Sermon Tone Analysis

Death of a Tree

This week I had to say good-bye to a friend.

No, no… not one of those children.

Can we zoom in?

There we go.

In 2014 when we moved in to the house I live in now, my incredibly generous friend Ted, aka Uncle Ted, gave us this tree as a housewarming present.

And it has lived next to my front door for these last five and a half years.

And it has grown.

It started as a little-bitty tree and grew until, as you can see in the picture, it was kind of falling over.

And you can see in that picture the tree is alive.

Maybe not doing amazing, but definitely alive.

Green.

And every week or so I watered that tree, and it got light from the surrounding doors and windows.

Except… well my watering could be a little inconsistent.

Every few days for awhile.

Then realize I forgot for a week and make sure to get it real good.

Try to notice the soil every time I walked by.

Well, I noticed the soil when I walked by last week.

And… it was bone dry.

And I looked up at the tree… and it was bone dry.

Like… dead dry.

And I tried to remember the last time I had watered that tree.

I killed it.

I killed the tree with neglect.

It was there everyday and everyday I walked past it.

Assuming it would be fine.

And I “assumed” it would be fine for long enough… until it wasn’t fine at all.

There are things I take for granted, beautiful wonderful things, I take for granted that they will always be there.

But somethings die if we don’t water them.

Antioch

Remember the church at Antioch.

Antioch, as we said last week, was a huge city, the third largest in the Roman Empire.

And, after the fall of the Roman Empire, cities that size didn’t appear again until the 1850s.

It was an urban center, culturally diverses with many languages and ethnicities.

They were religiously pluralistic.

Greek cults, Roman cults, Syrian cults, Jewish cults, different philosophies… a diversity of thought and a functional religious freedom in this period as those many faiths were at least tolerated.

In short, the world of Antioch is remarkably similar to our own context.

And, again as we saw last week, this amazing thing happened in the city of Antioch.

The gospel spilled right over the cultural and religious boundaries of Judaism and all these "Hellenists” started believing.

Barnabus comes in and LOVES what he is seeing… he sees it, he encourages them, and then he runs and gets someone to teach them: Saul.

We touched on this last week.

Why did they call them Christians?

Because they didn’t know what else to call them.

This group was defying the established borders and boundaries… and they wouldn’t shut-up about this guy Jesus or “The Messiah” or (in Greek) “Christ”… so they called them “people of Christ” or followers or even slaves of Christ.

So we have this beautiful unity among the church in Antioch, leading the way in what it looks like for Jew and Gentile to come together in “Christian” unity.

What do we call that commitment to one another, that remarkable quality by which all men will know that we are Christ’s disciples?

Perhaps what most set apart this community in Antioch as needing a new name and deserving the name of Christians?

The church at Antioch loved one another without distinction.

Without distinction, in particular, to their ethnic boundaries.

Loving across town.

Loving each other, but not just within Antioch… loving every Christian wherever they are found.

Already, look at the active gifts of the Holy Spirit being practiced in this church plant.

amazing.

These are prophets, not just saying “The Lord loves you” but prophets speaking to future events:

This is not a present crisis but a prediction of a coming crisis in AD 46 or 47.

But they are sending funds for relief in advance of the actual crisis.

This is maybe AD 41 or 42.

Love… with $ symbols behind it.

Sacrificial giving, every one according to his ability.

Love not only where they saw the need but where God showed them a need would be.

That is remarkable love.

The church at Antioch loved one another without distinction.

They loved their “Christian” brothers and sisters in Antioch, regardless of Jew or Gentile, language, cultural or religious background, etc....

They loved their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem enough to be check book real.

The church at Antioch seems to get this kind of love almost for free.

It is the hand of Christ upon them, Barnabus sees it and is glad and seeks to add to it… but he didn’t create that in them.

That is the gospel of Jesus freeing them to love, empowering them to love, the Holy Spirit teaching them what love is.

It reads like they get it for free.

And maybe this is a spontaneous love for one another, a beautiful unity, simply gifted to the church at Antioch.

But even if they received it for free… they don’t keep it for free.

That is, the love and unity in the church at Antioch has to be protected and defended.

Defending Love

Now the timeline of Acts can be a bit tricky as, as I said last week, Luke isn’t always necessarily speaking chronologically.

However, we read about Saul visiting Jerusalem once before after his conversion.

And now, here at the end of Acts 11, we hear about Barnabus and Saul to be sent to Jerusalem.

In between Saul’s conversion and second trip to Jerusalem he tells the church at Galatia that there is a period of fourteen years, so the narrative is covering quite a bit of time in there.

And Saul has some challenges in Jerusalem on the issue of circumcising some of the Gentiles he brought with him, so this divide between Jew and Gentile is already beginning to raise it’s head all over again.

But in between the end of Acts 11 and the beginning of Acts 13, not covered in chapter 12, there is an event that Saul tells us about in his letter to the church in Galatia.

Saul goes back up and is serving in Antioch and Peter, aka Simon Cephas, comes up to visit.

Initially Peter, who himself received this vision from the heavens that Gentiles are now welcomed into the Kingdom of God.

That Jesus is for all, without distinction.

Peter should be the first to enter into this Christian love-without-distinction.

This beautiful culture of love that church had.

and indeed, at first he does.

But some of these folks come to town who aren’t a part of that culture.

Folks from the “home church” in Jerusalem who are maybe more “conservative” or “traditional” or “legalistic” even.

The “circumcision party”.

And Peter modifies his behavior.

Saul tells the story:

Now let’s be kind to Peter and my friend Barnabus.

Easiest thing in the world to fall back into old habits.

It is more comfortable.

It is maybe even more fun.

And they are being sensitive, maybe, to the theological convictions of these men visiting from Jerusalem.

It would be hard for them to see Peter and Barnabus and others eating with the Gentiles, so what does it hurt to sit with the Jews for awhile?

How big a deal is it who I sit with?

"NO!

You do NOT sit there!”

Woah! Calm down, dude!

What’s the big deal?