The Sunday Sermon: June 12, 2022 – Trinity Sunday
Scripture: Acts 2:42-47
Life in the Spirit
And so, Pentecost has come and gone – fifty days after Easter. Easter, of course, came forty days not counting Sundays after Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Lent always comes closely on the heels of Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas, with the first day of Christmas right after Christmas Eve and the four weeks of Advent. Do you remember all of that?
I walk you back through the Church year, which begins on the first Sunday of Advent every year, to set up the “now,” the season we enter this morning: Ordinary Time. Not ordinary as in “common, regular, or mundane.” Ordinary, as used in the church calendar, comes from “ordinal numbers” by which the weeks of this season are ordered, or numbered. There is a shorter period of Ordinary Time that we’ve already moved through in the church. It’s the weeks between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, but that period is so short and filled with the life of Jesus from baby in Bethlehem to baptism in the Jordan and all his teachings and healings on this way to Jerusalem that the time passes quickly and before we know it, we’re at Ash Wednesday and our Lenten journey.
Not so much with this, technically the second, period of Ordinary Time. This is the longest season in the church stretching from this morning, Trinity Sunday, all the way through to the First Sunday in Advent in late November. It includes the long, lazy days of our June, July and August summer; the beginning of a new ministry year in September after Labor Day weekend; our annual Stewardship season in October and November; and the Thanksgiving holiday. All that seems so far off now. And it should, lest we lose the “nowness” of this season. Because there’s nothing ordinary about Ordinary time if we’re truly alive to Life in the Spirit.
Pray with me …
What is going to happen this Summer that changes things around here? What is the Holy Spirit, whose arrival we celebrated last week, going to do with us that it has never done before? In a very real sense we begin “life after Jesus” today. His final promise to us in the Gospel of John, the arrival of our Advocate, came to pass and we are to pick up where he left off: Life in the Spirit is Life after Jesus.
I came across the phrase in some reading I was doing this week in preparation for all that lies ahead. And as I pondered it, I found myself wondering what the very first gatherings of those who would become Christian’s may have been like. Those men and women from last week who, according to Luke, were first “stricken in the Spirit” that was promised to them by Jesus. These would be the men and women that walked with Jesus, historically speaking. And now, with the arrival of the promised Spirit, they have to go on without him physically present.
Now these wouldn’t be the communities that Paul founded. We most often jump from Pentecost to those communities – the churches in Thessalonica, Philippi, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, and eventually Rome. But “Christianity” was established before all that, of course. In some way, shape, or form, Christianity – whether as a separate religious practice or a sect of ancient Judaism, Christianity existed before Paul. After all, Paul was persecuting communities before he was producing them. Paul comes next, in the growth and development of this new faith, but not in its birth. Christianity had to be born before Paul could notice its existence and persecute its presence (Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, 62.). I’ve been wondering “What was there for Paul to persecute?” And how might we learn about ourselves as we discover the answers to that question.
Let’s listen now for the Word of God from the second chapter of Acts. After the Spirit filled everyone present on Pentecost, Peter began to preach. We explored that first sermon a bit last week. Well, when he was done, Luke records that “all who heard him were cut to the heart,” welcomed his message, and were baptized – three thousand were added. And then, beginning with verse forty-two in chapter two …
Read Acts 2:42-47 … The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
The book of Acts is our most comprehensive history of the spiritual and political movement that gave birth to the early Christian church. In the first chapter, Luke recaps his first book – his Gospel account of Jesus of Nazareth, and then he writes about Jesus’ ascension into heaven. This took place forty days after Easter, as Jesus had promised. Next is the selection of Matthias to replace the lost Judas. And then, of course, the Coming of the Holy Spirit, again as promised, on Pentecost, fifty days after Easter.
The Book of Acts then begins to chronicle the deliberations and actions of the church at Jerusalem and the spread of Christianity across Greece and Asia Minor, finishing with the Apostle Paul’s Christian presence in Rome. It all began with the first sermon we explored again last week on Pentecost Sunday, and the first theological, or Christological, question it provoked: What does this mean? We’re still asking that question, aren’t we? Even in their uncertainty, with the question still on their lips, Luke records three thousand baptisms. And then he describes what “life among the first believers was like, a rather “utopian-esque” community.
It’s easy for us to imagine that, even before Paul, Christianity began “with a bang.” I mean it’s recorded right here in Acts. From the one hundred and twenty persons recorded in Acts 1:15 the community leaps into a megachurch-like status of three thousand. And that after only one sermon in Acts 2:41 (I’m filled with humility and envy, myself – how might I preach like Peter!). And from there, “day by day the Lord added to their number” (2:47). That sounds like a “bang” for a start!
But the truth is, nothing happened “all at once.” And nothing happened in a “tidy progression” of perfect responses that tempts us today toward nostalgia of some time in our lives, some time “back when” in our own churches, that never really was. To begin with this isn’t a “Christian church,” yet. Not in the sense that we know the “Christian church” – separate from its Jewish heritage. This community is still a “sect” of that mother faith, growing, yes, but not apart from Judaism, still very much within the fold. And it’s growing through the grace of God, the faith of individuals – many of whom will pay a price, and it’s growing through the messy expressions of human determination. It’s so incredibly easy to forget all this, to forget all that comes first in our life after Jesus, life in the Spirit. In fact, many of us may not have forgotten it because we never learned it to begin with. We’ve always moved right from Spirit delivery to Church founding all our lives – from Pentecost to Paul without considering what had to have happened in-between.
The short passage we read for this morning has, in large part been the reason. This passage and the community it describes has become the emblem of the earliest Christian community – the first “church.” So “perfect” is it that we are distanced from it in our own realities of denominational divisions, theological differences, and social justice initiatives. But we should put this in a sharper focus. This community was shaping up under the larger authority of Judaism. It’s not, and never was, something breaking away from it. It is the first description of that transitional time when old Jewish practice and new beliefs were coming together into something different, something pretty novel, but it was still part of the ancient practice. Verse forty-six makes that clear, noting “they spent much time together in the Temple.” What we, as a long established Christian community see as an ideal and emblematic community was actually getting ready to create enormous shifts in faith and practice for its larger religion. Our “perfect community” was first century Judaism’s problem child.
This makes me wonder how we, as the church today, maybe ought to be seeing things differently “through the new eyes of the Spirit” we recognize most fully at Pentecost. How are we to “redefine” and “recharacterize” our own traditions and lives of faith? What is the Holy Spirit, whose arrival we celebrated last week, going to do with us this in this season of Ordinary Time that it has never done before?
In six verses Luke tells us that a new expression of faith, a life together “in the Spirit,” is changing, and will change, where people live and with whom; how they understand property ownership; their sense of “communal obligation,” or how they are to take care of one another; and how they understand something as basic as food. Meals themselves are becoming a spiritual activity, accompanied by an understanding of who doesn’t have food and our role in providing it for them. The “ideal” community we “ideal-ize” is one that is set apart from whatever has been established and has been practiced for centuries as “normal” and “faithful.”
We have read this passage for centuries and found wonder in its new ethic, economy, and culture. It’s a profoundly political vision. For centuries we’ve inevitably compared this community to our own – our own “church community” – and we always come up short. Of course we do. If this is what a true “Christian” community is supposed to look and act like, we don’t stack up so well. And once we’ve “come up short,” we begin to wonder whether this is what really what happened. There’s actually no historical record of a community such as this doing what it says it’s doing in the early first century of the Common Era. So, is this an exaggeration that tries to describe what should happen, but never fully did, or does? And if so, how close to this is “close enough” for us? But, here’s the thing: These are the wrong questions for a post-Pentecost community – for a group of men and women engaging “life in the Spirit.”
The question we must ask, about this passage and this description of the first community that led its life after Jesus is not “how do we compare?” But “how do we respond?” What momentum, what new, spiritual, and political movement is at work in our community, our congregation, our church today, that is refreshing our entrenched and institutional religious tradition?
How must we respond to the Spirit of Christ after, and because of, the Life of Jesus? What is our response today to the maddeningly increasing gap between those who have so much more than they need and those who don’t even have enough to survive? How do we engage a consumerist mentality that keeps us enslaved to our possessions? A capitalist society that increases wealth gaps? A militaristic mindset that insists war will bring peace and ignores justice? And a therapeutic culture that keeps us too drugged up to really notice, or even care, beyond our own personal concerns?
Because Jesus lived and loved as he did, we must ask and answer, what our life in the Spirit is supposed to represent? The question for our life together now is not “how do we compare?” But, how do we respond? “Day by day” we, too, must spend time together “in the sanctuary,” breaking bread together “at home” and “here,” seeking God and “having the goodwill of all people.”
We’ll engage that on Sunday mornings in this season of ordinary time this year. But we don’t have to wait until next week. “Day by day,” our scripture tells us. Everyday, together, we must ask and answer the questions of our new life: How are we living differently through our “Life in the Spirit?” What difference does the presence of the Holy Spirit make in your life?
There’s nothing ordinary about Ordinary time if we’re truly alive to Life in the Spirit. May it be so. Amen.
Reverend Joel Weible, Pastor
Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church / June 12, 2022