It pays to know some history.  It was the American philosopher and Harvard professor George Santayana who wrote, back in 1905, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Looking around, it seems to me that people can even remember their history and still repeat it.  Santayana wrote those words before World War One, with its twenty million dead, yet this wise warning didn’t prevent World War Two, with its forty million, at a conservative estimate.  What keeps us doing what can only lead to sorrow and ruin?  Idiocy, I suppose, would be one secular answer, a hopeless answer.  Brokenness begets brokenness.  People who are hurt tend to hurt, themselves and others.  At heart, unhealed hurt is not ultimately responsible for the woes we inflict upon one another.  What keeps us doing what can only lead to sorrow and ruin?  The answer a Christian has from Scripture is sin: sin keeps us doing what can only lead to tragedy.

Christianity offers an answer to that deep, stubborn problem.  The answer is not what we do for God.  The answer of Christianity is what God does for us: the accomplishment of Christ.  He comes among us, seeks and invites us into relationship, friendship with God.  That’s not typical, in religion.  Most religions have precious little to do with friendship, particularly friendship with God!  In most religions current in the world today, God does not come down: people must ascend, transcend, to God.

Without God, history is an impossible trap.  That wasn’t the majority opinion in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but events afterwards suggested a re-evaluation was in order.  The call to remember that God is involved in human history is an unintended but clear message in the film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine (1960), which depicted human society stuck in the same self-destructive pattern, despite every bright veneer of progress.  With God, history has a purpose, a direction, happily out of our hands.  No amount of human meddling can keep that purpose from its perfection, and people do meddle.

God will achieve His purposes, through us and, if need be, despite us.  We hear a message similar to this from a surprising source: Gamaliel, whom Luke identifies as a Pharisee and “a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people” (5:34).  Later, Luke also tells us Gamaliel was the teacher of Saul of Tarsus.  This honored teacher was attempting to inject some calming, clarifying wisdom into the fiery, frothy argument among the religious authorities regarding what to do to Peter and John—and the rest of the Jesus people—who refused to keep their mouths shut.  These agitators were undermining the whole system!  What was said of them in Thessalonica was true: the Jesus people “have caused trouble all over the world” (Ac 17:6).  When the authorities seek to silence you, it isn’t simply because you’re a nuisance.  They perceive you as a threat to their power, their claims to power, the foundation of their power.  The foundation of the power of the religious authorities was not God, beloved.  By this point and for centuries before, the foundation of their power was power, that sandiest of soils.

Gamaliel, who, as a wise teacher, understands one or two things about power and about God, reminds his listeners of some of their recent history: “Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him.  He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing” (5:36).  Claiming to be somebody.  David Koresh stuff.  Isn’t that exactly what John the Baptist would not do?  And though scores and hundreds throughout the region regarded Jesus as the messiah, did he ever claim to be that messiah?

Gamaliel provides another example: “After [Theudas], Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt.  He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered” (5:37).  “In the days of the census”: it takes a moment to connect those dots.  Gamaliel is talking about the Roman census, taken when Augustus was emperor, the one that required Joseph to take oh-so-pregnant Mary with him on the journey down to Bethlehem.  Why would a census cause a revolt?  Why wouldn’t it?  The census was to establish a documented basis for taxation: money the Jews would be required to pay their Roman overlords.  Protection money, I guess you might call it.

And the point Gamaliel is making by means of this quick review of their recent history, these flickering, failed rebellions?  “Leave these men alone!  Let them go!  For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail” (5:38).  When people try to force God’s hand, hasten His plans, it never ends well.  There are plenty of groups out there that had real purpose, a real mission, once.  Remember Occupy Wall Street, or the Tea Party?  Promise Keepers?  Even Black Lives Matter doesn’t seem to have the clout it had just three years ago; they no longer have sufficient political expediency for the power behind the power.

Gamaliel is no idealist.  Neither is he some reactionary.  He has dedicated his life to contemplating God and God’s Word and to teaching men about God and God’s Word.  Gamaliel may be greatly mistaken about a great many things, as perhaps we all are, definitely including me.  Gamaliel does seem to have one thing figured out correctly: God will succeed where man, by himself, can only fail.  In a way, Gamaliel is proclaiming the message of Christ.  He tells those listening that, if this movement “is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God” (5:39).

Yes, Israel had a long history of contending with God.  More often, God’s people seem better at struggling against and wrestling with God than resting in Him with quiet confidence and trusting obedience.  Gamaliel seems to be saying, let’s just wait and see if these events and this movement is from God or not.  Let’s give God a chance to show us a little more of His plan, His ways, His wisdom, glory, and grace.  You know what’s going to fill up our churches, what’s going to bring people in?  It’s not soup kitchens or bread ministries or leasing the facility out to daycare or preschool programs—helpful as all those are.  It’s not going to be marches on Washington for this or that cause or deferred matter of justice, important as those are.  It won’t be making the denomination a sanctuary and accompaniment church for migrants making their desperate dashes across the border.  Those are outward things—the things people think of, when and if they ever think of what a church really ought to be doing in the world.

What ought the church be doing?  Many years ago, A. W. Tozer preached on the importance for each of us to figure out “why we are part of a Christian congregation and what that congregation is striving to be and do.”[1]  My take is that the church—we here and what happens in this place—ought to be clearing the way between people and God.  The church ought to be that place to be still and know that God is God.  The church ought to be where we conscientiously make room for God to work, where we aren’t crowding out God with our busy-ness, thinking we’re being so very faithful.  People will start coming to church when it pleases God to show them a little more of His plan, His ways, His wisdom and glory, and grace, when it pleases Him to open their eyes, their ears, open their world-bent minds and hearts so tender for this and that sad issue but hard against God.

Oh, let the church be doing, certainly: doing what God gives us to do—cultivating our garden, working out our own salvation.  Let us never use that cultivation as an alibi for not taking a Christ-interest in the lives of those around us.  Let us never use the desire to make a difference in the lives of those around us as an excuse not to invest labor in our own faithful, obedient walk with Jesus in Spirit and truth.

The Jewish council approved of Gamaliel’s call to make haste slowly.  That didn’t prevent them from having Peter and John flogged (5:40), just for good form’s sake and as a stern reminder not to bother the authorities or attempt to upset the old power structure.

And those apostles?  Try to imagine your back into how it would feel after a flogging: the welted, raw, bloody throbbing.  You’d never want to experience that again!  The humiliation, the outrage, the injustice, the pain!  Yes, the authorities got their message across.  And the message of the cross had made an even stronger, deeper impression in the hearts of Peter, John, and those who gathered with them, gathered around the Word, gathered as the church.  The pain and hurt were real.  The grace and glory were real, too, and stronger, worth suffering for.

What’s really worth suffering for, in this life?  For what is it really worth practicing faithful self-discipline?  “The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name” (5:41).  They were rejoicing because they knew there truly was something worth suffering for—someone!  They all knew suffering would come, anyway.  In this life, it comes, anyway.  Unemployment, aging, deaths of loved ones—the expected and unexpected—sickness, cancer, injury, the sorrow inflicted on us by the thoughtless, casual cruelty of our fellow human beings—sometimes even fellow Christians.  We live for the sunshine as we weather the storms.  Sometimes, we’re counted worthy to suffer disgrace for the sake of the name.

The crazy thing about Peter and John, the crazy thing about that little church in the big world, was that, for them, it was suffering for the sake of Jesus that helped make life’s journey worthwhile.  We don’t seek the suffering.  We know that to speak for Christ in this world, to stand up for Jesus, here, is to invite resistance, rejection, and, increasingly, trouble.  No one has a heart brave enough for that.  Such a heart must be given.

“Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.  Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven.  For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets” (Luke 6:22-23).  Peter and John remembered when Jesus said that: they had been there, listening.  Maybe at the time they didn’t know what to make of it, didn’t know why Jesus would talk that way or say such things.  Up to that time, Peter, John, and the rest hadn’t experienced much in the way of rejection, scorn, and the consequences of official disapproval.  They would.  In Christ, that is not all they had to look forward to.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

               [1] A. W. Tozer.  Tragedy in the Church: The Missing Gifts (1978).  Qtd in Tozer on Leadership, a Daily Devotional via BibleGateway.com