"Forbidden"

A boundary usually mean a partition or a separation between two entities.  So I am curious, are there boundaries that you have encounter in life that cause you difficulty or concern?   

April 29, 2018  Readings: Acts 10: 44-48, Psalm 98, 1John 5: 1-6, John 15: 9-17

Our world is full of boundaries line isn’t it?   No trespassing signs warn the uninvited to stay out.  In many sporting events if you slip out of bounds you are usually penalized.  Nations and land owners hold carefully to negotiated sometime invisible borders that make the boundary lines.   Railroads tracks often divide a community, there is always someone who lives on the other side of the tracks.  There are even boundaries when it comes to what small town you are from when growing up.  Now I don’t know about you but I grew up in the small mining town of Springhill in Nova Scotia and am proud of it.  But you didn’t boast about the fact that you were a Springhiller when attending a Saturday night dance in the neighboring town of Amherst.   Oh no, that could get you into big trouble, because there were invisible boundaries when it came to townies.  In fact Every Friday night in Springhill around 8:00 pm a group of us would go down town to the Gibbs snack bar on Main Street just to watch the action, the Friday night fights.  There would almost always be a car load of fellows from Amherst, Oxford or Pugwash show up looking to fight.  But folks it didn’t stop there either because if you were Anglican in my home town which I was, my Catholic friends call us the want-a-bees.  If you were United Church you weren’t saved.  If you couldn’t speak in tongues or you weren’t baptized you were going to straight to you know where.    Here is the most astonishing thing about religious boundaries, it really hasn’t changed much for many.   We are still divided and many are still proud of it.  If it’s not religion that divides us, it is culture and or color.

We do not have to look far to see that the religious communities are still separated or segregated by specific religious doctrine, dogma or by denominational barriers.   Boundaries whether visible or invisible segregate and separate us, and these boundaries often function to reinforce our identities.  Case in point:  We are identify by our culture, color, religion, or our denomination.   This helps to define who we are and who our people are.   Many find security and comfort in being able to identify themselves with their denomination, be it Methodist,  United, Anglicans, Catholics, Wesleyan, Baptist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, Seven Day Adventist and so on. This is not necessarily a bad thing folks unless we feel that we have exclusive rights to the truth the way and life of the Christian religion, of Jesus, or the movement of the Holy Spirit.  The danger here is when it promotes exclusion and superiority towards others.   

The passage from Acts this morning brings to us a monumental event in the life of the earliest church and it takes place between a Jewish follower of Jesus, the Apostile Peter and an uncircumcised Roman centurion a confirmed Gentile, Cornelius. 

When the Christian church first started to be developed and take root, the Apostles including Peter believe that the Holy Spirit could come upon, not only the circumcised Jew but also to the uncircumcised outsider meaning the Gentiles.  In fact Jesus commanded them to take his message to the ends of the earth and to feed my sheep he tells Peter, John 21: 15.   In John 10: 16 Jesus says I have other sheep in other pens and they to know my voice and follow me.  The boundaries of religious rules and laws that had separated and segregated the Jews from the early Christians, or people of “The Way” and from those considered Gentile has now been broken.  That we too should no long to be separated or segregated by race, color, denomination, religion, or ritual.   Here was the proof that the anointing of the Holy Spirit was not then, nor is today subject to any  law secular or religious order but is free to come upon whomever or wherever the Spirit sees fit.   Is not this still a problem for us today in the church?  What does Ephesians 4:5 say:  There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism.  A question we might want to consider here is, where in the scriptures does it say there is one lord, one faith, on baptism, with many Christian denominations, folks it simply doesn’t say that.  Do you think we will ever get it?

May I suggest here that we need to take a serious look at man made Religion, Christianity, its denominations, rituals and rules that have developed along with the  evolution of what we know as the Christianity today, testing it against the love of God found in Christ.  For truly Love is the Way but it must be unconditional.  For that is truly the way of our God and we can find and see it visually in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.