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January 11, 2009
First Friends Meeting
Acts 8:1-8, 14-15
‘Philip’
Doug Gwyn
We’re spending a few weeks looking at the personalities and group
dynamics that made up the earliest Church. Last Sunday, we saw
two key groups that defined the movement from the first months.
These two groups had different perspectives and different
priorities. They were called Hebrews and Hellenists.
Both of course were Jewish. The Hebrews were men and women who
had always lived in Palestine. Some were Galileans who had been
with Jesus from the start of his ministry. Others were Judeans
that got to know him only at the end. The Hellenists were Jews
who had returned to Palestine from the Diaspora, from many places
around the Roman Empire where the Jewish people had settled.
The Hebrews were usually more traditionalist. They understood
Jesus within the framework of the Palestinian Jewish world they
knew. The Temple in Jerusalem was the center of their
universe. They preached around the Temple and even won over some
priests. By contrast, the Hellenists, since they came from
somewhere else, wanted to relate the message and meaning of Jesus to
other cultures. So they looked at Jesus within a wider
framework. They wondered what this Jewish Messiah might mean to
men and women far and wide. In other lands, the Hellenists knew
people who never heard of a Messiah. But they had other words for
similar hopes – like the Greek word Christos, Christ. The
Hellenists searched for the Greek words and concepts to express the
gospel to other races.
Today, we might think of these groups as conservatives vs.
progressives, or particularists vs. universalists. That would
impose our modern worldviews on ancient minds. They didn’t
think in terms of historical progress or universalism as such.
But the tensions and struggles between the ancient Hebrews and
Hellenists were similar ones we experience today between so-called
conservatives and progressives, or particularists and
universalists. We can gain clues from the ancient Hebrews and
Hellenists how to find our way together as conservative and progressive
Christians.
Last week, I only briefly mentioned Stephen. He was one of the
Hellenist leaders of the early Church – brilliant, charismatic,
very controversial, very confrontational. The first flash point
of conflict between Jewish Christians and the wider Jewish community
took place around Stephen. Stephen confronted the Jewish
leadership that had turned Jesus over to the Romans for
execution. He spoke so strongly, he was stoned right on the
spot. That spontaneous lynching led to a wave of persecution of
Jewish Christians around Jerusalem. Saul of Tarsus was the chief
persecutor. Saul was a Hellenist. He had come from Eastern
Turkey to study with the best Rabbis. But Saul was offended by
the Christian message. He viewed the Jesus movement as a
contagion spreading in the Jewish faith. He was determined to
stamp it out.
Well, Jerusalem became so dangerous for Christians that all the leaders
except the apostles had to leave town. Again, the apostles were
more friendly with the temple establishment, so they were less
controversial. I’m sure the apostles, all Palestinian Jews,
were horrified by what happened to Stephen. But I can also
imagine they were angry at the Hellenists in general. They were
stirring up trouble for the Church, alienating the governing powers in
Jerusalem. Luke, the writer of Acts, tends to downplay the
tension between Hebrews and Hellenists in the early Church, but it must
have been strong. I can imagine the Hebrew leadership
wasn’t entirely sorry to see the Hellenists leave town and let
them work at cooling things down.
But the momentum of events that sent the Hellenists fleeing persecution
became the momentum of the Church’s future. The passage Hal
read for us highlights the key role played by Philip, another of the
Hellenists. Philip fled Jerusalem for Samaria and began preaching
the gospel to Samaritans. This is the first step of the Church
beyond Judaism. A half-step, really. Samaritans were a
people of mixed Jewish descent. They kept the laws of Moses but
they didn’t recognize Jerusalem or its temple. You might
think Jews and Samaritans would feel a kindred spirit. But in the
Middle East, then and now, it seems things never work out that
way. Jews and Samaritans hated each other. So reaching out
to Samaritans was a small step in some ways and a big step in
others. And the Samaritans really responded to Philip’s
preaching of Jesus. Maybe it was partly because they knew it was
so unpopular in Jerusalem!
It’s like Phil Gulley’s and Jim Mulholland’s book, If
Grace Is True, six or seven years ago. It become very popular
among liberal Christians only after conservative Christians criticized
it. It’s a good book, but the ongoing culture wars among
Christians produced a lot of the buzz.
Well, Peter and John were still back in Jerusalem. They of course
were original disciples of Jesus. They were in the inner circle
of Hebrew leadership. They heard about Philip’s Samaritan
exploits. I can imagine they had mixed feelings. Here they
were in Jerusalem trying to put out fires. And now these
Hellenists were out setting more of them. But Peter and John also
remembered that Jesus had reached out to non-Jews. We have traces
of that in the gospels -- the story of the Roman centurion, for
example. And John’s gospel tells of Jesus speaking to a
Samaritan woman who was very receptive and insightful. Peter and
John couldn’t reject what Philip was doing up there in
Samaria. So they traveled up there to see for themselves.
They saw it was good and they blessed this first Christian
mission.
The important thing is that the movement held together. At a
moment when tensions were high and could have split the movement, they
drew together. Philip needed Peter and John to come and bless
this new work. And Peter and John recognized the rightness of it
– even if this was really going to complicate things.
This story says something important about what it means to be the
Church. The Church always has to balance and rebalance between
two key tasks. We need to reach out in new directions, include
new people, try new kinds of missions, outreach, service. We need
to experiment, to reconsider what it means to be Christian. It
doesn’t remain the same, because our society and culture keep
changing. We have to ask ourselves, are there people we are
fencing out, either explicitly or implicitly, from God’s love and
our acceptance? Are there needs in our community we can respond
to better? The downside with experimentation is that it can go
out in all directions. At some point, it can disperse our
identity and sense of community with each other.
So we also have to consolidate. We have to work to integrate new
people into our fellowship. We have to integrate new directions
into our identity as a people of God. We have to reflect on these
new experiences in light of our identity as Christians and as
Quakers. How do the new and the old fit together?
To a certain degree, we work this out rationally. We think about
it individually. We talk about it as a group. But the real
work of keeping us together is the work of the Spirit among us.
The Spirit works among us at a level that’s higher than our best
thoughts and deeper than our deepest feelings. That’s our
only hope of holding it together.
When I was librarian at Pendle Hill some years ago, I struggled with
trying to keep the collection in order and to get people to bring those
books back I sometimes thought, if I could just lock these doors,
I could get this library in really good order! But the library
exists for people, not for itself. A library has to endure a
certain amount of chaos if it’s serving its purpose.
Likewise, the Church has to cope with a certain amount of chaos,
change, uncertainty, experimentation or it’s not serving its
purpose.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day. King and the leaders who
gathered around him in the civil rights movement offer a great example
of the dynamic we see in the early Church. A few weeks ago, I
talked about his famous ‘Letter from the Birmingham
Jail’. In that letter, he responded to the concerns of some
sympathetic but cautious local clergy. They warned that civil
rights work in Birmingham was “unwise and untimely.”
It was too confrontational. Why not wait for better times and try
less dramatic tactics? They were thinking like the Hebrews of the
early Church. These were the local leaders. They had to
deal with continuing racial conflict after King had left town.
King’s response was not dismissive. He was conciliatory,
but also firm that this was the time, this was the place.
Less well known are King’s struggles within the movement.
There were more radical leaders who wanted to push things
further. For example, some rejected King’s commitment to
nonviolence. Andy Young once recalled how meetings of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference went. King depended on
Andy Young to take the more conservative and cautious position, to
counterbalance the more radical leaders. King once chastised him
for not speaking up at a strategy session. King complained,
“if you don’t speak up on that side, how can I come down in
the middle?”
So, even within the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King had to be
a peacemaker, a reconciler. Like Peter among the apostles, King
labored to hold things together. To white society he was a
prophet. He challenged the Church to live up to the gospel and
the nation to enact the provisions of our own Constitution. But
he was a pastor to his own people. He struggled mightily to keep
a volatile movement from disintegrating and self-destructing.
Jesus told the story of the good Samaritan when he was asked,
“Who is my neighbor?” He turned the question
upside-down when he told a story not of a Jew being neighborly to a
Samaritan, but a Samaritan being neighborly to a Jew. In our
story today, we could say the Samaritans helped the early Church grow
into its destiny. Who is our neighbor today? Who will help
First Friends grow into its destiny?
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