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January 4, 2009
First Friends Meeting
Acts 6:1-14
‘Hebrews and Hellenists’
This morning, I want to start a series on the personalities of the
earliest Church, as we find them in the Book of Acts, the Acts of the
Apostles. You haven’t heard me use the Book of Acts
much. That’s because I struggle a bit with Acts. It
was written by the same writer that wrote the Gospel of Luke. It
tells us what happened to the Jesus movement after the death of
Jesus. That’s important. But sometimes it’s
hard to imagine that the writer of Luke also wrote Acts.
For example, last fall, we looked at a number of the healing stories of
Jesus. And most of them I drew from Luke. Luke shares a lot
more healing stories with Matthew or Mark. But Luke tells them
especially well. We saw how each story of healing also works as a
parable of faith. So whatever we think about the historical Jesus
performing miracles, we can learn something about faith from each of
these healing stories. There are clues about the power of faith
for our own lives and times. And faith itself is healing in
various ways. But in Acts, there are so many healings and
miracles. One after another. Shazaam! There goes
another one! And they don’t seem to work as parables for
our own lives. They just seem to tell us that those apostles
really had it going on.
I also struggle with the way many churches read the Book of Acts as a
kind of how-to book. This is how you grow a Church. For
example, the passage Richard just read tells how the Church appointed
deacons to help the apostles distribute the food. Well, OK, that
was a practical solution to a practical problem in those first days
there in Jerusalem. But then churches today decide that
you’ve gotta have deacons, because they are ordained in the Book
of Acts. Even if they’re just distributing the wafers and
grape juice on Sunday morning, you’ve gotta have deacons.
It becomes a form of magical thinking.
But I don’t think the issue is really whether you have deacons or
not. It’s about a community of people sharing their
resources generously and looking for the best way to do it. And
that’s how we struggle with our issues of faith and faithfulness
today. Kay O’Brien and the Stewardship and Finance
Commission help us plan the finances of First Friends Meeting and help
us focus on contributing to those finances. Wayne Copenhaver
struggles to handle our giving to the poor in a responsible way,
through our Good Samaritan Fund. Les Williams works to see how
the churches of Richmond can do a better job of coordinating and
optimizing our poor relief in Richmond. These are all challenging
tasks. Deacons schmecons – how can we be faithful Friends
here and now?
So I want to look at Acts mainly to see the kind of characters that
made up the earliest Church. To learn what we can from who they
were and the challenges they faced. The decisions they made, with
the help of each other and in the power of the Holy Spirit. That
might help us be who we are more faithfully with the challenges we
face. To make good decisions together, hopefully with the same
Spirit’s leading.
The passage this morning eventually focuses on Stephen. But on
the way to talking about Stephen, Luke tells us there were two main
contingents in the earliest days of the Church, around Jerusalem.
They were all Jewish, of course. But Luke speaks of Hebrews and
Hellenists. In this context, ‘Hebrews’ means the
Palestinian Jews who had first followed Jesus. Many of them
Galileans, who followed Jesus to Jerusalem. They stayed there
after his crucifixion, trying to understand what happened and what to
do next. They came to realize that Jesus was still with them, but
in a new way – the Holy Spirit, which they felt powerfully when
they met. So they stayed around Jerusalem. They struggled
to find the words to describe what Jesus taught and did, the message to
share with others. They stayed mainly around the Temple and
preached to people around there. We’re told a number of
priests were drawn to the message of Jesus. But these
‘Hebrew’ Christians thought in terms of a renewal of
Judaism, a movement that would remain centered in Jerusalem.
The Hellenists were Jews who had come back from Diaspora, from various
places in the Roman Empire, and resettled in Palestine. They
didn’t return to Palestine for economic opportunity. It was
a collapsing economy. No, they went back out of religious
devotion. And some of these Hellenists were religious
fanatics. For example, Saul of Tarsus. He came to Jerusalem
from Eastern Turkey to study with the best rabbis. He became a
radical neo-conservative, defending the law against all corruptions and
subversives. Saul persecuted Jewish Christians as
subversives. Saul’s persecuting zeal probably offended and
concerned many Palestinian Jews. Of course, Saul eventually
becomes the Apostle Paul and a different kind of radical. But
that’s another story.
The Hellenists also spoke mainly Greek, not the Hebrew or Aramaic of
the Palestinians. And with that Greek language came Greek and
Roman ideas that tended to hybridize with traditional Judaism in new
ways. Even Saul had a good grounding in Greek philosophy.
The Hellenists would play a key role in translating the gospel of the
Palestinian Jesus to people in the wider Greco-Roman world. Not
just translating Aramaic to Greek, but finding the right words and
concepts to restate the Gospel in a way that made sense to non-Jews.
Another thing about the Hellenists is that they were generally
anti-Temple. They had lived outside Judea and they understood
better than Palestinian Jews that you could be a good Jew without a
temple. And when they heard about Jesus, they heard he
didn’t think much of the Temple either. So the Hellenists
heard things in the teachings of Jesus that had not really registered
with the Palestinian followers. And likewise, the Hebrews, the
Palestinian followers understood things about Jesus the Hellenists
didn’t get.
Now, Stephen was one of these Hellenists. And apparently, he
really knew how to wind people up. He was strongly
anti-Temple. He also challenged some of the traditional ways Jews
practiced the laws of Moses. Luke claims the charges brought
against Stephen were false reports, things twisted and
exaggerated. But they were probably related to things he actually
said. The next chapter of Acts goes on to give a long account of
what Stephen said to the council of Jewish leaders. And
it’s about as inflammatory and insulting as anything Jesus
said. In fact, it led to a spontaneous stoning of Stephen
right there on the spot. Now if these had been Quakers, I’m
sure he never would have been stoned. But he might never be
nominated to serve again on a committee! Living death for a
Quaker.
Well, the point I want to reflect on this morning is this: From Day One
at Ground Zero, the Church has always had two key contingents.
Always something like the Hebrews and the Hellenists. Like the
Hebrews there in Jerusalem, every Church, ever Meeting has a more
traditionalist group. People with deep roots in a particular
place, a real love for the traditions, and a desire to pass those
traditions on to the next generation. And like the Hellenists
there in Jerusalem, every congregation, every denomination has people
who want to combine the traditions with new ideas, new practices.
Like the Hellenists, they often come from somewhere else, where people
do things differently. Like Saul, they are sometimes
neo-conservatives, passionate, even violently zealous, to get back to
tradition. Others, like Stephen, are just as passionate for
change, for shaking things up, for experimenting with new ways.
Like the Hebrews and Hellenists, we hear different things in the
teachings of Jesus, as they have been handed to us. Some hear the
voice of tradition, the voice of a beloved Sunday School teacher from
our childhood. Others hear a prophet, a radical
change-maker. And from our different backgrounds, we make our
different claims on who Jesus was, what our Christian faith is
about. But that’s not all there is to it. If it were,
those ancient Hebrews and Hellenists would never have kept
together. But they also relied on the power and guidance of the
Holy Spirit. And as traditionalists and progressives, we too must
be be guided by the Spirit, not just our personal preferences.
Finally, the Hebrews and Hellenists struggled through their differences
by being faithful together in practical ways – meeting basic
needs among them, sharing their resources. And so we too struggle
through our differences as we struggle to be faithful to God. We
share our time, our energies, our finances. And it slowly takes
us beyond our pet peeves and hobby horses, beyond ourselves, to a place
where God keeps working on us, weaving us together into something new
and original.
I cherish our differences as much as our unity. Both are marks of
the true Church. We’re trying to do it by the numbers,
appointing deacons, for example. But as we read the Book of Acts,
we notice that we struggle with some of the things they did. The
differences look different, but they are much the same. Some of
us want First Friends to be more open and affirming toward gays and
lesbians. Others of us are more concerned that we continue
nurturing more traditional families. Some would have First
Friends be a model a sustainable lifestyle. We could do more with
the way we heat the building, use plates and cups, for example.
Others are concerned that we don’t start playing
‘more-sustainable-than-thou’, that we provide a (literally)
warm and welcoming environment. Some would like us to support the
Friends School more, while others remind us that First Friends has some
financial problems of its own these days.
These are all important concerns arising in our Meeting. They
arise from our listening to the Holy Spirit, from our reflections on
Scripture, from our struggles to be faithful together. Thomas
Edison famously remarked that genius is 10% inspiration and 90%
perspiration. We could probably say similarly that being a
community of faith is 10% inspiration and 90% muddling our way through
together. I look forward to a new year of inspired muddling with
you.
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