Today's passage is Acts 15:22-35.
The Jerusalem church sends Judas and Silas with Paul and Barnabas back to Antioch with a letter apologizing for the trouble caused by a circumcision group and explaining that the only extra things they had to do were to refrain from sexual immorality, from eating food sacrificed to idols, and some other Jewish food prohibitions. Silas and Judas encouraged the Antioch brothers for a time before leaving. Paul and Barnabas stayed in Antioch and taught and preached.
Although the Jerusalem church rightly apologized for some Jewish Christians trying to impose circumcision on the new Christians as essential for salvation, they showed their Jewishness by insisting on some Jewish dietary restrictions.
They just couldn't let go of their Jewish traditions despite Peter's vision and the reality of thousands of Gentiles being converted and baptized by the Holy Spirit.
And because they couldn't accept the sufficiency of God's grace, they couldn't see the trouble ahead.
They don't see the need for basic rules of organization and beliefs rising up because of the increasing number of converts.
The Jewish Christians fall back on a thousand years of organization, but it's a case of new wine being poured into old wineskins. It's not going to work.
God's grace has gone beyond the old rules to a simple new freedom of faith.
What I eat has nothing more to do with my purity in God's eyes than a piece of skin on the end of my penis.
Food and foreskins are irrelevant to my salvation in Christ Jesus.
And that's what the Jewish Christians are just not understanding in today's passage.
I'm dealing with something similar in my school at the moment.
I was raised in a highly organized school system that functioned reasonably well in that it produced a lot of literate and numerate kids, some of whom actually learned to think.
I taught in a time of transition from that highly organized and rigidly narrow system of education to one that increasingly focused on crticial thinking and creativity.
I arrived as principal in a time of even greater educational flux.
I began guiding my school to interdisciplinary themes, character development, a curriculum of inquiry and teaching techniques based on neuroscience.
It may sound complicated but it's quite simple and it works.
Like any organization, though, it's at the mercy of individuals who want something they've done before because what they did before in a different context worked for them.
They want my new wine in their old wineskins and it just doesn't work.
I have administrators telling me the same sort of thing.
They like the new stuff but only up to a point and then they get uncomfortable and want the old familiar administrative model to deal with the new situation.
It won't work.
I think I feel a lot of what Paul must have felt.
He's been knocked over by Jesus and he knows beyond all others what the new model of worship is.
He didn't live with Jesus for three years and so missed all that direct training.
But he listened to the apostles tell the stories and repeat Jesus' words.
Paul knew beyond what Peter knew because Paul was steeped and trained in all the rules as a Pharisee.
He knew they didn't work for the new revelation.
That's why he's going to hammer Peter when he backslides and yields to the circumcision party.
By God's grace, I know education, I know curriculum, and I've been through the educational sea change of the 20th century.
Like Paul, God knocked me off my educational high horse when he fired me as curriculum director and department chair and sent me into the wasteland of a small universtity and then into the Wild West of second language learning where linguists were turning the old assumptions and practices upside down.
I saw wonders and marvels.
Then the Lord sent me back to the kind of school that I thought had gone away.
He took everything he had put me through and realigned it.
Then, bit by bit, he led me to introduce change to a school.
Like Paul with Judaism, I had to reassess all I thought I knew about education, reflect on it and then apply things in a different way.
Like Paul, I have to guide others in what I went through.
Not a day goes by that I don't feel my inadequacy to the task.
My people skills break down, my ability to explain fails utterly, my encouragements aren't strong enough, my vision is not understood, opponents rise up and defeat me, my insecurity betrays me, my sins overwhelm me.
But through God's word and mokjang and Pastor Kim's sermons, I see more and more clearly my sins and failings, which I rejoice in because they show me God's perfection a little bit more.
And the more I can see God's perfection, the greater my trust in him grows.
I never saw that coming.
Lord, inspire me to love the people in my school more than I do. Give me more of your grace to do the work you have set before me. Let your sure hands guide mine on how to handle what I quail at. Continue to be my rock and my fortress against evil. Come, Holy Spirit, fill me anew.
