Alright, we're gonna do the thing where I open up with a question here. It's a question for you that I really actually want you to think about. And ideally, regardless of your social situation, just shriek out the answer with no context whatsoever. You feel like in some way it'll be harmful to your standing at work or in a social setting that you're in where you don't want to embarrass yourself. You don't have to. I mean, I can't check to make sure that you participate when we do these exercises, but you know, you be the judge as to what the right call is. Okay, here's the question. What is the setting in middle school that made you feel the most anxiety? Chewing for a minute. Some of you right now, you're like bathroom. For sure. It was the bathroom. When I was a kid, the bathroom in eighth grade, we didn't have doors on the stalls. Just I don't know if kids went in there and they smoked the marijuana or the cigarettes or what they did in there, but it might have been naughty. So they took the doors off. So I did not poop at school in eighth grade. I'm not doing that. Are you kidding me? So that was pretty anxiety-inducing. Oh, also, they just had troughs. They had urinal troughs back then because when I was a kid, people liked to spread infectious disease and have horrible unsanitary bathroom conditions. So I didn't really like peeing when I was in middle school. It was, I guess our bathrooms really were horrible, but that's not the worst for me. Maybe it is for you, but it wasn't the worst for me. What do you got? What else did you come up with? Some of you maybe like classroom was pretty anxiety-inducing for me, you know, because maybe people pick on you, or you had a teacher who's tough on you, or whatever. But I bet there's a lot of you right now who are thinking of the lunchroom. You go through that line, you get your gruel slopped onto your plate, and it makes that gooping sound, and then you got it. Now you turn around, and there's the moment of dread. Everybody's out there immediately. It's like you're Iron Man or something, and you have that computer scanner AI helmet, and you look at the whole room. It's like beep beep, beep, beep, and those little beeps and little targeting things happen. You can see the whole layout of popularity. It's like a popularity heat map unfolds right in front of you. And there you are standing with your tray in the shorts and the Hawaiian shirt that your mom made for you. If you were me, she did a good job. She made clothes for me. We didn't have a lot of money. And I thought I really liked them. I liked the clothes that I had. But sometimes people gave me a little bit of a hard time about my Hawaiian shirt, and I think they were jerks. And I'm, mom, if you're listening, I'm still grateful that you made me that shirt. Thank you. But there you are, a little bit nervous looking around, and you have to find somewhere to sit. I just take you back to it. Are you feeling it right now? That is the social pecking order, and where you sit or don't sit is a huge deal. And if you try to outstrip your rank and go sit somewhere where you're not entitled to sit socially, oh, you're gonna hear about it and you're going to get shamed. Or at least that's the way it used to be. Maybe it's nicer now. I don't know. I haven't been to middle school for a while. And if you get relegated because no one will have you and you don't fit into any of the groups, there's like a leftovers table, and you end up there. And that's where I ended up. And then for whatever reason, there was a jukebox right by there, and so it was super loud, and nobody wanted to sit by the jukebox. And there's like this running joke. There was the only things that worked in there were Pump Up the Jam by Technotronic and Dr. Feelgood by whoever did Dr. Feel Good. And people go pop in quarters and just put it on repeat, super, super loud. And those songs were already old and dumb by the time that I was in middle school. And I had to sit right by Dr. Feel Good and pump up the jam for my entire lunch hour by myself again and again and again, all the way through eighth grade. And it's terribly anxiety-inducing. Girls didn't invite me to sit by them. It was very difficult. Now, maybe there's some of you who are like, I didn't feel any of that. I don't know what you're talking about. But I bet there's a lot of you know exactly what I'm talking about. The middle school lunchroom social pecking order is a thing. Who you sit by totally says something about where you fit into the whole equation. Likewise, where you sat in the lunchroom was apparently a thing when it came to the church in Antioch in the very early going of Christianity. And even though it might seem trite and trivial now, the truth is anything that we assign agreed social meaning to and value to as humans, no matter how ridiculous it is, it has value, and stuff means stuff. We are a semiotic species, and all things will eventually be assigned meaning, and things that have meaning will be assigned value. And you want to be on the right end of that equation when it comes to value and not on the wrong end. One of the beautiful things about the Christian experiment in the early days was that it was for everybody. Now in Jerusalem, the whole pecking order and who sat where for lunch, it wasn't going to be that big of a problem because the concerns were different in Jerusalem. Pretty much everybody was a Jew who became a Christian and a follower of Christ in the early going there. So we see a few mealtime controversies in the Gospels, but it's mostly around ceremonially cleansing your hands and if you washed long enough or if you didn't. But when Christianity goes out to the sticks, things are a little bit different because there were all of these weird prohibitions in the Old Testament, some of which were part of the Old Testament law, clean and unclean law, stuff that Jesus fulfilled. But some of it was just cultural expectations, stuff we talked about last time around, about like who you hang out with and who you don't associate with. Some people are clean, some people are unclean. And so, I mean, you can't eat next to somebody who's unclean in the mind of many Jewish people, or you wouldn't be ceremonially clean to go and do your temple stuff and your religious duties. It was a really big deal and something that we have to stretch very far to find an analog for in modern day culture, but let's go right back to middle school. Just think of whoever was below the social pecking order for you. Why were they ick? I don't know. You don't really know either. They just lost the social game a little bit more than you lost it, so they were ick, and you hoped that you wouldn't be ick like them someday and were sad to whatever degree you were ick. If you got too close to their ick, their social ick might socially rub off on you, and your ick level would increase and you might end up in a lower tier or a lower caste. So you got to keep your distance so that doesn't rub off on you. Now, whether you're a child or an adult, if you really think hard enough about it, this kind of clean and unclean association thing, we have it, we do it. We just also try to uphold the Western ideal of everybody's created equal, and you know, hopefully that's what we achieve and what we go for. Well, in the early going in the church in Antioch, this seems like it smoothed out really pretty quickly. I I should step back a little bit, a little bit of background on how all of this worked. Christianity explodes in Jerusalem. It looks like it's gonna fail because Jesus is the leader of the whole thing, gets killed, but then he gets raised back to life. He appears to a bunch of people. Word is he ascends to the right hand of the Father, but now it kind of looks like maybe it's gonna fail again because you only got 11 disciples left. I mean, they hire on a new one after Judas kills himself, and you got some very high-character women who were there and a part of it, and even helping to fund it. But it's really just a few people huddled together in Jerusalem after Jesus is gone. But Jesus said, like, you know, hang out, my Holy Spirit, the helper, is gonna come. This is gonna work out, and you're gonna be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And so the little cluster of disciples are like, okay. And sure enough, God comes through. The Holy Spirit shows up, the day of Pentecost happens, little balls of fire above people's head. I know it sounds crazy, but this is what happened. And they can speak in all the languages of all the people who are there in Jerusalem, and everybody hears it in their own tongue. And it looks like primarily Jews in the early going from all around the world who speak different languages, they hear it, and a whole bunch of people convert and start following Jesus. And then there's some persecutions that crop up over the next year or two. A brand new, newly commissioned Pharisee named Saul is a participant in those, and a bunch of those Jewish Christians who had been in Jerusalem in the early going, they scatter out. Looks like some of them went to the third most populous city in the ancient world, which was Antioch. You had Rome, and then Alexandria, and then Antioch, which is probably about three, four hundred thousand people, and then maybe Ephesus was the next biggest city. Ephesus or Jerusalem would have been fourth or fifth to round out the top five. So Antioch was a pretty big deal, but it's in southern modern-day Turkey. It's a very Greek-ish city. And so when the message showed up there, I mean there were Jews and there were God fearers, that being people who were practicing some of the Jewish ways because they believed in the God of Abraham, maybe when the were in the process of converting to some sort of Judaism. But the gospel showed up there after the persecution started in Jerusalem, and it totally caught on. Whoever went first with it, it was just a lock and key fit socially, culturally, linguistically, the languaging, maybe it was all just a miracle. I don't know. But it totally worked in Antioch, pow, right off the bat. This is recorded in Acts chapter 11. And so the church in Jerusalem is like, I mean, remember from the Old Testament that this was supposed to happen. And Jesus said, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. But what is this even gonna look like? What does it look like to be a Gentile follower of the God of Abraham? I don't know. Somebody should go look. So they send Barnabas, the son of encouragement. I don't think Barnabas is actually his real name. Barnabas means son of encouragement. I mean, that's pretty rad moniker to get to wear around. So they believe Barnabas would be the right disposition for uh the kind of guy that you'd want to send up there. This is gonna be abrupt, but this is a huge story, and I'm gonna unpack the whole thing in one smooth flow of thought, at least for me on my side. I'm gonna divide it up for you. So we're gonna hit pause there and we're gonna resume tomorrow, right where we left off with this big, long, interwoven A plot, B plot story that leads us to the confrontation between Peter and Paul in Antioch, as recorded and reported in Galatians chapter two. I don't know if that whole sentence added up or worked or made sense, but I think it's there. I think it worked. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.