Text: Acts 15:1-12 Date: February 17, 2019 Healthy Relationships Week 5 Title: Trust Theme: Trust in God and each other is the thing that enables the church to do hard things. Intro This holiday weekend, we thought it might be good to return to the Healthy Relationships series once more And we may continue to do that from time to time, because I definitely have a few more ideas of topics to cover Today, we re going to be talking about something that seems especially appropriate in light of the special General Conference in the United Methodist Church that begins next weekend Plus on this Scout Sunday, it s the first point of the Boy Scout Law a Scout is Trustworthy. Today we re going to be talking about trust Question How do you build (or rebuild) trust? Sermon 1 Every single one of us knows the pain of having trust broken Of being let down by someone who promised us something Of being betrayed by someone we thought was a friend Of hearing something we thought we shared in confidence come back to us as gossip being shared around the circle Trust is simultaneously the most important and most fragile component of any relationship Trust is the thing that really marks a transition from being just an acquaintance to being a real friend It s the difference between being willing to share your heart and your life with someone and keeping everything on the surface 1
2 A breach of trust is no joke When it happens, it can be nearly impossible to recover the relationship Once lost, it s an incredibly difficult thing to rebuild And I m not sure it s ever *exactly* the same Like a scar that heals, but still feels tight when you move a certain way Now, when I said a minute ago that everyone knows what it s like to be on the receiving end of that kind of injury I know that a corollary is also true: Every single one of us also knows that we ve been guilty in ways large and small of breaking trust with someone else Now that s a hard thing to admit But I know that it s true 3 As the United Methodist Church gets ready for General Conference next weekend, where we may or may not make major decisions about the role of LGBTQ persons in the life of the church One of the things we re suffering from is a trust deficit really at both ends of the spectrum Traditionalists say progressives have broken trust by breaking the rules to celebrate gay weddings, and in the Western Jurisdiction, ordaining a gay bishop Progressives say traditionalists have broken trust by organizing in ways that signal an intent to leave the church if they don t get what they want 4 I thought it might be instructive to look at a story from the scripture that reminds me that these kinds of challenges are nothing new in the life of the church In fact, they have been going on back to the first few decades after Jesus death and Resurrection! 2
The background of Acts 15 what we call the Council at Jerusalem is the mission that Paul undertook to the Gentiles that is, non-jews Paul believed that what he was doing in reaching out to non-jews was something brand new And something God had specifically called him to undertake That he was commissioned by a special revelation you can read about this in Paul s own words in Galatians 2 In a time when Jewish Christians from the mother church in Jerusalem were saying unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved, Here was Paul saying, I don t believe it And so, what the scripture says, in a kind of mild way is: Paul had no small dissention or debate with them Now Paul had reason NOT to believe what people were telling him His experience of ministry with the Gentiles was that they were being blessed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, the same as everyone else They didn t need to be circumcised, they didn t need to keep the law, he argued the evidence was right in front of him God was blessing these Gentiles with salvation and changed lives Acts 15 has Peter as the one whose argument wins the day He says, you know that in the early days, God chose me to preach to the Gentiles In fact, some scholars argue that Peter probably came back from a missionary journey in order to attend this council In Acts 10, we learn how Peter himself has a vision that convinces him to let go of his fears of ministering with and to Gentiles And then James, the brother of Jesus, who seems to be presiding over the Council as head of the church, agrees So the bottom line outcome is that the Council validates Paul s ministry to the Gentiles, and issues a very bare set of instructions to Gentiles about parts of the law that they still considered important The church had a hard question to resolve one that set the stage for ALL the ministry to follow, right up to today And they were able to resolve it because they trusted God and trusted each other 3
5 Now, it didn t have to go that way What s really interesting in this debate from Acts 15 is reading it up against Galatians 2 In Galatians 2, Paul describes a visit he once had from Peter in Antioch, one of the places where Paul preached It wasn t a good time But when Cephas [Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction (Galatians 2:11-12) Acts 15 describes Peter and James as champions for Paul Galatians 2 tells a story that makes it sound like anything but Now, if both of these things are to be true that is, if the scripture is to be believed You had a break in trust, and what sounds like a very personal one, between Peter and Paul Paul essentially calls Peter out as a hypocrite One would not expect this kind of a personal break to lead to a breakthrough for the church And yet that s exactly what Acts 15 describes a breakthrough that essentially opened the way for all of us sitting here to be part of the church How did we get there? I wish I knew, I d certainly publish that to the world But there s really no more to the story that the Bible tells We have a dramatic breach of trust And then a total 180 degree turn around I don t know how it happened it s a mystery 4
But I know what it tells me: For the church to do hard things For the church to make difficult decisions For the church to be able to move ahead in ministry We have to be able to trust each other And we have to be able to trust God Even in the face of our own personal stuff When we ve been hurt, when people in the church have let us down We need to find ways to trust in each other 6 In the course of my ministry, I ve had conversations with people who told me about speaking in tongues I ve talked with people who swear they ve seen angels People who ve experienced answered prayer in miraculous ways Their experiences of God are different from mine, and mine from theirs But I don t doubt them I trust what they are telling me, because their lives are evidence to me that God has been at work in them Some say that God speaks to them through the music of worship Others through the sermon, or communion, or just being together Some are more comfortable in traditional worship in a sanctuary, others are more comfortable in a contemporary service in the hall All of it is ok. Why is all of it ok? Because I trust God to do what God s going to do. I trust God to keep speaking to people To keep reaching people And I don t doubt that someone else s experience of God is every bit as real and valid as my own That s really what the Council at Jerusalem tells me When Paul came back and shared what he had seen, everyone said, I might not understand it, I might not see it the same way, but you know what, we trust God, and so Paul, we re going to trust you too. 5
We have some hard things to talk about in the next week It s not going to be easy it s going to require a lot of prayer and a lot of listening But trust trust first in God, and through God, each other that s the thing that enables the church to do hard things Amen. By Joe Monahan, Medford UMC, Medford NJ 6