Daily Liturgy and Scripture

A lot of wild things are going on in this passage today. Paul and Silas are blocked from going where they thing they ought to, and find themselves in a town with a fortune teller and a family of believers. The Spirit has gone ahead of them, though. There among this odd crowd, they find entire households ready to receive the word they have to bring. 

Just after yesterday’s reading about the church coming together to be of one Spirit, today we have Paul and Barnabas parting ways because of a disagreement. This seems like a pretty big deal, since both of those guys were giants in the early church. The Spirit is still at work, though, and the parting of ways certainly brings about fruit that we can see in the Bible. John Mark wrote the gospel of Mark, and Paul met Timothy, who he mentored very closely. It makes you wonder… what if Paul and Barnabas has stayed together? Would John Mark have been mentored to write his gospel? Would Timothy have become a young pastor? It’s impossible to know, but we can be pretty certain that God was working even in this division.

If you think churches don’t need to be linked together, here’s a great example of why that might actually be a good idea. In its earliest days, members of the church were guided deeply by the Spirit. That Spirit was bringing new wisdom to the believers, but it wasn’t broadcast directly from Heaven to everyone’s ears. They still needed one another, needed to come together to agree on the moving of the Spirit. This prevents celebrity cults from erupting within churches, and also keeps church accountable to one another. And of course, all are accountable to Christ.

The church is really wrangling with the way Christianity should look. Since it started among the Jews, of course they think it should look Jewish. Jesus was Jewish, after all. But strange things are happening, and the Spirit seems to be moving among the Gentiles. Spoiler alert: we’re going to keep it all about Jesus. It doesn’t belong only to the children of Abraham, because Jesus is the the “light to the nations” that Abraham’s family was challenged to become.

A crowd that can be won with celebrity is a fickle thing. They wanted to grant celebrity status, even god status, to Paul and Barnabas. The pair only wanted to help them see Jesus, so they declined. But when less scrupulous religious types showed up, they granted them the same thing. Only this time, the new preachers were more receptive. They took the celebrity and turned it on Paul and Barnabas in the darkest of ways. Luckily, God wasn't finished with them yet. They were preserved to preach another day.

After Paul preaches, he is immediately rejected. It says, “by the Jews,” but that shouldn’t be understood as the entire Jewish nation as a whole. There were definitely Jewish converts, but the Jewish power players who tended to speak for the people had set themselves against the apostles. In that scenario, Paul didn’t fight with them or argue. He simple moved on. How many times have we chosen to fight against others when we should have spent the time looking for where God might be moving somewhere else?

Paul stands up to preach, and what he says sounds really familiar. Certainly, his lifetime of Jewish scholarship came into play, he was quoting the Jewish history that he had built his identity on. But that isn’t what makes it poignant. This short jaunt through history leading up to Jesus is a much more brief version of the sermon Stephen had preached when he was stoned. And who was there, giving approval to Stephen’s death? None other than Paul. We don’t know if Paul got the significance of his carrying on Stephen’s words, but we certainly can appreciate it.

We don’t know what was going on in Paul’s mind when he declared blindness to come upon this false prophet. Consider the man doing it, though. Paul himself had been struck blind by Jesus himself. For Paul, this became an awakening. He didn’t just go blind and regain his sight to carry on the way he always had. Paul regained his sight so that he could learn to see God’s way. Perhaps Paul acted in anger, but perhaps he also saw something in this man that made him think that Elymas the Sorcerer could find a path to right seeing the same as he had taken himself.

It was really a wild time to be a Christian, here as the Church was being launched. Peter was an important part of that plan so God preserved his life until the time came for his martyrdom. This little scene is kind of funny: the servant girl who sees him gets so excited that she forgets to let him in. Truly, God welcomes all personalities in this crazy Kingdom he’s building.

Once again, God is building his church. This time, it's a combination of both persecution and connecting leaders. Since we're going to read a lot more about Saul/Paul and Barnabas, let's key on those who were spreading the good news after having fled in the wake of Stephen's stoning. Surely, that was a horrible event. Stephen was a leader in the church, and many probably thought his death would be a major blow to the spread of the gospel. But God wasn't done, and his work isn't dependent on just one person. What God has in mind to do, he will provide the resources to accomplish.