Luke
10:1-12
In
Acts and then in his Gospel, Luke is writing a narrative about God’s actions in
the world to fulfill hopes that had energized Israel and, then, the young
Christian church. He is shaping an account of God’s redemptive purposes for the
entire world in a way that shows the faithfulness of God. This is intended to
invite Gentile communities facing a crisis of identity to trust the actions of
God in the face of what appears to be a failure of expectation. Luke will show
that the issue is not God’s faithfulness but the narrow ways in which the
gospel had been understood. In Acts he does this by emphasizing the
boundary-breaking actions of the Spirit in the midst of resistance and conflict
from religious and civil authorities as well as from within the young Christian
community.
The
backdrop within which Luke writes, then, is one of conflict. From the birth
accounts to Jesus’s struggles with the Jewish leadership to his arrest and
crucifixion, this theme of struggle and conflict shapes Luke’s work. The young
Christian community also struggles. Too quickly it is propelled into similar
conflicts that run through Acts; in the final chapters the outcome is far from
clear and nothing is wrapped up and tied with a neat bow. And so outside of
Luke, Acts and the Epistles we know very little about the early Christian
community and its ability to adapt to and follow the leadings of the
Spirit.
In
both Luke and Acts the conflict continues and the uncertainty about the outcome
is not removed, but through it all Luke’s story line shows that God is at work
shaping a whole new world. Some of the conflicts internal to the young
Christian community in Acts were born of expectations and assumptions of how
and where God was going to work, especially the taken-for-granted conviction
that the Jesus movement, as a completion of Judaism, was an essentially Jewish
movement. In describing the work of the Holy Spirit as the boundary-breaking
presence of God who will not permit these Christians to define, settle, and
manage the little boxes into which they placed the movement of Jesus, Luke is
inviting his Gentile audience to embrace an alternative narrative of thought
and imagination to the one they had been given in terms of their hopes.
I
want to suggest this same pattern of events is at work among American
Christians today, and the Spirit has continued to be boundary-breaking. The
churches formed from the European religious reformations of the sixteenth
century established forms of church practice and theologies that have been
assumed foundational not just for European–North American cultures in a
specific time but for all cultures in all times and places.
This
sense that the important questions about the church and its relationships with
the cultures have all been addressed in the reformations of that period created
a situation that assumed the importance of “the church” to the point that, all
else, (the gospel and our cultures even people, for example) are about the
development of tactics to adjust and engage changing circumstances. This is the
thought and imagination in which churches continue to live.
We
will be looking at Luke-Acts as a means of assessing how we might find fresh
ways to understand our own situation. We can understand our own time as one in
which the Spirit of God is breaking the boundaries within which the Christian
movement has operated in the Western context. Not only is this
boundary-breaking about a preoccupation with the church as the central idea we
have to get right (the so-called “essence” or “form” of the church issue), but
it is also about the tradition of theologizing that came out of the
sixteenth-century reformations in Europe. In a rapidly globalizing West, now
characterized by new and massive people movements from many other parts of the
world, this “Reformation” boundary may also be one the Spirit is breaking.
In
Acts, Luke is reorienting the hope and expectation of Gentile believers. In the
midst of confusion and a crisis of identity, it is possible to read the
circumstances in a very different manner. The established thought for
understanding their hope in terms of Jerusalem, temple, Jewishness, and the
empire’s embrace was too small a box in which to place the radical announcement
of good news in Jesus and the birth of the Jesus community. The good news is
that God is doing something far bigger and more imaginative than can be placed
in these small, narrow categories. The crisis of identity is not a crisis
concerning God’s purposes but comes as a result of the narrow ways in which early
Christians experienced and structured God’s purposes after Pentecost. Luke is
inviting his Gentile readers into a different way of thinking. While it opens
up a new space for hope and a radically new context for theologizing and
practicing the gospel in towns and villages, it also raised a whole new set of
questions.
Raising
New Questions
Within
the old understanding of expectation, certain questions could be easily
answered in terms of the Jerusalem/temple/empire narratives. But in this
different economy of God’s actions that the Spirit has burst open for the
first-century Christians, how does one know what God is doing in the world? How
does one decide what it means to be the church in this new way of
thinking—where the old explanations of how things work no longer cohere? These
were questions that needed answers if the Gentile churches were to address
their crisis of identity. They are also the questions we have to answer in our
day.
If
it is the case that God’s Spirit is breaking the boundaries of church life in
the Western churches because they can no longer contain the ways in which the
Spirit is at work in the world, then these non-church questions of what God is
doing must be addressed. If the church-centeredness of our conversations is
now, in fact, a barrier and boundary the Spirit is in the process of breaking
apart, then it is urgent that we answer these other questions.
The
boundary-breaking Spirit is making it clear to a growing number of people that
church-centeredness has little future. The hope in this difficult discovery is
that there are also new, strange questions we haven’t needed to think about
before. When the church lay at the center of the conversation, it was
relatively simple to name what God was up to, and we had endless books that
defined and described what it meant to be the church. In this new space, where
the church is not the central focus or question, how do we go about addressing
these new questions? How will we know what God is doing when the answers can’t
be taken for granted? How do we know what it means to be the church when the
church is no longer the central preoccupation?
My
next several sermons will propose that we can discover answers to these
questions in Luke’s Gospel. Rather than engage the whole Gospel, we will
initially focus on Luke 10:1–12. The proposal is that in these sermons we can
discern a way in which Luke continued to frame a response to Gentile Christians
faced with their own crisis of identity, and it can, therefore, offer us a way
of understanding how to be faithful to the gospel in our time.
No comments:
Post a Comment