Lines in the sand

 Reading the first few chapters of Acts, the clues are all there as to how the faith began to free itself- not quite the phrase I want, but let it pass- from its Jewish roots. First the Samaritans are admitted ( chapter 8) then the Roman centurion Cornelius, a God-fearing Gentile, becomes a Christian (Acts 10) and in Acts 16 the gospel leaps over to Europe. 

Given the sharp intake of breath which greeted Peter when the Jerusalem brethren heard that a Gentile had become a member of the faith, we can imagine the lines in the sand which would have been drawn by the more conservative members in Jerusalem at all these developments, and how those lines had been erased, perhaps painfully, by the advances which the proclamation of the gospel made. 

God is always somehow ahead of us, and calls us into the work he is doing. And we love rules, to know where we stand, to have certainty- and that's fine, as far as it goes. It's a lifetime's work to straddle the tension between what we perceive as the surprising calls of God, and the perceptions of what we see as the limits of faith. Sharp intakes of breath are perhaps called for as we survey the dynamism of God's works in ourselves, our communities; but possibly fewer as we realise another line in the sand has been erased.