The Path of Least Resistance

When a wildfire is burning, firefighters use a variety of techniques to try to put it out. One of those techniques is call a fire break. And what a firebreak does is it attempts to deprive a fire of fuel and redirect its movement to a safe and controlled area where it can burn out. A fire naturally burns in the path of least resistance, where fuel is easily avaliable.

Which makes sense, because I do the same thing right? If I want a turkey sandwich I’m much more likely to go to Jersey Mike’s or Jimmy John’s than I am to go out, shoot a turkey and then bake bread for my sandwich. I want the fuel that is quickly and easily avaliable.

So what fire fighters will do in the wild is dig giant trenches around the fire that act as a barrier between the fire and the source of fuel — likely other trees and vegetation. These trenches create boundaries for the fire and contain it so that fire fighters can concentrate their efforts to extinguish it in a more effective manner.

I tell you all of this because it’s a part of the fire fighting strategy, and because it is something that the early church had to contend with. If you’ve been here for a few weeks then you’ve figured out that we are in the middle of a sermon series call “How to Start a Fire” where we are looking at elements that were present in the early church that allowed the message of Jesus to spread like a wildfire across the known world.

And we’ve talked about a lot of stuff, mostly we have focused on the large amount of resistance that the early church faced from the outside. The larger Jewish society was skeptical and often times downright hateful towards the early community of Jesus’s followers. And in a lot of ways God used that to advance the mission of the Gospel beyond Jerusalem. In fact, one of the worst persecutors of the Church — a man named Saul — was converted to following Jesus as he chased down and tried to prevent the spread of the Gospel.

But what we are going to find now is that some of the greatest threats to the advancement of Jesus’s Church would occasionally come from within the church itself. Which should give us some comfort, because we are often our own worst enemies still today. Without knowing it, some people within the community of Jesus were building firebreaks, digging trenches, and installing boundaries around the movement of the church.

You may recall that last week we talked about the Apostle Peter going to the home of a man named Cornelius and preaching the gospel there to non-Jewish people. Peter had received a vision from God that the Gospel message was not to be constrained to people of Jewish descent. Remember, Christianity began as a sect of of Judaism, and Jewish people and non-Jewish folks did not intermix or even really socialize.

All of a sudden the Gospel was offered an unlimited source of fuel. And Saul — the man who was once attempting to shut down the movement of Jesus — sprang into action and began planting churches throughout the gentile non-jewish world. He formed a home base in the city of Antioch, and from there he and some of his co-workers begin the great expansion of the Gospel, and he begins using his greek name — Paul.

This massive expansion though did not come without growing pains, the most important of which we find in Acts 15. This is one of the very first church council meetings — it’s called the Jerusalem council. And it occurs because there is disagreement brewing. So lets just dive in and see what this little budding conflict is all about.

So Paul is recuperating and resting at his home base in antioch:

Acts 15:1 NRSV

Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.”

So Paul and friends are just doing what they are called to do — starting new Jesus communities. The church is growing, people are coming to faith, the Gospel is spreading. Everything is great. Then those people show up.

You know those people right. They are well meaning. They don’t mean any harm. They just overthink things some times. These are like the overzealous theologians of the community. In fact, they aren’t even from Antioch or any of the places that Paul and friends are working. They’ve come from Judea to see what Paul has been up to.

And they are like whoa… y’all forgot something really important here. You all gotta get circumcised if you’re going to be in the Jesus community.

This sounds so weird to us. So lets just take a minute.

Circumcision was the physical sign of the covenant between God and Israel. It was the way that the human body was marked to say “I’m from Israel. I belong to YWHW’s people.”

Every Jewish male had to be circumcised. And anyone who converted to judaism, regardless of age, had to be circumcised. And that’s not a super good time.

So Paul and his buddies are preaching “Good news” to the greek and non-Jewish world, and then these other dudes show up and start telling them some very not so good news. What gives right?

Paul is going to step in:

Acts 15:2–5 NRSV

And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles and the elders. So they were sent on their way by the church, and as they passed through both Phoenicia and Samaria, they reported the conversion of the Gentiles, and brought great joy to all the believers. When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they reported all that God had done with them. But some believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees stood up and said, “It is necessary for them to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses.”

So they have an argument and can’t come to a consensus, and decide they better take this matter back to the head honchos in Jerusalem. That’s where Peter and the rest of the original Apostles — those who were closest to Jesus — are. It’s the center of the Christian faith and so it makes sense.

So they go and give testimony of all that God has been up to among the gentiles.

And then some converts, people who follow Jesus, but who are from the sect of the Pharisees, stand up and give their theological interpretation.

For them the Jesus faith is from Judaism, and therefore to properly follow Jesus a person needs to follow the law of Moses. Jesus followed the law of Moses… it just makes sense. Except — you’ll remember that God visited Peter in a Vision and made a proclamation to him about the restrictive laws. So Peter stands up to speak:

Acts 15:6–11 NRSV

The apostles and the elders met together to consider this matter. After there had been much debate, Peter stood up and said to them, “My brothers, you know that in the early days God made a choice among you, that I should be the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the message of the good news and become believers. And God, who knows the human heart, testified to them by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us; and in cleansing their hearts by faith he has made no distinction between them and us. Now therefore why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear? On the contrary, we believe that we will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”

Peter says “Listen, God has removed the dividing line. What was once symbolized by circumcision is now symbolized by the coming of the Holy Spirit to people (and the ritual of Baptism). If that’s what God sees and desires then who are we to demand more? Who are we to demand that these people do what we have proven incapable of doing for our entire history? We can’t even keep the 600+ laws of Moses!

Peter goes on a few lines later:

Acts 15:19–21 NRSV

Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God, but we should write to them to abstain only from things polluted by idols and from fornication and from whatever has been strangled and from blood. For in every city, for generations past, Moses has had those who proclaim him, for he has been read aloud every sabbath in the synagogues.”

Basically, Peter is like listen — don’t engage in stuff that is linked to your old worship of other gods. No meat sacrificed to idols, no engaging in the kind of sexual indecency that’s prevalent in the temples of your gods, no rituals of any kind that will tempt you to go back to your old ways.

And that’s literally it. That’s all that’s required.

The Allure Uniformity

What we see from these well meaning but misguided people within the church is an attempt create a uniform society by demanding that outsiders and newcomers take upon themselves the traditions and customs of the Jewish part of the Jesus movement.

They want the Jesus community to be culturally homogenous, because in a lot of ways that is all that they knew. The Jews had long placed very rigid boundaries around themselves in the ways that they lives. They were very intentional about being set apart. Everything that they have ever known set them apart from the rest of the world, and so it only makes sense that they would want to protect that.

But The Holy Spirit and Peter know that this is not the way of the future, because it was never really the end goal of the past. God has long celebrated the diversity of humanity. God is the one who originally created all of the nations, and it is written that in the end all of the nations will gather together to worship God in their own language and tongue.

What God sees is the beauty of diversity in the family of humanity. All that God requires for people to be a part of this big family called Christianity is to believe in the name of Jesus and to walk away from the worship of other gods. No more, no less. No special clothing, no special food, no special body markings.

While I was working at my last church in Dunedin I pastored a separate congregation of people from Micronesia. They met in the afternoon at the church. They were members of the church, but had a completely different worship experience and way of living than us Americans who worshipped in the morning.

This was my first experience in cross-cultural ministry, and I had a lot to learn.

I ended up writing a thesis for school that sought to figure out a way to develop more unity between the English speaking and Micronesian congregations.

What should it look like for them to be one church community? I did a lot of polling and found out something kind of shocking. The English speaking congregation had a real desire to be in community with the Micronesians. But they had absolutely no desire to show up to their worship service.

Conversely, the Micronesians wanted to be in community with the English speaking congregation but absolutely had no interest in giving up their worship service — even though they all spoke english. They wanted to continue to worship in their way, and they wanted their kids to worship in their way as well.

It became clear to me that these people who had very different cultural experiences were completely happy existing together without having uniformity forced upon them.

What we did was begin to explore ways for the communities to serve together. Church events, VBS, serving the homeless, cleaning up the church grounds, and other projects brought the communities together and allowed them to be on mission together and build wonderful relationships.

This is the real message of the Jerusalem council. We don’t want the kingdom of God to be uniform. We want the kingdom of God to be diverse. And it is diverse. I go to clergy gatherings with all of my colleagues here in Ft. Pierce and it is deeply diverse. We all worship in our own ways. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t family. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t or can’t be on mission together.

While the Pharisees of the church in Jerusalem meant to make sure that the Jesus movement was theologically pure, what they were inadvertently doing was digging a fire break trench around the Jesus movement. They were unknowingly trying to force the Gospel to take the path of least resistance. By placing additional requirements on outsiders they would have effectively stopped outsiders from joining the movement. And the movement would have been trapped to die.

But Peter. Peter says no. This is not how it’s going to be. This is not what God wants. God wants unity in mission, not uniformity in practice.

And we should learn from this too. We don’t want to build barriers around the church. We don’t want to force uniformity on people. We want to cooperate with one another in order to push the mission of God further in our world.

I’ve been around here long enough to know that we don’t really have a bad problem with demanding uniformity. We let all kinds become a part of our community. We are really good at seeing people for who they are and celebrating that. We are really good at being on mission together with the organizations around us.

So today is really just an opportunity for me to encourage you. You’re doing really good. You’re doing the work. You’re making the world look more like the Kingdom of God. So let’s just not give up on that vision. Let’s not be discouraged. Lets agree to never dig trenches around the Gospel. Let’s agree to be the church that is open and affirming to all.