Tag: Peter

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Unity is Hard Work – Galatians 2:8-14

In this passage, Paul discusses “The Incident at Antioch.” It comes after the vision that Peter has in which Christ declares all foods clean. It also comes after the Council of Jerusalem made the determination that gentile Christians did not have to become culturally Jewish in order to join the Church.

After this time, per Paul, Peter lived much like a gentile in terms of cultural and ceremonial rules. But when he was with more culturally Jewish Christians, Paul would revert in how he behaved and most importantly how he treated gentile Christians.

For Paul, this was a big deal. The “New Perspective on Paul” movement suggests that much of Paul’s discussion of the “works if the law” are really focused on these cultural identity markers, those “signs of the Covenant” that marked the distinctions between Jews aha Gentiles. For Paul, unity within the church is vital because Jesus came to bring all people to himself and break down those barriers.

But real unity is hard work. It requires more than social media, but real investment in each other, across those barriers of ethnicity and culture. No matter how ‘aware’ you are, you can be called out – just like Peter, but also even in situations where you have the best of intentions.

Unity is hard work because promises get broken, and we can get hurt. The Jerusalem church and Paul agreed to how they would do ministry, but the leaders in Jerusalem backslid on that agreement. Related, leaders will disappoint us.

Unity is hard work because politics and power win the day too often. History is full of the church being co-opted for secular political ends. Peter’s behavior here was simply an early form of this, changing behavior to maintain influence. We see this across the ages of the church and certainly into the present day.

Unity is hard because it counter-intuitively involves conflict. In order to keep unity we must be willing to confront those who would subvert unity.

Unity is hard because it will mean surrendering things. This is one of the reasons Sunday mornings are so segregated – we are not willing to give up our cultural expectations of worship and church in order to come together. These things are not core to our relationship with Christ, but at cling to them because we see them as “markers of the Covenant” much like the leaders Paul came into conflict with.

So in the end the only answer is to love like Christ did, loving across boundaries and against the gradients created by culture and society. The only answer is to do this hard work on unity as we seek to be more like Jesus.

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, September 29, 2024

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The Center of it All – Mark 8:27-33

“Who do you say I am?” This question from Jesus is the exact center of the Gospel of Mark. It’s the question that the whole book pivots on – and, in fact, all of reality. Peter is the first person in history to explicity acknowledge this truth, though what comes next isn’t really what we would expect.

First, he charges them to keep it quiet, as he has done earlier in the book. Second, he begins to warn them about what was coming – the suffering and death that was on the horizon. Peter, even having made this confession of faith, takes hold of him and scolds him. After all, everyone knows the messiah is there to throw off the oppression of Rome, to lead the Jewish people to military victory and secular power.

Jesus’ response is as harsh as any we see from him in the gospels. Peter goes from being the start pupil and the first to name Jesus the Christ to being the embodiment of Satan. Why is this?

It’s not that Jesus feels disrespected, but it’s because the direction Peter wants Jesus to go is in direct opposition to the Gospel Jesus came to bring.

The word gospel, or euangelion, was historically used to refer to royal decrees or reports from battles (famously, the report from the battle of Marathon would fall into this category). We even see it used to describe the birth of Augustus in inscriptions. The Gospel of Caesar was a known and understood thing, a thing of the Empire and a thing of worldly power. The Gospel of Christ was a new thing, a subversion of the concept that wins by losing, that succeeds by failing, that rules by serving. But the temptation to reverse this paradigm back into what is natural and normal is strong. This is what Satan’s final temptation of Jesus was – all the kingdoms of the earth. This was the option open to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, and its power made him sweat blood.

The American church has often fallen into Peter’s mistake, framing the gospel of Christ into no more than the gospel of Caesar, one where secular power is the mode and victory over our earthly enemies is the end goal, where the world is divided into us and them rather than the teeming mass of sinners all in desperate need of the true Gospel.

This would not be the last failure of a disciple. As the cross approached, even with many warnings, they would abandon him and Peter would deny him. We have the same calling down hard paths. How will we respond?

— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, February 4, 2024