“Great Grace Was Upon Them All” (Acts 4:32-37)

I want to begin by saying what a privilege I consider it, to be invited into this pulpit on the occasion of your anniversary. Karen and I have just been attending over the last five weeks and it are clear to both of us that God is doing great things in and through this church.

Thirty-three years! Sometimes (especially when my knees are bothering me!), I wish I could go back to the age I was then. But it excites me that many of you were not even a twinkle in your parents’ eyes back then. Thirty-three years! A third of a century—take a moment to think how much has changed in that span of time! I was still using a typewriter thirty-three years ago! Anyone here know what a typewriter is?

Thirty-three years: the tender age of an innocent man who hung dying on a cross. As he cried aloud, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the curtain of the Temple was ripped in two from top to bottom, the earth shook, the skies darkened, and the world would never be the same again.

It is in the shadow of that event that we meet Jesus’ followers in the book of Acts this morning. In those final verses of chapter 4, Luke gives us one of his little glimpses into the life of the community of believers that had begun to form in Jerusalem. And a remarkable picture it is! The church was barely in its infancy. But just take a look at it. Luke tells us in verse 32, “The full number of those who believed were one in heart and soul… With great power the apostles were giving their testimony … and great grace was upon them all…”

Now I am convinced that Luke, the author of Acts, has given us that amazing portrait of the church for a reason. It’s not like a picture in an art gallery, where you stand and admire it for a few moments and then move on to something else. No, as beautiful and compelling as it is, this picture is really far more than that.

In fact, it is the second little portrait of the church that Luke gives us in the early chapters of Acts. And, just as with the first, he has written it down for us not only to show us what the church was, but also to teach us what the church is both called by Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit to be.

So we can see these verses as a kind of pattern, a model. Not that we’re required to follow it precisely to the letter. But we are to learn from it, to glean principles from it, and then by the Holy Spirit’s power to put those principles into practice. So what are the principles that Luke wants to share with us?

I want to suggest that there are three. And they fall under the headings of community, testimony and generosity.

Community

So, let’s begin with community. We find it right there in verse 32: “Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul.” I believe that that description stands in dramatic contrast to so much of what many people are experiencing in our society today. What we see around us again and again is not community but estrangement. It is not connection but alienation. It is not togetherness but a profound loneliness.

It’s more than twenty years since Robert Putnam wrote his book entitled Bowling Alone. In it he detailed the gradual decline over the previous fifty years in community involvement, in everything from political parties and public meeting attendance to membership in civic organizations and social clubs (and that of course includes the church). In the years since he wrote, the decline has become only more precipitous. Social media for an increasing number of people have taken the place of real relationships. We spend more time texting on our cellphones than in face-to-face conversation. And now, to put the icing on the cake, we have covid, which has forced us even further into our own separate cocoons—where we hesitate to give one another a hug or exchange a handshake. Even a friendly smile is obscured by a mask.

All of this stands in stark contrast to God’s plan. You only have to read two chapters into the Bible, where God has just created the universe in all its complexity out of nothing. Each day God brings more and more things into being—sun, moon and stars, dry ground and seas, plants and trees, animals and birds and fish in all their endless profusion. And at the end of each of those days, what is the chorus that we hear? “And God saw that it was good.” “And God saw that it was good.” “And God saw that it was good…”

Then we turn the page and we read of God forming the first human being from the dust of the earth. God looks down once again upon the creation he has made, but this time what does he say? Not, “It is good,” but, “It is not good…” “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18).

You see, God has created you and me for community. And when God begins to bring about his new creation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and through the gift of the Holy Spirit, what is one of the first things we begin to see happening? Community.

And an amazing community it was—a community where people saw themselves as belonging to one another. Years later the apostle Paul would reflect on this and write about the church as a body, where feet and hands, eyes and ears and noses (not to mention all our internal organs) are all interconnected and interdependent.

“Community,” wrote Henri Nouwen, “is not a human creation but a divine gift…” But it doesn’t just happen spontaneously, Nouwen warned. “[It] calls for an obedient response. This response may require much patience and humility, much listening and speaking, much confrontation and self-examination, but it should always be an obedient response to a bond which is given and not made.”[1]

I believe that one of the greatest challenges facing the church in our western society today is to be that kind of community, where the self-giving love of Christ is visibly and tangibly present. I believe that’s what many people are looking for in our society today. And I believe that when it happens people will flock to it like bees to a honeypot.

Testimony

If the first mark of the church was community, then the second was testimony. Luke tells us in our passage this morning that “with great power the apostles were giving their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus”.

Now it may have been the apostles who were tasked with proclaiming the good news about Jesus at the beginning. But that did not last for long. We have only to turn to chapter 8 of Acts to read that it was ordinary believers who carried that good news beyond the confines of Jerusalem into Judea and Samaria and eventually into the farthest reaches of the known world. I love the way Eugene Peterson put it in his translation of the Bible: “Forced to leave home base, the Christians all became missionaries. Wherever they were scattered, they [proclaimed] the message about Jesus” (Acts 8:4).

I remember when Karen and I were in Libya in north Africa, strolling through the ruins of a Roman city that had flourished a century or two after the time of Christ. Those were years when being a Jesus-follower was still forbidden by the powers-that-be and Christians were severely persecuted for their faith. Yet, scratched and carved into rocks and walls, I could spot an “ichthus” here and a Chi-Rho there. I have to tell you, it was a deeply moving experience to stand in front of that silent witness of my Christian forebears, who would not be stopped from sharing their faith. Could they have imagined in all their wildest dreams that nearly two thousand years later their message would still be visible?

Those early believers were simply practising what they had learned from the example of people like John: “That which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you…” (1 John 1:3). They were convinced of what the great evangelist Paul had declared years before. Like him, they were not ashamed to proclaim the good news about Jesus, “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16). And they could not be kept silent.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that you start carving Christian symbols into walls. Or that you start buttonholing people on the streets. But what I am saying is that we cannot be silent. And in that regard we need to take to heart the wise advice of the apostle Peter. “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect…” (1 Peter 3:15)

I believe that what Peter was recognizing in that verse was that the Christian message is most commonly and most effectively communicated in the context of relationships. It’s when people are able to see the difference that Jesus makes within our lives that they begin to ask questions. And then we have an opportunity, not to cajole or coerce or to get into some kind of sales talk, but to allow the Holy Spirit to speak through us.

Generosity

So, we have community and we have testimony. Which brings us to the third characteristic that we see in those early believers, which was generosity.

If we are to believe what people report on their income tax returns, we Canadians are not a generous society. Taken as a whole, Canadians give just 1.6% of their overall income to charity; and half of those who do contribute give less than $200 annually.[2]

Now I recognize that you can’t measure everything in dollars and cents, and that generosity can be expressed in a whole variety of ways. But the generosity that we see in that first body of believers in Acts was an extravagant generosity. It is the generosity that Jesus talked about: “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, pouring into your lap” (Luke 6:38). For it is the generosity of God, who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all and now graciously gives us all things (Romans 8:32).

I remember a wise friend of mine once saying that when people met Jesus, they moved from being centripetal—that is, where they see everything in their world as spinning inwards towards them—to being centrifugal, where everything flows outwards for the benefit of others. He gave the example of Zacchaeus, the miserly tax collector in Luke’s gospel. Zacchaeus had spent his whole life squeezing the last penny out of the hapless citizens of Jericho. But after meeting Jesus it was as though he couldn’t give enough away. And it wasn’t though he did it grudgingly or because Jesus had been guilting him out or twisting his arm. He did it willingly, joyfully, extravagantly.

The same was true with the little Christian congregation in Corinth a generation later. When they heard that their fellow believers in Judaea were going through a hard time because of a drought, they gave generously. They could be generous because they had experienced God’s generosity in Jesus. “Though he was rich,” wrote Paul, “yet for your sake he became poor, so that you by his poverty might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). So it was that Paul could urge them not to give “reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Corinthians 9:7-8).

It is important at this point to remind ourselves that generosity is far more than money. What I am talking about is an attitude of generosity that colours every area of life—a whole culture of generosity, of extravagant open-heartedness, of joyful largesse, that permeates every aspect of the whole Christian community. I am convinced that where this happens there is little that could be more attractive to an unbelieving world.

Let’s leave it there, then, with those three thoughts in our mind: community, testimony and generosity. And as we move into our thirty-fourth year, may the Holy Spirit so move among us that Jesus may have all the glory. Amen.

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[1]     Henri Nouwen, Community

[2]       https://afpglobal.org/sites/default/files/attachments/generic/WCDW2021.pdf

“The Wind Blows Where It Wills” (Acts 2:1-4)

 

It’s probably been a long time since you were in a room with a hundred and twenty people. But I want you to do your best to imagine it anyway. You might even need to close your eyes for a moment—as long as you promise not to fall asleep!

The scene I want you to form in your minds is, of course, the upper room in Jerusalem. There Jesus’ followers had been gathering ever since the day he had been taken up into heaven. You may recall that he had left them with the command to wait for the gift the Father had promised, when the Holy Spirit would come upon them.

Luke tells us that they had faithfully followed Jesus’ instruction, joining together constantly in prayer. Ten days had now elapsed. It was the festival of Pentecost, seven weeks after the celebration of Passover. And next to Passover it was the biggest holiday of the year, marking the beginning of the barley harvest. You might think of it as a little bit like Thanksgiving, with people travelling from all over the empire to celebrate.

The big difference was, though, that instead of going back to their family homes, everybody came to Jerusalem. So the city was chock-a-block with people. And as a result the upper room must have seemed like something of an oasis—even with a hundred and twenty people packed into it!

Then something strange began to happen. Suddenly from out of nowhere the quiet murmur of prayer was overwhelmed by the roar of a violent wind. We’re not talking about a gentle spring breeze here or even a howling gale. Think Dorian. Think Juan. Now start multiplying. This was a wind that tumbles down trees. This was a wind that churns up waves that tower over the masts of ships. And Luke tells us that the roar of it filled every corner of the house where the hundred and twenty were assembled.

What could it all mean? I can only imagine that those first believers were utterly mystified. I know if I had been there I would have been shaking right to the marrow of my bones!

At the beginning of creation (Genesis 1:2)

But let’s stand back for a moment and from the safe distance of nearly two thousand years and let’s try to gain an understanding of what was happening on that Pentecost morning. Because what those first believers were experiencing was in fact just part of a much larger story. So over the next few minutes I want us to try to capture a view of that broader picture—and that will begin by going all the way back to the opening verses of the Bible.

There we are confronted by a remarkable picture. It is one that our human minds really aren’t capable of conceiving: absolute nothingness. The author of these verses uses the words “formless and void”—utter, impenetrable darkness. Yet over it all we find the Spirit of God. The words in Hebrew are Ruach Elohim.

Now that word ruach can mean not only “spirit”, but also “breath” or “wind”. So it is that one translation of this verse runs, “The wind of God swept over the face of the waters.”

Now if you’re a gardener like me, wind is not always a welcome phenomenon. In fact, it can be downright annoying. It’s the wind that blows the snow into three-foot drifts that I have to plow to get my car onto the street in the winter. It’s the wind that blows down the leaves from the trees in the fall and playfully scatters them all over the lawn so that I have to spend hours raking them up.

But the wind of God—Ruach Elohim—is just the opposite. As the ruach sweeps powerfully over the waters, order appears out of chaos. From the swirling formless plasma there begin to appear earth and sky; land and seas; trees and plants; sun, moon and stars; fish and birds and land animals. Then finally, bearing God’s own image, human beings. And like an artist standing back and looking at his work, the Bible tells us that “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good”.

So it is that a primary work of the Holy Spirit is to bring order out of chaos, beauty out of confusion. And that was exactly what was happening in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost.

Just try to put yourself into the minds of the disciples for a moment. Their lives had been a roller coaster. Just eight weeks before, they had been surrounded by a cheering crowd waving palm branches and shouting “Hosanna to the king!” as they made their way into Jerusalem. Five days later they had stood by helpless as they watched the one they had come to believe was their saviour hang dying on a cross as a convicted criminal. Then on the third day after that they had had to get their minds around the fact that the same man they had seen put to death was alive. And yet, while little doubt may have remained on one level, what were they to make of it? What did it all mean?

Enter the Holy Spirit, to bring order out of chaos, to make sense out of what in the eyes of the world would have been (and for many still is!) nonsense.

On the shore of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:10-22)

On to another scene now, this time with the Hebrew people on the banks of the Red Sea. It had been a dramatic time for them. They had lived through the long series of plagues that had afflicted the kingdom of Egypt. And then the worst had struck, taking in its wake the firstborn son in every Egyptian family. But it was this final tragedy that had led to the fulfilment of what had seemed an impossible dream. It was what allowed them to escape from their life of slavery in Egypt and find a land that they could call their own.

They had set up camp near the shore of the Red Sea, when word came to them that the Egyptian army was just over the horizon. Needless to say, they were panic-stricken. “What have you done to us?” they shouted at Moses. “Better to have been slaves than to be slaughtered like animals!” As the sun set, a powerful wind began to blow from the east. It blew all night, so that when daylight returned, the sea had dried up and the Hebrews were able to cross over into safety. As we all know, the Egyptian armies were not as lucky. Their horses and chariots bogged down in the soft ground and before they could escape, the sea had rushed back into its place.

And here we have a picture of a second work of the Holy Spirit: to bring hope into an atmosphere of despair, victory in the face of defeat. That too must have been the experience of Jesus’ followers in the upper room. Yes, they knew that Jesus had been raised from the dead. But realistically what was going to happen to them? Would they remain a tiny cluster of devotees who clung together around some fond memories? It wouldn’t surprise me to find that they were still locking the doors for fear of being found out by the authorities.

But now there was no longer any need for fear (or indeed any possibility of secrecy), as the Holy Spirit caused the sound of their joy-filled praises to flood out onto the street below.

In the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14)

There is a third scene that I want to share, that underlies the events of Pentecost. It comes in what to me is one of the most arresting passages in all of Scripture—in a vision that God gave to the prophet Ezekiel.

Ezekiel tells us that he is led by the Spirit of the Lord (and once again it is that same word, ruach—breath, wind) to find himself standing in the middle of a valley—a valley full of bones. Countless numbers of parched and whitened bones surround him in every direction that he cares to look. As he gazes around at this scene of desolation, God puts the question to him, “Can these bones live?” Then God instructs him to command the bones, “Dry bones, this is what the Sovereign Lord says… ‘I will make breath enter you (and here again it is that same word, ruach), and you will come to life…’ ”

Hardly have the words left Ezekiel’s mouth than he begins to hear a rattling sound as the bones come together. Soon they are being covered with tendons and flesh and skin. But Ezekiel observes that there was no breath, no ruach, in them. Again God tells Ezekiel to prophesy, “Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.” As he does so, they raise themselves to their feet. And God gives Ezekiel the promise, “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live…”

Thus we see a third work of the Holy Spirit: to bring life where there is death. History tells us that, of the eleven apostles in that upper room, all but one would suffer a martyr’s death. But they would go to their deaths in the firm conviction that there was nothing that could separate them from God’s love in Christ. In the words of their future co-worker Paul, “He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.” (Romans 8:11)

As a result, they would go to their deaths in the comfort of the Spirit-implanted conviction that nothing could separate them from Jesus’ love. In Eugene Peterson’s rendering of Paul’s words, “The Spirit of God whets our appetite by giving us a taste of what’s ahead. He puts a little of heaven in our hearts so that we’ll never settle for less” (2 Corinthians 5:5).

One night in Jerusalem (John 3:1-8)

Let’s shift now to one further scene. It’s a starry night in Jerusalem. Two figures can be seen in deep discussion. “Rabbi,” says one, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God…” To which he receives the enigmatic reply, “No one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.”

“But how is this possible?” Nicodemus asks. “How can someone be born when they are old?” And Jesus replies, “The wind blows where it wills. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

On this festival of Pentecost we remind ourselves that the Holy Spirit continues at work today—in the midst of a confused and increasingly confusing world, in the midst of military wars and culture wars, in the midst of a growing environmental crisis, in the midst of a global pandemic—to bring the assurance that there is a God who reigns over all and whose good and perfect purposes will come to fruition—and that Jesus Christ has won the victory over sin and evil and death.

But it remains to you and to me to catch the wind—to allow God’s Holy Spirit to blow in us and through us. It will be unsettling. And no doubt he will rearrange your life a little. Perhaps more than a little! But the adventure will be worth it…

“In the Meantime…” (2 Corinthians 5:1-21)

Years ago (in fact it was the first summer after we were married), Karen and I decided that we would spend our summer vacation visiting her relatives and my birthplace here in Nova Scotia. We didn’t have a large salary between us, and we were young and adventuresome, so we decided that it would be a camping holiday. Everything went wonderfully smoothly until we were in Ingonish on Cape Breton Island. It was there that, around two in the morning, the heavens broke loose with a torrential rain. The downpour was unremitting. Pools of water began to develop on the roof of our old canvas tent and the whole structure began to sag. I ran around the outside tightening the guy ropes, but my efforts were of no avail. We rearranged things inside the tent to protect them from the drip-drip-drip that had begun to develop. But by five o’clock and not having slept a wink, we decided that it was time to pack up and abandon ship, so to speak. So, we hopped into the car, drove the two hours to Sydney and waited in the parking lot outside Canadian Tire until opening time. (Needless to say, the sky had already begun to clear, and I don’t think we had another drop of rain for the rest of our time in Nova Scotia!)

Well, I hope my little tale of woe doesn’t discourage any of you who might be thinking of camping this summer! It’s really an attempt to help us dig into the apostle Paul’s words in our passage from 2 Corinthians this morning, where Paul begins by writing about tents: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven…”

I probably don’t have to remind you that Paul was a tentmaker by profession. That was how he made his living. And I suspect that he worked hard to make good, quality tents. Although in the climate where he lived, they would have been more to shield from the sun than from the rain. Yet Paul knew that, no matter what kind of material you stitched a tent from, it was not going to last for ever. It might stand up for years, with special care perhaps even a decade or two. But the ravages of the hot Middle Eastern sun would eventually reduce it to worthless rags.

For Paul the tents that he carefully cut and sewed together were a reminder of his own mortality. The author of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament put it much more grimly when he mused,

Honour and enjoy your Creator while you’re still young,
Before the years take their toll and your vigour wanes,
Before your vision dims and the world blurs
And the winter years keep you close to the fire.
In old age, your body no longer serves you so well.
Muscles slacken, grip weakens, joints stiffen.
The shades are pulled down on the world.
You can’t come and go at will. Things grind to a halt.
The hum of the household fades away.
You are wakened now by bird song.
Hikes to the mountains are a thing of the past.
Even a stroll down the road has its terrors.
Your hair turns apple-blossom white,
Adorning a fragile and impotent matchstick body.
Yes, you’re well on your way to eternal rest,
While your friends make plans for your funeral.
Life, lovely while it lasts, is soon over.
Life as we know it, precious and beautiful, ends.
The body is put back in the same ground it came from.
The spirit returns to God, who first breathed it.
It’s all smoke, nothing but smoke…
Everything’s smoke. (Ecclesiastes 12:1-8, The Message)

Well, if that doesn’t get you down, in recent months the fragility of life and health has been made much more real for us with the advent of covid. Who would have thought less than half a year ago that we would all be attending church on YouTube, followed by a fellowship hour on Zoom, and shopping at stores dressed like bandits?

Promised (1-8)

Well, it wasn’t my intention to put you into a depression this morning! Nor was it Paul’s when he wrote to his friends in Corinth. Because Paul wanted to assure them that this tent, that is our bodies, is not all there is to life—that they will be replaced with something far greater and far more glorious than anything you or I can ever begin to imagine. In Paul’s words, it is “a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands”.

Now the biblical authors in their wisdom (and that includes Paul) do not tell us in any detail what that resurrection life will be like. Suffice it to say that it will surpass anything we have experienced in the here and now. The prophets offer us glimpses in the language of poetry of a place where “the wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food,” where there is no harm or destruction (Isaiah 65:25). The book of Revelation gives us that remarkable picture of a numberless crowd of people “from every nation, tribe, people and language” standing around the throne of the Lamb, while the angels and the heavenly beings cry aloud,

Amen!
Praise and glory
and wisdom and thanks and honour
and power and strength
be to our God for ever and ever.
Amen! (Revelation 7:12)

But it seems to me that apart from a few other images here and there, that is about as specific as the Bible gets. C.S. Lewis was able to put a lot of these biblical pictures together in what I think is a very original way, in a little book entitled The Great Divorce. It is the imaginative story of a group of people who are transported from this world into the next. To his surprise, Lewis finds that the world as he had known it had in reality been little more than shadows and that life in the world to come was far more real and far more solid than anything he might have envisioned even in his wildest dreams.

After he gets out of the bus, he senses that he is in a space with a vastness far greater than anything he has ever experienced before. Even the solar system seems like nothing more than the inside of a room. As his gaze turns to his fellow passengers, he observes that they are transparent like ghosts, that the grass does not bend underneath them when they tread on it. He stoops down to pluck a daisy growing at his feet and, although he tugs at it until sweat pours from his forehead, the stalk refuses to break or even twist. The story goes on and I’ll leave it to you to read it. But the point that Lewis was seeking to make is that the world that awaits us is immeasurably more substantial than anything we have experienced or can even imagine in the here and now.

Practised (9-17)

At this point we need to be clear what Paul (and for that matter the whole Bible) is talking about. It is not just some future experience that awaits us, the proverbial “pie in the sky when I die”. For those of us who have entered a relationship with Jesus Christ it is a present reality. Paul puts it this way in verse 17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!”

So there is a sense in which, through our faith in Jesus Christ, you and I have already begun to set foot in that new creation. To be sure, we are still fallible, sinful and as prone as ever to mess things up (and here I speak from my own experience!). Yet at the same time we are called both as a church and as individual believers to live as inhabitants of that new creation.

“So,” says Paul in verse 16, “from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer.” That is, when we enter a relationship with Jesus, everything takes on a new perspective—particularly the categories by which we are so inclined to define ourselves and other people, whether they be social status or education or looks or sex or race or whatever else.

As I was preparing for this morning’s sermon, I came across some profound words on this subject by James Denney, a Scottish Bible scholar who taught with remarkable clarity. Here is a little of what he wrote more than 125 years ago:

Those who are in Christ have died to the whole order of life in which [people] are judged ‘after the flesh’. Perhaps the Christian Church has almost as much need as any other society to lay this to heart. We are still too ready to put stress upon distinctions which are quite in place in the world, but are without ground in Christ. Even in a Christian congregation there is a recognition of wealth, of learning, of social position, … of race, [all of] which is not Christian… These distinctions … are meaningless in relation to Christ, and ought not to be made… If [these] distinctions … are lost in the common relation to Christ, then life is open to us in all its length and breadth; all things are ours, because we are his. To make them narrows and impoverishes the soul. To be guided by worldly distinctions is to know … people by what is superficial in their nature; but … to look at [them] in relation to him who is Redeemer and Lord of all, is to know all our [brothers and sisters], and to know them not on the surface, but to the heart.[1]

This was the point that Paul was at pains to get across again and again in his two letters to the church in Corinth. For tragically it was a congregation where social status was still all too important for some, where others had not let go of pagan practices, and still others had allowed themselves to slide into immorality.

In contrast to this, Paul writes elsewhere that in the Christian community “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). And in the book of Acts Paul’s companion Luke tells us of the earliest Christian community, where

they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together… They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42-47)

Now I’m not saying that we need to mimic that church in every detail, but clearly it was a community in which Jesus was present, where the world to come was visible in the things that are, where God’s new creation was erupting amid the old. And that is what God in Christ is calling you and me to be today. To put it in Paul’s words, we are Christ’s ambassadors.

Purchased (18-21)

But how is all this possible? Paul summarizes it for us in what for me is one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture: “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

It was on the cross that Jesus absorbed into himself all the anger, pain, bitterness and division, all the injustice, prejudice, conflict, hatred and evil that have so poisoned and corrupted God’s creation. It was at the cross that God pronounced his definitive “No!” to all that is wrong with the world. And through that cross God has opened the way to the new creation, to our home in eternity.

The day will surely come when you and I will shed this tent of our earthly bodies—when we shall be gathered in that new creation to stand in awe around the throne of the Lamb. But between that time and this God has redeemed us and called us and empowers us to be agents and representatives of that world that is to come—a community where Christ is present and seen and believed through the witness of our lives. May God the Holy Spirit make us equal to that task!

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[1]       Denney, 2 Corinthians, 1894, p. 208

“The Real Miracle of Pentecost” (Acts 2:42-47)

I wonder how many people had their TV sets switched on yesterday morning at 5 o’clock. That’s when the CBC coverage of the royal wedding began and for the next five hours I can only imagine that millions of viewers were glued to their screens, trying to catch a glimpse of this or that celebrity among the six hundred who were invited to the event.

Long before it took place, countless hours of television time had already gone into the anticipation of the wedding—and for the publicists it was all big money. While the costs of the wedding are estimated to top $36 million, it was expected to generate over $860 million in revenue. If it is anything to go by, memorabilia sales alone for the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton seven years ago amounted to more than $380 million.

By this time you may already have been asking yourself, “What is this preacher fellow getting at—and what does all of this business about royal weddings have to do with the Bible anyway?” Well, for Christians today is the anniversary of another big event, when three thousand souls were added to the fledgling group of Jesus’ followers who had come together that morning to pray.

Little could they have imagined when they gathered in the upper room that they would be swept off their feet (spiritually if not physically) by a “rushing mighty wind”, touched by fire, and speaking in languages never before heard from their lips! So completely strange was what happened to them that it is little wonder that it all began to attract a crowd of people who were no less amazed and perplexed than they were. “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!”

So today, while the rest of the world is recovering from the royal wedding or preparing for Game Five in the playoffs between Vegas and the Jets, we Christians quietly celebrate the Feast of Pentecost. And quite rightly our attention is fixed on the miraculous events that occurred that morning: the mysterious whistling of the wind, the flames of fire that divided and settled on each of the believers, and the praises of God in all the varied languages of the known world.

It was a remarkable event—and I don’t know how many times I have preached on it over the past forty-plus years. Yet this year as I began my preparations, it dawned upon me that my attention has always been focused on the events in the opening verses of Acts, chapter 2. At the same time it began to occur to me that maybe what Luke wrote in the closing verses of that same chapter has even more to teach us about the real meaning of Pentecost and about the work that the Holy Spirit yearns to do in you and in me. So allow me to read them to you.

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

Devotion

There are three aspects of this brief summary of the first days of the church I would like us to focus on. The first of them can be summarized by the word “devotion”. Luke begins, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

My Greek lexicon tells me that those words “devoted themselves” can be translated in a whole variety of ways: “persist in”, “attach oneself to”, “be faithful to”, “be busily engaged in”, “hold fast to”, “persevere in”, “spend much time in”. By now probably you get the idea. Those first believers were not prepared to allow anything to stand in the way of learning from the apostles or from coming together regularly for fellowship, worship and prayer.

Early in my own walk with Christ many years ago, my pastor encouraged me to begin memorizing Scripture. The first verses I ever committed to memory were Psalm 119:9 and 11, and I quote them as I learned them in the old King James Version:

Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?
By taking heed thereto according to thy word…
Thy word have I hid in mine heart,
that I might not sin against thee.

It seems to me that those early believers did exactly what Psalm 119 counsels us to do: they were taking God’s word to heart with an unshakeable commitment to the apostles’ teaching. Now of course they had no New Testament and they wouldn’t for a couple of generations. But they had the apostles themselves and they spent time learning from them, drinking in their words—and we’re not just talking about a weekly twenty-minute sermon or even a forty-minute one. Acts 20 tells us of an evening when the apostle Paul went on talking till midnight—to the point where one young man drifted into sleep and fell out the window!

But the point was that they could never hear enough. Like the two companions who met with Jesus along the road to Emmaus on that first resurrection day, I can only imagine that their hearts burned within them as they learned from the apostles and opened the Scriptures together.

Some years ago we had the privilege of hosting Ernest Gordon, who had been held captive in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma along what was known as the railway of death. Although he was not a believer at the time, he and some of his men began reading the New Testament together. It did not take long before they found that they could not put it down, for they had the amazing experience that the same Jesus whom they found on its pages was there among them.

Yet much of this seems so far from the experience of the church in our part of the world today. A recent study revealed that only forty-five percent of those who regularly attend church read the Bible more than once a week. Almost twenty percent say they never read the Bible—and that is about the same percentage as those who read it on a daily basis. [1] That seems a far cry from our early forebears who lived in the shadow of Pentecost, who could not get enough the apostles’ teaching. Would that the Holy Spirit would stir the same thirst in us today!

Awe

Those first believers showed a devotion to the apostles’ teaching. But Luke also tells us in verse 43 that “everyone was filled with awe”. Again, if you read that verse in the old King James Version, it would sound like this: “And fear came upon every soul.” The word in the original in fact is phobos. We find it in words like “claustrophobia”, the fear of small spaces, “acrophobia”, the fear of heights, and “arachnophobia”, the fear of spiders.

There was a German philosopher of a century ago called Rudolf Otto, who came up with the phrase mysterium tremendum—the sense of something so mysterious that it causes you to tremble. This, he said, is what happens to us when we come into the presence of the living God.

We see it in Moses as he tended his flocks in the wilderness and approached that strange bush that burned but was not consumed. The book of Exodus tells us that when Moses began to realize in whose presence he stood, “he hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:6). Or think of Isaiah in the temple, as he gazed at the six-winged seraphs and heard their cry, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty…” and felt the stone floor shuddering beneath him. “Woe to me!” was all he could think to utter, “For I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” (Isaiah 6:3-4).

Or we can turn to the New Testament, to the story of the centurion who came to Jesus on behalf of his servant. “Lord,” he said to him, “I do not deserve you to come under my roof…” (Matthew 8:5-9) Think too of the occasion when Peter and his companions had just hauled in an enormous load of fish because Jesus had told them to let down their nets in spite of there being no fish. He fell down before Jesus and wailed, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5:1-10)

Our forebears in the faith had that same sense of awe as they gathered to learn from the apostles, to break bread and to pray together. The letter to Hebrews tells us,

You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. (Hebrews 12:22-24)

How we need to ask God to inspire in us that same sense of awe—each time we gather to take time to come before him consciously and deliberately and ask him to open our hearts afresh to the unfathomable mystery of his love and power. I have no doubt that we would know more of the Holy Spirit’s presence if we did.

Community

A devotion to the apostles’ teaching, awe in the presence of the living God—and a third characteristic of those first Christians I would like to emphasize comes in a word for which there is really no adequate English equivalent. It is the word koinonia. Most often it is rendered “fellowship” as we see it in this morning’s passage. But if you think of fellowship (as I suspect most of us do) as what happens over a cup of coffee after the worship service, then we have fallen woefully short of what the New Testament means when it uses the word koinonia.

What it really means is having something in common on a profound level—and Luke gives us a picture of how that works out in practical terms in those last verses of Acts 2. Let me read them to you once again:

All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts…

Now for us who have been immersed from infancy in the independent-minded, freedom-loving principles western society, that is a strange and even frightening picture. It may relieve you to know I am not advocating that we seek to replicate detail for detail all the practices of the early church.

What I am saying is that there was a genuine sense of caring and sharing among those first believers that you would not have found outside the church. I remember some years ago a pastor friend telling me of a member of his church who was part of a small group that met for Bible study and prayer. The man happened to work for a tobacco company. Over time he became convinced that as a Christian he could not in good conscience continue to do this and he shared it with the group. To his surprise, they all agreed that if he felt that this was the direction in which God was leading him, they would give him any financial support he might need in order to make the change—and they ended up caring for him and his family for the better part of a year until he found a new job.

Those people knew the meaning of the word koinonia. It was our Lord Jesus himself who said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35). And so I don’t believe it was by coincidence that Luke concludes the day of Pentecost with these words: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”

As we look back on the mighty, rushing wind and on the tongues of fire that came upon those first believers, may we pray not for them to happen again, but for what they led to: to a wholehearted devotion to the apostles’ teaching, to a life-changing awe as we gather in the presence of the living God, and to a sense of community that is costly and real. In a word, may the Holy Spirit lead us to being the authentic body of Jesus in the world today.

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[1]     Ed Stetzer, “The Epidemic of Bible Illiteracy in Our Churches”, Christianity Today, July 2015