June 3, 2018 “Clearing Customs” – Acts 21:17-26

Acts 21:17-26
“Clearing Customs”
June 3, 2018 – Second Sunday after Pentecost

Two months ago, Crystal Tadlock paid for the most expensive apple ever. She didn’t even get to eat it. On her flight back from Paris on Delta Airlines, she received an apple in a sealed wrapper from the flight attendant. She put it in her bag to eat later, then forgot about it, until a border protection agent at customs in Minneapolis asked her if her trip to Paris had been expensive. She said, “Yeah.” Then he said, “It’s about to get a lot more expensive.” He had found the apple which she had failed to declare and the fine was $500.

As Paul re-entered Jerusalem in our text, clearing customs there turned out to be expensive for him too. At first it appeared that his return would cost him a little trouble and money, which he was willing to give. But as we will see next week and on through the end of Acts, customs there in Jerusalem ultimately cost Paul his freedom.

Paul’s initial welcome was warm, as we read in verse 17. This initial welcome may have been from Greek-speaking Jews who were more friendly to Paul’s ministry to Gentiles. But verse 18 tells how Paul then went to meet James and the elders of the church in Jerusalem. James was the long-standing leader of the Jerusalem Christians. Back in chapter 15 of Acts he moderated the first “Jerusalem Council,” which allowed Gentiles to become Christians without being circumcised or keeping other Jewish laws.

At first in verse 19 it looks like James and the elders should have lots to celebrate. Paul reported how his mission to the Gentiles had been wonderfully successful. He gave all the credit to God, telling “one by one” story after story of “the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.” We’ve just been reading and hearing together some of that in our study of Acts. Great numbers of people were trusting Jesus in Corinth and Ephesus, churches were being encouraged and growing in Macedonia and Asia, miracles were happening. The first part of verse 20 says the leaders of the Jerusalem church praised God for Paul’s good report.

Luke the author does not specifically mention here that Paul brought an offering back from all those new Christians in Greece and Asia. They had made a financial sacrifice to help their brothers and sisters in the very first church there in Jerusalem. Luke only lets us hear Paul mention it briefly later on in Acts 24. But that council of elders had a double reason to praise God for Paul’s work. He had led many people to Christ and he had remembered the need back where it all began.

Yet the second half of verse 21 shows those elders had mixed feelings. Yes, it was wonderful that thousands of Gentiles were now believers, but there in the homeland thousands of Jews had also accepted Christ. There was good news on both fronts, but it was also a problem for Paul. In Jerusalem the preaching of Christianity in no way suggested that a person needed to stop being a Jew, to stop obeying Jewish law and custom. Jewish Christians there still faithfully kept the Sabbath, circumcised their sons, ate kosher, and observed other sorts of rites and rules for holy living according to the Law of Moses.

In Matthew 5:17 Jesus Himself had said that He had not come to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. Jesus’ Jewish followers took Him at His word. Our Gospel reading today from the end of Mark 2 and beginning of Mark 3, doesn’t teach that Jesus abolished the Sabbath. It only shows us Jesus making clear that the purpose of the Sabbath is to help and bless human beings, not to put a burden on them. All those Jewish Christians kept their Jewish customs in that spirit.

The rub was that rumors about Paul had filtered back to Jerusalem. Verse 21 says they heard that Paul was teaching Jewish Christians in Asia, who lived among Gentiles, to abandon the Law, to forego circumcision and dietary laws and other Jewish customs. Those rumors made Paul unpopular back home in that primarily Jewish church.

The fact was that Paul had only been teaching Gentiles that they did not need to become Jews in order to become Christians, that they did not need to be circumcised or keep kosher. But the perception was that Paul was a renegade, a traitor to his own race and upbringing, a maverick leading people astray from established custom. Verse 22 expresses the concern that Paul’s presence will stir up trouble in the Jerusalem church. “What then is to be done?” they ask.

When the elders asked what should be done, they already had a plan. They proposed an exercise in public relations. Paul should do something visible to reestablish his Jewish credentials. In verse 23 they suggested he join four other men in the conclusion of a Nazirite vow, a spiritual discipline where one fasts from drinking wine and does not shave or cut one’s hair. He would join in the final ritual of purification and pay for the sacrifices which those men were to offer at the temple. That way Paul would demonstrate publicly that he was as Jewish as anyone, that he respected and honored the customs of his people. Verse 24 says, “Thus all will know that there is nothing in what they have been told about you, but that you yourself observe and guard the law.”

Then in verse 25, James recalls the decision made long before about Gentiles in chapter 15 of Acts. While Jewish Christians may remain faithful to all the Jewish customs, all that is required of Gentiles is that they stay away from what is genuinely harmful spiritually, like idols or sexual immorality, and that they give up the eating of blood, which would make sharing food with Jewish Christians very difficult.

Paul did what they asked. Verse 26 says that he joined those four men, purified himself, and went to the temple to help them complete their vows. Some Bible scholars find that very odd. It doesn’t seem to fit, they think, with the Paul who wrote letters to Corinth and Ephesus and Romans in which the big message is that grace is key for Christians, not the keeping of the Law. It especially doesn’t jibe, they say, with Paul the author of Galatians, who complained that churches there were falling back under the spell of the Law and that the Law was a prison from which Christ had set them free. They imagine that Luke fictionalized Paul to be more friendly to Jewish customs than he really was.

Those scholars who see a contradiction between Luke’s Paul in Acts and Paul’s own voice in his letters are influenced by a notion to which even Bible readers who accept Luke’s account as truth subscribe, the idea that Paul and the Gospel of Jesus really does throw out Law in favor of love and grace. That’s a mistake that authors like N. T. Wright have challenged in recent years, helping us understand that what Paul says about the Law is more about our identity in Christ than about some deficiency in God’s ancient Law. Paul wants us to know faith in Christ is what makes us who we are as Christians rather than some external marker like circumcision or diet.

Paul accepted their plan to clear his name by clearly performing Jewish customs because he knew that God’s law behind those customs was still valid and worthwhile. At the same time, he knew perfectly well that some external marker like shaving his head at the end of a vow, which we saw him do before in Acts 18:18, is not as important as the mark of the Holy Spirit on his soul given by the grace of Jesus.

Not long ago I sat down and applied for Global Entry passes for Beth and myself. Looking forward to more trips to Canada, we want to be regarded as “Trusted Travelers” and smooth our way through customs coming back into the country. Paul accepted James’ plan to go through Jewish customs in order to smooth his relations with fellow believers and to respect their faith in Christ while retaining their Jewish identity.

That allowance for old customs by Paul is a good example of an important lesson that missionaries keep learning over and over. Faith in Christ is not meant to trounce and eradicate all other cultural identities. People may come to faith in Christ and serve Him faithfully in their own language, with their own music and in many of their long-standing customs. Missionaries have realized that Asian Christians don’t need to give up honoring their ancestors, that African Christians don’t need to give up drums, and that native Alaskan Christians don’t need to give up native dances.

Down the ages some of the best Christian missionaries were those who accepted some of the customs and dress of the people to whom they witnessed. Missions to China are a good example. In the 16^th century Mateo Ricci brought the Gospel to new parts of China by studying Chinese culture, learning the language, and even dressing in Chinese clothing. He taught that Chinese people had always believed in God. Christianity simply completes their faith. He allowed the Chinese to honor their ancestors and worship in their own style.

More recently in the early twentieth century, our own first Covenant missionary in China, Peter Matson, at the end of the 19^th century, dressed in Chinese clothing, learned the culture and language, and spent 47 years leading people to Christ. 94 other Covenant missionaries to China followed him. All of them were expelled from the country along with all other foreign Christian missionaries in 1949, but that custom-sensitive mission had a lasting effect. When relations with China eased and western Christians started to return to China at the end of the last century, they found Christian Chinese people and churches still there, still keeping the faith. Covenant people even found Christian communities in the locations where Peter Matson and his fellow missionaries served.

Today our own David and Joy live among Chinese people, work hard at learning their language, sent their children to Chinese schools, and do their best to have their team work within the customs and sensitivities of the students to whom they witness. Christian faith can work in and through old customs, rather than simply tossing them out.

Paul teaches us here that custom and tradition have a role, an important role in God’s work and in the Christian church. It’s partly just because I’m older now, but sometimes it seems to me like more recent generations of Christians are totally committed to erasing custom and tradition from worship and church life. Music must all be written in the last few years. Worship order can be whatever you wish. Places of worship can be warehouses or bars. We’re not even “Christians” anymore, we are “Jesus followers.”

The aim of some of those changes is not all bad. New believers want their faith to be centered in Jesus and the Word and not in tired words and tunes and forms which may have more to do with what race and nation we are part of rather than the Gospel itself. But at the same time, we run the danger of unnecessarily dividing ourselves from each other and of losing customs that really are part of what it means to follow Jesus.

That’s why our congregation over the past forty years has tried to keep putting the old and the new together. We sing old hymns from the hymnal and project new songs on the wall. We follow the traditional church year while learning to worship occasionally in Spanish as well as English. We engage in old fashioned Bible reading and discussion using a brand new translation and format.

Some folks don’t like it. I’ve heard people over the years say they wish we were one or the other, all hymns or all praise songs, all liturgy or all informal, spontaneous worship. But Jesus and Paul both showed us that it’s so often not either/or in Christ. It’s both/and. For Jesus it wasn’t let his disciples eat or respect the Sabbath. It was both. For Paul it wasn’t reach the Gentiles or keep peace with his own Jewish people. It was both.

That’s the sort of faith we have, a faith where our Lord takes our good customs, whether religious or cultural, and makes them part of His church. They are part of who we are and so they are important to our Savior.

So we come now in our worship today to the central custom we observe as Christians. It’s not something we can lay aside or forget by fresh innovation or zealous attempt to be relevant. As we say and hear our Lord’s ancient words, “This is my body broken for you” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood,” we enter once again into the old custom which brings us new life. Let us do this, as we always do, in remembrance of Him.

Amen.