Sermon: A Glimpse of What's Possible

Acts 2:42-47

A Glimpse of What’s Possible

James Sledge                                                                                       May 11, 2014

I think this is one of those scripture passages that makes a lot of American Christians a little bit nervous. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. That sounds a bit like, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” a communist mantra popularized by Karl Marx. But that’s somewhat counter to a number of basic tenants of American society.

The utopian, commune like feel of the Jerusalem church in Acts is also way outside most of our experience of faith. It is as removed from our experience as Mother Teresa’s life of faith feels distant from our own. And the preacher tempted to urge a congregation, “Be more like the Acts church,” is likely to find such efforts as ineffective as urging them to be more like Mother Teresa. Not that pastors don’t still try on occasion.

One of the problems, or perhaps better, the limits of preaching is that unless a congregation invests divine authority in a pastor – something that was probably always rare but almost never happens in our cynical age – preaching itself has very little power to change how people act or live. People may like or dislike a sermon. They may agree or disagree with it. They may even be convinced to change their mind about something from time to time, but in that sermons are little different from editorials in the newspaper, if more focused on religious rather than political discourse.

And so the typical sermon on today’s passage seeks to convince people how becoming a bit more like the folks in an admittedly idealized Jerusalem church might be a good and doable thing. Or it seeks to explain some updated practice that might be better suited to our modern world. Or it talks about how our lives as consumers are contrary to the life of those who are in Christ. Or it may even explain why this utopian vision of the early church has nothing to do with us. I’ve certainly charted a couple of these paths in sermons I’ve preached.

But the problem with such efforts is that, very often, they urge certain sorts of activity or behavior without much attention to what caused such behavior in the Jerusalem church. The people in Jerusalem didn’t share everything with one another, or devote themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to prayer, because a preacher, even Peter himself, urged them to do so. They did so because of a dramatic encounter with the power and presence of God that changed and transformed them.

I throw this quote out from time to time, so you may well have heard it before. I don’t recall its origin, but it was addressed to Mainline churches like Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc. It goes, “People come to us seeking an experience of God, and we give them information about God.”  Now there’s nothing wrong with information about God, but absent some real experience of God, it has very little power to change or transform. And if all we have is information about God, then God becomes simply an idea or a concept.

The power and reality of God was no concept to those in Jerusalem, and two experiences of this power created the odd community described in Acts. The first was the experience of the risen Christ. Even those who had not actually seen the risen Jesus had seen how his frightened followers who abandoned him at his arrest had become bold leaders who would  risk anything, even their own lives, to continue Jesus’ ministry.

And along with resurrection, the Holy Spirit was required for anything like what is reported in Acts. Indeed the community we read about today could not have existed without Pentecost, without the real presence of the risen Christ dwelling within that community of believers, empowering them to do what they could never have done on their own. The community described in today’s reading makes no sense if we see it as the product of immense human effort. It only makes sense when we realize it is the transforming power of God at work in their lives.

So… where have you experienced the transforming power of God in your life? Where has the Spirit touched you and led you to do something you would never have done on your own? We Presbyterian types have not always been comfortable talking about such things. The notion of the Spirit running around makes us nervous. We like things orderly. It does say in our Book of Order (interesting name) that the elements used in worship should create “ardor as well as order,” but if you visited worship at a hundred different Presbyterian churches, my guess is you’d see a lot more order than ardor.

Still, it’s hard for me to imagine that very many people stay active in the worship and work of a congregation without some experience with God’s presence, without some encounter with the holy. Surely most of us have some moment when God got ahold of us. Maybe it’s happened rarely, maybe only once, but surely it happened. So why don’t we make this more central to our lives of faith? Why don’t we talk about such experiences more? Why don’t we expect them more? Why don’t we design our worship and our prayer times and our meetings to be attentive, to wait for and listen for God to speak, for the risen Christ to meet us, for the wind of the Spirit to blow us in a direction we had never expected or intended?

I’m not suggesting we can manufacture or guarantee the Spirit’s presence. We can’t, but we can sure get in her way. We can worship without any expectation that God is in our midst. We can be so in control of things that we won’t give the Spirit much of an opening. We sometimes seem to work very hard to keep the Spirit out of our worship, our prayer, our committee meetings. Sometimes Presbyterians are so skilled at this that nothing even hinting at that strange community in Acts could ever break out. And when there’s no such possibility, it isn’t because people aren’t dedicated or giving their best. It’s because there is no resurrection power and no presence of the Holy Spirit transforming people and creating something new.

When the book of Acts tells us about a strange community of faith with radical care and sharing and fellowship, a community that drew admiration from the outsiders who saw it, we aren’t being given a blueprint for exactly how our community should look. Instead, we are given a picture of what is possible, of the wondrous things that can happen, that do happen, when the power of resurrection and the Holy Spirit get ahold of us.

Come, risen Lord. Come, Holy Spirit. We are waiting.