A reading of the holy gospel according to John. And Jesus said, truly I assure you, whoever does not enter the sheepfold through the gate but climbs in some way or other is a thief, a murderer. The one who enters through the gate is shepherd of the sheep. The keeper opens the gate for him. The sheep hear his voice as he calls each one of them by name and leads them out.
When he has brought out all of those that are his, the ones he owns, he walks in front of them and they and the sheep follow him because they recognize his voice. They will not follow a stranger. Such a one, they will flee because they do not recognize a stranger's voice. Now, even though Jesus used this figure of speech, they did not understand what he was trying to tell them. He therefore said to them again, my solemn word is this, I am the sheep gate.
All who came before me were thieves and marauders whom the sheep did not recognize and did not obey. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be safe. He will go in and he will go out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and to slaughter and to destroy.
I came that they might have life and have it to the full. This is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. The first reading today introduces us to a question, a problem which disconcerted the early church.
Notice, the church of Jesus Christ began as a society. Our first introduction to it, it's as a group of people. Not a bunch of isolated individual human beings each with his hotline to the holy spirit, but as a collective group. And there's a certain amount of organization here. Now these are the things to note because this is what is precisely denied and is being increasingly denied today.
Now what disturbed the early Christians was a problem that they was bound to happen. Jesus Christ was a Jew. All the disciples were Jews. When Paul comes along, he's from Tarsus, and Paul was head and shoulders above the rest of the disciples as regards background, education, prestige. He was a pharisee.
He was a learned man, and he's from Tarsus. He was a Roman citizen. But he was a Jew, a full fledged Jew who knew the law as well as any of them and probably better. It was Paul who was the great champion of the law against the new way and pursued the Christians out of his fidelity and zeal for the law. So nobody can accuse Paul of being less a Jew than any of the other disciples.
Now the problem faced was this, as long as all the converts were Jewish, they kept their Jewish practices including circumcision and all their dietary laws and all their other laws because it was called the new way. You had had Jewish Jewish faithful who were simply following a new wave but not rejecting the old or rejecting their practices as Jews or rejecting the law as Jews. Now here's the problem. What happens when Gentiles came or let us say non Jewish people? Were you going to make them be good first class Jews, observing all the dietary laws, the laws of circumcision, all the ritual laws?
Or because they were Gentiles was the new way so new that it didn't need the foundation of the ritual, the dietary laws, and the right of circumcision of the Jews, here was the problem. And apparently the majority, as you would guess, felt that the way to follow the Jesus Christ and the new way was to be indoctrinated or inducted into the old way first and to keep it and then move on. And this caused a great deal of dissension because Paul said no. And some and Barnabas, I think, said no. At least there was a small minority who said no against the majority, that is a certain majority.
Now how the point I wanna make most clearly is this, how did they resolve the conflict? Now before I answer that, I want to raise bring in another point. You see, you hear if you've read Clive Staple Lewis, for example, if you talk to Episcopalians, high church Episcopalians, and maybe some others, a Greek Orthodox, if you talk to these people, see, they will tell you that the church of Jesus Christ was made up of churches. You had the church of Antioch, the church of Rome, the church of of Athens. You had the church of Corinth.
You had the church of Jerusalem. These were all churches, but they were all the church. So that in the sixteenth century, when Henry the eighth comes along, you have the church of England. Just you have the church of Rome, just you have the church of of Russia, as the church of Greece, as the church of Constantinople, the church of Alexandria. That's the theory of this thing.
This is what Thomas More said no. Henry a said yes. And apparently, the majority of Englishmen went along with it. But now let's go back and see something. Look at what happened.
Remember, no one has anything more than what you have when you read the book of Acts of the Apostles. That's all we have. Now what do we find? Here is a very divisive issue. Here is an issue that needed a resolution.
It had to be solved. It was causing dissension. It was fracturing the fraternity. So how was it resolved? Paul wasn't in Jerusalem.
So did Paul gather around him the group that constituted the church where he was and say, look, we will decide this issue because we are the church here? Is that what he did? He did nothing of the sort. As prestigious as he was, as outstanding as he was, he sent back to Jerusalem where Peter was to have the problem resolved. Now that all of this isn't in today's text, but this is all in the book of the acts if you will only take the time to read it.
It'll be a revelation to some of you if you'll take the time to read the acts of apostles. Because if there is people say there's a big vacuum here. We don't know much about the early church. That's very true. We don't know a lot about the early church, but we know something.
And maybe the something is pretty substantial, as I think it is. Because when you take this fact, is beyond dispute, beyond dispute, that there was a council of the church in Jerusalem and Peter was acknowledged the head of it in '48 about. So there was a no matter where these disciples were scattered around, it was to Jerusalem where Peter was at this time that they looked for the answer to the problem. They didn't look to their own local geographical unit. And as I say, when you couple this fact, f a c t, when you couple that with what we see in the New Testament about the dominance of Peter, in in fact, beyond all dispute.
And when you have our lord's word to Peter, thou art the rock, put this together and see what you come up with. There's only one answer to it, really, if you want to face the facts. And the answer is that even in the primitive church, you had a certain amount of organization and that there was a high that it was a different level of authority and Peter is at the head. Now there's a tendency today towards Gnosticism which rejects all of this just as it did in the third and the fourth century. And so when we're reading the acts of the act the acts of apostles, keep in mind, this is the history of your church, and here's another strong foundation for your faith.
It doesn't generate faith, but it sustains it. We know whereof we are. We know to whom we belong. We stand firm with Peter on the rock. In the name of the father and the son and my spirit.
Amen.