Acts 8:4-25

In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells his disciples that they will receive power by the Holy Spirit to serve as his witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The vision of the Jesus movement is to see the gospel move out from Jerusalem to encompass not just the Jews, but Samaritans, Africans, Greeks, Persians, and everyone else. The vision and promise is that this gospel would spread out and out and out as his disciples, led by the Holy Spirit, bring to the world the good news that Jesus was the resurrected King who was making all things new. But up to now, the movement was still contained to Jerusalem. But after Stephen is martyred, a great persecution arose against the church, and they fled out of the city and into towns and villages all over the region, and at the start of our text this morning, we see that those who were scattered went about preaching the word. In Acts 1:8, Jesus says that his kingdom would move out over all the world, and in Acts 8:1, we see the beginnings of that vision being accomplished.

But notice what precipitated this movement of the gospel: it was a great persecution. It was a season of great hardship. There would certainly have been low morale in the church, mourning and sorrow. It was a season of loss.

I think we can relate to that. No, we are not being thrown into prison for our beliefs nor are we being threatened with violence, but we’re in a season of loss. A loss of normalcy. A loss of relationships. A loss of the opportunity to celebrate. We’ve had two babies born during this season, and we can’t celebrate those births in the way we long to. We’ve had graduations that we’ve missed, family reunions cancelled. We’ve lost jobs.

But the promise of God that we see in Acts is that even in seasons of loss and hardship, Jesus keeps working, his gospel movement, led by his Spirit empowering his church, it keeps going. But more than that, what we see in Acts 8 is that it is often in these seasons of loss and sorrow that the Jesus movement really picks up steam, that his redemptive power really shines, and that the dark powers of the world really take a beating by his mighty hand. Because in Acts 8 we watch as the stronghold of a centuries long cultural divide is torn down by the gospel of the Kingdom of God and by the name of Jesus Christ.

Philip was one of those scattered by the great persecution in Jerusalem, and he goes down to Samaria and starts spreading the gospel to the Samaritans. Now, Jews and Samaritans do not get along, and they haven’t for centuries. The tensions began more than nine hundred years before Jesus, when the kingdom of Israel split into the southern kingdom centered in Jerusalem and the northern kingdom with its capital in Samaria. They warred with one another for centuries. Later, Samaria was defeated by the Assyrians, and their people were carted away into exile more than a century before Jerusalem would fall. When the Hebrew exiles were allowed to return to their lands, the Jews refused to allow the Samaritans to help restore the temple. As a result, they built their own temple in Samaria, which the Jews would later destroy when they invaded Samaria a few centuries later.

All of this history goes into what John wrote in his gospel that Jews did not associate with Samaritans. Jews traveling to Jerusalem from the northern areas of Israel would purposefully go around Samaria, adding days to their journey just to avoid being in their presence. Samaritans were said to be unclean half-breeds. A mixed-race of godless traitors. They were less than dogs in the eyes of a Jew.

So it is no small thing that Philip proclaims Christ to the Samaritans. Even though the world has sought to divide and separate them, Philip purposefully welcomes them into the Christian community. The gospel brings together what the world wants to divide.

If there is ever a time when we need to hear that truth it is now. We live in a divided city, in a divided state, in a divided country, and we are at risk of allowing that division to seep into the church by allowing the world’s infatuation with division to affect our hearts and minds. The apostle Paul writes in letter to the Ephesians that “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” And let me tell you that those powers of darkness celebrate like nothing else when the divisions of the world seep into the body of Christ.

The message of Jesus is the message of reconciliation. It’s the message that Philip brought and the signs that backed that message up that brought healing to the divide between Jew and Samaritan. The gospel brings together what the world wants to divide.

I want to show you the lengths to which Jesus pursued reconciliation between the Jews and Samaritans. Not only did he bring Philip to preach the gospel in Samaria which resulted in their being baptized in the name of Jesus, but much to the displeasure of systematic theologians, he changed the order of conversion. The normal flow of events says that when someone comes to faith and is baptized in the name of Jesus they receive the Holy Spirit! Boom. On the spot. Peter said as much in his Pentecost sermon: “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

But notice…that doesn’t happen here. Verse 14:

“Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, for he had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit.”

So Philip goes to Samaria to share the joy of Christ with a community that he has never once identified himself with, a community that the world has done everything possible to keep separate and divided from him. They hear his message and see his Spirit-powered signs and they believe and are baptized, but the Spirit does not fall on them. So Jesus puts it in the hearts of the Jerusalem church to send Peter and John, the leaders of the Christian community, the top dogs in the church, the guys who everyone listened to, who had incredible influence, these guys now arrive on the scene to lay hands on Samaritans, a people that they were forbidden to touch as Jews, and to pray that they receive the Holy Spirit and be truly and fully welcomed into the family of God and become their brothers and sisters.

We are not told why the Spirit waited to come to the Samaritans, but I can’t help but think that God wanted Peter who he had told was the rock upon which his church would be built, who was given the keys to the kingdom in Matthew 16, and God wanted John, who wanted to call down fire on a Samaritan village during Jesus’ ministry, I think God wanted these leaders of his church to be present when this centuries-old division came tumbling down in Samaria, present to see the Spirit fall on the Samaritans, so there could be no question that the King of Heaven had made them brother and sister. The gospel brings together what the world wants to divide. The message of Jesus is the message of reconciliation, and we are his ambassadors of that message and the embodiment of that message as his church.

Let us be aware of the ways that the divisions of the world have seeped into our hearts and minds during this season. Let us confess it. Let us repent.

In our Anglican tradition, the service begins with what we call the procession, and it ends with what we call the recession. These two movements of our service remind us what it is that we follow into worship and what we follow into ministry, what makes possible our ability to draw near to the God of the Universe and what makes possible our ability to serve him in the world as we go. And what we follow, the banner under which we are united, is not a donkey or an elephant, not a masked face or unmasked, not white or black, not native or immigrant, what we follow, and the banner under which we are united is the cross of Jesus Christ. Again the words of St. Paul:

“For Jesus himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.”

The gospel brings together what the world wants to divide. Where we have strayed from that in our hearts, let us confess it and repent. And let us pray that the Holy Spirit would rewire us to be more like Jesus and less like our divided world.

You see there is no unity without the Spirit. And the wonderful truth is that his presence with us and in us is the free gift of God given to those who receive the message of Jesus and the good news of the Kingdom. The Spirit is a gift that we have not earned or merited or purchased in any way, but in God’s grace, he has been poured out on the church to bring unity as we witness to the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

Simon the Magician is the foil in Acts 8. He serves to contrast the rest of the Samaritan community. Everyone who is estranged is coming together together in the story except for him. At story’s end, he’s left on the outside, and the reason is that he wants to choose who is in and who is out. He wants the power to choose who receives the Spirit and is welcomed into the family of God and who isn’t. “Give me this power also, so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit. I want to have the power to decide who makes the cut. I want to set the boundary lines of the church so that I come out on top.” For his own selfish reasons, Simon wants to choose who gets in, and he’s the one who we see is left out.

We are not the arbiter of who can be a part of God’s family. We don’t set the metrics or requirements. And that’s a good thing, because none of us would measure up. We follow the cross into and out of our worship service to remind us that our inclusion in the family of God is by grace alone. The Spirit that unites us to one another and to the Father is a pure, unconditioned gift. And when the Samaritans heard that message of grace and reconciliation, Luke tells us that there was great joy in the city. Jew celebrating with Samaritan under the cross of Jesus Christ. That is the kingdom of heaven right there.

The gospel brings together what the world wants to divide. May the world see something in the church that it doesn’t see in itself.