Month: December 2020

¹⁷ “Brothers and sisters, I know you acted in ignorance. So did your rulers. ¹⁸ But this is how God fulfilled what he foretold through all the prophets: that his Christ would suffer. ¹⁹ Change your hearts and lives! Turn back to God so that your sins may be wiped away. ²⁰ Then the Lord will provide a season of relief from the distress of this age and he will send Jesus, whom he handpicked to be your Christ. ²¹ Jesus must remain in heaven until the restoration of all things, about which God spoke long ago through his holy prophets. ²² Moses said, The Lord your God will raise up from your own people a prophet like me. Listen to whatever he tells you. ²³ Whoever doesn’t listen to that prophet will be totally cut off from the people. ²⁴ All the prophets who spoke—from Samuel forward—announced these days. ²⁵ You are the heirs of the prophets and the covenant that God made with your ancestors when he told Abraham, Through your descendants, all the families on earth will be blessed. ²⁶ After God raised his servant, he sent him to you first—to bless you by enabling each of you to turn from your evil ways.”

4 While Peter and John were speaking to the people, the priests, the captain of the temple guard, and the Sadducees confronted them. ² They were incensed that the apostles were teaching the people and announcing that the resurrection of the dead was happening because of Jesus. ³ They seized Peter and John and put them in prison until the next day. (It was already evening.) ⁴ Many who heard the word became believers, and their number grew to about five thousand. (Acts 3:17—4:4, CEB)

I have been talking a lot over the past few weeks, for the season of Advent, about fear and the state of the world. I have intentionally been linking Advent to fear because it seems like fear is pervasive, and would world is overcome in the past few years with evil. We are becoming more and more turned in our ourselves and looking our for our best interest rather than the interests of others.

I am writing this before the presidential election in the USA and there is an undertone of hope, yet the society is still more concerned with their own self interest and not the best for society. It seems we are in a time when someone says something I disagree with that we immediately say that the other is wrong and start defending our position. That is what is happening in the reading, Peter and John were preaching good news and the religious leaders felt threatened, so they fought back. I wonder what would have happened if they would have listened… They may not have changed their mind, but maybe there would have been an understanding.

I wonder what would happen if we as followers of the coming savior would listen to be compassionate, to hear our neighbor? What would happen if we loved as God tells us to and were a presence of peace in the community in which we live? What would happen is we let love rule rather than fear?

Let love rule, and kick fear to the curb.

The apostles and the brothers and sisters throughout Judea heard that even the Gentiles had welcomed God’s word. ² When Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him.³ They accused him, “You went into the home of the uncircumcised and ate with them!” ⁴ Step-by-step, Peter explained what had happened. ⁵ “I was in the city of Joppa praying when I had a visionary experience. In my vision, I saw something like a large linen sheet being lowered from heaven by its four corners. It came all the way down to me. ⁶ As I stared at it, wondering what it was, I saw four-legged animals—including wild beasts—as well as reptiles and wild birds. ⁷ I heard a voice say, ‘Get up, Peter! Kill and eat!’ ⁸ I responded, ‘Absolutely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ (Acts 11:1-8, CEB)

This is an interesting passage out of context. It stops at Peter saying that he would never eat anything dirty or unclean. The word that my bible uses is “common.” Reading only this passage, I was honestly somewhat confused as to what the point of the dream was, and what it was supposed to illustrate. Reading on, the same voice says to Peter, “Do not call unclean what God has made clean.” Peter goes on to the house of a gentile and baptizes him and his entire family, making them ‘clean.’ Verse 17 says “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave to us when we believed in Jesus Christ, then who was I that I could stand in God’s way?” 

It goes to show that we should not judge others, because we can never say that we truly know what is in their hearts or minds, just as we certainly can never truly know what is in the mind of God. If God has forgiven someone, why shouldn’t we? We have no way of saying that a person is ‘deserving’ of God’s forgiveness or not, because none of us are ‘deserving,’ and that is the point. We are all a part of God’s creation, and as such we all are created good and have been made clean by God. Who are we to stand in the way of that?

³⁷ When the crowd heard this, they were deeply troubled. They said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” ³⁸ Peter replied, “Change your hearts and lives. Each of you must be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. Then you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹ This promise is for you, your children, and for all who are far away—as many as the Lord our God invites.” ⁴⁰ With many other words he testified to them and encouraged them, saying, “Be saved from this perverse generation.” ⁴¹ Those who accepted Peter’s message were baptized. God brought about three thousand people into the community on that day. ⁴² The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers. (Acts 2:37-42, CEB)

I was excited to write this devotional because Acts 2:42-47 is a passage that for some reason I have always found very comforting. I think it stems from the idea of this ideal society that the new believers had with each other; sharing all they had, living in community with each other, making sure everyone’s needs were met. I like to imagine that I will find a community like that one day. The first summer that I worked at camp, where I met some of my friends who first brought me to Treehouse, this was a reading for our Thursday bible study. It is bookmarked and highlighted in my bible, and is something that I still turn to years after that first summer ended, hoping I can find another community in which to live, to share what I have with others, and to take care and be taken care of.

The verses 37-42 however, details not that perfect society but the way to get there. We get there by changing our hearts and our lives, loving one another, being forgiven of our sins. This is what we need in order to get to that place of love and caring. We leave behind the old, the sin, the hurt inside us, and we step into a community of believers who truly love and care for each other.