“Jesus, Prince of Peace” (Acts 6:1-7)

The Crisis

It’s the second Sunday of Advent. Today we proclaim Jesus as the Prince of Peace. I don’t know about you, but for me, when I say, “Jesus is the Prince of Peace,” I feel tensions between God’s promise of peace and the reality of conflicts and divisions in our world today. I cannot but ask, “Yes, Jesus came to us. But where is peace? Where do we see the signs of peace?” As I was wrestling with these questions, reading and meditating on different passages in the Bible, I discovered that God’s promise of peace is now partially realized through the church – the community of believers who confess Jesus as the Lord. The church is God’s means of showing the world how good, how peaceful it is to live in God’s kingdom, under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

The early church did taste and see that the Lord is good, and that Jesus is the prince of peace. They met together both at home and at the temple day by day. They shared everything they had. They shared their meals. They shared their possessions with joy and generosity. They were in great harmony. The disciples were increasing in numbers, and everything seemed to be going well. But then, the enemy launched a counter attack – first from without (persecution particularly from the Jewish religious leaders), and then from within (division and distraction).

Today’s passage tells us how the enemy tried to destroy the church through division and distraction. In the early church there were mainly two groups of people in terms of language and culture. The majority of the church believers were Hebrew-speaking Jews, and there were some Greek-speaking believers as a minority group. Satan tried to distort this "diversity" into "division." For some reason, the Greek-speaking widows were neglected in the daily distribution of food. So the Greek-speaking disciples started to complain against the majority group, that is, the Hebrew-speaking disciples. Satan put a barrier between the believers. That division made the apostles “distracted” from their ministry. Now the peace and unity of the church were at stake. So how did the early church overcome this crisis and keep the unity of the Spirit?

Holy Conferencing

The first principle is: holy conferencing. When the apostles heard this problem, they called a meeting of the disciples (v. 2a). Now I would like to invite you to use your artistic imagination and see what’s really happening in these seven verses. Though it’s rather a brief passage, there are a lot of things going on – between words, between verses. I don’t think the apostles called the meeting and told the group what to do. Rather, I think they did a holy conferencing – listening to each other, discerning together, praying together – for hours, or perhaps for days.  

Recently, I read the book Holy Listening written by Margaret Guenther. The first thing I have learned is holy listeners ask questions in order to put themselves in other people’s shoes and to feel their feelings and emotions. They ask questions with curiosity such as: “Could you say a little more about that? Can you give me an example of what you mean by…?” “Help me understand what you are saying. Do you mean ...?” Then they listen with compassion.  I am positive that the apostles would ask good questions to listen and feel the people’s feelings. It is not just about food. Underneath the complaints, as a minority the Greek-speaking disciples have the pain of not being accepted, of not being listened to, of not being heard. The apostles would sense that they have been hurt a lot. After this holy conferencing (listening), they develop two action plans.

Focus on the Essentials

First of all, the apostles focus on the essentials. They do their part, saying, “It is not right that we should neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables” (v. 2b), “… while we, for our part, will devote ourselves to prayer and to serving the word” (v. 4). They did not ask “Who or what is right and wrong?" (“knowledge approach”) Instead, they asked themselves, "How can I practice love in this situation?” "How can we build up the church together?" (“love approach”) And they found the answer! The answer was to devote themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word of God. The apostles realized that the church would be spiritually united only through prayer and the word of God. So they chose to focus on the essentials. They chose to focus on their own calling. The great temptation for pastors today is to try to control all church ministries. They become leaders in every area of the church ministry, but the thing is they come to neglect their own calling because of other ministries. This is the strategy of Satan: "Distraction."  But the apostles discerned that this distraction was from the enemy and that the cure for this was to go back to the basics. They knew the limitation of their time, energy, and gifts. They knew that they were called to be one part of the body, and they chose to focus on their calling, the essentials. 

Our spiritual ancestors practiced the following spiritual disciplines: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love.” Then, what are the essentials? As Christians, we need unity on our Christian core beliefs, such as the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Great Commandments (Love God, Love Others), and the Great Commission (Make Disciples). For any other non-essentials, we can have room to think and to let others think.

Choose Love  

The second action plan is this: empowering love. The apostles designated and empowered others. In verse 3 they said, “Therefore, brothers and sisters, select from among yourselves seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may appoint to this task.” Now it is the believers’ turn to choose. The great temptation for believers today is to be outsiders and complain against those different from them. This is the strategy of Satan: “Division.” But the early church believers followed the example of the apostles. They also used a “love” approach. They asked themselves, “How can we practice love in this situation?” “How can we build up the church together?” Then they chose the seven people. We can find a very interesting fact here. All seven were Greek names. In other words, all of them came from a minority group. The majority of the early church believers did not choose their own people. They did not insist on their own way, but instead, they chose the right persons for this issue. They chose seven people from the minority group to take care of their widows. This is love approach.

Jesus is our great model. One day the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery. They came to Jesus to catch him in theological or legal error and asked him a question, “What is right and wrong?” But Jesus refused to get hooked. Instead of answering them, he bent down and wrote something with his finger on the ground in silence. By his silence Jesus forced them to stop playing games, to look within themselves, and to ask themselves, “Is this love?” After this, they went away, one by one. Then, Jesus said to the woman, “I don’t condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8:11). Love and compassion without compromise.

The Church: A Foretaste of God’s Peaceful Kingdom

Jesus wants his church to foretaste his peace, his love, his joy, his hope today and to show them to the world. In today’s passage the apostles and the believers all together in one mind asked the same question, “How can I practice love in this situation?” When they devoted themselves to practicing love, the church of Christ prospered. The Bible says, “So the word of God continued to spread, and the number of disciples in Jerusalem continued to grow rapidly. Even a large number of priests became obedient to the faith” (v. 7, ISV). The point of this verse is not just about the church growth. But, it testifies when we really practice Christ’s love, the Lord will even soften the hearts of our enemies, and draw them to Christ.

When we think about the present and future of the UMC, it almost seems impossible to become one between traditionalists and progressives. But just as Dr. King had the vision of building beloved community, I have a dream today. I have Isaiah’s vision of God’s peaceful kingdom: “The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). My prayer is that we as a church will never give up having holy conferencing together, always focus on the essentials, always choose love, so that Christ’s Church may be strengthened and God get glory. Amen.