The Last Laugh (Genesis 18:1 - 15)

      Twenty-five years before our passage begins, God came to Abraham for the first time.  Remember?  He was called Abram at the time  . . . and God came to him in Haran and made him a promise: "I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great" and that's pretty cool, but there was catch: "I will bless you," God said "so that you will be a blessing . . . and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed."  And although the covenant is not dependent upon Abraham's being a blessing – that is, it's not null and void if Abram isn't – it's clear what God expects, nevertheless.  It's kind of like with us Christians, isn't it?  Our forgiveness is in no way dependent upon any good works we may do, but God expects us to do 'em anyway.

      And in the years since God's first appearance to Abram, things have been, well . . . interesting.  He is often held up as a paragon of faith – he just up and went when God told him, where God told him, and now he's just a-waitin' for the promise to be fulfilled . . . but if you really look at the story, you'll get a different perspective . . . somebody counted, and came up with only four instances in the entire, 11-chapter Abraham story where he is shown in a positive light.  In fact, Abraham's story is more of a story of un-faith, or misplaced faith, than anything else.

      Let's look at some of the highlights of the quarter-century between God's first appearance and this ome.  Abram does do as he's told, he heads South from Canaan, but when he gets there, there's a famine in the land . . . so much for the promise, right?  I mean, this God of Abraham and Moses and Joseph et al., must have a strange sense of humor to make a huge deal out of sending his faithful follower to a land where there's no food!  And so immediately, Abram has to leave Canaan, because the only thing you could do in ancient times if there was a famine was move.  So he picks up and heads to Egypt, and there he gets into a peck of trouble . . . and as he's approaching Egypt's border, he says to Sarah (who was named Sarai at the time): "I know well that you are a woman beautiful in appearance; and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife'; then they will kill me, but they will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you, and that my life may be spared on your account." And he does it . . . he says Sarai’s his sister, and the Pharaoh takes her into his house – undoubtedly to be just another woman in his harem – and for her sake, he takes good care of Abram, giving him all manner of good things.  But God keeps the promise – God curses Pharaoh, afflicting him with all kinds of plagues, until Pharaoh throws both Abram and Sarai out of the country.  So much for Abraham's faith in God to follow through  . . . he's willing to sacrifice his wife to save his own skin.  And he's not exactly a blessing to the Pharaoh and his people, is he?

      And what about Ishmael?  Sarai comes up to him and says "Here's my slave Hagar . . . take her to your bed so you can get yourself an heir."  And Abram thinks that's a pretty good idea: after all, it's been many long years since the promise, and no heir yet . . . besides, everybody knows that Sarai is barren . . . and so, once again, he takes matters into his own hands instead of trusting God, and we all know the disastrous results – Sarai's jealousy gets the best of her, and she almost kills Hagar and the boy . . . but once again, God's faithful to the promise, even though Abram has problems, and Ishmael is saved, and indeed Abram's seed spawns a great nation . . . traditionally, the Islamic nations.

      Finally, about a year before our story, God appears to Abram again . . . and this time he reiterates the promise to Abram: "I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God."  And oh, by the way, your name is no longer Abram it's Abraham, and Sarai's now called Sarah, and just so there's no confusion, your heir will indeed be out of Sarah's womb.  And so what does Abraham – avatar of faith – do?  Does he fall on his knees in wonder at the mighty promise, the power of God to open the womb of a barren woman, to truly do a new thing?  No . . . he falls on his face laughing and protesting the ridiculous notion that a hundred-year-old man and ninety-year-old wife could ever have kids, and so God – ever the playful one – tells him that his heirs name will be Isaac which, of course, means laughter.

      And so Sarah's not the first one who laughs, who shows something less than a full, trusting, faith at the prediction of her pregnancy, and I detect a little chauvinism in the fact that we all know this story of the woman laughing, and skip over the one of Abraham falling on the floor in mirth . . . after all, Abraham is the faithful father of a people, and Sarah's just a jealous woman . . . and Christians over the years have tended to blame the women of scripture for everything, starting with Eve . . . but note that it's Abraham that, not to put too nice a face on it, pimps out his wife, not the other way around . . .

      But here, in today's story, we have an example of a benevolent Abraham . . . he's pictured as a model of hospitality . . . when he spies the three travelers, he runs from the tent entrance and bows real low, and although we know that this is – somehow – a theophany, an appearance of God, Abraham doesn't know it . . . he looks up and sees three men standing there.  And he has no idea who they are – for all he knows, they're bandits or wandering vagabonds or shepherds looking for work.  But he treats them as if they were royalty . . . he calls them "lord" – and notice that this is in lower-case in our bible, to indicate that we're not talkin' about God here – and he runs around like a chicken with his head cut off, trying to make them comfortable.  "Let a little water be brought," he says, "and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves . . ."  There is no thought of recompense, no thought of currying favor . . . he shows them hospitality no matter who they might be, no matter what they might have done.

      Once again, does this sound familiar?  Showing grace, showing loving-care and nurture to someone no matter what they've done, no matter who they are?  Remember back in the creation story, humankind is made in God's image, God's likeness . . .  and therefore humans represent God to the rest of creation . . . and here we see Abraham fulfilling that vocation – for once – through his hospitality.

      In the movie Chocolat, a mysterious and appealing woman is blown by the wind into a small French town . . . she sets up a chocolate shop, with almost magically-delicious wares . . . she has the ability to see peoples' innermost needs, and to embody them in her chocolates . . . she invites all she meets into her shop, from the outcast gypsy-river-rat to the town mayor, who has the Church under his thumb and is persecuting her.  But her kindness and empathy slowly seeps out into the town, and into its citizens, until it is clear that a deep and abiding transformation is taking place.  It all culminates when even the stuffy, hide-bound mayor is transformed by her chocolate, a rebirth, a resurrection, if you will, that happens just at Easter's dawn.

      The woman – whose name Vianne sounds suspiciously like French for "come" – clearly practices the biblical concept of hospitality, and the biblical writers knew – as does Vianne – that hospitality has the power to transform lives.  It winds through both Old and New Testaments, coming to fulfillment in the figure of Jesus Christ, who taught that hospitality is to be practiced as a matter of course.  And he summed it all up with one rule, which he described as one of the two greatest commandments: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

      And so, Abraham is a pointer to God’s ultimate concern for "the other," God’s ultimate invitation of all into the loving embrace, of the divine, and it's expressed in Abraham's simple, heartfelt hospitality to three men on a dusty Canaanite road.    

And as he stands attentively, as a servant, watching his guests eat, they ask him "Where is your wife Sarah?"  And without stopping to wonder how they knew who his wife was, he says: "There, in the tent."  And then one of them says: "I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son."  And Sarah, listening from just inside the tent opening, hears this pronouncement, and it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women, and so now she laughs to herself – only a little rueful chuckle, quite unlike Abraham's falling down on the floor before God– she laughs to herself and says "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?"  And this question holds more than just a skepticism about opening a barren womb . . . it's wistful, bittersweet, pensive . . . after all these years, shall I have pleasure?

      Then the Lord's voice booms out – still speaking to Abraham – "why did Sarah laugh and say "shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?'" and its finally clear just who it is that's visited Abraham and Sarah there at the Oaks of Mamre . . . or is it?  Let's recap: we're told that the Lord appears to them, not specifically that God is one of the three men . . . when God finally speaks to Abraham, questioning Sarah's laughter, we're not told that it's the same person – identified as one of the three – who predicted Sarah's pregnancy.  In fact, there's a delightful, deliberate ambiguity at play here . . . the three men to whom Abraham shows hospitality include God in their number . . . maybe.

      If you go to a Benedictine monastery, you'll see written over the portal to the guest quarters "Treat all guests as if they are Christ."  Hospitality is a watchword for the Benedictine order, it's one of the reasons for their existence.  And in this, they are following the dictum of Christ himself, who will tell those at his right hand "I was hungry, and you gave me food, I was thirsty, and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger, and you welcomed me . . ." and when those at his right hand say "When did we do these things, Lord?"  do you remember his reply? "just as you did it to one of the least of these . . . you did it to me."  Christ himself is somehow – in some mysterious, undefinable way – identified with the least of these, those to whom we are to show hospitality . . . and here we see it in a story written a thousand years before Christ, in the marvelous ambiguity of the three wanderers at the oaks of Mamre, one of whom may – or may not – be the Lord God's own self.

            Brothers and sisters, as society gets more and more fearful, as we get more and more isolated and insular, more and more wrapped up in our own concerns and lives, it's difficult for us to show hospitality to those who live next door, much less those we don't know, who show up at our doorstep in need . . . but that is our lot, it's a part of our creation vocation, of being the image of God to all we meet.  And I'm not gonna kid you . . . it's not particularly easy.  It's often a hard, thankless task.  But just as in Chocolat, where Vianne is blown about by the wind, we are powered by the Holy Spirit, who blows strong through the woods and over the waters of the Ohio, and who cares for us, sighing with sighs too deep for words.  We are never alone in our work of being a blessing to all we meet, for Christ is with us through the power of the Holy Spirit, to comfort and teach and advocate for us, until the Kingdom is fulfilled here on Earth.  Amen.

Great Commissioners (Matthew 28:16 - 20)

      Christian studies can be roughly divided into theology--talk about God--and ecclesiology--talk about the church. And there are few passages that are so chock-full of both as this one. On the theology side, Jesus mentions the three persons we now know as the Trinity--although Matthew, for one, wouldn't have called it that--and he says that all authority had been given to him. And Jesus' authority is a major topic of both practical and theological concern in the Gospels.

On the ecclesiological side, this passage contains the Great Commission, the marching orders for the church. "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations," Jesus says, "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,"--there's that Trinitarian formula--"and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." And to top it all off, it's the last scene in Matthew, and like a lot of important stuff, it happens on a mountain, but unlike in Luke, there's no ascension. Or at least Matthew doesn't mention one . . . Maybe he'd never heard of the ascension (remember he was writing decades after the fact) or that he knew about it, but thought it not worth mentioning. Or maybe he thought it complicated the picture too much: Jesus' last words can be read as a promise: “I am with you always, to the end of the age," and then if he left, well . . . it would be confusing, to say the least.

Anyway, I think it's fascinating how the two--theology and ecclesiology, God-talk and church-talk--entwine in this passage. In particular, how one flows from another, depends on another, and it hinges on the word “therefore. " As in "Go, therefore, and make disciples." That one word makes the entire Great Commission--a word about the church--a dependent clause, and what it's dependent upon is the the theological fact that "all authority has been given" to Christ. Our authority to make disciples and baptize them and teach them and preach at them does not come because we are wonderful, morally upright souls--although of course we certainly are--but because all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Christ. Our authority to be the church comes from the authority of Christ, who grants it to us. We serve, in other words, at the pleasure of the King.

But who does the King serve at the pleasure of? Who is it that has given all that authority to Christ? Well, right at the beginning of Matthew's gospel, at the start of Jesus' ministry, on another mountain top no less, we see Satan offer him the whole world. Remember? The devil takes him up onto the highest peak and shows him everything, all the people and rivers and rocks and ants, the whole shootin' match, and offers it to Jesus for the measly little price--just a trifle, really--of falling down and worshipping him. But there's only one catch: ol' Scratch has been known to lie from time to time, and that's what he's doing here. He can't give Jesus the world to rule: he's the adversary, not the creator, so it isn't his to give.

In fact, we know that the only one with the capacity to give authority over anything is the one who owns it all, who created it all, and that's God the Father, maker of, and ruler over, heaven and earth. And by the end of Matthew's gospel, and the end of Jesus' ministry, he's done just that. God the Father has given the Son power over the earth--all of creation--and heaven--all the spiritual realms--to boot.

And so the church's authority derives from God the Son's authority, which derives from God the Fathers's authority, and it makes a nice little chain, doesn't it? In fact, that's how it works here on earth and, as far as we know, all of creation: the universe, the cosmos or whatever you choose to call it. Whenever we do something in the cosmos, when we preach the gospel with our actions--using words if necessary--we do so under God's authority. When we do otherwise, when we do what we want to, without the blessings, without the permission of the Divine, what we do is not destined to turn out so well in the end.

But it's so much more than permission ... it's an umbrella of power, of aid, of comfort, and that's where the Holy Spirit comes in. We may not know where or to whom the Spirit goes, but we do know that if we are acting under God's umbrella, under God's sponsorship, it is there for us.

And speaking of the Holy Spirit, here's where the Trinity comes in . . . As part of this bubble, of this force field, this transcendent atmosphere within which we operate, we are to invoke the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, we are to wrap ourselves and our ministries in the full life of the Divine in all its aspects. The awesome creativity of God the Father, the transcendent source of all; the redemptive and incarnational work of the God the Son; and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in the world as the one who empowers, comforts and advocates.

And when we baptize folks in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as we still do 2000 years after these words of Jesus, we acknowledge that this fullness has indeed come upon the one we have just baptized. And do our actions, our invocation of the holy names somehow help enable the action of the Godhead? Do we cooperate with the Divine in this like we do in the nurture and maintenance of our world?

Well. We're to make disciples of everyone--that's what "all nations" means here: black or white, young or old, male or female, Ugandan or Sicilian, gay or straight--we're to make disciples of everyone. And we usually think of “disciples” as followers of Jesus, and of course they are that, but the Greek word we translate as disciple means, literally, "one who is being taught." That's right: the primary meaning of disciple is student. Thus the Great Commission can to be understood as: first, we're to make students and second, we're to be their teachers. And here's what we're supposed to teach them: to obey all that Jesus has commanded.

Ok. So that includes quite a bit, doesn't it? Doing unto others, getting the log out of your own eye first, judging not lest ye be judged and etc. And over in the Gospel of John, we're assured that whatever the Son tells us, the Father has told him to tell us, and so all of his verbal commands are as if they came from the Creator (there's that chain thing again).

But over in John we're told something else: not only is Jesus the mouthpiece of God, but he is the very Word of God, incarnate. Embodied. In the flesh. So God's words, God's commands are instantiated, made tangible, touchable by the flesh of Jesus. This means we're talking not just verbal commands, or even primarily verbal commands. That's one of the main points of the incarnation.

And so Jesus' actions--the things he does--are literally words from God, commands, just as if they had been spoken by the Divine. For example, Jesus' extreme (at least for the time) inclusivity, his conscious welcoming the outsiders of the time into his fellowship, into the circle of who is welcome in Gods kingdom, is an embodied Word from the Divine, a command just as much as if one of the Ten Commandments had said "Thou shalt be extremely inclusive, welcoming the marginalized into the fellowship of God's kingdom." Jesus' actions in healing the sick--both mentally and physically--is a word from God, a command every bit as much as if he had said to his disciples "oh by the way, guys, you gotta heal the people, no ifs, ands or buts about it." That's what being the Incarnate Word means.

And Jesus' actions--healing the blind man, speaking to foreign women at wells, overturning the tables in the temple, I could go on and on--are not only his commandments but God's, every bit as much as those first ten up on Mount Sinai. Come to think of it, maybe that's why he goes up onto a mountain this one last time.

So. Here are our marching orders: we're to make disciples, to make students of Christ and teach them to obey his commandments. In doing so, we consider Jesus' life--his words, actions, and all the rest of it--the subject of our teaching. When we hold up Jesus' earthly life as a model for ur own, that's what we're getting at.

But wait a moment . . . Aren't we disciples as well, aren't we students? We are indeed, we are students who teach other students. And if we cease to teach others--using words if necessary--if we cease to teach other students by example and word, do we not cease to be followers of Christ, cease to follow the Great Commission? And by the same token, if we cease to be students, if we cease to be taught to obey Christ's commandments, embodied as they are in deed and word, do we not cease to be disciples? Hmmm . . . All things to think about when pondering the decline in Christian Education attendance . . .

Well. Always leave 'me smiling, and that's what Jesus does: after giving them a seemingly impossible task--he tells those eleven people, huddled shivering on a mountain top to go convert everyone--he ends on a hopeful note: Remember, I will be with you always, until the end of the age. Only the Greek original doesn't have "Remember" as in our translation, it has "Look! Behold!" Jesus is not a mere remembrance, Jesus as the Christ is a living presence. We are not alone in this, we have not been given a Herculean task, an impossible task, and expected to go do it by ourselves. Behold! Jesus is with us in our trials, in our sufferings, in our triumphs and setbacks, always, until the end of the age. Amen.

Windy City (Acts 2:1 - 21)

     Our son Mike and I were home when the tornado came.  Mike and I and our menagerie, that is . . . And so our task was to get everybody into the proverbial inside room with no windows, which for many of us in Tuscaloosa—land of very-few-basements—passed for a storm shelter.  But before we did, I looked out our front door into the teeth of the storm and saw the stop sign acting like the one in the Spielberg movie . . . You know . . . The one where the space ship sneaks up on Richard Dreyfus while he's in his pick-up?  It was waving back and forth like that.  I closed the door and locked it (fat lot of good that would do) and started rounding up pets.

We got them into that inside room—the bathroom, of course—and it was pitch black, the electricity having gone out some time before, but when Mike slipped in the door one of the cats slipped out, so he went after her, and I had visions of the roof collapsing on him while getting that darned cat, but he made it back, and the cats and dogs were all snarling and snapping at one another in the dark, and then we heard it come over, and they always say it sounds like a freight train, and you know what?  It did . . . It sounded like a great, big, scary freight train bearing down on us all.  And when it was over, and the animals had scuttled off to hide under various pieces of furniture, Mike and I looked out the front door, and that stop sign was twisted up like a pretzel.

I don't think the apostles would have described the sound of the Spirit’s coming in just that way . . . For one thing, freight trains wouldn't be invented for some 1800 years, give or take a half century.  There was no “listen . . . Here comes the Bethany Limited” or “is that a fighter jet engine?” and I wonder: did that help or hurt?  Did the lack of a human-made referent make it even more scary, even more out of this world?  All they could say was that it sounded “like the rush of a violent wind.”  Come to think of it, it was like they compared the coming of the Spirit to a tornado, or maybe a typhoon . . . Certainly the fisher-folk among them were familiar with storms on the Sea of Galilee.

They'd just filled the slot left open by Judas, and now they were back to 12, and you gotta think maybe the new guy wondered what he’d gotten himself into with this Spirit business.  There they were, lounging around on Pentecost, maybe noshing on some chips and dip, and then this happens.  A sound like a violent wind . . . violent!  And notice that Luke doesn’t say what it was, just what it was like, just like he says that the divided tongues weren't fire but were as of fire, they could have been big slurping tongues, for all I know, especially given the multi-lingual event that was about to happen.  Just imagine it: we'd be celebrating with dancing, streaming glottal appendages instead of flames.  It just wouldn't be the same . . .

But Luke's inability to adequately describe the coming of the Spirit, his reliance on simile language—as and like—is typical when faced with the Divine.  Later on in Acts, Peter is waiting for his supper when he falls into a trance, and he sees something like a sheet, not an actual sheet but something like one, with animals wiggling all over it.  And Ezekiel beholds “the likeness of the glory of the Lord” as something like gleaming amber, in the middle something like four living creatures, of human form with four faces apiece, in the middle of them something like burning coals, like torches moving to and fro among them, there were something like wheels within wheels, which moved with the four creatures . . . and there was a lot more, but you get something like the picture.  Whatever the Divine looks like, it's probably not a sheet with critters stuck to it or four, four-faced, winged creatures accompanied by fiery wheels (at least it didn't look like a breaded, grumpy old man).  The transcendent is by nature indescribable, because it is outside our experience.  The best we can do is use simile and metaphor.

As you all know, I've been attending Richard Rohr’s Living School, and one of our tasks is studying Christian mystics, and as good a definition of a mystic as any is one who has so-called mystical experiences, who participates to some extent in the ineffable.  And the thing is, though they often don't like to describe these experience, when they do, they can be pretty vague.  Some say it's like an emptiness.  Others—sometimes the same ones on different occasions—say it's a nothingness . . . Well, if the experience is empty or nothing, how do they know they're having it?  Clearly, it's not really nothing or empty, but describing it that way is as close as they can come.

It's why poets—dealers in metaphor and allusion—are often the best guides to God, and Scripture is full of great poetry.  In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.  As the deer longs for flowing water, so my soul longs for you.  But of course it's not just in Scripture: the medieval Hildegard de Bingen described God like this: “O most noble Greenness, rooted in the sun, shining forth in streaming splendor upon the wheel of Earth.”  The Sufi poet Rumi wrote “You are like water and we are like millstones. You are like wind and we are like dust. The wind is hidden while the dust is plainly seen.”  And Rainer Marie Rilke: “My God is dark and like a web of tangled roots all drinking soundlessly.”

What are your images of the Divine?  How do you think of God, picture God, experience God as you approach the almighty in prayer?  It's Pentecost, and the Spirit has come upon us like wind and fire.  Can we even imagine what that might mean?  Amen.

Heavens Above (Acts 1:1 - 11)

      One of the most important things for us 21^st-Century types to understand is that the authors of the New Testament did not have the same world view we “moderns” have.  The ancients viewed heaven as having geographic reality just like earth; that is, they believed that heaven is a physical place that has a relationship to earth you could point to, and that relationship of course is “up.”  The abode of the gods was thought to be up above us, in the sky, and further, the Earth was thought to be an imperfect reflection of this godly realm.  This of course is seen in Greek drama, where what happens in heaven is mirrored on earth, but for us imperfect mortals, often to tragic effect.  You can also see this in the New Testament . . . every Sunday we say:  “Our father who art in heaven” – there’s heaven as a place – “Hallowed be thy name.  Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  We’re asking that things be done here on earth as they are done in heaven.  In fact, the whole notion of the Kingdom of God is shot through with this.  If God’s rule in heaven is just, if the poor are never hungry or oppressed, if the blind see and the lame walk in heaven, then the coming of the Kingdom of God is nothing less than making Earth – now an imperfect reflection – into a perfect reflection of heaven.
      One of the problems many of us moderns have – although surely nobody in this room – is an overweening arrogance about it all . . . we’re convinced that our world-view is superior, we call it an “enlightenment” world view, for Pete’s sake, as in, aren’t we enlightened compared to those primitives in the pre-modern era, primitives like Michelangelo or Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas, Leonardo Da Vinci or Plato or Martin Luther . . . and this arrogance filters down lo unto the very basics of our faith . . . my favorite Episcopalian ex-Bishop, John Spong – who I may have said before my friend calls Spronnngggg! – has made a career out of it, a career out of ridiculing pre-modern beliefs . . . he’s written the same book over and over again, telling us that we’d better get rid of all these quaint beliefs like the virgin birth or the resurrection or the insert-your-miracle-here, cause nobody in the modern world would believe that, and I suspect that this obsession tells us more about John Spong, and his embarrassment over his faith, than it does about that faith itself . . .

      And of course this primitive guy Jesus said something about how those who are ashamed of him and his words of them he’ll be ashamed, but aside from that, whenever I read this morning’s lesson I think of Spong, who singled this episode out in one of his books, deriding it as Jesus lifting off like a rocket ship, isn’t that quaint, and I think it betrays a remarkable literalness about the modern mind-set, a remarkable lack of imagination . . . Luke’s audience would have had no trouble seeing this as symbolic, they would have had no trouble viewing it on more than one level . . . like biblical literalism itself, the obsession with debunking the miracles in Scripture is a purely modern affliction . . .

      In fact our passage is shot through with symbolism, beginning with its first line . . . Luke addresses it to Theophilus, and though there has been speculation over the years about who this person’s identity – Was he Luke’s patron?  Was he an elder of the church? – I rather think that Luke has written it to all of us, because after all, Theophilus is Greek for “God lover,” and we do all love God, don’t we?  Even though the idea of God itself is a pre-enlightenment notion?

      But the inscription reminds us of something else, it reminds us that the book of Acts is not just a history, not just a record of the activities of the early church, although it is surely that . . . the book of Acts is a Theological document as well, it has a viewpoint, an agenda, if you will . . . this is a story not only for the God-lovers, it’s about the God-lovers as well, it wants to project a certain image of them, it wants make certain theological points.

      And one of the points it wants to make here is the obvious one . . . Jesus Christ was lifted up into heaven . . . and note the passive construction, it said he was “lifted up” and that of course implies somebody doing the lifting . . . Jesus didn’t lift himself up, he was lifted up, as the two men in white said he was taken up, and we all know by whom . . . and what about those two men in white, anyway?  White symbolizes purity, it symbolizes holiness and righteousness . . . in his Gospel account of the transfiguration, Luke describes Jesus’ clothes as “dazzling white.”  And then again, at the tomb, the women find instead of Jesus two men in dazzling clothes . . . are these men in our passage the same guys?  In a way, they’re acting like kind of a Greek chorus, telling the disciples what’s going on, giving them needed information . . . kind of like angels . . . are they angels?  Angels means messenger in Greek . . . and they’re delivering a message, all right . . . and here’s the point: God took Jesus – now the risen Christ – God took Jesus up to heaven . . . and if we don’t get the point, it’s pounded into us: the last verse repeats the word heaven three times: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus who was taken into heaven, will return the same way you saw him go into heaven.”  Where has Jesus gone?  Into heaven, already . . . And of course, this gives us a clue as to his identity, doesn’t it?  The messengers are telling us that Jesus is the Son of God, returning to live in the home of his heavenly parent.

       But even though Jesus has gone from them, even though his heavenly parent has reached down and scooped them up, the apostles are not left high and dry.  As Jesus says “John baptized with water,” Jesus says, just before his departure, “but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now."  And of course, that is what we celebrate not many days from now at Pentecost . . . but the disciples, there at that last meeting with him, want to know what’s going to happen,  they want to know how it’s all going to go down, and so they ask the question they’d been asking from the beginning “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  Is it finally here?  And we know what kingdom they’re talking about . . . it’s the Davidic kingdom, the kingdom of their once and future King . . .

      After all this time they still don’t get it, they still don’t understand what’s going on . . . it’s as if they’re thinking “ok, we got that crucifixion and resurrection stuff outa’ the way . . . now let’s get on with the real deal, the real agenda . . . let’s get that kingdom restored.  After all, you are the Messiah, are you not?”  But Jesus just patiently lays it on the line: it’s not for y’all to know the times or periods that God has set . . . sorry.  I don’t care how many Y2Ks come and go or how many charts John Hagee puts up on the wall, it’s not for you to know.  Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins can write a whole library on the subject – and trust me, they will – but you’re not gonna figure it out.  It’s just not for you to know.

      But here’s what I will do for you, he says, I’ll give you power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and everywhere, to the ends of the earth.  And this witnessing business is no small potatoes, no small deal . . . it takes power to witness, the power of the Holy Spirit will come upon the disciples at Pentecost.  And that makes sense, doesn’t it?  After all, the Greek for witness is “martyr,” and that title came to be associated with Christians whose witness included the ultimate act of self-giving, the giving up of their lives . . . those Christians took Christ at his word when he said “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their lives for my sake will save it.”  Their witness was a sign-post pointing to Christ’s ultimate act of self-giving, his death on a Roman cross.

      Of course, that kind of total witness, whether it involves giving up your physical existence on this planet or not, isn’t easy . . . and that’s what the power of the Holy Spirit is for, it’s to support Christians in this risky, difficult, downright-dangerous undertaking of being a witness to Christ.  And this imbuing of individual people with the Holy Spirit’s power is something entirely new that God is doing with us Christians . . . the Hebrew scriptures – which we call the Old Testament – tells of the Spirit of God working in the world . . . Jesus himself tells Nicodemus that “the wind, the spirit, blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes,” and it’s still like that, the Spirit of God is still loose in the world, wild, unpredictable and free, but now – through the agency of Christ – we are able to wield some of that power . . . or at least that power can undergird our actions, it can support our witness to Christ.

      Early on in the movie The Apostle, the title character Sonny Dewey is doing some tag-team preaching . . . y’all don’t know about tag-team preaching?  Well, it’s when one of the evangelists is preachin’ and steppin’ and hollering about the Lord, and another comes up and pops him on the back or the arm, he comes up and tags him and takes over, and it goes on like that sometimes for hours, and Sonny is tagged by this humongous preacher in a white suit who starts stepping across the stage yelling “I got the Holy Ghost powah!  I got the Holy Ghost powah!”  He’s happy about it, it animates him, it gives him joy . . . it gives him strength to live in a world that’s not always sympathetic to three-hundred pound black men . . .

      And you know what?  We got the Holy Ghost powah as well . . .  we got that high-steppin’, blowin’ in the wind Spirit power to uphold us as we undertake the dangerous business of witnessing to Christ . . . what?  You say that you’ve never felt endangered by your witness for the Gospel?  You’ve never been afraid, you’ve never felt like you might be called upon to actually take up that cross and follow Christ to the end?  Ok, maybe not . . . I’ll buy that.  There’s at least a veneer of religious tolerance in this country . . . it’s not like we’re Muslims or anything . . . but we’ve all felt the ridicule as we bear witness in public, as we give credit to Christ for a good work – we always say we’re doing it in Christ’s name, don’t we? – or we bow our heads in a restaurant to give thanks . . . if we haven’t – and again I’m sure all of us in this room have – but if we haven’t, perhaps we ought to examine our witness to Christ . . .

      Our whole reason for being is to be his witnesses in Cincinnati, in all Ohio and Indiana and, lo! even to the ends of the earth . . . if we are not fulfilling this, if we’re not witnessing to Christ in thought word and deed, then what good are we to God?  After all, heaven is up there, not down here, and as that Greek angel chorus said “Why are we looking up into heaven?  Christ’s gonna come back here, back to earth.”  The action’s here on earth, the witness is here on this planet.  Fix not your hearts on heavenly things, brothers and sisters, but on our witness here on earth.  Heaven will take care of itself.  Amen.

Faith 'n' Agora (Acts 17:16 - 34)

     Paul got thrown into jail a lot.  He was always getting arrested on some trumped up charge or another.  There were those two long-term prison stays of a couple of years or so apiece, one in Rome around 60 CE and another in Caesarea, about the timeline of which we aren’t certain.  Paul himself mentioned them in his Second Letter to the Corinthians, comparing himself to everything, where he boasts just a wee bit: “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? . . . I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death.”

And to that I say . . . well.  If trials and tribulations are the measure of how great a minister you are, then I must not be much of one . . . don’t say it . . . but I’m a pretty typical, well-fed, well-looked-after American yuppie whose only trial is when they run out of black ice tea at Starbucks.  But for Paul, floggings, shipwrecks and imprisonments were just the cost of doing business, of proclaiming the gospel.  It’s been estimated that over and above the four years he spent in Roman and Caesarean prisons, another two years might have been added on by all the more minor, short-term jailings he endured.

Many of those episodes are described in Acts, and today we have one of the most famous: his speech on Mars Hill, in Athens.  Athens!  Cradle of Western Civilization!  Home of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle!  Home of Spiro’s Gyros, juiciest gyros this side of Corinth!  Or so I hear, anyway . . . But even without such delicacies, Athens was quite the place, even some 400 years after its prime.  It was still a center of learning and the arts, and it lived on its past glories.  Even Rome left it pretty much alone because after all, it was the Cradle of Western Civilization . . . Every philosopher worth his salt ended up there . . . they were as thick as thieves, they literally wandered the streets . . . philosophizing. It was a heady atmosphere . . . ideas perfumed the air like hyacinths, or like jasmine on a summer’s eve . . . they flew back and forth across the market square like demented shuttlecocks: an idea was thrown up by a Heraclitian, folded, spindled and mutilated by an Aristotelian, and then lobbed back the other way.  This was considered fun, but more important, serious business.

And that's what got Paul in trouble . . . philosophy, if you can believe it.  He'd gone down to the Marketplace—the Agora, in Greek—to do what anybody with a rhetorical bone to pick would: he set up on a corner and began to declaim.  And to dispute.  You know . . . standard philosopher stuff.  And it's important to understand why he felt compelled to do so:  he was deeply distressed, Luke tells us, at all the idol worship going on.  The little critters were everywhere, almost as thick as the philosophers, and it hurt his heart to see folks venerating those cold, dead things.

So he heads for the Agora, and begins to speechify, and there were some Epicureans and Stoics listening in—Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, that is, not food-lovers and guys not in touch with their emotions.  And they took especial umbrage at what Paul was saying.  They were materialists, they thought everything was made of matter, even the Gods . . . Just really, really good matter. Epicureans believed that the highest good was pleasure, and the highest pleasure was that of the mind . . . their gods were so interested in their own pleasure that they ignored people. For the Stoics there was a divine, rational principle in everything, and their goal was to live in harmony with it, which amounted to living in tune with nature. Both Epicureans and Stoics were rationalists, who thought the mind was superior to the emotions. In this, of course, they would have made good Presbyterians.

Anyway, these were the folks that Paul irritated, enough so that they hauled him before the council—the Areopagus—on Mars Hill. And though Luke doesn't tell us what he had said in the marketplace, he does give us his speech before the council.  He opens with a complement: “I see how religious, how pious y’all are, you even have an, ah, object of worship” (he meant idols, which were getting on his last nerve) “you have an object of worship dedicated to an unknown God.”  And I can just see the look of piety on Paul’s face—he’s only there to serve, you understand—“I can help you out there, I can tell you who that unknown God is, it's the one who made everything, the whole shootin’ match, who's Lord of heaven and earth, and who doesn't live in any old shrine, let me tell you.”

And now we can begin to see why he made the Stoics and Epicureans so nervous: they were materialists, they didn't believe in spirit, and they began to work it out in their heads . . . If this god doesn't live in shrines made by human hands, if it didn't need any food like other gods did, just where did this so-called Lord of heaven and earth live?  And more important, perhaps, what was it made of?

Well, as to the first question, Paul makes a remarkable statement: quoting their own poets he tells them that this deity is not far from each and every one of us, and further, that in that unknown god “we live and move and have our being,” and this is a extraordinary claim on multiple levels, not least if all its stunning universalism.  God's not far from any of us and in that god we—each one of us—love and move and have our being.

This was a far cry from the dominant view of the day . . . the prevailing notions of the Divine were very . . . territorial.  Each nation had a separate deity, each peoples their own god.  And those gods were not only different, but they were exclusive as well.  With those ancient gods, you were either in or out, and if you'd were in, the god would help you.  But if you were out . . . Well.  It would be best not to meet another peoples’ god in a dark alley.

What's more, each god had a place where they hung out, a place where they lived.  It was possible to meet them face-to-face, or walking down the road as Abraham did the Hebrew god at the oaks of Mamre.  Or Moses did on that mountain.  Or Elijah, who got a glimpse of that god’s backside on yet another mountain.

But Paul’s “unknown God” was radically different . . . he was near to each one of us, Paul said, each one.  Not just the Jews, not just the Medes or the Greeks or the Phrygians, but everyone.  And if this God was near everyone, how could it be localized to one place?   How could it be locked up in a little idol, a little effigy made of wood or gold or clay, one that you could up and take with you everywhere you went?  Far from us moving God, we move within God.  We walk in God, talk in God, chat with our neighbors in God, we are bathed in God.  But more than that, we have our being in God, we are sustained by God, we are shot through and through with God.  In fact, without God we would not exist.

Today, we call this view panentheism: pan (all) en (in) theis (God), and it did not become the dominant view in the Christian church.  Soon, God was in heaven—which was up there—and we were down here, as reflected in the Lord’s Prayer, where we pray to God “who art in heaven” and that God’s will be done, “on earth as it is in heaven.”  But in this episode from Luke, we can see that it was alive and well—at least in Paul and Luke—in Christianity’s earliest days.

Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman was famous for his atheism.  Or that's what he claimed anyway, but I always thought he protested just a little too much, because a good chunk of his films are about God’s distance or absence.  And how could you rail against God not being there if you didn't believe in God?  It seems to me that this is one consequence of our self-imposed alienation from God, our distancing of ourselves—promoted by our own religion—from the divine: we imagine God out there, away from us, who deigns to “come down” to help us.

Eastertide is a time of reflection on the nature of the Divine . . . It's why we "What if"?  What if our idea of God is wrong?  Or not wrong, so much as inappropriate—I don't that we can't get our finite minds totally around the notion of God.  A lot of us think of God as up in heaven, a bearded Santa Claus, who we call upon when we need something, and who may or may not respond, according to some obscure rules that we don't understand . . . What if God were all around us as Paul thought, within us, even, as Jesus taught in John's gospel, in the person next to us, as he teaches in Matthew?  How would it change the way we live our lives, treat one another, treat ourselves?  Amen.

Spiritual Milk (1 Peter 2:1 - 10)

      Last week, we saw how the first Christians attempted to live out their calling as followers of a risen God.  We saw how the devoted themselves to fellowship, to koinonia, and prayer and care for one another.  We saw that they had all things in common, that they sold all their possessions and gave the proceeds to whoever had need . . . for them, the post-resurrection reality was substantially different from that before, Christ’s teaching and living among them necessitated a re-thinking of how they lived their everyday lives.

      This week, we get another look at that post-resurrection reality, the state in which believers are now living after that first Easter morning . . . and it’s important to remember that fact: it’s a reality only in light of the revelation of God’s Word on that Easter morning . . . just before our passage is a rather famous assertion:  The grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of the Lord endures forever.  That word is the Good News that was announced to you . . . and so it’s only in the light of that Word—who remember is Jesus the Christ, crucified and then resurrected on the third day—that the reality described here stands.

      Rid yourselves, 1^st Peter says, of all malice, guile, insincerity, envy and slander . . . a laundry list of maladies we are to avoid.  And note that that they all take two or more to tango, they’re not solitary sins before God—malice is toward someone or something; envy is of something somebody else has; and slander, of course, is about saying bad things about somebody else.  And thus, they interfere with living the Christian life which, as we saw last week, is meant to be lived with others.  Malice and insincerity.  Envy and slander: all are things that make living in that post-resurrection koinonia difficult, if not impossible.  And what are we to do instead?   We are to long for the pure, spiritual milk . . . Like newborn infants—like sucklings, like helpless, mewling kittens, like hairless, baby rabbits—like infants, longing for that pure, spiritual milk . . . and notice that 1^st Peter writes as if we have a choice, as if we have a choice between insincerity, malice and guile, and longing, desiring that spiritual milk.  We normally think of desire as involuntary, as in we like what we like, we can’t help it, sorry about that . . . but 1^st Peter acts like it’s our choice to long for this pure, spiritual milk . . . and if we drink of it, we may grow into salvation, into our vocations as children of God . . .

      Let’s pause right here and consider this remarkable imagery . . . the Gospel as pure spiritual milk, as if from a mother’s breast . . . it’s a feminine image, in a sea of masculine prose for the divine.  In the 1^st century, just as here in the 21^st, milk has a comforting image, a nourishing image, a down-home connotation . . . milk is nurturing, it comes from the mother’s breasts, so this is a pretty radical image of the Gospel—and the Gospel, of course, is personified by that Word incarnate, Jesus Christ of Nazareth.  The Gospel is likened here to milk—as nurturing, comforting, body-building, as milk, come from the breast of God . . . how does the commercial go?  Milk does a body good?  Well it certainly does . . . that pure spiritual milk, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Word incarnate, does the church body a world of good . . . it causes us to grow into salvation, into sanctification . . . if we have tasted that the Lord is good, that is . . .

      And it is this tasting that the Lord is good that defines believers for 1^st Peter, if we have indeed tasted the sweet nectar of salvation . . . and if we have tasted thus, if we are believers, we are to come to Christ, and in the Greek it’s clear that Christ is the living stone in this instance, so a better translation might be “come to him as to a living stone,” one that has been rejected by mortals, and yet chosen—and in the Greek it’s our old favorite “elected”—by God and precious in God’s sight . . . and this election, this choosing of Christ is the basis of our own election, our own choosing, and that of course is the true wonder of this living stone, this living milk from the heart of God . . . through our association with Christ, we are like living stones ourselves, and like those living stones, we are to let ourselves be built into a spiritual house and a holy priesthood.

      And so here’s another metaphor for what we are, what congregations are . . . alongside the family metaphors in the Gospels, the bodily metaphor in the writings of Paul, here we are likened to a spiritual house and a holy priesthood.  We are to be a building, a house, and the word in Greek is oikos, house, home . . . it’s where we get ecos as in ecology . . . and calling it a house or household or a home implies that someone lives there.

      So as living stones—molded in the image of Christ—we are to let ourselves be a house, a home . . . and a home is for something or someone to dwell . . . so the question is, who are we a home for?  Who are we—collectively, as a body—a home for?  Paul thought it was the Holy Spirit . . . he said—using his body metaphor—that your body, that is plural, as in the congregation, the body of Christ—is the temple of the Holy Spirit, and so is that what 1^st Peter is saying?  That we, as living stones, fed spiritual milk from God, are to be a house of the Holy Spirit, a place filled by it, animated by it, quickened by it?

I think so, though it’s not totally clear from the text, but I can tell you something that I do know:  this wing of the house, this particular branch of the body called Greenhills certainly is spirit filled . . . I see it every day, I see it when we greet visitors with kindness and empathy, as we embark on new ministries like the very successful community dinners, as we fulfill our promises to our mission partners like Soul and Winton House.  And I can't help but see it in our dynamic music program, singing to God's glory, helping young people to get the training and experience they need.

And I can feel the movement of that Spirit, rustling against my cheek, swirling around and through you all out there in the pews, over and under and beside us all, as we begin to awaken, as we begin to stir in our concern for this beloved congregation.  The Spirit is here in the whispers as we discuss the possibilities for renewal and hope for our future . . . make no mistake about it, the Spirit is with us, as halting and as incoherent and frail a vessels as we have been . . . I am enormously grateful for each and every one of you out there.  We members of Greenhills are a temple, collectively, a house, an ecosystem for the presence of the Holy Spirit, and I for one feel it every day.

But wait . . . there’s more!  We’re to be made a priesthood, a holy priesthood, set aside for a reason . . .  to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God . . .   Our sacrifices are not just material, though those are important, they’re spiritual as well . . . we’re to intercede for the world—that’s one of the functions of a priesthood—we’re to intercede for the world, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.  And the most obvious way we do that is through prayer, which floats up like incense, a pleasing odor to the creator of the universe . . .

But that said, I have to say as well that we often create a false dichotomy between spiritual and material in our teaching and—I know you’ll be shocked by this—our preaching.  (Ok, I’ll just up and say it . . . my preaching)  We separate our mission as a household of God into two separate spheres . . . the spiritual, which includes praying and contemplation and all that stuff, and doing, which includes social justice and making programs and plans and et cetera.  And like Presbyterian congregations tend to do, we make jokes about what a bunch of head cases we are, but we lose sight of the fact that they are two sides of the same coin, or of the same mission of God.  All the prayer in the world, all that vertical stuff between us and God, isn’t worth a hill of beans without action, without process, without doing in the world; by the same token, all the activity, all the horizontal work—in the community and within our own house—is incomplete without the listening, the stillness, the vertical dimension between us and God.

I think it’s one of our tasks in our Greenhills household to find a unique spirituality for ourselves , to discern what spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God look like for us,alongside and apart from what others have found.  Oh, we should listen to the advice of others, we should consider about Christian spirituality in its many forms, from social action to contemplative practice, from William Sloan Coffin to Richard Foster, but honed and particularized for our neck of the house-of-God woods.

A spiritual sacrifice, acceptable to God encompasses everything we do, everything we say, everything we pray, and as such it presupposes a balance between the doing and the being, the activity and the listening, that is bound to be unique for Greenhills Community Church,  Presbyterian at 21 Cromwell Road in Cincinnati, Ohio, 45218.  And the trick is, we must be continually involved in discerning that balance, and of what it should consist . . . We must put into place practices that allow us to continually and perpetually hone and tune that balance to fit our time and surroundings, what we call in church-speak our ministry context.

But you know what?  Saying we must put into place, we must discern is misleading . . . one of the first things that struck me about this passage is it’s continual passive construction . . . like newborn infants—the most helpless kind of human being—we are to let ourselves be built into that spiritual household, that holy priesthood . . . allow ourselves to be built, and we know who the builder is, don’t we?  We know who the construction foreman is on the spiritual household project, don’t we?  But we must allow it, we must let go and let that foreman do that foreman’s business . . . if we don’t, if we try and do it ourselves and build it in our image instead of God’s, then it’s doomed to fail.

 Brothers and sisters, we are a chosen race, a priesthood of the royal house of Christ the King.  And the one who did the choosin’ was God, not us . . . we didn’t elect ourselves, we were elected by God, and for a reason: proclaim the mighty acts of the Christ who called us out of darkness, as 1^st Peter says, into this marvelous light.  So let’s long for that spiritual milk, let’s pine for that milk from the bosom of God with every fiber of our being . . . let us put aside the power-mongering, the turf-protecting, and the malice and bickering that tear us down . . . we are a household of God’s spirit, a temple of God’s mighty motivating force in the world.  Once we were not a people, but now we are God’s people . . . once we had not received mercy, but now we have.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

A Movement Begins (Acts 2:42 - 47)

     Our passage is situated not long after Pentecost, not long after the flames, dancing around the apostles’ heads, not long after the babble of languages became one . . . structurally, it's a bridge between two sermons of Peter—yes, that Peter, old deny-him-three-times Simon Peter’ who must have been one heck of a preacher, ‘cause he stood up at Pentecost and let her rip, and Jesus’ followers grew by three thousand that day alone, and our passage describes what was going on in the early days of the Christian movement.  And I use the word movement advisedly, because that's surely what it was.  Even in Luke's dry recital, you can feel the urgency, the excitement.  They devoted themselves  to the apostles’ teaching. They devoted themselves to fellowship, to the breaking of bread, to prayers.  Everyone was amazed, awe came over each and every one of them because the apostles were doing signs and wonders, healing folks, driving out demons, multiplying fish and loaves.

And their faith spilled over into their actions: they were with each other every waking hour—when they weren't working, that is—and they had everything in common.  In fact, they sold everything they had, their goods and possessions, and distribute the proceeds to anybody who had need.  And they didn't abandon their old faith, either, they didn't quit being Jews:  they spent a lot of time together in the Temple, the very center of Judaism, and then went home to break bread, to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, and to eat their food with glad hearts.  And do you know what?  They had the goodwill of all the people, and day by day God added to their number.

It was a movement, all right, and as any sociologist could tell you, movements don't last.  As movements, anyway . . . to survive they have to change, they have to gain structure and leadership, and rules.  They go from being movements to institutions.  Something like that is going on with the Center for Action and Contemplation, the parent organization of the Living School which I have attended the past year and a half.  It began as a movement with a charismatic leader—Richard Rohr—and as he nears the end of his life, they are trying to figure out how to continue without his integrating presence.  And so they are becoming more institutionalized, and it's not always a pretty sight.  People who are good at teaching, especially teaching and organizing religious programming, aren't necessarily great at administering an institution.  I was able to spend some time last week with the new CEO they hired, and he's a good guy, but we'll see how he is able to navigate the rocky waters of managing employees used to the looser structure, along with strong-willed “talent” like Richard and Cynthia Bourgeault.  The change is beginning to show up in their communication with us, and it's making some folks uncomfortable.

But that's what happens as a movement ages, and the cool thing about Acts is you can kind of follow it, at least a little ways.  Acts is far from what we today would call a history, attempting to be unbiased and all that:  those beasts didn't exist back then.  But you can see the beginning of the cracks in the movement if you know what to look for.  After Peter’s next sermon, in Solomon’s Portico, the reactions were mixed.  They added a bunch of new members, but not everyone was thrilled: it landed Peter and John in the pokey.  Only one more mention is made of having all goods in common, and the story of Ananias and Sapphira are stark reminders that the practice lived and died at the mercy of human frailty. (Recall that they dropped dead after withholding the proceeds of a property sale.  Let that be a warning to you not to get behind in your pledges.)

We don't know how widely the practices in this passage spread; it could be they were localized, or they could be representative of wider ways of doing church.  We do know that there were a variety of ways to be Christian in that first century, but by its end, by about 100 Common Era, the institution of the church—with Bishops, Archbishops, etc.—was beginning to take hold.  Christianity was transforming from a movement to an institution.  It had to to survive.

And now it's two thousand years later, and the framework of that institution is getting a bit rickety, at least here in the West.  There are all kinds of reasons for this, debated hotly, of course, among us.  Being too conservative, being too liberal, too unbending, not unbending enough, not changing with the times, changing too much with the times.  This isn't the place to talk about it except to say that it all boils down to this moment, this place, and these pews . . . We are the result of that movement begun two thousand years ago, we are the children of that enthusiasm, that excitement, that vision.  We are the descendants of Peter and John, Barnabas and Paul and, yes, Ananias and Sapphira . . .

And is there anything we can learn from them?  Is there anything at all to say about this passage, other than the obvious?  It would be silly to say we should begin doing what they all did, selling all our goods and property and distributing it to all who have need . . . that ship has sailed.  The practice, even if it was at all widespread, was very short-lived in Christianity at large (except in monasteries, of course).  But an extreme, perhaps even sacrificial, generosity did remain, for a while, at least . . . And I think we have to ask ourselves: why are there poor, especially in the ranks of our sisters and brothers in Christ?  There are Christian sisters and brothers right here in Hamilton County who don't know where their next meal is coming from.  If we really “took care of our own,” shouldn't their numbers be on the decrease instead of on the rise as they are?

Well.  One of the issues with this passage is that the bits about having “all things in common” and selling their goods and possessions and distributing the proceeds to any who have need tend to wash everything else out, because, you know, it sounds like the S-word, like socialism, and we all know that's bad.  But there's more to the passage, and it lies in the actions of the early Christians, in what they were doing.  Yes, they were practicing charity.  Yes, their experience of the Divine radically re-ordered their economic priorities.  But their other practices were equally radical.

First, they “devoted themselves to the Apostles’ teaching.”  Devoted.  And though I'm not sure what that word implies, the way I read it is as somewhat more fervent than spending an hour in the pews each week, an extra one in Christian Ed and perhaps another at Bible study.  Devotion implies, to me anyway, a giving ones self over, a dedication to, something which I admit, I personally have trouble with.  There are so many distracting pleasures: the latest in that mystery series I'm reading.  My favorite tech web-sites—when is that new iPad going to be here?—and which has-been demi-celebrity is going to get thrown off “Dancing With the Stars” this week?  Then, of course, there's the family, and all the energy one puts into those relationships . . . And while they're good and necessary, how do they fit in with the notion of devotion to Christian teachings?

In addition, Luke says, they devoted themselves to fellowship, which is koinonia in Greek, and it's not a coincidence that it's the same word as “in common,” as in “they had all things in common.”   Not only did the gospel radically re-order their financial priorities, but their way of life as well . . . Their entire lives were lived in common with their fellow converts.  Instead of remaining holed up in family units, going to temple or synagogues within those units or as individuals, they devoted themselves to doing the difficult work of being in community.

That included a devotion to breaking bread together, and it's likely that this held kind of a double meaning for Luke . . . It's likely that he meant both the Lord’s Supper and general, communal meals, perhaps kind of like our pot-luck suppers, and that has been a mark of Christian gatherings for our entire history, hasn't it?  And it's more than just “you gotta eat sometime,” there's something satisfying, something sacred about gathering around the table together . . . and of course it's not just formal church gatherings.  Pam and I are associated with a group of Christian contemplatives, and whenever we meet, a meal together is a big part.   Some of our best ideas are hatched while breaking bread together.

One time, I was asked by a disaffected Methodist whether I thought you could be spiritual outside a church, and I answered “Sure.  But it won't be a Christian spirituality.”  Christianity is practiced in community, it's practiced with others.  We believe that the hard work of being in community is worth it, that it brings us closer to God, as well as each other.  And as our passage shows, it's been that way since the beginning.  They devoted themselves to fellowship and breaking bread together.

And there’s one more thing they devoted themselves to, and that's prayer. Again, that's devoted themselves to it.  Not just when there's something they wanted, or when they were feeling particularly thankful.  And I must admit that I have just as much trouble with this one as I do anything else.  I have my prayer times, and I give things to God in prayer, but devotion?  I don't know . . . And in everything, I rely on the grace of God, and sometimes God’s good humor.

One of the reasons I wanted to talk about this passage is that I spent last week in a Benedictine monastery.  There, the monks’ lives are ordered according to the Rule of Benedict, designed to guide its followers in living the Christian Life.  And the monks’ days are structured around prayer, fellowship, communal meals and study.  Their lives follow a rhythm, nestled in the work of God, the work of living in Christian community.

And while it would be silly to suggest we all need to join a monastery, I wonder what would happen if we modern Christians, members of this congregation and others that are showing their age, that are steadily shrinking, I wonder what would happen if we rededicated ourselves to prayer, fellowship, breaking bread and learning.  I know what God did back then: God did a completely new thing, he grew their numbers like a weed, exploding the Christian faith over the Middle Eastern landscape.

And I wonder: would God do the same?  Would God increase our number like God did back in the day?  Perhaps . . . But if it happened, if God enriched our lives, both together and in part, it might not look like a thing that's ever happened before.  Because that’s the nature of our God, the modus operandi, if you will: our God is always doing a new thing.  Amen.