Sermon May 2, 2010
Acts 1
Called to be the Church
Ebenezer and Eden Mills UC
Rev. Daryl Webber
The impact was filled with grace and danger. Grace (especially from our perspective) because people were encouraged to sort out their ultimate understanding of what was truth for them. There could be more than one truth, and the individual was to determine their truth. So if you were a Protestant in those early years you may have wanted to study the scripture and the early church, with a great eagerness and without hinderance of the church hierarchy sentencing you to heresy. You may have been part of a group of young “Galileo-ites” questioning the order of the universe, but because you weren't part of the Catholic Church you would have been respected for the truth you held, and would have found strength and belonging in a group of society that shared that view. The grace that came with the Reformation was the encouragement to seek truth, not simply comply with an old authority, and established teachings.
The danger that rose from the movement was that the church, with its 1400 year tradition, would lose its place in society and its vision would become fragmented because of the plurality of truths. And thus it would no longer find itself unified.
While our forbearers found permission to cultivate a profound depth in faith and spirituality through the tenants of the Protestant Reformation, it has cost the church its sense of unity that was the hallmark of Acts.
In many ways we feel the effects of the Reformation. Foremost we can feel like failures in culture, unable to speak meaningfully to the communities in which we live, and limited in our ability to appeal even to those vast numbers of our adherents that they would have a greater participation in our communal life together. Church bores many of them- doesn't speak to their truth. We find our numbers dwindling and the prospect of church closures as our society finds truth in areas that are not related to church. In the meantime, we become congregations often divided against ourselves, often times by economic factors and along lines of differing theological truths.
We scratch the surface of our lives and church life and realize that we can, apparently, occupy only a limited scope of importance in the community.
We begin the study of the book of Acts over the next few weeks together follwing in Anthony Robinson's and Robert Wall's book, “Called to be the Church”. Acts is fairly short, so I encourage you to read it in one or two sittings, you'll have a bit of a sense of our early heritage and the importance given to Spirit, unity, community life.
We begin with the first chapter. In its introduction we learn that the book is a continuation of Luke's story of Jesus' life. This book is written to a person or community named Theopolus with the purpose of framing the important elements of Christian faith and life. It is written for Christ's successors, for the congregation and for leaders that they might live in a way to give witness to God's power that came and worked healing in the human community. Christ had lived among them and birthed a new Kingdom of Heaven on Earth – called people to be servants of each other.
Acts reflects on the early church as a people who, not assuming to know the future specifically, embrace an unknown, unrealized future and commit themselves to living out what it means to truly honour the Christ in their brother and sister- the human family. Read Acts and you will soon realize the strength they found in community and just how committed they were to living in unity. But more about that in the second chapter of Acts.
In 1st Acts we hear the important call of Jesus to the disciples to not leave Jerusalem, but to wait for the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. Luke doesn't record the community abandoning its Jewish roots at all, but waiting for something to rise up out of the pain, grief and confusion of all they experienced in Jerusalem. They mustn't just dismiss the hardship as empty of the Spirit. It will be in the midst of that hardship, as often is the case in life, that the Spirit is given.
Before acting in anxiety, or grief, or anger, or promise even, and this is very much against our church culture today, Jesus calls the disciples to wait. Waiting is often difficult when in the midst of pain- in the midst of all that reminds us of our pain. Jesus calls them to wait for the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, an empowerment of the gifts that each had. The early disciples were not sent out merely as disciples who receive and follow the Christ, but those who receive the Spirit are people who are filled with the Spirit's power. They have been made apostles- made and sent out to be witnesses to God's activity in the world...it means that they had become very aware of how God had worked in the past and was working in their community, and their lives. They waited forty days (the forty days reference is to a period of time given over to preparation) to receive this awareness, this empowerment, this gift of awareness. The disciples before they move into mission wait and prepare, become aware of their story, and their experiences of grace. Preparation for receiving the Spirit is a time of communion and teaching and fellowship. We don't do the waiting thing very well in our church, with a sense of expectancy that the Spirit is empowering us. We are more apt to pack our bags and try to navigate our way out of Jerusalem before the Spirit can prepare us for a unknown but promised future. Can you think of times when we might have waited with expectancy of the Spirit's work and did just that? Did not do just that?
(We have actually done some of that together since I came four years ago. You shared your story...and at Eden Mills there was a strong sense of Spirit moving the congregation as it discerned its next steps and is empowered to act on its sense of mission. Ebenezer shared its story too, and have felt the pain of financial issues and the anxious prayers we have emitted about that. These as of yet have left us without a sense of having heard the voice and Spirit that is promised to us as we wait.)
In their waiting the young church devotes themselves to prayer and worship. Waiting is difficult in our hyper and entertainment driven culture generally, and it is particularly difficult for a portion of our church culture that is driven by activism. As Will Wilimon says, our waiting implies that the things that need doing in the world are beyond our ability to accomplish solely by our own effort, our programs and crusades. Some other empowerment is needed; therefore the church waits and prays. The church is reminded in Acts 1 that no person and no community can give to others what has not first been received. Before the early church is a giver of grace it is first a recipient of grace...It's mission is born in the humility of having been called into being, having heard God speak, having been commissioned as successors of those early apostles!
What have we received, what is our story of grace? As a church I think we are like Acts 1- a community waiting, preparing to receive the Spirit but so distracted by the painful situation we find ourselves in as people on the fringes of our culture, and as a people who live out a tangle of truths, and all the graces and dangers arising from the as far back and further even as the Reformation.
Acts 1 may be an important passage for the church to study, for it calls us to listen for the Spirit moving us in our own day to prayer and listening for our purpose as successors of the early church. As successors we are called to embrace the mission that Jesus gives back to us with the promise of the Spirit. In prayer and discernment , and through Jesus we will find a sense of authority and reason for our being.
Where are we in terms of having received...and what gift has it been? Have we not been waiting for this moment to find out what it is that has been given us as a community?
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