If you are new here, let me explain why we are jumping in at Acts 21. We walk through full books of the Bible generally, but we do it in seasons. We are walking through Acts every August to Advent and wherever we end up, we pick up the next August. We are doing the same thing with Matthew January to Easter and we cover other parts of the Bible in between. Our hope is to walk through books of the Bible AND cover as much of the breadth of the Bible as we can in a year. So that takes us back to Acts which we should finish this year. And because of the missional thrust of this book, our missionaries all over the world have agreed to make videos reading our passages which is why you saw John and Hanna Malone reading this morning. 

It’s actually pretty interesting that this is where we are jumping back in because this passage begins a new part of the book of Acts. Paul has had incredible success planting churches all over the gentile world. He has collected a relief offering from those churches for the church in Jerusalem and he has returned to Jerusalem with that offering. This is also the last passage where we will see Paul as a free man. 

This was one of the hardest sermons I’ve put together in a long time because this is such a confusing passage. I actually finished the whole sermon on Thursday and scrapped it on Friday morning because it finally became clear to me. Let’s just set the stage in our minds for a second. Paul has arrived in Jerusalem with his entourage. James, the leader of the church in Jerusalem (and some would have said in the world) is there with his entourage. Paul has had incredible success bringing gentiles into the church all over the Roman Empire and James has seen thousands of Jews give their lives to Jesus. So the church is growing significantly in both contexts. But, each of these two groups have deeply divided cultures and that comes to a head in this passage. Luke records this relatively short passage because it had the potential to, at best, divide the church in two forever and, at worst, destroy it completely. 

This is a passage about the unity of the church. A unity that was incredibly fragile in Acts 21. If you think we have issues today that threaten our unity, we have nothing on the early church. Today, we sadly have divisions over music styles, Bible translations, and politics. Probably, the closest thing we have in our culture that comes close to the cultural division in this passage is race. In the 1990’s there was actually a big to-do in this church about bringing a bass guitar into worship. People felt like we were bringing the world into the church. The argument was finally settled when the band agreed to hold it up and play it like a cello. True story. 

As the New Testament church grew and began to embrace different cultures, unity was harder to maintain and Luke is showing us how Paul and James brilliantly maintained this unity, but it required significant sacrifice. 

The disagreement in this passage isn’t about salvation or even morality, but about culture and tradition. What we see in this passage is the core enemy of our unity and the power for our unity. 

1. The enemy of unity

The core enemy in this passage to our unity is tribalism. Why do I say tribalism? Tribalism is our tendency to group off with those who are most culturally like us. In Jerusalem we have this brewing tension between two very different cultures coming to a head. Both parties value the law of Moses as a way of showing us our need for salvation. Both parties value the law of Moses as pointing toward Jesus as the way of salvation. And both parties value the law as a way to grow in our walk with Jesus. Nothing these Jewish Christians are doing ceremonially is atoning for sin or compromising the gospel in any way. That’s what we call Judaizing. All that has already been taken care of at the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. 

But, while the Jews have abandoned the law as a means of salvation, aspects of it are still very much an important part of their religious culture. And Paul has not done anything to challenge that. In fact, he greatly values their culture and really any culture that comes into the church. To force any culture to abandon their cultural expression of Christianity would basically be legalism in the opposite direction. But, many of these newly converted Jewish Christians are under the false impression that Paul is telling Jewish Christians to turn their back completely on Moses and aspects of their cultural expression of Christianity. They are under the false impression that Paul is telling Jewish Christians to unhitch themselves from both the Old Testament and their cultural heritage. 

So, this isn’t a salvation issue and it’s not about what Paul taught Gentile converts, it’s about what they thought he was teaching the Jewish Christians who lived among the gentiles. Here’s what I think is happening with these Jewish Christians. I think they felt threatened by other cultures around them, it put them on the defensive, and it caused them to hear something that Paul is literally not saying. It brings out what we call the hermeneutic of suspicion. That’s where some insecurity causes you to just assume someone is doing something even when you have no reason to believe they are.  

I think I’ve told this story twice, but it illustrates the point so well. I’ll retire it after today. My kids for some years have been under the impression that anyone who drives a white van is a criminal. Kidnapper at best, murderer at worst. I’m sorry if you drive a white van, there is no convincing them otherwise. So, one day we were driving down 436 and saw a white van that was basically a ministry taking people with special needs to different parts of town. And my daughter said, “See, it literally says, ‘We Will Take You”! There was just no convincing them otherwise. And that is the hermeneutic of suspicion. 

And these suspicions most often swirl around culture, not doctrine. This is the hermeneutic that caused people to be wary of the bass guitar. This is the hermeneutic that causes people to be weary of people who don’t school children the same way you do. This is the hermeneutic that is weary of people who don’t vote like you. Some years ago we put an end to voter guides being distributed in church and people heard that we were telling them not to vote Republican. We never said that! We just said that this wasn’t the place for that. That’s the hermeneutic of suspicion. 

Why do you think we want to believe things that aren’t actually said and aren’t actually true? Because we feel threatened by different cultural expressions and we act to protect the culture we embrace. Tribalism causes us to group up with people of the same culture and to protect the culture that binds us. And on one level I will at least say that this is an easier way to live life, but Jesus is calling us to more. 

Years ago, I was lamenting how culturally homogenous our church was. And one guy said, “There are other churches for those types of people.” Meaning people who don’t look like us or have the same culture as us. That is about as anti-gospel as you can get and is directly confronted by this passage. So I pushed back…. and then that guy got in his white van and left. Tribalism encourages our natural blind spots. And the irony here is that while the main problem to unity is our cultural differences, the solution to that… is our cultural differences. But, I’ll say more on that in a minute. 

These believers in Jerusalem when they heard these rumors would have done well to go to the source as best they could. Now, I’ll give them grace in the fact that they couldn’t just shoot Paul an email. But they could have gone to James. They could have gone to their leadership, heard the truth, and then chosen to believe the best. But they didn’t. When there is a misunderstanding in this church and you have come to the leadership and talked to us, I would say 99% of the time it’s cleared up and everything is fine. But, when that doesn’t happen and the misunderstanding festers, we believe the worst in others, and the natural next step is to tell other people, which results in spreading rumors that are not true. And when misunderstandings fester long enough, by the time we are able to talk, some of the damage that has been done is just beyond fixing. 

We do exit interviews with everyone who leaves this church to pray for them, secure our relationship, learn whatever we can learn, and bless them on their way. But I have been in exit interviews where people are leaving because of misunderstandings that they have let fester and even after we clear up the misunderstanding, the damage is still done. Sometimes it has even threatened the unity of our leadership the way it threatens to divide James and Paul.

The heart of the problem is that we all have a bent toward tribalism. We want to feel better about ourselves so we group up with culturally like minded people because it is more comfortable and because they don’t threaten our cultural values and traditions. And when we do this, we can begin to love some of our leaders and hold others in disdain. This is exactly what people were doing with James and Paul. It’s exactly what the church in Corinth did with Paul and Apollos. 

This is the problem. People believe the gospel for their salvation, but they don’t yet see the truly radical way that it challenges all aspects of our lives. And it’s easy for us all to just look down on people who do this and either put them in their place or show them the door, but if we do, we actually become just like them. We have walled ourselves off from Christians who don’t share our cultural values. But, that is not what Paul did. 

1. The power for unity

The power of our unity lies in the gospel. We can see this in two ways. First, we see it in the God-centeredness of both Paul and James. At the beginning of this passage, Paul gives a report to James about all that has happened. I imagine him talking about the riots in Ephesus, the dream of the Macedonian man that caused Christianity to spread west rather than east, the jail in Philippi where the doors were opened by an earthquake, and at that very moment their bonds were unfastened. Because I imagine Paul to be a humble man who can make fun of himself, I imagine him telling James that he preached so long that someone fell asleep, fell out the window, and died. But, it was ok because God brought him back to life. 

The first sign in this passage that things are ultimately going to be ok, is the way Paul is giving this report. It’s not about Paul, it’s about God. Paul tells James all the things that God did. I’ve seen people brag about how many people they led to Christ or how many people they are discipling or how large a church they pastor. That way of recounting should always be a red flag. If anyone could have had reason to brag, it’s Paul, but he is giving all the glory to God. 

But James gets some credit here too. When James and his crew heard these things, he praised God. We can’t just skirt over this. It’s not easy to praise God when things go well for other people. It’s not easy to praise God when someone gets their dream job, but you hate yours. It’s not easy to praise God when someone else’s kids are doing great, but yours are not. It’s not easy to praise God when someone else’s loved one makes it through cancer, but yours did not. And this is no less true when we are talking about ministry. Some of the most jealous and easily threatened people I know are pastors. But, James is not like this. He cares more about the glory of God than who is having the most success in ministry. 

At the heart of the gospel is the knowledge that everything that we do in life is working to draw glory away from us and toward God. We are born looking for glory and we mistakenly work to draw glory toward ourselves. But, Jesus comes into our lives and shows us that the glory we seek is not in ourselves, but in him. And the more satisfaction we find the glory of God, the less we are going to seek that glory for ourselves. And that is precisely what Paul and James are showing. 

Then, secondly, we see the gospel power for unity in Paul’s sacrificial posture. This is where it gets confusing. James proposed a plan to Paul. Basically, “Paul, why don’t you take a Nazarite vow to show these Jewish Christians that you haven’t abandoned the Jewish ways?” Now, this is actually a brilliant plan on the part of James. A Nazarite vow originated with Moses in Numbers six, but it isn’t in any way sacrificial and doesn’t compromise the gospel in any way. It is a vow to show your devotion to God by letting your hair grow, ceasing all work, not touching grapes or anything that comes from grapes including wine, and then at the end of a period of time, in this case a month, cutting all the hair off your head and face and casting it into the fire. 

Probably the closest thing we have in our culture to understand this vow is fasting. We don’t do it to gain God’s favor, but to draw closer to him. James is saying that if you do this everyone will see that the rumors are false. Do this and everything will be kosher (pun intended). They want some Moses and Paul is giving them some Moses. 

Now, some people have said that Paul was either in the wrong for doing this or did it begrudgingly, but I don’t see how that could be. First, nowhere does Luke indicate that. But, second, this is the second time we know of that Paul has taken a Nazarite vow. He did this in Acts 18. Paul is doing this readily and thankful for the opportunity to show his great respect for the Jewish customs and for Moses. But, that doesn’t mean that this didn’t come without sacrifice. I’m not sure about Paul, but shaving your head feels like a bit of a sacrifice. But, paying for himself to go through this as well as four other men would have been a huge financial sacrifice. Not only would he be covering their lost wages during this month, but the animals required for this process were significant for one person to afford and he’s footing the bill for five people.

What Paul is doing is sacrificing for the unity of this young and fragile Christian Church. And this has been a consistent aspect of Paul’s ministry all along. The whole letter to the Romans was a letter trying to bring unity between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians. This is what he wrote to the Philippians,  So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from flove, any gparticipation in the Spirit, any haffection and sympathy, 2 icomplete my joy by being jof the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from kselfish ambition or lconceit, but in mhumility count others more significant than yourselves. - Phil 2:1-3  Paul sacrificed to maintain the unity of the church across cultures, but he also sacrificed to bring people of different cultures into the church. To the Corinthians, he wrote 20 kTo the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. - 1 Cor 9:20

Paul is unwilling to waver if the gospel is compromised in any way, but he is the first to be willing to sacrifice his desires, needs, and comfort if it strengthened the church. An old theologian F.F. Bruce once said, “A truly emancipated spirit is not in bondage to that emancipation.” Do you hear what he’s saying? We who are free from the bondage of many things are not enslaved to that freedom. We can embrace practices we don’t have to for the sake of others. So, the correction here isn’t to the younger Christians to be ok if Paul himself doesn’t practice some of these things himself anymore. The correction is to the more mature Christian to understand that we have the responsibility to affirm unique cultural expressions of Christianity that we might have the freedom to not embrace if it contributes to the unity of the church. And not just affirm and embrace, but even doing that at great sacrifice to ourselves. 

We see these kinds of cultural concessions all over the New Testament. In Acts 15 at the Jerusalem Council when they were deciding what to do with Gentile Christians, whether they needed to be circumcised and basically become Jewish first, all the apostles agreed that they didn’t, but they asked the gentile Christians to not eat meat that was strangled as a concession for the unity of the church. In Romans 14 and 1 Cor 8, Paul asks believers of one culture to make cultural concessions for believers in another culture. Now, those are what we call the weaker brother passages and Acts 21 is not a weaker brother issue, but the principle of sacrificing for the unity of the church across cultures is the same.

And if that’s true, and I believe it is, then we need to see how our culture impacts our faith. In Acts 21, Romans 14, and 1 Corinthians 8, the disagreements go right between cultural lines. They weren’t doctrinal as much as they were cultural. Often what we think about as a theological debate or a philosophy of ministry difference is actually a cultural debate. There is a reason that most Presbyterian churches in America are white and most charismatic churches in America are filled with people of color. It’s because we tend to read our Bibles through our cultural lenses. I’m not saying we need to throw culture out, I’m just saying we need to see the influence it has in the practice of our faith so that we can better know how and what we can sacrifice for other believers. And the more culturally homogenous a church is, the more cultural blind spots we will have, the less willing we will be to sacrifice in this way for other believers, and the unity of the church will be hindered as a result. 

So why is sacrificing our freedom for the building up of the church a gospel issue? Because this is the gospel! How much did Jesus sacrifice for the building up of the church? How many desires and comforts did Jesus sacrifice just to leave the throne room and come here? Honestly, I don’t think if all of us spent a week coming up with a list, it would just scratch the surface. And that doesn’t even take into account that when he was here he was reviled, arrested, tortured, and crucified. But on the cross, Jesus made his greatest sacrifice. He sacrificed the pleasure of the presence of God’s love for the horror of the presence of his wrath. His wrath that we deserve that we might know the pleasure of God’s love. Jesus sacrificed all this because he had a greater desire. The salvation of his beloved people and the building up of his church. So what would the sacrifice of a Nazarite vow be by comparison? Not only would it be nothing, but Paul saw it as a joy to step into the same ministry as Jesus. 

And our call is to do the same. To value the unity of the church more than our desires. To value the cultures of other believers more than our comfort. So we should endeavor not to let issues of schooling, politics, alcohol use, styles of dress, music choice, tattoos, piercings, race or any other amoral cultural issue divide us. And we do this because we have a greater desire. To glorify and honor God through the building up of his church. The unity of the church is worth sacrificing for and the gospel is our power to do so.