Acts 2. 42-47: On Being the Church Today.
Wow! What a church! Wouldn’t it be great to be a member of that first church in Jerusalem!
· Here is the church where there is an active Christian education program, where people don’t have to drag their kids to Sunday School merely out of guilt or habit, but rather because everyone was so devoted… to the apostles teaching.
· They had such a wonderful time together they didn’t want to limit it to Sunday’s, even with the add on of tea and coffee in the gathering area. Day by day they met and shared all that was going on in life with each other. They actively cared for one another, having all things shared in common. Mmm! Incipient communism 20 centuries before its time????
· A church without factions, cliques, divisions, all who believed were together. They prayed, they grew. Every day new people beat a path to their door to become members.
When this picture of the early church painted here in Acts is laid alongside the reality of the church as we have experienced it here in NZ over recent decades, and it doesn’t matter much whether it is Dunedin or Christchurch, Knox or Highgate, we might be saying to ourselves “Oh to be in that church!”
And I guess the basic thing I want to say this morning is, you are! That is you and I, no less than they, live in the same One Church of Jesus Christ in the aftermath of Easter and Pentecost. Easter wasn’t just something that happened once to Jesus, a dead body raised to life by the power of the Spirit of God, as Paul put it. Acts is telling us Easter continues to happen, breaks out all over as that same Spirit continues to work. Furthermore Easter has communal, economic and political implications, using ‘political’ in the Aristotelian sense of a polis, a people, a city .
Here were these people, a lot like us. They didn’t have all that much in common. They came from different parts of town, different social groups. It’s difficult to get together across the boundaries of class and income. Some of them were poor, some were rich. But something had happened. Here they were around the table, sharing with each other, looking out for one another. No sociological, economic or political theory could explain why these, who had so many things that could divide them, were together. There was no explanation for them apart from the amazing new thing that had happened in their midst over recent weeks at Easter and Pentecost. Something new had broken out among them. New life. God’s life made available to them by the risen Christ and the gift of the Spirit.
I sometimes get asked how do we know that Jesus was raised from the dead on Easter Sunday? Is there proof that Easter is true or is it just some grand myth or, even worse, deception? When it comes down to it the only proof I can give that Christ has been raised from the dead, that life is stronger than death, that there really is a new power let loose in the world named Christ, the only proof is us, the church, a body of people whose life together is so new, so inexplicable by any other means, that the world needs to look at us and say, “Surely Christ is risen, he has risen indeed!”
And at least that is the way the story played in the first few centuries after Easter, which is why it expanded so rapidly. And it is the way it has played out in the last half of last century in much of Asia, Africa, South America. But what about us in western societies? NZ? Dunedin?
Well these things are rarely explained by one factor, are usually multicausal – and that is what I keep arguing when I am wearing my historian or my sociologist hat. But today I am a preacher and what do I have to say.
One thing I am convinced of, is that a very major factor is our over emphasis on the individual at the cost of community. One of the strengths of modern western culture has been its respect for the individual and the way it encourages individuals to realise their aspirations and potential, often subjugated in other cultures and societies. But every strength or virtue when pushed too exclusively can flip over and become a weakness. And believe this happened in most communities in the west, including the church, so that the enduring bonds and relationships of community are weakened and individuals have become disconnected atoms. As one writer puts it, it is often easier to think of ‘my faith’ rather than ‘our faith’, ‘my’ relationship with Jesus rather than ‘our’ life together, ‘my’ spirituality rather than ‘our’ life as a people.
Yet the whole witness of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation is bent toward God’s intention to form a people who will be a light to the whole world, a blessing to all other peoples on the earth. Sometimes our emphasis on the individual has blinded us to this social and theological reality: God is in the business of creating a people, building a community, and calling each of us into this new community that is defined by new commitments and a new story. And in Acts we see God at work to create a new people who are not to be defined by the old categories of possessions, race, language, gender or social class, but a people united in witness to the death and resurrection of Christ and common life of the Spirit they share that give birth to a new way of living. As one person has put it this is ‘a sociological impossibility’, something only an act of God can create.
Behaviouralists tell us that we have two conflicting life forces built into us. The drive for togetherness and the drive for individuality. And so the idea of community simultaneously attracts and repels most of us. We long for the life-affirming benefits that community can bestow, but we resist the demands that community makes because we want to be an individual. No wonder we find it difficult to know what to do with passages such as this one. In an early chapter of her book Of Widows and Meals: Communal Meals in the Book of Acts, Rita Finger surveys a range of interpretive approaches that have concluded that Christians should not take the communal ethic described here and in Acts 4 as normative. Interpreters since the Reformation have proposed that Acts offers a symbolically idealized portrait of communal life, that these verses describe practices that were necessarily short-lived and limited in scope, or that such practices are simply unworkable in a modern context. Her point is that a lot of us instinctively chafe against these descriptions because we recognize that we have a lot to lose in such a situation – especially if we have much, which all of us do. So much tempts us to dismiss these verses as quaint, or unrealistically idealised, even as we claim to yearn for such conditions as a sign of God's activity among us.
It is important to acknowledge that Acts, taken as a whole, does not hold up this depiction of corporate life as universal in the church's experience. It may represent the best of what God's people are capable of, in the power of the Spirit, but after Ananias and Sapphira defraud the Jerusalem community in chapt 5 we look in vain for any description of community life that approaches the radicalism seen in this earlier chapt. This doesn’t mean that hospitality, charity, mutuality, and worship are not characteristics of the communities that the Spirit still creates; they are, and they continue to be commended elsewhere in Acts. But Acts likewise concedes the flawed nature of believers and their struggles to achieve and maintain unity.
The description given in these verses suggests the possibility of what the Holy Spirit can do. They do not lay down rules or specific structures for Christian living. In their context they indicate that the reign of the risen Christ creates the potential for mutual service that embodies God's justice. The life and work of a Christian community can reflect—even if only dimly—the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed while on earth and secured through his death, resurrection, and exaltation.
This passage presents a summary filled with generalisations, yet several details are instructive for us even today. The community of faith in Jerusalem lives a multifaceted witness, one not restricted to a single place or mode. This witness to the transforming impact of the gospel shows itself in houses and in the temple. It benefits its members and earns the admiration of outsiders. The community exists not for its own sake, but to care for its most vulnerable members and to be a means by which God extends this liberating salvation to others.
There is so much in the culture and daily life of the kind of ‘ownership’ societies that we as churches live in today, that we are easily frustrated in any attempts to build communities that functions as an authentic expression of the gospel, or even to approximate that, and so we settle to life as it ‘just is’. But it is an empowering thing to realize that we as followers of Christ are not left to our own flawed abilities in creating such community. The ministry of God's reign that Jesus inaugurated during his life and secured by his death and resurrection, is not merely a thing of the past or a faint hope for future days; it continues, sometimes barely perceptibly, in the corporate life of communities of faith, through the activity of the Spirit gifted to us by the risen Christ. And it is important to underscore that these verses describe a community of faith that operates in the power of that Spirit. The virtues of justice, worship, charity and mutuality are not accomplishments of extraordinary people; they are signs of the Spirit within a community of people who understand themselves as united in purpose and identity, shaped as they worshipped together through the apostles teaching… the breaking of bread and the prayers—not a dispersed collection of individuals who occasionally met up in church.
It is important to acknowledge that Acts, taken as a whole, does not hold up this depiction of corporate life as universal in the church's experience. It may represent the best of what God's people are capable of, in the power of the Spirit, but after Ananias and Sapphira defraud the Jerusalem community in chapt 5 we look in vain for any description of community life that approaches the radicalism seen in this earlier chapt. This doesn’t mean that hospitality, charity, mutuality, and worship are not characteristics of the communities that the Spirit still creates; they are, and they continue to be commended elsewhere in Acts. But Acts likewise concedes the flawed nature of believers and their struggles to achieve and maintain unity.
The description given in these verses suggests the possibility of what the Holy Spirit can do. They do not lay down rules or specific structures for Christian living. In their context they indicate that the reign of the risen Christ creates the potential for mutual service that embodies God's justice. The life and work of a Christian community can reflect—even if only dimly—the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed while on earth and secured through his death, resurrection, and exaltation.
This passage presents a summary filled with generalisations, yet several details are instructive for us even today. The community of faith in Jerusalem lives a multifaceted witness, one not restricted to a single place or mode. This witness to the transforming impact of the gospel shows itself in houses and in the temple. It benefits its members and earns the admiration of outsiders. The community exists not for its own sake, but to care for its most vulnerable members and to be a means by which God extends this liberating salvation to others.
There is so much in the culture and daily life of the kind of ‘ownership’ societies that we as churches live in today, that we are easily frustrated in any attempts to build communities that functions as an authentic expression of the gospel, or even to approximate that, and so we settle to life as it ‘just is’. But it is an empowering thing to realize that we as followers of Christ are not left to our own flawed abilities in creating such community. The ministry of God's reign that Jesus inaugurated during his life and secured by his death and resurrection, is not merely a thing of the past or a faint hope for future days; it continues, sometimes barely perceptibly, in the corporate life of communities of faith, through the activity of the Spirit gifted to us by the risen Christ. And it is important to underscore that these verses describe a community of faith that operates in the power of that Spirit. The virtues of justice, worship, charity and mutuality are not accomplishments of extraordinary people; they are signs of the Spirit within a community of people who understand themselves as united in purpose and identity, shaped as they worshipped together through the apostles teaching… the breaking of bread and the prayers—not a dispersed collection of individuals who occasionally met up in church.
I want to finish by reflecting on the words of NT scholar Tom Wright, who, concludes his comments on this passage by reminding us that, the challenge remains for every generation of the church to make this kind of community a reality, saying: “Where the church today finds itself stagnant, unattractive, humdrum and shrinking… it’s time to read Acts 2.42-47 again, get down on our knees, and ask what isn’t happening that should be happening? The gospel hasn’t changed. God’s power hasn’t diminished. People still need rescuing. What are we doing about it?”
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