Choosing to Challenge the Status Quo

We know that the book of Acts is, in some important ways, a critical foundation for Christian history. Eugene Peterson writes, “Because the story of Jesus is so impressive – God among us and speaking a language we can understand, God within us healing and helping and saving us – there is always the danger that we will be impressed but only be impressed with the love of God in Christ… we could easily become enthusiastic spectators – admirers of Jesus… instead of disciples.” So Acts speaks to us of discipleship. (Eugene Peterson, The Message) Clarence Jordan makes the point that the Acts of the Apostles is really part two of the gospel of Luke: the miracle that began in Mary’s body by faith and the Holy Spirit is born again into the world only this time it is through the flesh of the young church. “You will note a very close similarity between these two biographies,” Jordan writes.

Both give birth narratives: in the first volume, Mary is his mother. In the second volume, the Church takes the place of Mary so that God implants the Holy Spirit into the Church to bring forth a new kind of Son of God on the face of the earth… So the book of Acts is going to tells us all about Jesus who has been raised from the dead, who is alive and still up to his old works, but now he’s not working through one body – Jesus of Nazareth – now he’s working through many bodies – his Church – which we call the Body of Christ. (Jordan, The Substance of Faith)

But in addition to these truths, the Acts of the Apostles is also a fascinating example of first century spin control for the early believers had to make peace with a brutal occupation army from Rome: using the loftiest terms possible, Acts describes the birth of the Jesus Movement as if it were a combination of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Christmas morning and the movie, “Godspell” all rolled into one.

All the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person's need was met… and their numbers grew daily.

OH COME ON: we’ve read St. Paul – those early Christians were just as cranky, ornery, afraid and confused as… you and me, right? We’ve read other parts of the Bible, too: think of the fights that took place between James and Paul - or James and Peter - or the zealot disciples and the tax collectors! Do you recall the story of Ananias and Sapphira? It’s a great one for Stewardship Sunday – it comes from Acts 5 and tells what happened when two of those early pillars of the church decided NOT to throw all their resources into the common kitty and hold everything in common.

But a man named Ananias—his wife, Sapphira, conniving in this with him—sold a piece of land, secretly kept part of the price for himself, and then brought the rest to the apostles and made an offering of it. Peter said, "Ananias, how did Satan get you to lie to the Holy Spirit and secretly keep back part of the price of the field? Before you sold it, it was all yours, and after you sold it, the money was yours to do with as you wished. So what got into you to pull a trick like this? You didn't lie to men but to God." Ananias, when he heard those words, fell down dead. That put the fear of God into everyone who heard of it. The younger men went right to work and wrapped him up, then carried him out and buried him. Not more than three hours later, his wife, knowing nothing of what had happened, came in. Peter said, "Tell me, were you given this price for your field?" "Yes," she said, "that price." Peter responded, "What's going on here that you connived to conspire against the Spirit of the Master? The men who buried your husband are at the door, and you're next." No sooner were the words out of his mouth than she also fell down, dead. When the young men returned they found her body. They carried her out and buried her beside her husband. By this time the whole church and, in fact, everyone who heard of these things had a healthy respect for God. They knew God was not to be trifled with! Acts 5 (The Message)

So what’s going on just below the surface of this morning’s lesson? What is the point of telling us that all the believers were together living into the teaching of the apostles, the breaking of the bread and prayer? What is the Bible trying to teach us? The obvious answer, of course, has to do with the teaching of the apostles, the breaking and sharing of the bread and the cultivation of an inner spiritual life: these are marks of what it means to be Christian people of faith. But that presupposes that modern people know what the apostles’ teachings are… to say nothing of what it means to break the bread of Christ together and deepen our spiritual lives in prayer.

And there is empirical evidence, my friends, that American Christians of every stripe and hew – in every age group and denomination – really don’t know what it means to practice authentic Christianity in this generation. In their ground-breaking National Study of Youth and Religion funded by the Lilly Endowment… sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) document that teenagers overwhelmingly admire their parents as the single greatest influence in their lives, and gladly imitate their religious beliefs. Further, their study showed that teenagers actually like church. The conventional wisdom of teenage alienation from parents and hostility toward religion is an entrenched but erroneous stereotype, they argue. (Dan Clendenin, Apostolic Devotion, Journey to Jesus, 4/11/05)

That’s the good news – but there is also bad news for when these same sociologists asked these same teenagers to describe the particulars of their religious faith: they were "incredibly inarticulate" about even the most basic tenets of their beliefs and practices. Rather, the vast majority of kids were abysmally ignorant of the religion they espoused… For example, one 15-year-old who attends church four or five times a week, said this when asked to articulate her faith: [Pause] I don't really know how to answer that. ['Are there any beliefs at all that are important to you? Really generally.'] [Pause] I don't know. ['Take your time if you want.'] I think that you should just, if you're gonna do something wrong then you should always ask for forgiveness and he's gonna forgive you no matter what, cause he gave up his only Son to take all the sins for you, so...

From their scientific survey of 3,290 teenagers (ages 13-17) and parents – and 267 personal interviews conducted across four years (2001–2005) – Smith and Denton conclude that most "Christian" kids really operate with a vague sort of Moral Therapeutic Deism: be nice, don't do bad, for a remote deity wants you to be happy and feel good about yourself. In other words, says Smith, "we can say here that we have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of 'Christianity' in the U.S. is actually only tenuously Christian in any sense that is seriously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.

http://www.journeywithjesus.net/BookNotes/Smith_and_Denton_Soul_Searching.shtml

And… this “epidemic of ignorance” has its roots… where? With mom and dad and extended families and congregations all across American that no longer really know what it means to be a disciple of Christ anymore. Now some people want to ascribe blame – and spend a lot of time and energy pointing fingers at straw men and women – but the simple truth is the genie is already out of the bottle. The PCBs are already in the river – and we can’t go backwards, right? So rather than make a lot of noise, I think we need to embrace what the old German mystic, Miester Eckhart said: reality is the will of God – it can always be better – but we must start with what is real.

And what is real in 21st century America is that fewer and fewer folk in our churches and families know what it means to follow the teachings of the apostle, almost all of us are confused about what communion is all about and many of us don’t really know how to pray. And I say this not to blame or point fingers or waste your time: it is just a simple fact, Jack which means that part of our work and ministry together is to reclaim what has been forgotten or lost or even discarded so that we train disciples of Christ rather than mere admirers.

Take the statement: the teaching of the apostles – what does that really mean – any ideas? At its heart, the teachings of the Apostles has to do with knowledge of the Bible – but not as a collection of factoids or as a series of random moral pronouncements: to follow the teaching of the apostles as articulated in the Scriptures means cultivating a life that makes Jesus visible in our generation.

St. Paul put it like this in Romans 12: So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don't become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what God wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you. I'm speaking to you out of deep gratitude for all that God has given me, and especially as I have responsibilities in relation to you. Living then, as every one of you does, in pure grace, it's important that you not misinterpret yourselves as people who are bringing this goodness to God. No, God brings it all to you. The only accurate way to understand ourselves is by what God is and by what God does for us, not by what we are and what we do for the Lord.

Are you with me on this? The teaching and lifestyle of the apostles has to do with disciple-making – bringing the heart of Christ into our ordinary lives – because disciples are made not born. Do you know that? Another way of saying it is that the Church is always just one generation away from extinction because you can’t inherit faith – you have to choose it.

The sociologists I mentioned earlier said that without training and practicing the Jesus life it should come as no surprise: That our profound ignorance about Christian specifics results in life-styles that are barely distinguishable from those of non-believing people. Social-scientific surveys document that evangelical Christians divorce as often as the general population, if not more. When a Gallup poll asked people if they would object if a black neighbor moved in next door, fundamentalists and Southern Baptists gave the most racist responses. Physical and sexual abuse in conservative Christian homes mirrors that of the general population. (Smith/Denton in Clendenin, op. cit.)

So what does it look like to be committed to the teaching of the apostles? Minds greater than mine have suggested that there are 6 key elements:

1. Repentance
2. The study and application of Scripture
3. Fellowship – Koinonia
4. Holy Communion/feeding those in need
5. Bringing joy, beauty and hope to the world
6. And prayer – cultivating and interior life

One scholar put it like this: “It began to dawn on those first disciples in the early days of the Church, and it should dawn on all of us who stand on their shoulders, that "apostolic devotion” to Jesus entailed a commitment to a holistic way of living and thinking, what today we might call faith and practice, or in fancier parlance the development of a distinctively and comprehensive Christian world view…. a Christian style of living that prizes intellectual vibrancy, economic generosity, and communal caring does not happen casually or automatically. It requires intentionality, effort, and choice, or what the apostle Paul called "working out your salvation" (Philippians 2:12).” (Clendenin)

The time has come for us to really start going deeper – to develop a distinctively and comprehensive Christian world view for this generations – so that we can claim the mission of First Church clearly and live into it boldly as spiritually alive disciples of Christ. Jesus put it like this in this morning’s gospel lesson: “Let me set this before you as plainly as I can… I have come so you can have real and eternal life, more and better life than you ever dreamed of.” So for the next four weeks – during worship and afterwards – I’m going to talk with you about the six marks of the Jesus Movement:

+ Choosing to challenge the status quo
+ Making the Bible real for our generation
+ Embracing the horizontal commitments of Christian community
+ Celebrating the presence of Jesus in Holy Communion

+ Sharing joy, beauty and hope – creativity/compassion and commitment – in the world
+ Nourishing the inner life

And let me be clear about why a distinctively and comprehensive Christian world view matters: when I was in Tucson we hired a music director – a talented, fun and creative man – who unbeknownst to us at the time was beginning to experience the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. It was slow in its development but it was troublesome and most of us believed that he was just an “airhead and a flake.” It was exasperating to work with him but we loved him and wanted the best. After about 5 years of this crazy making, however, it got to the point where there was no short term memory and he was unable to do his job.

So I met with him and after carefully and tenderly discussing the problem told him that as a condition of continued employment with us he needed to see a specialist – and because I knew he had no health insurance I added that the congregation was committed to carrying the cost of this examine and most likely treatment. He burst into tears: this big bear of a gay man – who was all by himself – wrapped his arms around me and wept like a baby because he was terrified. He knew full well that things weren’t going well, he understood that something was wrong and he had nobody to turn to for help. (NOTE: some of the hard nosed business types wanted to fire his ass - the "sloppy agape" types wanted us to just carry him and let others pick up the slack - none of which was fair to our friend or the Body of Christ. What we needed was a way of being creative and compassionate as well as accountable.)

So… we worked with him – kept him as our music director for another 2 years, got him treatment and help - and found ways to grow together. And when he was no longer able to do his job we also made arrangements for his long term care and then celebrated his ministry as a gift from God – not just for his music which was brilliant - but also because he gave us the chance to become our best selves as the body of Christ and we found a way to become people of compassion, creativity and commitment.

When a congregation puts on the full mind of Christ and lives as Jesus to the world, others notice. Healing starts to spread – and joy and hope begins to replace fear and doubt. That is the promise I believe God is offering to us: Let’s pray together in song:

Jesus, Jesus, let me tell you what I know,
You have given us your Spirit, we love you.