I remember when I was a kid. I knew exactly what my home church looked like. I should. I spent enough time there that I knew just about every nook and cranny that a kid could get into. I even knew how to jimmy the lock on the toy closet in the nursery so that we could get the toys out!
In the Summers we had early church. I didn’t know much about it, except that it was down in the Fellowship Hall, which was kind of cool, but the best part about it was that there were donuts every Sunday!!! (I still enjoy donuts on Sunday mornings)
At my home church we would sing out of the old hymnal, and I remember being really confused when the new ones came out. I knew that Dad directed the choir, my piano teacher played the organ, Mom was running around taking care of something. I was in Sunday School every week, and I knew the order of classes, and couldn’t wait to be in the High School class.
In the summer we had VBS and those chocolate sandwich cookies and kool-aid. Every January we took a church ski trip to Colorado where I learned to ski and where I fell in love with the mountains, and Sunday School lessons were taught using felt boards.
I remember sitting next to Betty Russell (probably between her and my grandmother) and Betty had the candy bag. Really it was a coin purse that she got from the bank where she worked, but there was always candy in it on Sunday mornings.
But as things go, things change along the way. Things that I thought were written in stone, traditions that when you’re a kid feel like they’ve gone on forever, came to an end. Betty and her husband Ed (I always called him Rus) went on a vacation one year, and she didn’t come home. Hers was the first funeral I remember attending.
Sunday school would change, early church would stop, but then we’d start an early service that had guitars and drums. In High School I had to stop going on the church ski trips because of school activities that got in the way.
Somewhere along the way, everything seemed to change, and that change is hard to deal with.
Even though this is a message from a previous Sunday, I'm writing this blog post on Graduation Sunday. There are a lot of families going through a lot of change this weekend. The tears are happy, but they're also recognizing that things are going to be different from here on out.
One of the things that gets lost is how much change Jesus brought with him. All of this change was one of the reasons why what he was doing, and saying was so hard for many to accept. They just didn’t know what to do with him. Easter morning and the empty tomb didn’t just show that Jesus was alive, but it solidified the change he was bringing.
The empty tomb took what his believers knew, and stretched it beyond what they could comprehend. These were the folks that believed, and yet it was hard for them. Others felt that they had been stretched beyond their breaking points. In order to get through this change, you had to take it on faith and trust in Jesus, because nothing else was making a lot of sense.
In this post, we pick up our scripture reading in Acts 10, but we have to back up a bit to get the whole story of how we get to this point. Because when we pick it up a whole bunch of gentiles have received the Holy Spirit, but they haven’t been baptized yet, and that’s not the order that things are supposed to go in.
Things were changing.
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| On the right is the stoning of Stephen with Saul (Paul) in the background. On the left is Saul (Paul) on the road to Damascus. |
Starting earlier in Acts, Jesus’ followers are scared and trying to figure things out. On Pentecost they’d received the Holy Spirit and started making great gains in converting folks. However, that made a number of other folks mad, and they took the gloves off and started coming after Jesus’ followers and disciples.
This lead to Stephen being stoned in chapter 7. After that the church scatters in fear of their lives, and they didn’t know what to do. A young pharisee by the name of Saul (who would become Paul later) is making a name for himself by persecuting the followers of Jesus.
But then a crazy thing starts to happen.
They may be scattered, but they don’t really stop preaching and telling their stories. Gentiles, who’d heard some about Jesus were starting to ask questions and they were starting to believe, even though they were gentiles and not Jewish!
But crazier still is that it’s working! They can see that the Holy Spirit is working in these Gentiles, and they’re starting to get confused about what to do. This is all in Chapter 8.
In Chapter 9, we see something else happen. This is the story of Saul’s Damascus road experience when he is called out by Jesus and he converts from being a Pharisee’s Pharisee, to being a follower of Jesus. At the end of Chapter 9, Peter shows great power by raising a woman named Tabitha from the dead.
Crazy things are happening, and change is taking place.
In chapter 10, now we’re getting close, Peter meets a man named Cornelius. He and his family are gentile worshipers. They were showing signs that they’d received the Holy Spirit! That was only supposed to happen after baptism, but they hadn’t been baptized, and they weren’t Jewish. They were still gentiles.
Peter didn’t really know what to do with this.
Peter said, “I really am learning that God doesn’t show partiality to one group of people over another.”
--Acts 10:34
Peter, and those that were with him, were watching as God was at work, even though they didn’t know what to do with it. This was something that they couldn’t have imagined before.
The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.
--Acts 10:45
They were being challenged, but their faith was carrying them through.
Change is hard and difficult. And a lot of it will come from other places. Because some of the comments that Peter heard were, “you’re eating with them, they’re unclean you can’t do anything, you’re not being faithful to God,” and so on and so forth. All about what was going on with the Gentiles.
And it was hard for them to figure it out and try to understand what was going on. But the thing is, we may never really understand it. That’s one of the hard parts of change.
Change is always there.
When the Holy Spirit is at work, and we can see it at work, we can either fight the change that is taking place, or we can roll with it. One is easier because there isn’t much risk, but then we may get left behind. The other is riskier, but ultimately where we’re being led.
God is going to move, whether we like it or not. Our challenge is to roll with that change, and have faith that God knows what he’s doing.
We have watched many of our kids graduate and go on in life many times over. Sometimes we share great celebrations, sometimes we share great sorrows, but never could we have stayed in one place. They were going to change, no matter how much we didn't want them to.
What we can do, is send them out with our prayers, our blessings, and the knowledge that they still have a home with us full of people that are supporting them. Most importantly, for them (and us) is that we all go through this change knowing that God goes with us.
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