The Spirit’s Moving from the Margins, Again

Our summer journey through Acts brings us this week to a city that isn't Jerusalem, and that's not an insignificant point. Pastor Terry Kyllo joins us again, to preach from Acts 11:19-26 and 13:1-3. This section in Acts represents an important transition in the Spirit’s moving of the church, as she relocates the early church to Antioch, and where believers, scattered by persecution, start speaking to Greeks, Gentiles, as well as Jews. Here, something unplanned, begins to take root. And it’s here, in this new place, where the author of Luke-Acts drops one of the most consequential lines in the whole book: "it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christians" (11:26). Not in Jerusalem. Not from the apostles. In a diaspora city, among a mixed community that hadn't asked permission to exist.

This marks a real hinge in the story Luke has been telling. Acts 1-12 has largely followed Peter’s witness to the risen Jesus, the preacher of Pentecost, the one whose authority roots the church in continuity with Israel and the Jerusalem community. Barnabas is sent to check on Antioch and, instead of correcting what he finds, he's glad and encourages the believers to remain faithful. He then finds Saul, and for a full year the two of them teach together in this new, unlikely center of the Spirit's activity. By Acts 13, it's Antioch, not Jerusalem, where the Spirit speaks during worship and fasting: "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them." From here forward, the narrative's center of gravity moves with them — toward Paul's mission to the Gentiles, carrying the gospel outward from Jerusalem's authority into the wider empire.

Why Antioch? The theological shape of the shift Geographically, the move from Jerusalem to Antioch is a move from the ancestral, Torah-centered heart of Israel to the multiethnic administrative heart of the Roman empire, and Luke lets the Spirit's initiative follow that same trajectory outward. It's a pattern that will repeat: the gospel keeps finding its next foothold not by the center exporting itself outward, on its own terms, but by the margins improvising something new that the center then has to catch up to, bless, and integrate. Barnabas's visit, and later the Jerusalem Council, as we will see, in Acts 15, both function this way. Antioch isn't just a new location, it's evidence that the Spirit's authority in the crucified and risen Christ, doesn't stay tethered to a singular, original geographic and ethnic center, but keeps relocating to wherever the boundary-crossing is actually happening.

I find this movement of the Spirit both steadying and unsettling. The Spirit doesn't stay put where we expect leadership to originate, or with whom we expect it to remain. She raises up unlikely centers and unlikely messengers, and asks us to notice, and follow.

See you Sunday,
Pastor David