How many of you have taken some sort of personality test in your life?

Yeah, I figured there would be a lot of hands. We’ve got all kinds of ways to categorize our different personalities. Sometimes we end up a color, sometimes an animal, sometimes phlegmatic or melancholy or maybe even just a bunch of letters.

The last personality test I did was called an enneagram, and all I got was a number. I’m a two, the helper: the caring, interpersonal type. We like to please people, and we like to have people get along.

If you’re a two like me, you got done reading this passage and thought, “All this tension! All this fighting! I’m sure there had to be SOME way Paul and Barnabas could have done this without causing so much division!”

But some of you out there are eights, like Paul, and you know it had to be this way.

You’re the challengers, the one who speak truth boldly, no matter what the cost. Paul MUST have been an eight: self-confident, decisive, willful, and confrontational.

From here on out in the book of Acts, Paul is like the stick stirred around in the ant hill. He’s the match dropped in the kerosene. Paul comes into town one minute, and sneaks out or gets carried out on a stretcher the next, leaving a trail of happy, gutsy, new followers of Christ, as well as angry, livid people who want his head.

But it would be wrong of me, in my prideful “two” sort of way, to blame all of this tension and jealousy and division on Paul just being an “eight.” The truth is, Paul is an amazing communicator who did everything he could to make this work.

No matter who he is with, Paul finds a way to connect.

Earlier in chapter 13, we read part of what Paul says to the Jews in the synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia. He knows his audience, and his message is brilliant.

He connects Jesus intimately with things the Jews would have known and loved. In verses 17-20, he goes back to the key time in Israel’s history, the captivity in Israel and the gift of the promised land. He jumps quickly through the judges to the first king, Saul, and then gets to the main guy, the man after God’s own heart, King David.

Paul reminds them in verse 23 that God promised someone from David’s family would save the people of Israel, and he tells them that someone is Jesus.

Pay attention, he says! Don’t miss this, like the people who killed Jesus missed it. God wants to fulfill a promise, made long ago to our ancestors. (I love the our; he identifies with the ones he’s talking to.)

The good news, he says, is that God has finally kept the promise. Jesus will do more than David ever did. David died and stayed dead in the grave; but God raised Jesus from the dead, and now all things are new.

No, the fighting and the jealousy and the rejection can’t be blamed on Paul.

Paul has done his best. He’s done an amazing job of understanding the people he’s talking to, of doing his homework, of identifying with them and helping them see who Jesus is, why he matters, and why all of this is very good news.

In fact, after he speaks the first time in the synagogue, everybody’s happy! Everybody’s impressed! Listen to vs. 42-43 [READ]

Right before the verses we read together, everybody is happy and excited about what Paul has shared, ready to receive God’s good news about Jesus with joy.

And then it all turns.

Frankly, I want more of an explanation than we get.

I’ve read this chapter over and over this week, and the turn is so sudden and so sharp, it’s difficult to understand. Luke, the writer of Acts, chocks it up to jealousy. When the Jews see that the whole town is showing up to hear Paul, they turn on him.

Why? Were they against more people? Did they not want to share the good news? Was it sort of a “nationalistic pride”?

See, one of the big promises that God made to David, one of the promises that Paul said Jesus came to fulfill, is found back in 2 Samuel 7.

“I have given my people Israel a land of their own, where they can live in peace, and they won’t have to tremble with fear any more. Evil nations won’t bother them, as they did when I let the judges rule my people.”

Well, for Jews, for the people of Israel scattered far and wide away from that promised land, the evil nations had been bothering them a lot over the centuries.

If this Jesus really was David’s descendant, if he really would bring God’s promise of the king on the throne forever…that really would bring nationalistic pride to a Jew.

They’d love Paul for bringing that news. And it’s easy to see how the sight of the whole town, the whole town of people from the evil nations, we might add, would bring up some jealousy and anger.

And that’s when something really big hit me: the message of Jesus IS ITSELF divisive.

It is good news of forgiveness and hope, but it is not everything that we want. It is not our genie in the bottle. Even if Paul had been a nice, people-pleasing two like me, he still couldn’t have avoided tension and conflict.

Some people will respond to Jesus with great joy. And some will be so turned off by the movement of God that they will actively oppose God, and anyone who stands with God.

Take a look again at your worship folder, at the words we read together.

Who are the angry ones? [ASK}

Who are the ones glad and filled with joy and praising God? [ASK]

The message of Jesus makes the insiders, the “haves”, the ones who have something at stake… angry. The message of Jesus makes outsiders, the “have nots”, the ones with nothing to lose… filled with joy. It’s a difference, and it’s a choice.

After months of being in the book of Acts, we’re almost finished.

Next Sunday, we’ll have a speaker from India sharing how God is at work in Nepal, and for Easter, we’ll look one more time at Acts, in chapter 17.

We’ve seen the story of the early church. We’ve read several times as Peter and Paul and others have told us the good news about Jesus.

What will our choice be in response?

In one sense, the deck is stacked against us. We’re insiders. We’re part of a community that has followed God for a long time, and those seem to be the ones who run the greatest risk of rejecting what God is doing, of being angry at the mercy of God in Christ, of needing to defend something that we feel is being taken away from us.

I’m really grateful that we seem to be a community that doesn’t let that keep us from embracing what God is doing.

I noticed that in our meetings in January for the long range planning process. In our groups, very few voices sounded like the angry mob here, speaking against what God was doing, inciting others to go against a new movement of God.

Instead, over and over, the heart cry in our groups was to be open to where God was leading us as a body. We want to follow where God leads. We don’t want to stay the same, stay stuck in our traditions. We want to joyfully follow what God is doing!

I see and hear so many of us making the right choice, to embrace what God is doing in us and in our world.

There isn’t a strong need to “protect our way of life” in a defensive sort of way. We’re able to embrace whatever God has for us.

There really are different responses to God’s good news.

There really are people who fight what God is doing and protect turf. But we can join those who embrace what God is doing, who are filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

We’ll do that best when we follow Paul’s example. His hard work of connecting Jesus with the past, building continuity between what has been before and what God is doing now, is something we can all learn from as well.

The division and tension doesn’t come just from the “new” ways versus the “old” ways. The tension comes when we try to hold or possess God for ourselves, in some way that is better than or more special than others.

The saving power of God is going to all the earth! To the four winds and the seven seas!

Rather than contain it, possess it, control it…let’s choose to receive it. With gladness, and filled with joy and the Holy Spirit!