometimes for years – unless it undergoes some good old-fashioned conflict resolution. And when that happens, the Holy Spirit to free to once again do its nudging and guiding and pointing the way out of Scare City and into the light of all the church is called to be.

         Church fights, of course, are not a new phenomenon.  They have gone on since the very beginning of the church itself.  The passage from the Book of Acts that we just read is a testament to the fact that conflict – deep and potentially divisive conflict - has been part and parcel of the institutional church since its inception over 2000 years ago. 

         Let’s take a look at what was happening to the newly formed Christian church in the Holy City of Jerusalem.  Even that early on, church members had very different perspectives on who was “in” and should be welcomed into the fellowship and who was “out” - and on what basis someone who was “out” could be “in”.

        In order to understand the origins of what had become a hotly contested conflict, we need understand its historical context.  Because Jesus was first and foremost a Jew as were all of his disciples, the early church that formed after his resurrection and ascension was composed entirely of Jews.  They all came from a common background steeped in the same religious rules and regulations governing worship, purity, and sanctity. 

         However, as the decades went by, more and more non-Jews – foreigners - Gentiles we call them – were drawn to the church.  That fact should not be surprising.  After all, Jesus had commanded his earliest followers to preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth – and they had taken him at his word.  The result was an assortment of pagans being baptized.  This new church was spreading rapidly – which would seem to be a good thing.

         However, as one blogger I read this week noted: “More and more Gentiles (i.e. non-Jews) became Christians. When this happened, however, some Jewish believers, especially those from a very strict and traditional background, did not find it easy. They had various religious, cultural and racial prejudices to overcome.”

        Our Scripture passage tells us that certain people – perhaps newly baptized Pharisees - were teaching that, in order to become a full-blooded Christian, a male had to be circumcised.  These teacher evangelists strongly believed that it was not enough to simply put one’s faith in Jesus.  Certain Jewish customs and traditions needed to be obeyed because, they felt, the Jesus movement was really an offshoot of Judaism.  In other words, these teachers were saying that, when all was stripped away (no pun intended), you needed to look like us in order to be one of us.  “You have to circumcise the pagan converts,” they vociferously reasoned.

         Our blogger continues:  “(The teachers in question) did not mind Gentiles becoming Christians but felt Gentile believers should start following Jewish laws and customs, including male circumcision. It was as if they were saying, ‘As long as you Gentiles become like us and do everything the way we do, then fine. We will accept you.’”

         To circumcise or not circumcise:  That was the question.  It was a difficult one to answer too and struck at the core of who these Jesus followers believed themselves to be as a community. However, in this case, the differing perspectives did not stay in the parking lot or backroom very long before they became a full-blown controversy – a church fight.

         The result was a Council made up of apostles and leaders assembling in Jerusalem, the Holy City.  As our reading says in “The Message” translation, “The arguments went on and on, back and forth, getting more and more heated.” And they were heated because everyone – on both sides – was so sincere.  The teachers were not trying to cause trouble.  They were deeply committed. 

         In the midst of the debating and arguing, the Apostle Peter rose to speak his mind about who was “in” and “who was “out”.  I like to think that, before he uttered a word, he remembered all the times he had known Jesus to embrace and engage with those not like himself – foreigners with different customs and cultures. 

         I like to think Peter remembered the stories he heard about the Magi from mysterious Eastern lands who searched until they found the baby Jesus, and the small children Jesus surely played with in Egypt after his refugee family fled King Herod. 

        I like to think Peter remembered coming upon Jesus sitting by a well and having a lively conversation with a Samaritan woman or a debate at dinner with a Syrophenician woman or healing a leper from a foreign land. 

         I like to think Peter remembered these times when he spoke up at the Council. “God, (he said) who knows people’s deepest thoughts and desires…made no distinction between us and them, but purified their deepest thoughts and desires through faith.” 

         No distinction between the circumcised and uncircumcised.  No distinction between those who look like us, act like us, think like us – no distinction between us and those who are racially or ethnically different from us, who are politically motivated in a different way, or who are theologically distant.  In the church of Jesus Christ, Peter proclaimed, we are one.

         Peter, of course, did not come to his perspective lightly.  Although he was the top gun in the new church, knew Holy Scripture backwards and forwards and the rules of his Jewish heritage inside and out, he still struggled with these questions.  In fact, in an earlier chapter in the Book of Acts, we can read about a vision the Peter had. 

         As Methodist pastor Bri Desotel wrote, Peter “is praying one day, fasting and praying, and he has a strange vision: three times, something like a sheet comes down from heaven, covered with every kind of animal; and three times, he hears a voice from heaven saying, “Get up, kill and eat.”  And Peter thinks it’s a test, so three times he refuses; “No, Lord, I know the rules; I have never eaten anything unclean, and I’m not going to start now.”  Finally the voice from heaven says, “Do not call unclean what I have called clean.” It’s as if God says, “Listen to what I’m saying now. It’s a new day, and I’m doing a new thing.”  

         And so, Peter came to realize that the old ways were outmoded.  They were no longer useful, nor did they have a purpose.  He shared his perspective with the Council in Jerusalem and established a precedent that we are still challenged to follow. 

         There is no “us” and “them”.  In Jesus’ church, the world is one.  There are no walls.  There are only bridges. We are called to embrace, engage, or at least be curious about and respect, those who are different from us.  We “in here” have a responsibility to those “out there.”  Those “out there” are part of our church family too. 

But are we building walls to shut them out – or are we committed to building bridges to bring them in?

         Let’s face it.  In spite of Jesus’ strong message of inclusion that Peter re-emphasized, we all – you and I - prejudge other people.  Not that we get up in the morning, look at ourselves in the mirror, and say, “Today I am going to be ageist or sexist or racist.  Today I am going to be less of a Christian than Jesus would want me to be.” 

         But we prejudge anyway.  We second-guess why people cannot pay their electric bill or their rent or why anyone would be so undisciplined as to run out of oil in January.  Many of us do not want to get too close to someone who is flamboyantly gay - or exceedingly butch.  We are not sure how we feel about the man who smells like the gutter he came from or the woman whose basement harbors rats amongst the garbage and detritus of her broken and unhappy life. 

         And yet, Peter tells us – as he told the Council in Jerusalem: God shows no favoritism.  That we are one is God’s dream for the world.  Therefore, as Christians, we are challenged not to partition people into categories of goodness and worthiness.  We are challenged not to erect invisible fences.  We are challenged not to create barriers because, when we do, we retreat into Scare City.   Fences and barriers become signs that fear overpowers us.  When we build our walls and stockpile our resources, we create not more freedom, but our own prisons – and prisons for those around us.

         Let me tell you the story of Mariana.  She is a 16 year old native from Columbia who, along with her sister, are starters on our son, Padraic’s, high school soccer team in Boston.  Mariana and her extended family – seventeen in all – were off to the White Mountains one weekend for a glorious late-summer family tradition of hiking, swimming, and staying in the cabin they always rented. 

         However, this year was different - and would turn out to be world-shattering.  Border patrol agents were invoking a little-used federal law from 1946 that allowed them to stop and conduct searches without a warrant on vehicles within 100 miles of the border, including the coastline, searches that would be unconstitutional elsewhere. They had set up a checkpoint on Interstate 93 and were asking for identification. That law, by the way, includes all of New Hampshire and large pieces of the northern New England states, including Maine – leaving us vulnerable – or well-protected, depending on your viewpoint.

         Mariana and her family including their 12 year old brother were herded from their cars.  The men were separated, and all were taken to a processing center in Vermont.  They were found to have overstayed their visas.  The women and children were released within a couple of days, the men after two weeks.  All of them – kids and adults - will be deported unless an immigration judge decides otherwise.

         Mariana and her family did not stay in the US because they were criminals or drug dealers or intent on raping young white women.  Some would say that they have no right to be here.  Others would say that we cannot judge what we do not know.  We do not know what it is like to live in a country characterized by a lively drug trade and constant gang wars. We just know that it was enough to make Mariana’s family to decide to remain under the radar - but illegally – in the US.

         What we do know is that Mariana is a top student taking Advanced Placement courses.  She is driven to excel and is passionate about going to college and caring for her family. What we do know is that she is required to wear an ankle bracelet now to monitor her whereabouts. 

         What we do know is that, although border patrol workers cannot use racial profiling, they can rely on their suspicion of who is part of a given community (those who are “in”) and who is not (those who are “out”). As one agent recently interviewed on an NPR report acknowledged, “We know this area well enough to know who belongs here and who does not.”  What we do know is that Jesus engaged positively with and embraced the foreigner, the ones we label “them” – and calls us to do likewise.

         Now I tell you this story not to say that Mariana and her family should be above the law.  After all, we are a nation of laws – which is what, in the end, makes us great.  And Mariana’s family agrees – according to an article I read in the Boston Globe.  But I tell you this story to urge you to reflect on the ways we build walls and prejudge people and the ways we retreat into Scare City.

         So – the essential question for us in our little church is this:  How do we break down walls, draw the circle wide, and embrace those who are “out there”? 

         Certainly a place to start is the suggestion of one blogger I read this week.  He writes:  “I've found it a humbling exercise to ask what categories of people I spurn as impure, unclean, dirty, contaminated, and, in my mind, as far from God…What is my modern equivalent? Greedy executives, lazy welfare recipients, (Republicans?  Democrats?) How have I distorted the….egalitarian love of God into self-serving, exclusionary elitism?

What boundaries do I wrongly build or might I bravely shatter? To name our prejudice is the first step to understanding them.

         Another concrete step would be to remain ever vigilant about, and responsive to, occurrences in our communities, in our nation, in our world that breed distrust and build walls between “us” and “them”.  Part of this step would be to reflect on the significance of the story of Mariana and her family – for our nation but more importantly for ourselves as followers of Jesus.  After all, I wonder if Joe and I would have been stopped as well driving home from Canada on those same roads as we do each summer?  I think not – unless people with gray hair were being targeted.

         Certainly being “one in Christ” is easier said than done.  As Desotel wrote, “It’s not enough to say: we are one in Christ – no more than it’s enough to say, I’m not prejudiced, or I love everybody, or we are all people of sacred worth. Words are easy; words are cheap. Living into them is the hard and humbling work of a lifetime. We need to commit and recommit ourselves, again and again, to the challenge of the gospel – to the promise that God’s love does not follow our rules, that God’s grace isn’t limited by our small imaginations – but that God, who crossed the divide between heaven and earth, who crossed the divide between death and life, is still crossing lines….today.”  And God is calling us to do the same.

         The Gospel message challenges our church – this church –to be “out there”, affirming in every way we can, over and over again, that our faith family extends far beyond these four walls.  That is the only way we will stay out of Scare City – to embrace the abundance of gifts of the whole human family, to be courageous enough to obey when we hear God calling, and to have the faith enough to follow when God challenges our assumptions and prejudices.

         As this new hymn suggests:

Go make a diff’rence. We can make a diff’rence. Go make a diff’rence in the world.
We are the hands of Christ reaching out to those in need, the face of God for all to see.
We are the spirit of hope; we are the voice of peace. Go make a diff’rence in the world.

         That is what your financial commitment to the ministries of this church allow us to do – make a difference in the world by teaching our children what it means to be “out there” breaking down rather than building up walls and barriers, by encouraging one another to reflect on the meaning of ministry in the 21^st century, by bringing the Good News of Jesus, the news steeped in inclusiveness, affirmation, and drawing the circle of acceptance wide instead of narrow – bringing that Good News to all the world, so that God’s dream for humanity will become a reality. 

         That is why we put so much emphasis on an annual stewardship campaign.  It is not because your Council wants to guilt trip you into emptying your pockets to pay the oil bill.  It is because your financial commitments are the leverage we need to lead our church out of the darkness of Scare City and into the light of God’s dream.

         It took a church fight amongst the apostles and teachers long ago in Jerusalem to decide to build bridges instead of walls.  My prayer is that it will take only a pledged commitment from each one of you to do the same as we together – upheld by God’s grace and affirmed by God’s blessings – as we together strive to draw the circle wide.