Rubicons Real and Apparent - Sermon 17th May 2009

There’s a small river in north-east Italy called the Rubicon. It’s not much more than  twenty miles long, but two thousand years ago it had a very important political significance. It marked the boundary between the Roman/Italian homeland to the south, and the first that you came to of Rome’s provinces, Gallia Cisalpina, “Gaul-this-side-of-the-Alps”, to the north. Because Gallia Cisalpina was a province, if you were a Consul, or a Proconsul, or any of the other commands of the Roman army, you could be in charge of legionary forces there. South of the Rubicon, in the Roman homeland, you couldn’t. The law forbade it.

That was for the protection of the Roman Republic from ambitious generals who might want to take it over and found a military dictatorship, and as he approached the River Rubicon in what the old Roman calendar would have called January of 49BC, that was exactly what Julius Caesar had in mind. On the northern side of the river, he was a powerful, successful general, with a string of successful campaigns behind him, and every right to be there. If he crossed the Rubicon, he would by that act be declaring war, not just on the political factions in Rome who were, amid their own squabbling and in-fighting, trying to organize against him, but on the Roman Republic itself. He would be redefining himself – and he couldn’t be sure how until, unless, he won the war that he was starting by doing so. By crossing the Rubicon with his army, he was starting something that, for good or ill, would be irreversible. This was, for him, total commitment. There was no going back.

So “crossing the Rubicon” has become a phrase bequeathed to us by history and Caesar himself. And he also gave us a second. As he set foot in the river, he muttered “alea iacta est.” The die is cast...

This morning’s Acts reading seems at first glance like the crossing of a Rubicon. We’ll see, though, that it’s more complicated than that. In the run-up to it, Peter has found himself confronted by a group of people who seem quite decisively to be outside the Church – yet he decides to include them. They don’t seem to qualify for admission because they don’t bear the usual marks of the kind of religiousness and piety that allow people to be included. The males, in particular, aren’t circumcised. They aren’t Jewish. And if they aren’t Jewish – how can they become Christian? That’s a non-question for us, of course, but two thousand years ago, it certainly wasn’t. It practically split the Church. How could you let in people who weren’t already clearly, and traditionally, God’s people? How could you let in people who were this different?

The first half of Acts looks at first glance like a succession of crossings of Rubicons. In a sense, it starts with the end of Luke’s Gospel, where there are only the disciples, terrified and bereft after the crucifixion, and then the Risen Christ comes and stands among them. And then, in the first chapter of Acts – Luke’s volume 2 – this little core group is added to by the appointment of Matthias, to make up for the loss of Judas. He’s from just outside the inner circle. And then comes Pentecost  - we get there a fortnight today – when the Spirit comes on the disciples and the Church is born, and born out on the street, proclaiming the Gospel. All sorts of expatriate Jews hear the new message – and respond, because it speaks to them, literally and metaphorically, in their own language.

All sorts of barriers begjn to fall, as the new-born Church grows, up until there’s a crisis. The Greek-speaking Jews seem to feel that their community is being discriminated against. Their widows seem to be being neglected in the daily distribution of food and alms. It’s as though there’s some kind of mentality at work that only the Aramaic-speaking members are “real” Christians; these Greek-speaking Jews, presumably with connections, and maybe origins, well outside Palestine are – or feel, which is just as bad – second-class Christians. So the early Church creates a new ministry, the Deacons, to look after them, and integrate them into her life.

Then there’s a persecution. It starts with the stoning of one of these seven deacons, Stephen, but as we saw last week, it leads to a scattering of the Christian community, and another deacon, Philip, finds himself in the desert, at a lonely roadside, in just the right place to encounter a highly placed official of the Ethiopian Kandake, being chauffeured home in a chariot. We probably need to assume that the man is a Jew, but it certainly isn’t irrelevant that he’s also a eunuch. Castration often went with eligibility for high office in oriental courts, but it was something that Jewish sensibility, with its emphasis on family and the need to maintain the existence of the Jewish people from generation to generation found deeply offensive. Here was a man who had been unmanned because of the demands of his position, and his standing with regard to the Jewish religious community would in some Jewish eyes have been very uncertain. And yet, he is immersing himself in the Jewish scriptures. And Philip expounds them as they jog along, and suddenly there is water at the roadside. “What is to prevent me being baptised?” says the eunuch, and Philip can see no objection at all. Is the water at the roadside a Rubicon? Luke hints very strongly that the whole Church crosses into new territory in this act.

But even before he gets to this point, Philip has done something that we know enough from the Gospels to realize is quite revolutionary. Because he’s been preaching the Gospel to the Samaritans. So close to the Jews in so many ways, with a common descent that’s both affirmed and disputed, and a similar claim on the Patriarchs and Moses, we know from Sunday School how much the Samaritans and the Jews hated each other. And yet, the Samaritans accept the Gospel. Irreversibly, the Church is moving out into the world.

In Acts chapter 9 comes Paul’s conversion, Paul who will spend his life taking the Gospel to the Gentiles. But before we can get to that part of the story, Luke feels that we have to address the biggest issue on the horizon, and it’s one that hasn’t quite come up yet. Everyone who has become a Christian up to this point has been, and remains, some kind of Jewish person.  The Greek-speakers, the eunuch, even the Samaritans. They are on one side of a line, with the rest of the world on the other, marked off from it by their Law, and the physical sign of their subjection to it, the mark of circumcision.

And the way Luke tells the story, it’s Peter who reaches this frontier first. He is summoned to the house of Cornelius, not so much by the servants the gentile centurion sends as by the Holy Spirit, who gives him advance warning that they are coming – and a strong hint how to respond. A dream, in which a cloth is lowered from heaven containing all sorts of animals, some of which Jews are not permitted to eat, and a voice says “Arise, Peter, kill and eat...” And he refuses, appalled. He has never eaten anything unclean. “What God has called clean, you must not call unclean...” says the voice. And the penny drops. When Peter gets to the centurion’s house, and the Spirit falls on the devout, godly man and his whole household, he baptizes them all there and then. As he says in his report to the Jerusalem church – what was he to do? The clearest signs were there that the Spirit was at work in and through these people. He wasn’t extending the boundaries of the Church arbitrarily, on his own authority. He was simply marking as inside the Church what the Spirit had shown him was inside the Church.

In one sense, you could say, that was a crossing of a Rubicon, for Peter. With him, the Church comes to a place she had never been before. Certainly, he was stepping outside the territory that the old Law demarcated. These were people the Law had never applied to, and yet they were included in the Church. So if this was right – the Church was bigger than Israel. The Church was bigger than the Law.

And that would be a terrifying thing to say on your own authority. A huge, awful, colossal thing. But in a  way, Jesus had already said it. Repeatedly, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says “You have heard it said... but I say to you...” Which means “Moses said.. but I’m saying to you... “Jesus does say this on his own authority, and this authority is a crucial component of the revelation of the Christ. “He speaks as one with authority... Who has [such] authority...?”

Peter doesn’t – not according to Acts. He is an authoritative figure, for Luke, the first of the Apostles. But it isn’t on this authority that he admits these Gentiles into the Church without making them Jews first, without, that is, making them submit to the Jewish Law. He does what he does because the Spirit compels him. Because the Holy Spirit makes it impossible for him to do otherwise.  God is among them, the Spirit at work within them. What else can he do?

Oddly enough, this year is the fortieth anniversary of something that looks a lot like a crossing of a Rubicon in the history of the Church of Scotland.

The first woman to be ordained as a minister in the Church of Scotland was the Revd Catherine McConnachie in 1969. Ironically enough, she was ordained by the Presbytery of Aberdeen. There were many people at that time who felt that that was a Rubicon the Kirk should not have crossed, out of the lawful and safe into the chaotic and dangerous. But see what’s changed since! Now, forty years later, there are still people who oppose the ordination of women in the Kirk, but in order to maintain their position, they have to turn a blind eye to everything that the Holy Spirit has done through the ministry of women in the last forty years – and on the Great Day of Judgment, they will have to answer for that refusal to look at what the Spirit has done.

Human beings cross Rubicons when they take affairs into their own hands, and transgress the boundaries of the law on their own initiative. But with Peter, that’s not what’s going on. There’s another dimension. The question for him is: is God in this? If the answer to that is “Yes!” – then what else is he to do? He isn’t staking everything on the uncertain currents of history, or the tide of events, or his own strength and resolve. He is committing everything to God, and taking his stand on God’s truth.

The Book of Acts is the story of the Church being dragged, kicking and screaming, by the Holy Spirit, beyond the comfort of a Law that is smaller than Christ, smaller than his love and grace. And this happens when people see what the Spirit is doing, and acknowledge it. Peter is no Julius Caesar. He is a cautious, timid disciple who finds himself forced to answer the question: is this the work of the Spirit, or isn’t it? And it’s saying “Yes!” that fills him with courage. And that courage transforms him. And see what that does to him.

It’s as though the Spirit had snatched off his cap, and thrown it over the wall. He had no choice but to go over, because what was on the other side of the wall was too precious for him to turn back and lose it.

Because suddenly, what was on the other side of the wall was Truth. What was beyond the barrier was God...

And when you know that, what choice do you have, but to go, boldly, where no-one has gone before? Except, it seems, God…