Life Together
Acts 2: 42-47
August 15, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/oRGhyGHKq88
Let’s do some word association for just a minute. I’m going to say a word and ask you to notice what comes into your mind. Maybe it will be more than one thing. Whatever it is, just notice it for yourself. People on Zoom, feel free to drop a note in the chat with the word or words that come to mind. OK, ready. Here’s the word: church.
There are a lot of associations we might have made. When I did this at home, I first thought of that hand rhyme – “here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people.” Then I thought of so many pastors who have emphasized to me that the church is the people not the building. The word church also brought to mind the people I know who have very negative associations with the word – because they have been hurt by churches or because they associate church people with judgment and narrow-mindedness even if they don’t personally know any.
If we pooled all of our word associations, the resulting list would likely be long and diverse, but we would probably also have several answers in common. After 2000 years of existence, the idea of church is complicated. It is layered with good and bad connections.
The church of the twenty-first century is necessarily going to be different from the church of the first century, but every once in a while, its good to consider our origins, to remember where we came from, and to consider the ways in which we may be re-formed.
In Acts 2, we find a summary of the daily life of the early Christians in Jerusalem. It says that they are devoted to four things. Another translation is that they persevere, they keep on doing these four things.
The four things are:
The apostle’s teaching
Fellowship
Breaking of bread
Prayer
I wonder how each of these showed up in our word association. We may have called them by other names, but I expect they were probably there.
The first practice is the apostles’ teaching. They persevered, they kept on learning from the apostles. As they heard about Jesus, about his life and his teachings from those who had known him, their faith and understanding grew deeper.
Justo Gonzalez is a Cuban-American Methodist theologian and church historian. His commentary on the book of Acts was originally published in Spanish for Christian communities in Latin America and the USA in the 1990’s. It was intended to highlight the relevance of the book of Acts for the struggles of Christians in those contexts. I find it helpful to read over their shoulders (in an English translation) because it helps bring my own context into view.
Gonzalez writes, “The ‘teaching of the apostles’ is not the mere repetition of what the apostles taught. It is above all the teaching and the studying that allow us to carry forth our own apostolate, our mission today. The Church lives in an ever-changing world. Because the mission is a bridge between the message of what has taken place in Jesus and the reality in which the addressees live, missionary or apostolic study must always take into account the world in which the Church lives. That is why it is not enough to repeat what has always been said, in the same way in which it has been said before. It is necessary to study both the Word and the world to which it is to be communicated.”[1]
The second practice is fellowship. The Greek word is koinonia which can mean sharing or solidarity. There is an intensity to this word. It didn’t just mean good feelings among friends. It meant common enterprise. In Luke 5:10, we’re told that Peter, James and John were joint owners of a fishing boat. The word for that ownership, that partnership, is koinonia.[2]
The Christians in Jerusalem counted on each other for encouragement and friendship, but also to meet physical and financial needs. They were in each other’s lives on a daily basis. They were as closely connected as business partners are.
The third practice is the breaking of bread. This refers in part to the Lord’s supper, but we remember that Jesus broke bread in all kinds of meals with all kinds of people. So sharing communion and eating ordinary meals together are spiritual practices in the early church.
And contrary to popular opinion, this is Biblical evidence that Baptists did not invent the potluck. Christians were eating meals together long before Baptists were a thing.
Barbara Brown Taylor notes that Jesus spent his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash feet and share supper. She says, “he gave them concrete things to do, specific ways of being in their bodies together, that would go on teaching them what they needed to know. . . So Jesus gave them things they could get their hands on, that would require them to get close enough to touch one another. In the case of the meal, he gave them fragrant things to sip and chew that they could pass to each other around the table. In the case of the feet, he gave them real dirt and calluses that they could use to enter one another’s lives.”[3]
We have recognized again the vitality of those concrete, incarnational practices, as we have been deprived of most of them over the last 18 months of the pandemic.
The fourth practice is prayer. Luke doesn’t describe this much here, except to say that they praised God with glad and generous hearts.
Four practices – teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayers. They seem simple, but they’re messy enough to keep us busy, and with the presence of the Holy Spirit, to stay just beyond our control.
Here’s a sidebar I find interesting. The early Christians met primarily in homes. That was where they shared meals and prayers. That was how they were in each other’s daily lives. In the gender roles of the time, households were the sphere of women. Public places were the male domain. But women could be and often were the managers of households, with administrative, financial and disciplinary responsibilities. They had authority to direct men and women within it. And so, when church activities took place within households, the role of women in leadership was not questioned.
In her book, When Women were Priests, Karen Jo Torjesen writes, “For more than 200 years, Christianity was essentially a religion . . . practiced in the private space of the household. It’s concerns were the domestic life of its community rather than the political life of the city.” At the beginning of the third century, there was shift from ministry to governance. “As Christianity entered the public sphere, male leaders began to demand the same subjugation of women in the churches as prevailed in society at large.”[4]
Of course, I believe that shift was harmful to women, to the church and contrary to Jesus’ good news. Recognizing that one change which took place as the church became more institutionalized, I have to wonder what else was shifted in not so good ways. I have to wonder what else we might need to reclaim from within those practices of the first 200 years.
Church was not easy then. It is not easy now. We should not expect it ever to be so. It is counter-cultural. It is messy. It requires us to work with each other, including working with people who make mistakes and need to be forgiven. It means that we will make mistakes and will need to seek forgiveness. It demands sharing and sacrifice. No, it will never be easy. But sometimes, I wonder if we have made it harder than it needs to be. Or if the things that are hard are not the most important things we should be doing.
I am struck by the intense togetherness described in Acts 2, by the solidarity and sharing. The Gallup Well-Being Index is an on-going study of happiness in the world. It looks at many different factors about health and well-being. One of its findings about religious belonging is relevant here. They group people into three categories -- highly religious, moderately religious and not at all religious – by their own self descriptions. Moderately religious, are those who have a belief in God, but are not engaged with a faith community. Gallup found these people are less happy and less fulfilled than those who profess no religious belief at all. It seems that the key is not just believing, but believing and belonging. To believe and not to belong is a sign that something is wrong.[5]
That suggests to me that our efforts to share the love of Jesus with others might begin with efforts to help others belong.
Micah J. Murray is a writer and speaker trying to make sense of faith. He has been described as your typical somewhat disillusioned-but-tenaciously-hopeful post-evangelical millennial. I have shared this meme with you before, but I share it again because I think it sums up so much of the longing of many in his generation.
“I want a community where we can sit on a couch together and swear about how badly we want to be loved by a god we’re not even sure we believe in anymore.”[6]
What if one of the greatest gifts the we could offer our broken and alienated society was a vision of intense social belonging such as we hear described in Acts today? What if our best testimony to the life of Jesus was our life together?
Several times in the book of Acts, Luke offers these short summaries of the early church. Some people think they’re idealized. Others want more details. The Rev Janelle Holmes pastors a church in Atlanta that is about 5 years old. She rewrote our text passage to try to make it more realistic and specific. Here is what she said,
“They learned together, new things, hard things, liberating things. They hung out with the leaders and learned from them things they didn’t know and taught the leaders a few things as well. Some of the leaders were a little over-rated.
They ate together, sometimes with china and sometimes with paper plates. Some were better at cooking than others, and sometimes the kids refused peoples food and it was embarrassing. But they prayed together and that helped calm their nerves and connect them with God’s grace.
Cool things happened in their relationships and in their communities and they were amazed. They spent time together with like-minded individuals because they felt cared for by them and needed to know they weren’t crazy.
They shared the things of their life--food, money, childcare, shelter--to anyone who needed it and it was exhausting sometimes and they had to take breaks, especially the introverts. They did it daily and the extroverts over-functioned. They sacrificed time from other things, which was hard, in order to dedicate a lot of time together in holy places, showing up for God and for each other and for themselves.
They spent a lot of time together in their homes, clean homes and messy homes, eating and being happy and crying and being generous with each other because that is how God wanted their relationships to be. They were so grateful to God for all of this, although resentfulness occasionally sneaked in. Yet in all of this, God gave them more and more friends.” [7]
May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
[1]Justo L. Gonazalez, Acts: The Gospel of the Spirit (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2001).p. 52
[2] Gonazalez, p. 51
[3] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2005-04/practicing-incarnation
[4] Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were Priests, (San Fransisco: HarperCollins, 1993), pp.37-38.
[5]Timothy Carney, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, (New York: HarperCollins, 2019) p. 133
[6] https://www.facebook.com/micahjmurray/photos/10153648604412820
[7] https://www.ormewoodchurch.org/single-post/2020/07/06/relationships-and-community