Sermon: Not Hindering God

Acts 8:26-40

Not Hindering God

James Sledge                                                                                       April 29, 2018

Gathering those who fear they’re not enough, so we may experience grace, renewal, and wholeness as God’s beloved. This new “missional mandate,” that has been printed in our bulletins for about two months now, was developed by Session through a long process that began with last year’s Renew Groups.

Session took the feedback from these groups and created synopsis of what we heard. It spoke of a culture that tells us to be more productive, more athletic, more studious, etc. It spoke of people feeling stressed, tired, and harried. It suggested that we needed to remind ourselves of what we already know. God loves us just as we are.

The synopsis then wondered what this might mean, suggesting, “Perhaps we are called to be a church for recovering perfectionists, of Sabbath keepers. A place where we can rest, where we are enough, where we are fully known, where we are wholly and completely loved by God, and where we can experience true joy.”

Last summer, we presented this synopsis to the congregation, with listening sessions after worship for people to tell us their thoughts, to let us know if we had heard the feedback from the Renew Groups correctly. Overwhelmingly, the answer was “Yes.”

With the synopsis confirmed, Session held a Friday evening, Saturday retreat where we joined in fellowship, worship, and work on a missional mandate. We listened for the Spirit, and over time, the mandate emerged, Gathering those who fear they’re not enough, so we may experience grace, renewal, and wholeness as God’s beloved.

I mentioned in the sermon a couple of weeks ago that further work by Session has identified several strategy areas where we hope to live into this new mandate, areas with much deeper meaning than their shorthand titles indicate: Gather, Deepen, Share.

It has taken a great deal of work to get us to this point, but the most difficult work is just beginning. We must figure out how to live out our mandate. What sorts of programs and ministries will help us Gather, Deepen, and Share? No doubt some current activities will, but we will also need new ministries and methods. And that inevitably will require letting go of some old ones. We can’t become something new doing exactly what we are doing now.

When the Church began to form following the first Pentecost, it faced similar challenges. Jesus had been a lifelong Jew, as were his disciples. When they began to share the good news of Jesus, they did so as Jews. They understood the fledgling church to be Jewish, and for a generation or two, non-Jews who wished to follow Jesus had to become Jewish first.

But as the Jesus movement spread more and more into the Gentile world, this became a problem. Many Gentile males were not circumcised. The kosher-like dietary restrictions were strange and unfamiliar to them. For Gentile converts, they made it difficult to have meals and fellowship with old friends, even their own family members who had not converted.

Some missionaries, notably the Apostle Paul, began to baptize people without requiring circumcision or dietary restrictions, creating real strains in the faith. These Gentile Christians were religiously “unclean” to Christians who considered themselves Jewish. They were not welcome at the Lord’s Table in Jewish Christian congregations.

The book of Acts and its companion volume, the Gospel of Luke, are written by a Gentile for Gentile Christians. Acts addresses how a Jewish Church was led by the Spirit to fully welcome Gentiles. In our reading, Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch, but it’s no chance encounter. The angel of the Lord sends him toward Gaza, and the Spirit directs him to the chariot where this Ethiopian is reading from the prophet Isaiah. Presumably this fellow is drawn to the teachings of Judaism, though as a eunuch he could not have become Jewish.

Philip uses the words from Isaiah about sheep led to slaughter as a starting point for telling the good news of Jesus. And as the chariot travels along, the Ethiopian eunuch says, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

Quite a lot, actually. He is not Jewish. On top of that, the law codes in the book of Deuteronomy state clearly, No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of Yahweh. Eunuchs not allowed. Period. Yet Philip, presumably led by the Holy Spirit, goes ahead and baptizes him.

But this is not a matter of Christianity abandoning its Jewishness or rejecting what we call the Old Testament, the only Bible the Church had at this point. In fact, in the very same section of Isaiah the Ethiopian had been reading, the prophet says, Do not let the foreigner joined to Yahweh say, “Yahweh will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree” For thus says Yahweh: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, within my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters…  And to the foreigners who join themselves to Yahweh… all who keep the Sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast to my covenant – these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer.

The writer of Acts understand this Ethiopian’s baptism not as an undoing of Old Testament law, but as fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. But oh how hard it was for those first Jewish Christians to let go of old, familiar faith patterns that had sustained them since childhood. How hard it was to embrace this prophetic fulfillment.

In the book of Acts, the Church often has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the new thing God is doing. On one occasion, the Spirit prods Peter into visiting some Gentiles. But Peter does not “get it” and baptize them until after the Holy Spirit has already entered into these Gentiles. When he returns to Jerusalem, he’s criticized for baptizing them by church leaders and must explain himself. He recounts what had happened, ending with, “Who was I that I could hinder God?”

What follower of Jesus would want to hinder God? And yet, the book of Acts shows Peter, other disciples, and the leaders of the Jerusalem church all doing just that at times. I wonder if Acts doesn’t mean to remind us how easy it is, even for those of great faith, to confuse the things we like, find comfortable, grew up with, are long standing practice, or are just assumed to be part of church, with the things Christ calls us to do and be.

That brings me back round to where I started. If Jesus is indeed calling us to gather those who fear they’re not enough; if we are to draw in those who have been harried and worn down by the overly competitive, never good enough, never rich enough, never pretty enough messages of our culture, in order for us to experience God’s love, grace, renewal, and wholeness, then we need to consider carefully and prayerfully what this asks of us. We must be wary of unintentionally hindering God. We need to be open to the Spirit taking us places we would never have gone on our own.

And the good news promised in the book of Acts is that when we are open to the Spirit’s guidance, she will show us where Jesus wants us to go, taking us on wonderful, new adventures. And even if the Spirit sometimes has to drag us places we don’t want to go, God’s purposes are still moving forward. And Christ continues to call us to play our part in revealing the joy and hope of God’s new day.