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Acts 11:19-30 (The Church in Antioch)
19 Now those who had been scattered by the persecution that broke out when Stephen was killed traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch, spreading the word only among Jews. 20 Some of them, however, men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. 21 The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.
22 News of this reached the church in Jerusalem, and they sent Barnabas to Antioch. 23 When he arrived and saw what the grace of God had done, he was glad and encouraged them all to remain true to the Lord with all their hearts. 24 He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith, and a great number of people were brought to the Lord.
25 Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, 26 and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.
27 During this time some prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. 28 One of them, named Agabus, stood up and through the Spirit predicted that a severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. (This happened during the reign of Claudius.) 29 The disciples, as each one was able, decided to provide help for the brothers and sisters living in Judea. 30 This they did, sending their gift to the elders by Barnabas and Saul.
Statistics is not my favorite subject but I do hope that these facts and figures will not only interest you but will put fire in your spirit this morning.
About two hundred years ago, when the father of modern Protestant mission, William Carey sailed to India as a missionary, 9 out of 10 professing Christians in the world lived in Europe . But in the year 2000, that ratio is only 28 percent. Today, out of 100 Christians, 43 of them lived in Latin America and Africa . And out of 100 Christians today, 13 of them now lived in Asia .
Just about one hundred years ago, 10 percent of the population in Africa was Christian. But by the year 2000, about half the African population profess the Christian faith.
In the 1970s, there were an estimated three million Christians in China . Now, the number may be as high as 130 million (more than 400% growth). Last Sunday, more Presbyterians were in church in Ghana than in Scotland .[1] And do you know that South Korea sends more missionaries abroad to spread the gospel than any other country except the United States ?
So what’s the story behind the stats? What does it mean?
Sociologists tell us that the global church has experienced such phenomenal growth in Africa, Latin America and Asia in the last fifty years… such a huge demographic shift that we have never seen anything like it since the earliest years of church history as recorded in the book of Acts that we’ve been reading for the last couple of weeks.
That means… no one country… no one culture… no one language… no one ethnic group can be considered as the dominant center of the Christian faith. It is a truly global faith.
It’s interesting if you compare that with Islam, for example. The Islamic faith has a geographical center based in Mecca (every day, Muslims pray facing the kiblat)… There is a privileged language in which the Koran was written and recited. It cannot really be translated into any other language (other versions are just interpretations, the real thing is only in Arabic)… the contrast is even more remarkable when we consider the fact that the Bible is the most translated book in human history. Period. It is translated into more than 2000 languages (and counting) so that local cultures may own a copy of the Bible and read it for themselves. And as a global movement, it’s also very hard to pinpoint the geographical center of Christianity – is it Jerusalem ? Rome ? Geneva ? Germany ? The United States ? The emerging global South? There is no one dominant location but many centers of influence…
And that is in the DNA of the church from the very beginning, isn’t it?
Remember the gospel blueprint in Acts 1? Jesus says: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem Judea and Samaria
On the day of Pentecost, it took a miracle of the Holy Spirit to enable them to preach the good news in various foreign languages to Jews coming from various countries, starting with Jerusalem as Ground Zero.
Then it took the persecution of Stephen to forcefully scatter the disciples across Samaria Judea …
As we have seen last week in Acts 10, it took a strange vision about eating unclean animals to overcome Peter’s mental block, to give him a new paradigm shift
That God’s salvation was intended for … every nation… every tribe… every tongue… every people… every land… to the ends of the earth that they may give glory… give honor… give praise unto the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
In today’s episode (in Acts 11), the gospel broke through big time in Antioch , the third largest city in the whole Roman Empire . History books tell us that Antioch was a super-dense, super-diverse urban center. It was a melting pot of Western and Eastern cultures, with traders coming in from as far as Africa , Persia and Asia . Not only was the city surrounded by an external wall as protection from outsiders, it was also divided by many internal walls… There were walls on the inside to keep apart these diverse people groups, to separate and divide them into different ethnic townships or racial ghettos. The Jews would stay in one part of town, the Greeks stay at the other end, all separated by walls. Why? Because such ethnic divisions often lead to riots, especially after some big sporting events and somebody’s favorite team lost a race. So these internal walls gave Antioch a nickname as the ‘Four Cities’ (Tetrapolis).
In the first place, it was never part of a City-to-City church planting strategy to come to Antioch … These believers were actually scattered by the persecution that broke out after Stephen got killed… and after Saul (remember him?) that hardcore, rightwing, fundamentalist, (Perkasa look-alike) Pharisee who went on a rampage hunting down Christians and chased them out of their comfort zone… So they brought along the gospel with them. They talked to the Jews wherever they went at first but then, somebody had the bright idea to talk to the Greek-speaking outsiders as well… telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. And the Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord. That was how the church in Antioch was born.
From this episode, I would like to draw out THREE implications about what the kingdom community of Jesus looks like and what it means for us in Malaysia today:
1) Our new identity in Christ is the root of racial reconciliation
Does Antioch remind you of this place we call home? Because Malaysia too has diverse ethnic communities living side by side with each other but with precious little contact and understanding in between. We too are often reminded of riots and threats of violence if we have the audacity to openly discuss any sensitive issues relating to… Race! Maybe this sermon ought to have a hazard warning: “Danger! Listen at your own risk”.
But it was not always like that. Or maybe I am too old to remember correctly. But I used to grow up loving LAT, a famous cartoonist from Ipoh , my hometown… I’m sure many of us have come across his heart-warming stories about Kampong Boy living happily in this multicultural paradise of tolerance. But somewhere along the line, Kampong Boy got kidnapped and our hopes for social harmony, our dreams for national integration got hijacked and replaced with ugly walls… walls of suspicion, walls of fear, walls of hate and walls of racism… And as a nation, we have never been more Malay, more Chinese, more Indian and more Lain-Lain than now.
Did we change? Or has it been like that all along? What happened to Bangsa Malaysia ? What about “Satu Bangsa, Satu Negara”?
It doesn’t matter. What we desperately need now is an identity that can unite all of us under the Malaysian sun, an identity that goes beyond our tribal loyalties, that overcomes our communal walls… where can we find a resolution to this deep tension in the Malaysian story?
Well, the church in Antioch was special in many ways. Unlike Jerusalem which was predominantly Jewish, the Antioch church reflected the ethnic and social diversity around them. You can get a clue of that by just looking at their leadership team in Acts 13, there was Barnabas (a Levite landowner from Cyprus), Simeon called Niger (probably a black man), Lucius (a Roman from Cyrene in North Africa), Manaen (an aristocrat who grew up with king Herod Antipas himself) and last but not least, you have Paul (the converted rightwing, fundamentalist Pharisee). Believe me, you can’t get any more diverse than that!
Previously these people were separated by conflicting loyalties to their tribal gods or ethnic identities, but now they were united by the all-inclusive, all-embracing, universal lordship of Jesus. They now have a new identity that transcends all those barriers… For the first time, they are called Christians, people belonging to the Christ. So they are crossing over those walls of separation, pulling down barriers to come together and pray and worship because of their new identity in Christ. They are now Christians.
Just look around us. Because of the cross of Jesus, we are all reconciled to God and not only that; we are now reconciled to each other. Once we were natural enemies, but now we are grafted into God’s covenant family. We now belong to Christ and to each other. I love it when our CDPC worship service reflects that diversity… I love it when Phoebe from Ghana prays for us or the Lord’s prayer was recited by Samuel in Setswana, when the music team members from America, Indonesia and Malaysia play and sing together, when Project Serve goes out to serve children of Indian descent at the Enggang flats, when we as a diverse congregation edify each other and worship the Lord as one body… when we do that, we are breaking down walls.
Imperfect though we are, do you realize how beautiful that is? Our new identity in Christ supersedes all other loyalties and brings us together as one family…
The church is and should be the most inclusive community on earth. By being true to who we are in Christ, we become a countercultural sign pointing forward to a different way of being human, a sign of the kingdom that God is setting up here on earth.
So in Malaysia
Isn’t that awesome?
It was also in Antioch , some years later, that Paul confronted Peter for not eating with Gentiles, because Peter was afraid of some people who insisted that Gentile believers must follow Jewish custom… They must be circumcised in order to belong to God’s community… What happened was this… During their church kopitiam eating time, Peter used to sit at the same table with the Gentile believers but somebody from Jerusalem told him, “Hey, how can you do that? That char siew they are eating is not halal.” After that, Peter stayed away from them and ate with fellow Jews only… So Paul had to confront him, “We are not justified or declared as righteous by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ… Hello? You are not walking in line with the gospel”. Does the gospel transform your eating habits? Who do we normally eat with during lunch hours at the office or kopitiam in church? People who are same like us or different from us? Are we in line with the gospel?
And what is the gospel anyway? Well, the gospel says: “In Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:26-28)
In Christ, there is neither Malay nor Chinese nor Indian nor Lain-lain… In Christ, there is neither Pakatan nor Barisan. How about that? It doesn’t mean I’m no longer Chinese or I can’t vote if I’m a Christian. The church cannot be apolitical or neutral… but we are non-partisan, our identity in Christ goes beyond and transforms these distinctives…
It’s a bit like eating Rojak, you know… the pineapple is still pineapple (cucumber), the sotong is still sotong, the prawn paste is still prawn paste, but when you mix them all up, their distinctive flavors enrich each other so that something tasty comes out of it. In the same way, each member of the church retains his or her ethnic and cultural distinctiveness, (that doesn’t get watered down) yet at the same time each one lends flavor to and is flavored by the surrounding members, so that while we retain all the cultural distinctives, we come up with something unique to the church.
The Bible says: For Jesus himself is our peace, who has made us one and destroyed every barrier, every dividing wall of hostility through the cross. Through the cross, he put to death our hostility. His purpose was to create a new humanity and in one body to reconcile all of us to God. For through Jesus we all have access to God the Father by one Spirit.
As a result of that, we are no longer foreigners… no more strangers… no more outsiders but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s own family. In Jesus, we too are being built together into a holy temple in which God is present by His Spirit.
Wouldn’t you want to be a part of this radical inclusive community of God?
Friends – This is who we really are in Jesus. He has reconciled us to God and to each other. Let us be agents of reconciliation in a fragmented society, to build bridges and tear down walls of separation…
2) Inclusive mission sows the seed of racial reconciliation
There are missionaries in our midst… Brothers and sisters who have left a more secure and comfortable home, uprooted their family from a more developed country probably with better healthcare and better education system to settle here in Malaysia… at the same time when many Malaysians are dreaming and plotting to migrate to those nations from which they came. What’s wrong with this picture?
It seems like a decision that runs against “conventional” wisdom, doesn’t it? If you ask them why, I believe many of them would say, “I sensed the Lord calling us to Malaysia so that the gospel of salvation may somehow reach those who need it most, especially the largest un-reached people group here in this city. We came here with desire that the name of Jesus will be glorified in the hearts of many”. As a Malaysian, I am grateful for this ministry partnership in CDPC. I thank the Lord for their faithful discipleship, which inspires us to have the same sense of calling for our own nation.
And the Jerusalem-Antioch church relationship gives us an example of mission partnership… a partnership that is characterized by mutual encouragement, mutual submission to each other, and humility. Because when news of Gentiles coming to the Lord reached Jerusalem , they sent one of their best guys Barnabas to encourage and build them up in the faith. We also read that gifted prophets from Jerusalem also came and ministered to them. They were training disciples to go deep in the faith, not just making shallow converts. Barnabas also brought in Paul to come and teach the new believers for a whole year. He didn’t feel threatened by someone with better teaching gifts and abilities, but happily gave Paul the platform to serve when he was out in the cold… hiding from those who wanted to kill him. Can you imagine what a loss it would be if the apostle Paul had remained unknown and hidden forever! No wonder Barnabas is called: “Son of Encouragement.”
In many ways, CDPC Puchong as a church plant has been blessed by ministry partnerships like that with American churches such as Redeemer Presbyterian New York, Christ the King, Providence and others. Such cooperation and resource-sharing reminds us that we are part of a global, universal church involved in mission together.
But, friends, we need to remember also that mission is not just a sub-set of the church. Mission is not just the job description for a specialized few. It’s not a program or event that we run once in a while. It’s not even a sub-topic of the Bible.
The fact is, the entire church as church needs to be missional because God is a missional God. Part of our SIMPLE DNA in CDPC is to make disciples of all peoples. How do we do that? By creating space for conversation, reconciliation and peace making. That means if people touch CDPC, they should feel missional texture… If they cut us up, they should see us bleed missional blood… We exist as a community for the good of those outside. So we must always ask ourselves: How can we be a channel of God’s blessing to others? How can we reach out to “outsiders” in every area of the church? How can we be inclusive in every single ministry we do?
The Antioch church is an important milestone in God’s redemptive history, because it is from here that the first missionary journeys were launched to reach Gentile outsiders. They were passionate about mission and gladly sent their best leaders, their A-Team of Paul and Barnabas, to ministry OUTSIDE the walls of the church… to boldly plant churches in cities and nations where no one had gone before. As a result of that, seeds were sown that would one day transform not only the church but also changed the face of the Roman world.
And that is God’s plan all along since the beginning. It’s not Plan B in His agenda… God didn’t go, “Oh no, Israel has messed up big time so I better get the Gentiles in as some sort of disaster recovery plan.”
Actually…The whole bible, the entire Bible tells us the story of God’s mission working through His people to redeem God’s world.
It was God’s plan all along since creation. All of humanity was made in the image of God, in His own likeness. Therefore, people have infinite dignity and intrinsic worth… and it does not depend on the color of their skin, or their economic status, their abilities or anything like that. They are uniquely valuable and have inalienable rights on the basis of them being made in God’s image.
When humanity messed up the world through sin and hate, God came to the rescue through a family. He said to Abraham, “I will bless you and make you a blessing to many nations”. The whole purpose of God calling Abraham was so that other nations will be blessed through his seed.
When God made a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai , they were called to be a royal priesthood, a holy nation and a chosen people so that through their laws, worship, economics and politics, they will be a holistic witness among the nations. Prophets like Isaiah foretell a day when every knee will bow and every tongue confess their trust in God. Time and again, the Psalms sing of the inclusive scope of God’s salvation: May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face shine on us — so that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. Let the nations be glad! (Ps 67)
We are not just talking about the biblical basis of mission. It’s more accurate to say that there is a missional basis of the Bible. All of Scripture is a grand narrative of God’s mission that reaches its climax in Revelations, the last book of the Bible, when Jesus will one day be glorified because by His sacrifice, he has redeemed people for God from every tribe and language and nation. (Rev 5:9). I hope that I will live long enough to see the day when we can worship and witness openly together with Malay brothers and sisters in Christ. Because the Gospel was never meant to be confined exclusively to any particular country or ethnic group…
And until that fateful day, the whole logic of mission (our mission if we choose to accept it) is that there is one Lord who created everyone and to whom all people groups belong and owe their allegiances. So we, as His people, proclaim this reality to everyone.
Do you realize that once in blue moon, Muslim background believers as well as non-believers may come in and join our worship service? It’s happened. It’s true. Amazing, isn’t it? Imagine if that happens today, would you do anything different from what you are doing now? I wonder: Does anything need to be changed in our language, in our musical style, in our sermons, in our church culture if we are to communicate God’s love more effectively? When we begin to think like that, we learn to be a missional church, where every single part of our church life is geared for the presence of non-believers.
Friends: The kingdom of God
3) Incarnational living bears the fruit of racial reconciliation
Not only was the Antioch church diverse and missional, they also emptied themselves sacrificially in order to help others. A severe famine would spread over the entire Roman world. Everybody is going to get hit including the Antioch church. They too have bills to pay. But the disciples, as each one was able, decided to take up a collection and intentionally help the brothers and sisters living in Judea . They sent financial gift through Barnabas and Saul. They cross over walls to meet the needs of suffering people.
The Gentile outsiders have now become a blessing to the Jewish community. This is almost unheard of in the ancient world.
Similarly, our preaching must always be done in the context of authentic community, in the context of sacrificial service to the so-called “outsiders”. Our ministries in opening up the children’s library, feeding the poor and providing English tuition classes… these are not just part time activity that we do after our main job of evangelism is done. They are an integral part of our overall Gospel witness. It’s always word and deed. Faith and action… Walk and talk. Show and tell…
We need to be incarnational, meaning we need to enter into other people’s worlds, just as God became like us and entered our world to serve and give His life away. We need enter into the world of our neighbors’ thinking as we try to understand how they look at life. We come into the world of their feeling as we try to empathize with their pain and suffering. It’s not easy. It’s always risky.
It’s always easier to keep our faith pure and stainless by staying away from people who think different and behave different, isn’t it? It is very natural to be fearful that if I work closer with those unbelieving, immoral people that I’d somehow be corrupted or influenced by them. But it also means that we are building up walls of isolation. If Jesus thinks like that, He would never become incarnate as a human being on this sinful earth.
I would like to suggest something more in line with the gospel, something even more radical than Occupy Wall Street or Occupy Dataran. Let’s occupy the Kingdom of God
Here’s an example of how we can do that. I’m not a brave person. I’m just your regular, middle class, tax paying Malaysian Chinese who hates to rock the boat. So some relatives and friends are puzzled when they know from Facebook that I attended all three Bersih rallies. The first one happened a few weeks after my wedding and the second one took place a few weeks after my son’s second birthday. Actually I was so worried that I even took a video of myself leaving some ‘famous last words’ for Yoong Zhen… just in case…
But together with CDPC friends (there’s encouragement and strength in community), we went for the rally because we feel that a fair and free election is important for our country… because we want a better future for our children… because as a Christian, we cannot stand idle while our fellow Malaysians come together for that cause. It’s a small symbol of our solidarity, to be present in body and soul.
Some of you who went would know this experience… I’ve never felt more proud of being a Malaysian than when we sing Negaraku on the streets, in the midst of this huge peaceful, multicultural, multicolored, multiethnic crowd united for a common goal. Some of us were moved to tears – this is what 1Malaysia ought to look like. This is the place we all call home. If we don’t make a stand when the country is moving the wrong direction, who will?
In the process, my skewed perception of our Malay Muslim neighbors also changed. I saw how courageous and disciplined the Unit Amal of PAS was. Their red shirts were always leading the way, organizing traffic, protecting the crowds by putting themselves in front of the FRU squads. A Malay uncle passed me salt when my eyes were stung by tear gas. Someone wrote, “Bersih was arguably the largest trust-building event in Malaysia 's history after Merdeka.” She is probably right. It’s funny that I felt safer walking beside guys wearing turban and long beard, looking a bit like Osama and shouting “Allahu akbar!” than the police who is supposed to protect us.
Being incarnational means that we need to step out of our comfort zone and into the world of others. By doing so, we are humbled to realize that our prejudices are wrong, that God’s common grace is poured out abundantly even on those who have yet to know Christ, and we ourselves are transformed by seeing what God is doing in the world.
Some people may ask, “Really? I don’t see how Jesus can be the answer to our Malaysian dilemma of ethnic divisions. In fact, Christian evangelism is part of the problem, isn’t it? That’s why people like Hassan Ali are so upset. You Christians just want to take over Penang and make it into a Christian state, right?”
Because let’s face it, everybody has a set of beliefs and we work to shape our society according to those beliefs. The religious people have their laws and they say: “How dare those immoral secular people promote gay rights and Sexualiti Merdeka here?” The secular people have their pluralistic ideologies and they wonder: “Who do these narrow religious nutcases think they are to ban these things?” Before you know it, walls are coming up all over the place. Conservatives against liberals, bumiputeras versus non-bumiputeras, capitalists versus socialists, and everybody thinks they are better than everybody else. .
It depends very much on what your core guiding beliefs are.
But if at the heart of Christian belief is a King who gave up His powers and rights in order to become a humble servant, a King who empties Himself to love and serve His enemies, a King who became poor and died for the good of those who rejected Him that they may have plenty… if we truly believe in this incarnational, crucified God revealed in Jesus, then the citizens of this Kingdom are the best possible citizens of Malaysia.
This is the kind of belief that will tear down walls. We know we are not any better than anybody because we are sinners, maybe worse sinners than the so-called ‘outsiders’. Justified freely by God’s grace… not by our moral achievements…
For this King rejects violence and carries the cross for the sake of others so we are not interested in getting power for our own tribe. This King saved the world through weakness, so we too will cross walls through sacrificial service to all people… to seek peace for the city as a whole, whether they believe it or not.
For this King died so that all Malaysians can find healing and reconciliation to God and to each other. That’s the kind of good news that will change our politics upside down and inside out. And if any Malaysian, bumiputra or not, finds this King Jesus compelling and attractive, he or she is welcome to follow and love Him freely and without coercion.
That’s what real Christian evangelism is all about.
Those who lose their lives shall find it. Those who lose their power will find true power to serve. Isn’t the Kingdom of God
Brothers and sisters: When we as the church reflect the diversity of our society, it would make the gospel so compelling to our non-Christians neighbors (Hey, this community is so multicultural!). At the same time, we will also be challenging the status quo (Hey, these Christians are so different and inclusive! What’s going on here?)
Let us be salt and light at such a time as this. Let us make that a reality in CDPC Puchong together.
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