Teaching Summary: What Now? (Acts) Grace over Agreement

I love this church, and I love what makes us complicated. Every Sunday, people who learned to raise their hands in worship before they could read sit beside people who were taught to sit still. Some of us met Jesus in Jamaica, some in Brazil, some in a Baptist church in the South, some in New England, some right here at Summer Street. God delights in that. So do I. But underneath our differences there is real disagreement, about how we worship, how Christians should live, what counts as faithful. The question was never whether we would disagree in this church. The question is what we do with our disagreement.

Acts 15 puts us inside a church facing that exact question. Paul and Barnabas have just returned from their first missionary journey into the Gentile world, and large numbers of Gentiles have come to faith in Jesus. Then men arrive from Judea insisting that unless a person is circumcised according to the custom of Moses, they cannot be saved. That sounds strange to us now, but for centuries circumcision was the sign that marked who truly belonged to God. This wasn’t a small dispute. It was a question about what faithfulness to God actually requires, and it was serious enough to bring Paul and Barnabas into sharp conflict with these men.

Before we look at what the early church did with that disagreement, it’s worth naming the easy ways out, because the world offers us three. The first is conformity, picking one group’s way of doing things and quietly making it the standard everyone else has to measure up to. That produces uniformity, which can look like unity but isn’t. The second is division, everyone sorting into their own group, their own service, their own church down the road, until everyone feels comfortable because no one is different anymore. The third is avoidance, keeping things friendly and on the surface so we never have to talk about what actually matters. All three let us skip the harder work of staying at the table together.

What the church in Jerusalem does instead is remarkable for what doesn’t happen. Nobody is forced into line. Nobody leaves to start something more comfortable. Nobody papers over the disagreement to keep the peace. The apostles and elders meet to consider the matter, and three people speak. Peter goes first, pointing to the evidence that God had given the Holy Spirit to uncircumcised Gentiles just as he had given it to circumcised Jews, and he lands on this: we believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are. Then Paul and Barnabas stand and tell what God has been doing among the Gentiles, and the room goes quiet, not because the argument is settled, but because the evidence is undeniable. Then James speaks last, and he doesn’t dismiss the law or the concerns behind it. He simply says we should not make it difficult for the Gentiles who are turning to God. Salvation was never in question. What was in question was how a divided family stays a family.

That’s the test I want to hand you this morning. When disagreement shows up, and it will, over matters of eating and drinking, dress and appearance, how we treat the Sabbath, worship style, money, even politics, the question to ask is whether scripture ties this matter to the gospel itself, or whether the church, across time and place, has genuinely held it differently. Most of what divides us fails the first test and passes the second. That doesn’t make it unimportant. It makes it non-essential, which is a very different thing than unimportant. Paul does the same work in Romans 14, refusing to settle an argument over food and holy days, and instead telling both sides to stop judging each other, because the kingdom of God was never actually about the food.

Here is why this is better than anything the world offers. Conformity says the family only holds together if everyone agrees. Division says the family isn’t worth the discomfort of disagreement. Jesus says something neither one of them can say: the family holds together because of grace, not agreement. Underneath most of our conflict are two fears, that saying what we actually believe will cost us our place at the table, or that staying quiet will cost us ourselves. Acts 15 answers both. The table was never held together by everyone thinking alike. It was held together by the same grace that reached every person sitting at it.

There’s a bathhouse on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that’s been open since 1892, and its two owners had a falling out decades ago. They still don’t speak. So they split the calendar, split the rules, split everything, rather than find a way to share one table. That is not what God is doing with us. He is not asking us to divide the room into people we agree with and people we quietly avoid. He is asking us to stay, by grace, at the one table he has already set for all of us, a table that previews the greater one we’ll share together for eternity.