Living in a Both/And Time with Freedom (Acts 11:19-26)
Living in a Both/And Time with Freedom
April 26, 2026
Acts 11:19-26
By Pastor Mike Conner
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After meditating on the dual nature of light, the poet Lia Purpura asks: “why wouldn’t / other things or states / present as / both/and?” Light, after all, is foundational to the cosmos—to life itself. Purpura’s insight, born of poetic wonder, is a key ingredient in wisdom. Wisdom calls us away from black-and-white, either-or thinking and toward an acceptance of life’s complexity, and into a reverent, curious posture toward all that we cannot fully understand or control.
We have entered a “both/and” season as a congregation. The upcoming weeks are going to be strongly marked by different energies coexisting in our bodies, and therefore in the spaces, moments, and words that we share together. There will be both grief and joy as you and I begin to say goodbye to each other and as you anticipate your partnership with Pastor Deepak. There will be deep gratitude for what has been, as well as a mixture of anxiety and hope about what is coming. These are days of departures and arrivals, of releasing and receiving with pure and open hearts. And who knows, whenever something in our lives changes in a significant way, there is the possibility that some other desire and regret that is highly personal and has nothing directly to do with the situation at hand will surface in the heart and ask us to listen. This is a tender time.
I’ll confess it is challenging for me to honor this “wobble” that the poet suggests we “take seriously / as a stance.” I don’t always get it right, welcoming the fullness of reality and not just the parts I’m naturally more comfortable with. And yet, I know it’s absolutely crucial that I try. It’s important not to repress some aspect of this experience or overindulge another—whether worry or sadness or even positivity—because that will only block the flow of love. And love is how we honor one another in the Spirit.
A “both/and” time invites us to be a “both/and” people. I am so grateful that I can ask for help from a “both/and” Savior. Jesus is both God and human, crucified and risen. When we lean on him, he doesn’t keep us from the wobble but gives us spiritual capacity to find peace in all things. As Paul puts it in Colossians, “in Him all things hold together” (1:17). I know that the Spirit of Christ will hold you and me and all of us together.
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Over the next month, I will be preaching a series of sermons that explore a narrative arc from the book of Acts which has a lot to show us about how a “both/and” church can respond to the movements of the Holy Spirit with spiritual freedom, creativity, and joy. Acts chapters 11 through 15 primarily tell the story of the Apostle Paul’s first missionary journey around the Mediterranean world, planting churches in a variety of cultural contexts. (On the front page of your bulletin there’s a map of this journey which you can reference as we go along.) There is no doubt that Paul’s missionary activity and the pastoral letters he later wrote to those congregations changed the world. And yet what I want to focus on with you is not so much the journey of Paul itself but the circumstances surrounding it. You see, there would be no Paul without Barnabas, or the church in Antioch, or the church in Jerusalem, or the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. These stories remind us of some of the essential characteristics of being a church. After all, it was in Antioch that the believers were first called “Christians.” Why?
Today I need to offer a good bit of background to get us started, but here’s the overriding question of the series: What is the Holy Spirit wanting to do with our creative freedom and our will?
Acts is the fifth book in the New Testament. The first four books are all Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—which tell the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Acts follows these up as a continuation of the story, telling about the birth of the Christian community and the earliest days of the Church.
After his resurrection, Jesus spent about forty days appearing to his disciples, and then he ascended into heaven and poured out the Holy Spirit upon the believers who were gathered together in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit shares the risen life of Jesus, the strong love of God, with each one of us. Jesus’ life and ministry continue here on earth through the Church that is his Body. And they don’t just continue—they expand, reaching new people and places through the hearts and bodies and words of those who bear his radical love. That’s the story that Acts tells, the story of that expansion. With each turn of the page, more and more people are drawn to the goodness of God through the preaching, teaching, and generosity of the Church.
The two “giants” of the Book of Acts are Peter and Paul. Peter was one of Jesus’ original twelve disciples, and after Pentecost he became a leader in the Jerusalem church along with the apostle John and James, the brother of Jesus. Remember, Jesus himself and nearly all his first followers were Jews, so when we talk about the “birth of the Church” we’re talking about something that had roots in Judaism and was largely a Jewish Messianic movement. Peter’s ministry in Jerusalem was primarily, though not exclusively, focused on Jewish Christians.
Paul’s ministry was itinerant; he traveled all over the Mediterranean world preaching both to Jews and to Gentiles. Gentiles are also referred to as Greeks of pagans. Basically, they are people outside the covenant relationship between God and Israel. Yet, over time, it became clear to the apostles that the salvation procured by Christ in his death and resurrection was for the whole world, for all people. The Holy Spirit was on the move, ready to bring people of very different backgrounds and worldviews and languages into radical fellowship with one another.
In Christ, God had reconciled the whole world to himself. Now, that reconciling power was at work in the Christian community, dissolving hierarchies and borders and divisions at the congregational level. Paul and Barnabas and Peter and the other apostles were all caught up in this ever-expanding movement of love. Their hearts were continually being cracked open to make room for more people.
This didn’t happen without struggle and controversy and debate, but it did happen. The church was and is always trying to catch up with the Holy Spirit, who is always already at work out there drawing the circle wider. Grace always outpaces the system. God is Love itself, and God desires to share Love with all creation, with every single person. To profess faith in Christ means you will get swept up in that movement. It’s just a matter of when.
During those first days in Jerusalem, Barnabas came on the scene. He was a property-owning Levite with Cyprian roots, which means he was already living that mixture of Jew and Gentile. When the first Christians, under the direction of the apostles, were holding all their possession in common and selling what they didn’t need to support the poor, Barnabas came and participated in that. He sold a field and laid the proceeds at the apostles feet. His real name was Joseph, but they gave him the nickname Bar-Nabas, which means “Son of Encouragement.” That Greek word for Encouragement could also be translated as Son of Advocacy, or Son of Comfort. Barnabas quickly became a leader, lifting from the bottom, with gifts for seeing the importance of the one in reaching the many.
Saul and Paul are the same person. Saul is the Jewish version of his name, and Paul is the Greco-Roman version. So Luke will refer to him with whichever name best fits wherever he happens to be at the time. Saul was originally a persecutor of the early Christian community. He was a zealous and ambitious Jewish leader who wanted to eliminate the Jesus movement. He authorized the arrest and torture of several of the first Christians, and he presided over the stoning of Stephen. So when today’s passage talks about the persecution that began with Stephen, it’s referring to something that started because of Saul’s violence.
Yet shortly after the killing of Stephen, Saul was on his way to Damascus to arrest more Christians when God struck him down on the road, blinding him and commanding him to no longer do violence. This was a direct encounter with Jesus. Saul repented. He converted. He was filled with grace. A murderer-turned-disciple. After regaining his sight he traveled back to Jerusalem to present himself to Peter and the others and ask for forgiveness and inclusion in the ministry. When he got there, they were all afraid of him and refused to meet with him. But Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement, brought Saul in. He advocated for Saul with the Jerusalem leaders and ended up convincing them that Saul really had been transformed by grace. After testifying about his conversion in Jerusalem to the amazement of the believers there, Saul traveled north to the city of Tarsus and disappears from the scene.
Then something unexpected began to happen in Antioch. The persecution of Christians that Saul had initiated caused the community in Jerusalem to disperse. What was intended for evil God used for good. People carried the Gospel into new places and began to tell more people about Jesus. Some of these folks ended up in Antioch where they began preaching to both Jews and Gentiles. Antioch was one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient Mediterranean world. There were people living there from many different cultures. And many different kinds of people responded to the message of Christ and began to share their lives and resources with one another. There had been suggestions of this kind of thing in Jerusalem, but in Antioch the cross-cultural, interreligious joining was the main event. It was new and beautiful. Word of what was happening there made its way down to the church in Jerusalem.
To understand what was happening there, and perhaps to help nurture it, the Jerusalem church sent none other than Barnabas, the Son of Encouragement. The scripture says, “When he arrived and saw the grace of God, he was glad and encouraged all of them to remain true to the Lord with devoted hearts, for he was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and of faith” (11:23-24). Barnabas got to Antioch and had eyes to see that what was happening there was good and holy, in sync with the Spirit. Here was grace that he didn’t bring with him. It was already at work. It preceded him and would outlast him and he would contribute to it and serve it, but at the end of the day it was all grace. He was filled with joy, and he encouraged the Christians there to keep going. What’s more, he became a part of what was happening there, establishing himself as one of the primary teachers in the Antiochian congregation.
The Spirit had started working in a new way in a new place, and the established church had sent a worker to see and assess and help. That leader, Barnabas, then exercised his own creative freedom. He did something the Jerusalem church had not asked him to do. He left Antioch to go to Tarsus. He went to look or Saul. Something about what was happening in Antioch triggered Barnabas’s memory of and affection for Saul. He wanted Saul to be a part of this ministry. He brought Saul inside the new thing God was doing. And it was in Antioch that Saul cut his teeth for preaching and teaching. Eventually, this congregation, where Jews and Gentiles and people from all over the known world prayed and served together, would send Barnabas and Saul out on mission.
Who does the work of ministry and makes it fruitful? Is it us or is it the Holy Spirit? Yes. Who holds authority in the Christian community? Is it “the system,” represented by Jerusalem? Or is it the local churches, like Antioch? Or is it individuals like Barnabas and Saul? Yes. Is ministry about responding to what God is already up to before we get there or about helping to create conditions for a fresh movement of the Spirit? Yes.
These are some of the things we learn from Antioch. They were a “both/and” people living in a “both/and” time. And they were thriving, because, for them, everything came down to saying Yes to the Spirit, which surprises us, widens our embrace, and does it all in a way that is so kind, so joyful, and so wise.
With our partnership here in Pocatello, God did a new thing. And God is preparing the ground for another new thing during these months of transition. God did a new thing in Bangalore, India many years ago when Pastor Deepak came back from his studies in the US to pastor his people. God is preparing the ground in Woodinville, Washington for a new thing that will emerge through my partnership with a new congregation.
In all these places, and over and over again, it’s all grace. It’s all Holy Spirit. And we bring our unique stamp to it. We dance with the Lord, though we can never know what it’s going to look like ahead of time. For some of us, the task is to go and see and rejoice and serve with joy. For others of us, the task is to receive new partners and be changed.
What it comes down to for each of us is this: In each new season, is my zest for love growing? Is my heart becoming more spacious? Am I offering all that I have and all that I am up to the embrace of the Holy Spirit, recognizing that I am one small part of the whole? Am I experiencing the joy of being in a kind of community with others that only the Spirit could knit together? I believe that we have done this, that we are doing it, and that we will continue to do it, so long as our prayer continues to be: “Lord, may your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.