Paul Visits Davis: The Startling Familiarity of Acts 17

Acts 17: 16-34

MP3 is here (right click and Save As)

How would you describe an average day on this campus? Or, what about this question: Can you think of a verse in the Scriptures that describes an average day on a major university campus? Let me propose one v 21 of Acts 17 from the story of Paul in Athens.

‘they spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.’

When we think of Athens, we probably think of a world class city like Rome or Alexandria or Antioch…but that is not really the case. John Stott describes Athens as ‘a small town despite its intellectual acclaim.’ Is this sounding familiar.

In Acts 17 Paul finds himself in a small town that was one of the world’s great intellectual centers and found himself surrounded by Stoics and Epicureans. Now this is a pretty substantial simplification, but these worldviews roughly correlate to today’s humanists and hedonists…both would consider themselves religious skeptics but the Stoics rooted the meaning of life in dispassionate duty Epicureans believe that happiness or pleasure were the chief end of human existence.

So what happens when we ask a number of UCD students:
What is the most important pursuit in life?


(I'd like to thank Matt Pye, Alyssa Barlow and Kiho Song for putting that video together. And I'd like to thank the students wh answered for their courage and candor in answering such a deeply personal question.)

Again, is any of this sounding familiar?

Almost two years ago, now, when Dan first pitched me the idea of teaching Acts…the first thing I said was ‘I want Acts 17.’ Here’s why. The thing I love about Acts 17 is that it paints a picture of ministry in a small town that is one of the premier intellectual and academic settings in the world. A small town with intellectual acclaim where people pass their days sharing and listening to ideas… …where there is a mix of prevalent but vague spiritual devotion as well as religious skepticism and where most people tend to order their lives either around the idea of social responsibility or the pursuit of happiness[0.5]…In other words welcome to Davis. There may not be a passage in the Bible that is more directly applicable to what it means to be a Christian on the UC Davis campus. So I have titled this talk:

We are going to make three observations about how Paul approaches ministry to this most UCD like of Roman Cities that can inform our attempts to engage our campus with the gospel. We are going to see what we can learn from:

I. Paul’s Character[1]
II. Paul’s Method
III. Paul’s Message

I. Paul’s Character

There are a couple things in the first verse that point to aspects of Paul’s character that prepare him to engage the academic center. The first thing I want you to notice is that he looked for God’s purposes in inconvenience. Look at the first four words. In verse 16:

‘While Paul was waiting.’ The first thing you have to understand about Paul’s stop in Athens is that it was decidedly inconvenient. Acts 17 is an unplanned, accidental story. He was headed to Macedonia. You could say that getting there was his dream, his life’s purpose. He was convinced that going to Macedonia was what God wanted him to do. But things didn’t go well. At this point in the story he has just run for his life from a nearby town[2] and was essentially in hiding. Getting discouraged at this point and just checking out for a while would be totally understandable.

But the first thing we notice about Paul’s character in this passage that equipped him to effectively engage the academy is that he looked for God’s purposes in inconvenience.[3] He recognized that a dramatic and inconvenient change in his plans might, actually, be a kingdom opportunity.

The second thing I want to notice about Paul’s character comes from the other half of the first verse. Look with me at v 16: “While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Notice, that he cared enough about God’s glory and people that the worship confusion and misplaced loyalties of the people he observed in this great intellectual center affected him deeply and personally. He was not offended or angry. He was heartbroken. He cared enough to be moved by the spiritual confusion in this town.

And so, here is the questioned posed to us in our cultural moment by the first few words of this passage. Do you see college an inconvenient diversion on the way to your real life…or do you see it one of the greatest opportunities of your Christian journey? People’s worldviews tend to harden in their mid-twenties. You will never again, in your life, be surrounded by so many people so open to ideas. You will never again have so many culturally acceptable outlets for the exchange of ideas. For a kingdom possessed person, every week you spend in this place is gold. Don’t wish it away. Don’t coast to the finish. Paul’s character…his willingness to look for God’s purposes in inconvenience and his general concern for God’s glory and people made him an effective kingdom agent in the academy.

II. Paul’s Method

The second thing I want you to notice about Paul’s approach to this great intellectual center is his method…in particular:

His method was typified by cultural curiosity AND conversational courage.

Paul begins his ministry in Athens by taking a long walk with his eyes wide open. He figured out where the culturally appropriate places were for the free exchange of ideas. But he didn’t immediately jump in there and start dropping Bible verses whether or not they would be welcome or understood.[4] Look in v 23 Paul describes the first step of his method of engaging this town ‘I walked around and looked carefully’. He took some time to try to understand these people’s deep longings.[5] He watched, observed, and listened.

Here is the really shocking thing about Paul’s method in this passage. He assumed that God would already be revealing himself to the people of Athens. He did not presume that he was ‘bringing God to them.’ He just tried to figure out how he could fit into what God was already doing. [6] Paul expected God to already be at work. This made him exceptionally observant and a careful listener.[7] It made him culturally curious. He doesn’t just start talking. He took an interest in the deepest longings of the people of this town. He went so far as to acknowledge and compliment their religious impulses and searching and, (look, in v22 “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious.”) Paul was culturally curious.

What I want you to notice is that Paul is not culturally curious to be hip or edgy or to smuggle the gospel into the conversation without anyone noticing. He is culturally curious because he believes that God is already at work all around him.[8]

And while we see in v 16 and in v 23 that Paul took some time to understand Athens when he got there…he probably hit the ground already conversant in pagan poetry.

Bruce: “He does not quote Hebrew Scriptures which would have been quite unknown to his hearers; the direct quotations in this speech are quotes from Greek poets.”

His cultural curiosity was not just an isolated thing that he did when he got to a city.[9] He drops two quotes from pagan poetry during his presentation of the gospel. He probably did not read up on this in the day he was in Athens…he had likely been cultivating a working familiarity with pagan poetry hoping to find echoes of truth in it. Which leads to an important aside from this passage: How do Christians interact with culture?[10]

Andy Crouch offers a model. He suggests that there are at least six tools available to Christians as they approach culture:

Condemning Culture
Critiquing Culture
Cultivating Culture
Copying Culture
Creating Culture
Consuming Culture

Crouch argues that each of these is useful in certain situations, but that none of them is universally appropriate.

There are cultural artifacts that should ‘greatly distress’ us just like Paul found in Athens. There is stuff in our culture that we simply must resist. But there is other cultural content that we can simply consume as a form of Sabbath…a rest. One of the unique aspects of Christian theology is that in the idea of Sabbath it contains relatively robust reflection on the human experience and utilization of fun. But, there is a subtle distinction between entertainment and Sabbath. Consuming culture should be invigorating. It should recharge you.

But Crouch argues that what we see Paul doing here is in the realm of cultivating and creating culture. He becomes conversant with the surrounding culture and then makes a third thing out of the best the culture has to offer and the content of the gospel.

This would be the equivalent of us demonstrating the Christian theology of human nature by appealing to Arcade Fire

“And there’s something wrong in the heart of man,
you take it from your heart and put it in your hand!”

Or to pitch the human need for and desire for cosmic mercy from Linkin Park:

In this farewell,
There's no blood,
There's no alibi,
'Cause I've drawn regret,
From the truth of a thousand lies.
So let mercy come, and wash away...

What I've done[11]

Paul believed that Jesus was the fulfilled hope of Israel…but he also believed that Jesus was the fulfilled hope of Athens…it was just going to take more work to be able to tell that story. He zeros in on the ‘temple to the unknown god.’ The way the story goes; there was a famine in the land years earlier. When the leadership asked a prominent philosopher Epimendies why this was happening despite their many religious centers and monuments he suggested that they must have missed a god and that had made him angry. So they constructed a ‘catch all’ temple. This is like multiple choice answer (d) – all of the above. Incidentally, the actual existence of a temple like this is verified by other historical sources.[12] And this is another way in which Athens is like UCD. University students are extremely spiritual as a whole.

The Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA reports in a recent study:

College Junior that believe:

- in an afterlife (64.8%)
- in a higher being (83.4%)

A faculty survey found:

- 81% of college professors consider themselves to be spiritual persons
- 69% report actively seeking out spiritual development

But the ‘Unknown God’ is the only one widely acknowledged. The more we claim to be able to make out the characteristics of our God, the more skepticism we encounter.

The first thing we notice about his method is that Paul was culturally curious. Here is the application. If you are a Christian, committed to engaging the university, look and listen carefully. Keep your senses sharp for ‘God sightings’ in the wider culture…recognize that ‘secular culture’ is punctuated with efforts by artists to ‘seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.’

Are you having trouble coming up with kingdom projects? If you are having trouble identifying the deepest longings of your fellow students or ways that you can serve them…try following Paul’s example from v 16 and in v 23.[13] where he says “I walked around and looked carefully”

Go on a long walk through the campus and ask God to help you understand what are the most fundamental longings of the students on this campus?

Mark Driscoll, is the pastor of a church named after the hill in this passage. It is the largest church in Seattle, which is widely considered one of the most secular cities in our country. This is how he describes his method “Our approach has always been two handed - what we believe is timeless and what we do is timely."[14]

That comes right out of this passage. The form of Paul’s message was flexible, the content was not, which brings us to the second part of Paul’s method.[15]
He was culturally curious AND conversationally courageous.
It is important to articulate the gospel as good news to the deepest longings of your cultural moment…but it must retain the major facets of the message. By introducing Jesus as the ‘unknown God of Athens’ Paul saw the gospel as the ultimate fulfillment of a very specific cultural longing. But he was not shy about its basic content of his message that included repentance, judgment and resurrection.[16]

And at this point, the passage continues to reflect the experiences many of us have had on the university campus. In v18 they mocked him and in v32 ‘they sneered’.[17] Paul gets laughed at…he gets ridiculed…but he remains conversationally courageous. I think I usually respond to ridicule with self doubt. Honest reflection and self assessment is always in order, but being a messenger of the gospel also requires a courageous confidence in the message…a kind, gentle, but thick skin.[18]

Paul did all this work to be culturally clear – and, in the end, most just sneered at him…but a few didn’t. If you take a risk and try to articulate your world view in an intellectually rigorous and culturally appropriate way on this campus, you are probably going to get worked…but there are a few who will be listening very closely. There are a few who will want to hear more. That is the story of what it means to be a messenger of the gospel in the University. It is hard work. It is often frustrating. But there may not be a more strategic place in the world. Paul was culturally curious and conversationally courageous.

So, Acts 17 has a message to those of you who are committed to the Christian story and are tying to figure out how that works on a pluralistic, post-Christian campus.

III. Paul’s Message

But maybe some of you are here tonight and are feeling more resonance with the Athenians than with Paul. You are interested in lots of ideas. Maybe you find the god-hypothesis far fetched or maybe you worship an ‘unknown god.’ You are legitimately interested in understanding the fabric of reality but don’t want to derail that process by prematurely committing to a world view. Well, first, I want to say that we are thrilled that you are here. We desperately want CL to be a place for two kinds of people: those who have made some sort of commitment to Jesus and are trying to figure out what that looks like, and the spiritually curious that are wondering if Jesus might be somehow related to your spiritual hunger. Let me just say, that from this passage, I think Paul himself would commend your spiritual tenacity. I hope that if you followed the message until now, you will realize that we don’t presume to be introducing you to God. We believe that if you have a legitimate spiritual hunger, that you have made progress looking for him. But, we also believe, that there are some specific things about Jesus that you really need to understand and appropriate.[19] There are three themes in Paul’s message that are worth noting. Judgment, Repentance and Resurrection. These ideas have two things in common: they will generally get you mocked on this campus, and you simply cannot understand Jesus apart from them.
You will not be able to appreciate the work of Jesus apart from judgment.[20]
You will not be able to access Jesus without repentance.
You will not be able to understand Jesus apart from his resurrection.
But this passage includes some phenomenal news for those of you who are on an as-of-yet unfulfilled spiritual quest. And that is, that God, is really bad at hiding.

27God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.

My daughter is just over two and a half. And one of her favorite things to do is to play hide and seek. Now, most of us have played hide and seek long enough to understand the objective…it is to NOT get found. But she has no interest in that form of the game. For Charis, the objective of hide and seek is not to stay hidden, but to be found. If I take too long to find her, she will poke here head out and smile at me. The object of hiding is not the hiding itself but the affection I show her in the pursuit.[21]

Well, there is one thing we can all agree on whether or not you are committed to the Christian story. If God exists, for one reason or another, he seems to prefer a certain measure of hiddeness. But, this passage resonates with my experience of that hiddeness. God doesn’t hide like a self interested adolescent playing hide and seek, who’s objective is self preservation. God hides like my daughter hides. He hides with the objective of being pursued and found.

v 27 says ‘God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.’

If you are on a spiritual quest…or even if you are a Christian who is just going through a bit of a dry patch and feel like God is distant…Paul’s message is keep looking, because God is really bad at hiding…he only hides to be found…and he might be hiding in plain sight…in the one place you have not yet looked…in Jesus.
__________________

[0.5] I have to admit, I expected more students to cite social responsibility as the most important persuit. Such a heavy weighting on happiness suggests that the University campus is far more Epicurian than Stoic. This was a surprising result to me. I guess I expected both
[1] You can not believe the compulsion I felt to alliterate this point. I considered ‘makeup’. Bronwyn recommended mojo, manliness and malleability (the latter I almost used)
[2] Why do we insist in calling them the ‘noble Bereans.’ Sure they checked the scriptures to see if Paul was right, but they were weak minded enough to be incited to try to kill him and chase him out of town. We forget the end of the story because they look like good protestant Biblicists. But I think there is a larger message here. The passage is definitely elevating biblical literacy and verification but also arguing that Bible knowledge is not enough to keep us from crass and dramatic deception.
[3] A contemporary equivalent would be something like “Paul realized that he didn’t have the right classes and had to stay at UCD an extra quarter” or “The only job he could find out of college was an internship in a disreputable Oakland neighborhood.”
[4] He actually doesn’t even quote the scriptures.
[5] Keller points out that to extrapolate from this that Christians are called to street preaching or contact evangelism is to miss the point of the passage. Street preaching is weird in our culture. It is dismissed as eccentric, offensive, and obnoxious. It is a breach of social contract. Paul figured out the appropriate places where there was likely to be a free exchange of ideas in a culturally appropriate setting. We need to identify those places in our culture. Where do people congregate to
[6] v25 Paul knows God does not need him, but he is thrilled to be involved…he didn’t overstate his own role. Note: Rightly ordering our importance in God’s work is imperative for ministry longevity. The human spirit can not bear the weight of the tasks we are involved in. We can not bear the guilt of ultimate failure or the intoxication of ultimate success. Either will destroy us, either by crushing or by self seduction. Most people I know who have persevered for years approach ministry like Paul or Nehemiah: “They are your servants and your people who you redeemed by your great strength and your mighty hand.” (Neh 1:10)
[7] v 25 He knows that God does not need him, but is excited to be used. He didn’t overestimate his own role
[8] Paul acknowledges the effort and desire of a people seeking the transcendent. We learn elsewhere in his writings that Paul actually believes that behind these idols there lie, no kidding, demons. Personal, invisible, malevolent nastiest. But he does not lead with that (he doesn’t even really bring it up). He finds something to affirm on the front end of his address. He doesn’t offend by tearing down their world view but by standing on the resurrection.
[9] And lest we think that his knowledge of pagan philosophy was from his life before being a Christian…remember…he was a Pharisee of Pharisees.
[10] Note: The idols did not aggravate or exasperate him. The Greek word is a medical term. He was grieved. He was saddened. He didn’t take it as a personal affront, but as the symptom of a spiritual sickness.
[11] Incidentally, I have not been able to listen to this song in quite the same way since it was on the Transformers soundtrack.
[12] FF Bruce. Bock argues convincingly that Luke fares very well when his accounts can be empirically tested with external historical data. I am fully convinced that, while he was certainly a polemical historian, he was as conscientious in the accuracy of his history as can be expected given the communicative limitations of the era.
[13] Incidentally, Nehemiah and Jerimiah take long walks in their cities, in the attempt to understand God’s vision for the service and redemption of their communities.
[14] He goes on to say, in his normal brash but hilarious tone, ‘We are theologically conservative and culturally liberal…It’s not whether or not a church contextualizes its to what year...Some churches are on the cutting edge of the 17th century.
[15] Theologians and missiologists make the distinction between contextualization vs accommodation. The former seeks to articulate the message in a context that makes sense in a particular culture without violating the basic principles of the message. The latter changes the message so it has a higher chance of adoption in a particular culture. You can imagine the debates that ensue about whether individual practices constitute contextualization or accommodation.
[16] Much is made between scholars that the cross does not play prominently in this address. But Luke’s presentations of apostolic preaching are almost certainly selective, highlight reels. For more on the cross in Acts see Stott’s The Cross of Christ.
[17] He didn’t offend them because he was a jerk. He didn’t offend by his manner, but by his message. Way too many Christians measure their success by the number of people they piss off, saying ‘the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing.’ But this can simply be self serving justification of intellectual laziness and cultural illiteracy. It is incumbent upon someone who is trying to articulate the gospel to make the distinction between a fundamentally offensive message (that God calls all people everywhere to repent and acknowledge his preeminence) and simply being an a@# h#$%. Even this week, in commenting on Kira’s facebook page, I used careless, condescending language, and people were offended by me before they even considered the content of the message.
[18] Postscript: So, how did he do? Well Paul’s ministry was validated neither by its success or its failure. It was hard work for small victories. Hardly the 5,000 of Pentecost or the exponential growth of Antioch. But in campus ministry, this is normative.
[19] I wrote three unrelated drafts of this paragraph and one or them is entertaining enough to include: And if you are here tonight, and are in the positions of the Athenians. You came to college and are interested in lots of ideas. Maybe you find the god-hypothesis far fetched or maybe you worship an ‘unknown god.’ Well, thanks for coming tonight. It was honestly courageous of you to walk into a room like this, and I recognize that you and God have been doing business far before you walked into Kleiber 3 to listen to an over educated guy with lopsided eyes. But I think Paul’s words in v 27 should be of special interest to you.
[20] FF Bruce - ”Like the biblical revelation itself, his argument begins with God the creator of all and ends with God the judge of all.”
[21] I got this illustration from Bronwyn Lea. She offered it while giving me feedback on a different talk several months ago, but it was just such a perfect picture of this story that I saved it.

The Wall Crossers of Antioch: (Acts 11&13)

Note: In this talk I lean heavily on the works of two thinkers and I would like to provide two links that provide acces to more of their ideas.
First: Tim Keller has 6+ free MP3’s on the Church and the city here.

Second: I wrote a summary of Rodney Stark’s book The Rise of Early Christianity and implications for the contemporary church that can be found here).

Acts 11:19-30

Acts 13:1-3

I find that most people have heard of Antioch…but can’t quite remember where? So I have put together the following, totally unscientific, survey of where people have heard of Antioch.

"O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals…then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.”

Seriously, that is an iconic scene. Last Christmas Eve I was visiting my brother at his church. A couple thousand people were passing through that church that night and he is the associate pastor. So I was a little taken aback when he tried to get my attention during the music from like 40 ft away. He mouthed these words, “Hly hnd gnd o ntch’ while pointing at the Christmas tree. I couldn’t figure out what he was trying to say, until I looked at the tree. He was pointing at this ornament.

The maker of this ornament was either hilariously oblivious or hilariously hilarious.

But tonight, we are going to resume our journey through the story of the earliest church with the account of the church in Antioch. It honestly, seems a little anti-climactic to jump back into Acts after that relationships series. But, we need to be careful not to distort the Scriptures by letting our questions totally dictate our study. It is appropriate to bring our questions to the text, which is why Dan and I try to topical talks about 25% of the time. We ned to let the scriptures speak about what they want to speak about in the proportion they want to speak about it. But, on the whole, the text should set the agenda. Fortunately, Luke starts out today’s passage with a little recap.

11:19 ‘those who had been scattered by the persecution in connection with Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, telling the message only to Jews’ 20 But, there were some…who on coming to Antioch spoke to the Greeks also, telling them the good news of Jesus.”

After a very good start, where the church grew like crazy and enjoyed a relatively good relationship with the surrounding community, the new Christians began to be hunted down and killed. They were getting stoned…and not in the fun way. In the moment this must have been really confusing, but in retrospect, God used it to chase them out of the safe confines of Jerusalem and start to bring the story and message of Jesus throughout the Roman empire.

Until now, Christianity remained, largely a Jewish movement. (11:19 ‘telling the message only to Jews.') We have seen isolated incidents of pagans becoming Christians. If you recall Kevin’s talk about the Ethiopian and my talk about Cornelius a Roman bad ass last quarter. But what was about to take place in Antioch was a total game changer. The fledgling Christian movement would never be the same again.[2] It is in Antioch, that the movement gets the name we still use today. And appropriately so, because it is in Antioch that Jesus’ command in chapter 1, that his name would be spread to the ends of the earth becomes a reality.

It all starts with two upstart, unnamed, self-motivated Christians from Cyprus.[3] These guys decide to try something totally crazy. They decide to try to plant a church in one of the most pagan, cosmopolitan, diverse, and divided cities in the Roman Empire. I guarantee you that people laughed at them. But to everyone’s shock, it goes incredibly well. The church hadn’t seen growth like this since Peter preached that first message back in chapter 2. And things would never be the same again. And so the Church in Jerusalem sends Barnabas to see what is going on. Barnabas not only approves of the church, but stays on to help and recruits Paul…and the Church spreads like no other world view in human history over the next 300 years from this remarkable church.

So, this passage begs us to ask one overwhelming questions…why? What was it about the church in Antioch that made it so effective? I am going to argue that there were three things that made the church in Antioch particularly effective. Three things that we can learn from this remarkable community. It was 1) Urban, 2) Misisonal, and 3) Multicultural.

1) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Urban

First, it was urban. One of the most obvious but least frequently observed features of the early church is that it was primarily an urban movement. Early Christianity thrived on the density, desperation, depravity and diversity of the great urban centers of the Roman empire. You can argue from this passage, that the movement didn’t really take off until it hit a major urban center. There is that scene in Braveheart where Wallace spreads oil over the enemy battle field. When a flaming arrow is shot at the nearby grass the blaze spread slowly until it hit the oil, and then it took off. This is the a good picture of how Acts and historical sources describe the growth of the church. It plugged along slowly until it hit the cities. Then it took off at a qualitatively different rate.

Antioch was the 3rd largest city in the Roman world[4]. You can think of it as the Chicago of the Roman world (behind LA and NY).[5] It was 10-20 times larger than Jerusalem. And, not only were there a lot of people, but they were packed in. Rodney Stark estimated the population density of Antioch at 195 persons per acre. Compare this to 100 for Manhattan, 122 for Calcutta and 183 for Mumbai (Bombay)…but Antioch had no buildings >4 stories high...and no toilets.

So why point this out. Isn’t essentially a historical curiosity. It is important to recognize because the urban nature of the early church was fundamental to its growth and effectiveness. The early church grew because it was a fundamentally urban movement. It grew because it came to love people and found them easiest to love in their densest, most diverse and most desperate state.

Tim Keller (to whom I owe most of my thought on this topic) says: “The more urban the environment, the bigger the city the more Christianity flourished. The more dense the population, the more pluralistic, the more crime the more poverty, the more social troubles, the more personal brokenness, the cityer the city the deeper the fruit in quality and quantity that the gospel bore.”

But somehow, contemporary evangelical Christianity has become one of the most anti-urban demographics of the American population. With the notable exceptions of the Black Church and the Catholic Church, modern American Christianity has gravitated to the suburbs. And, modern missiologists argue, this is sidelining us culturally. We are underrepresented in the city. And this is problematic in two ways. First, Christians should be wherever there are people and should be particularly attracted to the social ills that cities generate. But it is also a problem because culturally, Cities are upstream.[6] As the city goes, so goes the culture.

Keller again, “American Christians are the most anti-urban Christians in the world and as a result American cities are the most underserved by Christians. (It would take) 10% of evangelical Christians in this country to move into cities to live proportionally…Jew(ish people) for example, gay people for example, Asian people, Black and Hispanic people all live disproportionately in cities, and as a result the have a lot more cultural power, and they deserve it, because there they are …until evangelicals are willing to live in the city they can stop bellyaching about what’s going wrong with the culture.”

Cities are not more important but they are more strategic. If we were going to be underrepresented somewhere, it should be anywhere but our nation and world’s urban centers. It is the one place early church was overrepresented. This may be a particularly tough message for some of you, because, many of you could have gone to Berkeley or UCLA but chose Davis because of precisely how urban it wasn’t. You may hate the city. But you are going to have to get use to urban life sooner or later, because after the final day, when God establishes his kingdom and remakes the world, he describes the new realm of his eternal reign a great city. Eternity is going to be urban. You don’t read in the scriptures about a great escatalogical suburb coming down from heaven.

So what about us now? We are aggies? We go to a school that has, no kidding, over 100 cows (including this one) on campus[7] and a road called dairy drive. Well, in two weeks, I am going to argue from Acts 17, that the only thing in the same strategic ballpark as the city is the University. That is why Amanda and I are spending a season here. And you should make the most of your few years of influence in one of our world’s great academic institutions. But what I want you to get from this observation is: ‘Don’t run from the city.’ In the next 1 to 4 years you are going to be making some big life choices with your most flexible years. When you look for jobs, when you are choosing where to live, at least don’t avoid the city…and, maybe, pursue it.

2) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Missional

Second, the church in Antioch was fundamentally missional. They were the prototypical ‘externally focused church.’ They embodied the idea that has emerged from Acts all year, that the Church is one of the few organizations that exists primarily for the benefit of those that don’t belong to it.

Rodney Stark (University of Washington sociologist) wrote a great book trying to answer the question of how Christianity spread so dramatically in those first few hundred years. It is a scholarly work and when he started it he wasn’t a believer. He credits the study, in part with his reluctant and complicated conversion. But he says the unparalleled growth of the early church was largely due to “growth through social networks, through a structure of direct and interpersonal attachments. Most new religious movements fail because they quickly become closed, or semiclosed networks. That is, they fail to keep forming and sustaining attachments to outsiders and thereby lose the capacity to grow. Successful movements discover techniques for remaining open networks, able to reach out into new adjacent social networks.” In other words, Christianity exploded because, even though, as we have seen earlier in Acts, they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, they never ghettoized. They continued to maintain connections to the people itn their city that they were called to love.

But, one of the really interesting things about this passage is that the church saw its missional call as having two distinct facets: i) Incarnational and ii) Proclamaitonal. Or in other words, they engaged their community and the surrounding communities in WORD and DEED.

i) Incarnational

Look with me in v 27-30. They take up a collection for a famine in Jerusalem.[8] They take an intentional and active interest in the physical and felt needs of suffering people. And, on top of this, they cross ethnic and tribal lines to do it. The Antioch church was probably composed mostly of Greeks and Roman, who did not flinch at the prospect of seneding help to the mostly Jewish community. This is almost unprecedented in the ancient world. And I kept thinking of this passage (where two prophets challenged the church to give) when two weeks ago, when Steph and Cassia stood up here and essentially said, ‘something horrible has happened, and Jesus’ people have to do something.’ That night you gave over $700 to help the Hatian people.[9]

ii) Proclamational

So the early church was serious about working hard and giving hard to help meet the estimable needs of their city. But they also believed that the story of Jesus and his victory over sin and death needed to be told. So they did something crazy.

Antioch may have had the best preaching lineup of all time[10]. Mark Driscoll likes to say, ‘Can you imagine going to church in Antioch at this time, when just one of your five preachers is the Apostle Paul.’[11] It would have been easy for them to just sit back and enjoy that.[12] Surely some of the new Christians could be spared for the purpose of planting new churches without anyone noticing. Maybe it could even be social awkward ones that people didn’t get along with. But, instead, they set aside Paul and Barnabas. They hoard gifts but tasked their very best with the responsibility of starting up new Jesus communities. They were open to dramatic change if it meant that more people would have the chance to respond to Jesus.[13] They committed their A-team to ministry OUTSIDE the church.[14]

Throughout the history of the church, individual congregations have been tempted to elevate one of these over the others. Within a given church, it is tempting for those passionate about proclamation to get really annoyed by those who want to focus on incarnation…and the feelings are mutual. But a healthy congregation is passionate about both.

One last thought on this point: It is not incidental that this missional congregation is also a congregation described as one committed to worship[15], prayer[16], fasting[17] and deeply in tune with the Holy Spirit[18]. True worship is never simply inward or therapeutic…it should always lead to an outward, missional focus. Worship is dangerous.[19] The presence of God can produce marching orders.[20]

3) The Antioch Church Thrived Because it was Diverse

Finally, the new center of the early church was the most diverse, cosmopolitan city in the Roman empire…and I am convinced that this is not an incidental detail on why it became one of the most effective congregations in Church history. Antioch was a global city, and its inhabitants included large African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Western populations. In addition there is historical evidence of significant Persian, Indian, and Chinese neighborhoods in Antioch. The city was so diverse that it was split into at least 18 walled ethnic quarters (ghettos). Selucis who built Antioch, didn’t just build walls around the city, but large walls to separate the ethnic groups from each other.

But the church in Antioch appeared to be a reflection of the diversity of the city from the start. We see that from the description of the leadership team. The leadership team included a Jewish Pharisee, a black dude, a Roman, a Levite who was ethnically Greek, and a Greek prince of the Roman Empire.

Stott: “These five men, therefore, symbolized the ethnic and cultural diversity of Antioch.” The represented 3 continents and 4 different ethnic groups.

And this is why were they called ‘Christians’ first in Antioch. The name was made up because the Jesus followers were ‘wall crossers.’ They transcended the categories of their day. And those who tried to describe the movement realized that they needed to invent a new category for a religion that was not based on a national aleigence.[21] One of the defining characteristics of the early church was its ethic diversity…its ability to embrace the contributions of people from hugely diverse backgrounds and transcend the bitterest social divisions their culture maintained.[22]

Let me wrap us by trying to illustrate this point with a story. After I graduated from Grad School (the first time) I got a job in Buffalo, NY. We got a place downtown (because we believe that Christians should live in the city whenever possible). A few days after we moved in we went to the DMV to get our New York licenses. It was fifteen blocks or so away. But it might have been 15 of the most influential blocks of my life. When we arrived at the DMV I realized that I had not seen a single white person since we had left our apartment. I remember thinking, this thing (where the white people live and go to church in the suburbs and the African Americans and Latinos live and go to church in the city) is broken. This can’t be God’s best for his diverse creation. The Church should transcend even the most deeply felt cultural divisions. So we decided to put ourselves in the place of cultural learners and cross the Sunday morning color line. We found a remarkable little church on the edge of the east side, pastored by Emory Brown, (a man we retain a huge amount of affection for). The church was mostly black, but the elders were composed of two black men, Emory and the worship leader, a white guy who led the children’s church, a gentleman of mixed Black/Italian ethnicity and a Korean PhD student. This was the modern equivalent of the Antioch 5.

But what we didn’t know was that the reason people don’t often choose to transcend cultural divisions together isn’t because it doesn’t occur to them, it’s because it turns out to be really hard. We joined the church and asked the elders to put us to work. We were assigned to the youth ministry under the leadership of Calvin and Darlene Fitzgerald. We later found out that Calvin had only been out of prison for a couple years where he had been part of the Nation of Islam and various black power groups and Darlene had only been clean for a couple years…and was HIV positive. They did not try to hide their brokenness, but they connected with urban youth effortlessly.

They didn’t like us much from the start and I can’t say we warmed up to them. Calvin’s idea of a useful youth volunteer was someone who would pick up kids from the most dangerous neighborhoods and who could preach without notice. The meeting would get to the point where it seemed appropriate for some teaching and he would read a random passage and tell me to get up and teach on it. Now those of you who know me know that I think it is deplorable that anyone would presume to teach the contents of God’s holy self revelation without a lot of preparation. I had my first outline of this talk completed 11 months ago. So Calvin and I began to butt heads…regularly. I arrogantly felt like he wasn’t deep enough into the scriptures to have anything to say. He felt like I was too culturally removed from the students to have anything to say. He went to the elders to ask to have us reassigned. The elders refused, and told him to learn how to use us. Let’s just say, things were not going well…until the day of what I will call the ‘rib incident.’

One day Calvin called me up and asked me to meet him for dinner. We sat down at Casa de Pizza and he said, ‘Let me order.’ He ordered something like 45 barbecue ribs and then turned to me and said, ‘I don’t know what kinds of leafy green stuff white people eat, but we’ll do that next time.’ What I didn’t know was that that huge bowl of sparsely meated cow bones was a peace offering. We talked for a long time. He told me that about his black power background and even confessed ‘until very recently I hated all white people.’ I confessed that I was culturally adrift in the youth ministry, that I was having trouble connecting with the kids and had a lot to learn about urban life…but that I could be taught if he took the time to mentor me. And things were never the same. A couple months later when his kid ended up sick and in the hospital we visited them, not because it was the right thing to do, but because we had deep and genuine affection for them. A couple after that, Calvin had to pass an algebra exam (he was going back to school to become a caterer and chef) and asked me to tooter him. He started to utilize Amanda and I as part of his team and we learned things about urban youth ministry, the ghetto and the kids from them that we would have never picked up on our own. We took the ministry over a year later when Calvin and Darlene moved on, but simply would not have been able to without his mentoring. If God had not made us look at this Jesus follower who could not have been more different than us and recognize ‘he has stuff to teach us’…or if they had been written us off as unusable and been unwilling to teach us…the ministry would have not been nearly as helpful to those students who were struggling to live for Jesus in some of the nations toughest schools and would have ended when they left. This relationship could have been undone by my pride or his bitterness. It could have been undone by his pride or my bitterness. But Jesus heals that crap, and my making us both willing to learn, he built a better team to reach these kids.

In the book of Acts God makes it pretty clear that the collection of his people that would come to be called the Church, was not to be like the world. It was to be more not less diverse. It would transcend the cultural divisions of the surrounding society…but it would not necessarily be easy. It would require humility. But the church is God’s fullest expression of his kingdom when it, not only transcends the divisions that plague the surrounding culture, but embraces all his passions and has grace for each of their champions.
______________

[1] Same words as 8:4 – suggesting that the interveining material (of the mission in Samaria and the events with Cornelius) were preparing the church to deal with a full scale multi-cultural explosion
[2] ‘But the scale of Gentile evangelization in Antioch was something entirely new.’ FF Bruce
[3] There are rich implications of even this minor insight. First, the world wide, 2000 year and running, multi-billion member Christian movement can be traced back to two people who just decide to try something crazy. Second, Christianity is not and has never been meant to be a centralized, authoritative thing. It crumbles and dies in that form. It is a grass roots movement with the Holy Spirit organically using whoever is available. However, there is leadership and followership, even in the early church as these teachers submitted to Barnabas when he showed up to do an orthodoxy/orthopraxy check.
[4] There were a million people in Rome and the others not far behind – in 1850 only 4 cities over a million – we are just catching up with the urbanization of the Roman empire. (Keller)
[5] This came from Keller, but, then again, so did most of this point. I will try to city frequently, but so much of my thought on this topic has come from Keller that you should probobly just consider this whole point inextricably indebted to him.
[6] - James Davidson Hunter
[7] And the facilities to accomidate for 650.
[8] Boyce: “As far as I know, this is the first charitable act of this nature in all recorded history – on race of people collecting money to help another people. No wonder they were called Christians first at Antioch.”
[9] We also know, that 150 years later, they church was still incarnationally missional. Bishop Fabious wrote that in 251, the church in Antioch had grown to 30,000 people and was financially supporting ‘more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons.’ (Stark)
[10] Notice, that all accounts and instructions about early church leadership describe a teaching/leading team. The verse says ‘teachers and prophets’ Again, Boyce: “We have fallen away from thaty principle in our time through a pattern of organization in which churches usually are in the hands of just one minister.” Also see my discussion of this wrt the earliest non-canonical documents of the church under point 4 of this post
[11] This is a paraphrase from memory. It is probably not an exact rendering.
[12] Wright: “To be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.”
[13] ‘Missionary activity was not an addendum to a faith that was basically ‘about’ something else…’Christianity was never more itself than in the launching of the world mission’…The story of Acts is the story…of early Christian mission…World missions is thus the first and most obvious feature of early Christian Praxis.’ NT Wright – ‘The New Testament and the People of God’ 360-1 – Dan and I read this book together and his comment on this passage was ‘Missions is not an optional program of the church. You can be ‘kind of not into’ Men’s Ministry or Women’s ministry. But we all have to be into mission.'
[14] “We know that Judea did in fact suffer severely from a famine at some point between AD 45 and 48.” Bruce
[15] NT Wright: “We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular (corporate) devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction.”
[16] Piper “It is almost impossible to overstate the historical importance of what happened here…in this prayer meeting.”
[17] Stott: “In neither reference to fasting does it occur alone. It is linked with worship in verse 2 and with prayer in verse 3. For seldom if ever is fasting an end in itself. It is the negative action (abstenention from food and other distractions) for the sake of the positive one (worshiping and praying).”
[18] Side note: The Early Fathers leaned heavily on this passage and others like it to establish the divinity of the Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. He is commanding and obeyed as God. Boyce puts it really well, I think: ‘rather than thinking of the Holy Spirit (as) a power that we are somehow wo seize and use, we are to think of him as a person whose job it is to use us.”
[19] ‘We get a fascinating glimpse of their regular devotional life: fasting and prayer surrounding the worship of the Lord, waiting for the spirit to give fresh direction…to be told, suddenly, that two of the main leaders were wanted elsewhere must have come as something of a blow.” Wright p3
[20] Dan has declared this ‘the year of the Spirit’ and rightly so, because
Many of us probably feel a little squeamish about a focus on the spirit, because we have encountered what we might consider an undue emphasis on his work. But a true emphasis on the Holy Spirit should not lead to navel gazing or the pursuit of signs, but on obedience in serving and sharing with those outside the church.
[21] The wall crossers thing is from Keller.
[22] I recognized that come CL’s have made an intentional choice to help diversify our community just by being part of it. Some of you could have chosen ethnic based Christian fellowships. The choice would have been understandable. But I am personally grateful for each person who takes a risk on our not-so-divers community, bringing the correction and insight (and a portion of the image of God) from an underrepresented background.