Chapter 15 - Sameness is not Faithfulness

There is an ongoing debate and argument in the book of Acts that mirrors arguments and debates in the church ever since. The question is this; must followers of Jesus Christ conform to the likeness of other followers of Jesus Christ?  
Over and over and over again, there is a confusion presented, a distortion. If you have been part of a church for any considerable period of time you have likely seen this. The mistake that is made (often by leaders within a community) is that conformity to Jesus means conformity to a particular human standard, norm, expression, and even physical bodily standard. In this chapter there are leaders who are saying that the bodies of new believers, in this case, Gentiles, must be conformed to the bodies of those who had already believed (Jews). It is notable that this same argument exists today and that so much of this same argument finds its expression around matters of sexuality or gender.  
For long enough we have been told that the people who argue for the old ways are the ones who are faithful. We should know better by now. 
The faithful ones are the ones who are open to God’s acceptance of others, of the new. The faithful ones are the ones who realize that God’s unity is being expressed in Christ’s love for all, in the gathering together of difference under the love of Jesus Christ. 
Think about how many times we have seen, from religious leadership a judgment that people who are “other” are unacceptable. For many years people who had “disabilities” were considered unacceptable or less than. Then, people who are homosexual or transgender were told that they are somehow not what they should be. 
It should have been, of course, a dead giveaway, that such insistence on sameness was faithlessness, not faithfulness when we realized that the people who were arguing against accepting others put forward that in order to be acceptable people had to be like – like them.  
Most of these people were not trying to be faithless. They were told that such insistence on sameness was the way God would have it and they maybe even thought that they were serving God by their supposed moral insistence.  
We can do better.  
The Spirit of the Living God, the Spirit of Jesus Christ is leading us to faithfulness that is open to difference, not insistent upon sameness. 

As Peter said in Acts 15; 
“And God who knows the heart bore witness to them, by giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us, and he made no distinction between us and them having cleansed their hearts by faith. Now therefore, why are you putting God to the test by placing a yoke on the neck of the disciples that neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that ALL will be saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, just as they will.”