A New Family

Galatians 2:11-21

Reconciliation is an awkward thing.
Sometimes it's that morning-after the fight when you wake up and remember that things aren't quite right with you and your spouse.
And you are making coffee and she's making cooking eggs,
and there's a silence that lies like a blanket over the whole room.


Sometimes it's that friend you haven't seen in ages,
and you know that they've changed or they know that you've changed
and for one or the both of you,
that really makes the friendship as it was in the past very difficult to keep going.


And there's something that can happen.
Some kind of grace that can get you both over that initial awkwardness
and into a kind of new fellowship, a new community
but that first step is steep one and sometimes we're just not feeling up to it.

Sometimes it's a religious dispute, an argument about God or faith or other ultimate questions.
Someone posted something on Facebook that really irked you and
it “demands a response”
But there were hurt feelings and then a need for mutual recognition of how
I was just trying to argue my point, I didn't mean to demean you,
or I felt like you were deliberately making fun of me...
etc, etc, etc.


There are countless times in our modern life where reconciliation is knocking at the door of our hearts, and yet we prefer silence, we prefer separation to the work, the humbling work that it takes to take that first steep step.


Or maybe as in the case of Peter in today's reading from Galatians,
you had a really great experience
As he was preaching to Cornelius's household, something happened which forever changed the course of Christianity.
The Holy Spirit came upon those who believed in Christ there.
They were animated and in love with Christ and one another.
Just like the Jewish Christians had been on the day of Pentecost.


Now Peter would face an awkwardness. The awkwardness of going to Jerusalem and explaining himself to the leadership.
Well, you see, I know that they are not like us... but you had to be there....


And this great experiment of opening the circle of God's promise to the Gentiles,
of rereading in light of Christ the verses from isaiah:
“I will also make you a light for the Gentiles,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
and from Genesis where Abraham hears God saying to him:
“through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”


And considering, that perhaps what they are seeing in this new creation, begun by Christ's resurrection, is a new family. A family that is not restricted to nationality or culture but really universal in its reality.


And wrestling with this question, the Jerusalem elders along with Peter began to agree that this must be what it means to live in light of God's unconditional love.


It must mean all people. Regardless of where they're from, where they've been.
All are invited to God's family in Christ.


So it's that awkwardness again.


It's great in theory to have this sudden understanding of God's plan for salvation.
But then there's the actually living like it's really true.


And this is where we find Peter in today's reading. At least as Paul tells the story. We don't have Peter's side of the story. And many interpreters have spilled much ink trying to save Peter's face in light of Paul's story.


But I'm sympathetic with Peter. I've felt the tensions that he seemed to feel at Antioch.


It's important to remember that the way that the law of Moses had been interpreted by the Rabbis of this time made it so that Jewish people really did not share a meal with non-Jewish people.


There were lots of reasons given for this. Mainly having to do with the differences in how food was prepared, and all of the precise specifications for keeping the food ritually clean from farm to table. It was not because they didn't like their Greek neighbors. I'm sure there was many an awkward moment when a Jewish person would move in next to a Greek person in Antioch and would be invited for a meal and would have to for conscience sake refuse. Not because they didn't want anything to do with their Greek neighbor, but because it would just be too much to have to explain to them what all had to be done to the food, etc., etc.


So the long and short of it, was that up until this time it was rare for Jewish people to eat with non-proselyte Gentiles.


But Peter's experience at Cornelius's really caused a change to begin in the early Jewish followers of Christ.


And so in Antioch, the great experiment continued and Jewish Christians ate with Gentile Christians and through sharing a common table were brought together united by their common faith in God's love in Christ.


But then the group comes to Antioch from Jerusalem.
In the Jerusalem church there were not a lot if any non-proselyte Gentiles, meaning that if there was a Gentile in their church, that Gentile had been circumcised and fully initiated into the standards of conduct expected in the Jewish faith. The Jerusalem church was fully Jewish and fully Christian.


So when they heard Peter's story they welcomed it, but they never had the experience themselves of actually living out the consequences of sharing the faith with Gentiles who are not fully initiated in the Jewish faith, those who formerly they would not share a meal with.


And so when they come to Antioch, there's Peter, the pioneer in Gentile-Jewish relations, and he's sitting over at a table that is exclusively Jewish Christians. And the Gentiles are eating at another table.


And Paul tells us this story to illustrate the tension that exists in this early faith.
If God's family our new family is founded in faith,
then we are going to have to do the hard work of reconciling ourselves to those who share the faith very differently than us.


One is part of God's new family not on account of keeping the works of the law and therefore maintaining the identity of those who follow Moses.
We're part of God's new family by the example, by the faithfulness of Christ – whose life, death, and resurrection modeled God's love for all people everywhere.


Paul, himself a Jewish person, saw Peter separated from the Gentile table.
And he called him out.
Because that's not the way the new family is going to look.
And there's an awkwardness in accepting a family simply by grace and not on account of a common culture. But that's the awkward, steep, first step that is required if we're to truly live as if God's love were indeed unconditional.


As Paul puts it in this passage:


“For through the law I died to the law so that I might live for God. I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!”


This is how I hear Paul.


Through my identity as a Jewish person, I died to having that identity exclusively.
I have joined Christ in being cut off from that identity and have risen with him into a new identity as a part of God's worldwide, boundariless, community of faith.
The life I now live in the body – I live by faith in God's promise of new and unending life – demonstrated to all in the risen Christ who was showed the greatest love in living his life to the very end as an example of the forgiving love of God for all people – who forgave even me, Paul, the one who fought against his followers. Righteousness, wholeness of body and spirit, that comes from faith working through love – or else Christ's whole mission was in vain.


But this mission of Christ.
It's awkward.
And it calls us to do the hard work of talking with strangers who are part of our family but who we would never talk with otherwise.
Indeed of eating bread and grape juice with those who have angered us or who we've angered in the past.
This is the hard work of reconciliation that's going on in the early church.


It's hard. But just like a lot of hard things, it's worth the effort.
And if we can just revel in the grace of God that we've experienced time and again in our lives,
It might just become a little easier.


We're going to sing a song.
And it's all about “when the roll is called up yonder.”
It says when the roll is called up yonder, I'll be there.


I think it might be good for us to sing it, when the roll is called up yonder we'll be there.
I think that the tension that anyone experiences in singing the song that way
is getting close to the tension that we need to feel
when we embark as we are doing in being reconciled with God and one another.
In our new family of Christ. Amen.