What Is Church - AOTA IV

I. Our Fathers in the Faith 00:00

Yes, I wrote an entire message for this Acts of the Apostles series, and then I was like, “It’s Father’s Day. Maybe I should talk about Father’s Day.” And I was wrestling with this dilemma. But what we’re really talking about when we dive into the Acts of the Apostles, and the reason why I was so excited to preach this sermon, is that we are talking about our fathers, the fathers of the faith, those who have set the way before us, who broke new ground, who quite literally changed the world from the inside out.

And so, as we talk today, yes, I don’t talk a lot about fathers, although it’s probably one of the most important things the early church had. But I just want you to think about our society, our culture. Last week we had that great line where Peter is preaching on Pentecost, and he said, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation” (Acts 2.40). And I don’t think it is a shocker to anybody here that one of the major crises in our culture is the lack of fathers. And so when we talk about this, and we talk about God’s plan for the world, we talk about what the church should be: at the very least it should be a place where we raise good fathers. At the very least, that is core to our mission.

II. What Is Church? 01:04

And so when we talk about this, I have a very simple question to lead us into this message this morning, and it’s going to take 2,000 years to explain. No. But the question I have today is: what is church? We use that word quite a bit. We’re very familiar with it. But what is it?

And believe it or not, this is our fourth Sunday talking about the Acts of the Apostles, and we have yet to make it past Pentecost. And we will not be making it past Pentecost technically today either, because there’s this one little thing that’s written at the end of Pentecost, where it says, “And 3,000 were added to their number that day.” And then it says what they did with these 3,000 people, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. So technically we’re saying what happened right after Pentecost.

So let’s read in Acts chapter 2. Imagine this. You have these eleven guys. They’ve elected, by the Holy Spirit, a twelfth person to make up the twelve apostles, the people who are the leaders of the church. And they are given this task by Jesus to save the entire world, and they’re trying to figure out what that means. And so this is the very basic beginning of what that means. It’s deceptively simple, and yet it is extremely difficult, and yet it led to billions of Christians. So this is the game plan. If you’ve ever wondered, “What is church?” or “How do you do church?”, well, you see all the different displays, but at the very bedrock of what church is, is this passage right here that describes what the early church was doing. Acts chapter 2, beginning in verse 42:

42 And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. 43 And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. 44 And all who believed were together and had all things in common. 45 And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. 46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Acts 2.42–47

That’s the church. That summarizes the bedrock foundation of what we are supposed to do.

III. They Continued Steadfastly 03:02

So let’s talk a little bit about this. There are kind of the four things that everybody talks about: they devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles, the breaking of the bread, the fellowship, and the prayers. You can separate those out, and we will talk about those things. But I actually think one of the secrets to the early church’s success is hidden in the sentence that leads to this: “And they devoted themselves,” or in another translation it says, “And they continued steadfastly.”

Continuing steadfastly is not a normal thing in our culture. It is very rare to see anybody continue steadfastly at literally anything, including existing as a man, but that’s a whole other conversation. There’s this idea in our culture that we are completely changeable, beautiful; that we can choose who we’re going to be from one day to the next. And to see somebody who is just steadily who they are, doing what they have committed themselves to for a lifetime (what’s the great picture of that? marriage), is almost unheard of. Or at least, when it’s found, people are like, “What? How is that possible?”

And yet, in the secret of the beginning of the church, continuing steadfastly is extremely essential. In fact, I think it is the secret sauce of the church. If you look at the church that has gone through extreme change, earthquakes, earth-shattering changes in ideology and culture and persecution, what is the one thing that remains? It is those who continue steadfastly. For two thousand years the church has existed because people chose to continue steadfastly.

In our world there are actually many methods… and in fact, I want to really center in on this whole idea of continuing steadfastly and contrast that with the relationships we are experiencing in the world. In social media we can block, unfriend, or ghost people at the smallest sign of conflict. In our jobs we work as long as it benefits us, and then we move on to whatever we want to do next. In our churches we have church shopping, which is a great thing. There are some great videos out there. Because what is church shopping, really? Church shopping is walking around to different churches and deciding which one has the best programs, the best things that benefit me. It’s all about me; I’m shopping for my church. Or if you’re a really committed Christian, then maybe you church shop for the church that matches all of your beliefs about what Christianity can be, so that you don’t have to learn or grow or do anything.

We have these ideas that are kind of baked into our Evangelical culture that we don’t even know that we hold. And it’s kind of funny saying that to a lot of you who have been here for 30 years. But I do think that in the wider culture there is this idea that it’s really about what you decide. There’s no continuing steadfastly. There’s the idea that you do what benefits you. In our marriages we see that represented in no-fault divorce, and actually it’s gone far enough that now you have a moral imperative to get out of a relationship if it’s not benefiting you.

Even as parents: in our culture you’ll see these dramatic movies where the mother sits down with the son and says, “I have to leave. I have to go. I have to find myself.” And the son goes, “You do that, Mom. I want you to go find your identity. Go to India; do what you need to do. Self-discovery. I’m so proud of you, Mom.” No, that’s actually not how it works. At the very least, a parent should be devoted to their child. Why are we celebrating Father’s Day? Because it matters when a father lives as a father. You don’t just annul that. You don’t just get rid of that, dissolve that, go on your own spiritual journey.

I’m saying all these things not because you don’t know this, but because sometimes we can be blinded to the culture around us and the ideas that permeate our lives. We might even find ourselves congratulating somebody on getting out of their unhealthy marriage. Yes, absolutely, there are times when people need to get out of abusive situations, in every single one of these. You might need to leave your job. It might not be a good job. I’m not saying you need to remain faithful to your job. You may even need to leave your spouse. I don’t have any interest in defining what that might mean in this moment, because I think it’s a very dramatic and personal situation that has to be decided in discernment with the leaders God has put in your life, especially the leaders of the church. If you’re in that type of situation, please reach out. There are resources; there are all these things we can do.

But my point is that that’s not how God designed us to be. And yet we can get so bamboozled by the way our culture preaches this message over and over again. What’s the common thread with all of these things? You continue steadfastly until it doesn’t benefit you. It’s radical individualism. It’s that every decision you make is based on you.

Well, let me describe real briefly the situation of the early church. If you joined Christianity, you were immediately blacklisted from the Jewish culture you had been raised in. Your parents might not talk to you, your brothers and sisters, your friends. You would be an outcast in this community. Very soon, not only that, you’d be a legal outcast. You might be beaten. You might be imprisoned. You might be killed. At what point do you stop continuing steadfastly with the church? When your life is on the line? In our culture the answer is clear: you need to protect yourself, you need to protect your family, you need to find a way to live your truth that doesn’t come into conflict with what you want to do.

But there was something about the early church where people chose to be in the church, in community, even to the point where guards would come to their house and they wouldn’t tell the guards… They’d be like, “Hey, we’re going to torture and kill you. Just tell us who your leader is.” And they’d say, “No. You can torture and kill me.” Or they’d say, “Don’t you need to recant your belief? Say that you don’t believe in Jesus as Lord.” And they’d say, “No, I’m not going to say that.” I think that idea is so countercultural, and yet it’s the bedrock foundation of how the early church survived for the first 300 years. They continued steadfastly.

So let’s be careful to separate wisdom (when you do need to put in a boundary, when you do need to make a change, when you do need to decide to do something different) from inconstancy. The radical idea that you do whatever makes you happy is not a Christian idea. You will never learn to love until you love the broken and messy relationships and people that God’s put you with. If you float from place to place and just find the people that you like, you will never learn to continue steadfastly. That’s why I get to hang out with all you guys that I don’t like. No, I’m just kidding.

There’s something important about this. Well, I will just say: what makes Saint Michael’s so amazing? Honestly, 30 years makes Saint Michael’s so amazing. I’ve been here since I was born, and I look at the same faces. That’s incredible. You don’t find that anywhere. If you need any further evidence that our culture does not know how to continue steadfastly, just look at everybody’s inability to maintain relationships over time. They might know their parents, but they probably don’t know anybody else for that long. And I did say they might know their parents, because you never know about that.

IV. The Apostles' Teaching 10:56

So what were they continuing steadfastly in? Let’s continue here. First of all, the apostles’ teaching. So what’s the point here? You had these twelve leaders who were leading the church, and they were interpreting the Old Testament, as we call it now, to the church, in the context of what Jesus had taught. Because they didn’t actually have a Bible that they were handing out to people at this time. They actually had to tell people what Jesus had said. The Gospels hadn’t been written. The Old Testament was in temples, and you could go and read it with other people, and then you would go home; you couldn’t take it with you.

And so what happened very quickly was that they got these teachers. The apostles would raise up people, and it was almost like being a blacksmith. You’d be an apprentice, and you’d be a journeyman, and they would teach you all of the things Christ taught, how it related to the Scriptures, and then they’d pass it on. And so we have these writings, as people were preaching these sermons and quoting the Scriptures to their people, because their people don’t have a Bible. And so they’re telling them, “See, remember when it said here, it said there?” And we can actually recreate the majority of the New Testament from the sermons the church leaders wrote over the next couple hundred years after the apostles, because they were trying to tell the people what the good news was, what the fellowship was. We are so blessed today that we can actually see all these writings. You can actually go home and read them. Praise God.

But it was always meant to be taught in relationship with one another. Following the train of radical individualism, there’s this idea of “me, Jesus, and my Bible”: “I know what Christianity is because I have my Bible, and I know what it says.” That’s never been the model of the church. The model of the church is, we all come together with our separate knowledges, our separate perspectives, and we trust the leadership of the church, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the community to safeguard the Bible throughout the ages and to understand what it means.

Did you know you can go out and read the Bible and justify slavery? In fact, there were people who did that. Now, we can read the Bible today and say, “Well, they were wrong.” But why were they wrong? Because they weren’t in community with the tradition of the church. They weren’t in community with the way the Bible had been read since the beginning. And so they found their own isolated groups of people, who all got together and said, “Well, this is what it must mean,” out of communication with the 2,000 years of church interpretation and history.

So when I get up here and preach, when Father Powell, when the bishop, when all of us get up here and preach, what we’re doing is continuing the tradition of taking the Scriptures and talking about them to you guys. And then we go to our home groups, and they ask questions (and Mary Patrick asks more than everybody else, because she’s so curious), and she says, “Well, what does this mean, Jesse?” And we all have a conversation, and we say, “Well, let’s look at that,” or “Maybe we need to look it up,” or “Maybe we need to look to a commentary,” or sometimes the answer is, “I don’t know what it means.” And that’s the journey.

When it says they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, it doesn’t mean that they went home and read their Bibles and came up with their own interpretations and lived their life. It means that they lived community together, and they figured out what Christianity was together, led by the leaders of the church, the apostles. That’s why we have bishops and priests and deacons: because we are commissioned to help steward the sacraments, the revelation of God, and communicate them to you all. And the reason we have you all is because there are only so many of us, and you’re called to take that message into the world, to build your families, to build the kingdom of God.

Okay, so they devoted themselves to the teaching. I will say one more thing about this. They literally had to teach them how to respond when somebody was holding a knife to their children and saying, “Do you reject Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior?” I bring that situation up because I think we think that it’s all up here; you’ve got to know the Christian faith up here. But they knew from the very beginning that you have to actually live the Christian faith. What do you do when the Roman centurion’s knocking on your door? Or what do you do when you have an opportunity to betray someone who you know is a Roman informant? How do you love them? How do you forgive them? How do you respond in these dramatic situations?

We’ve gotten to the point where it’s like, “Yeah, I can know Christianity, and then I can live my life over here however I want.” We know the truth of Christianity, but we don’t know how to apply it to our lives. They had to know, because they were literally fighting for their existence. The church was going to get snuffed out. There were lots of people who were willing to go as far as they could, including Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, who was finding Christians to arrest them and kill them. So the devotion to the apostles’ teaching mattered not intellectually; it mattered in how they lived their life. So when they said, “What did Jesus mean when he said, ‘Turn the other cheek’?”, they actually had to go out and turn the other cheek. What does that mean?

So all of this led to a revolution in the world. I don’t have time to spell all of these things out, but I will say that the reason we believe humans have dignity today, the reason slavery doesn’t exist, or if it does, it’s illegal and we condemn it universally, all of the things we hold dear, the fact that we have hospitals and universities, all of that came out of the ideas that were in the apostles’ teaching that they were devoting themselves to. Because back then, you know what? You would go and sleep with temple prostitutes over here, to get your devotion to the sex god, and then you’d bring the baby of that union to this other god, and you would sacrifice your baby to that god. And that was considered normal. How radically different is our world because they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching! That’s amazing. I don’t know; it’s amazing to me.

V. Fellowship 18:09

And they devoted themselves to fellowship. We just had a little bit of conversation about what that might mean when we talked about continuing steadfastly. But I just want to give you one little story, and you’ll recognize this story. It’s kind of an archetypal story in our culture. Imagine a person who grows up, and they’re the only child in their family, and they go to college, and they get a job in the big city. They make a nice living. They have a decent apartment. They exchange memes with somebody at church or at work. They share their emotions with their therapist on an online therapist site like BetterHelp. And on their birthday they get a mailed present from their parents, and they get a shout-out in the generic company email, “Birthdays this month.” And then they die.

There’s something about this story that has so influenced our culture that I could list 10 movies that address this exact problem, from Fight Club to 500 Days of Summer to all these things. What happens in these movies? Something interrupts their life, their meaningless existence, and they see, “Oh wow, there’s something. There’s a crisis that I need to solve. There’s somebody I need to love. There’s something I need to do.” We have these stories told again and again and again.

What I want to tell you about that story today is that you’re called to be the interruption in that person’s life. All these people in this city: there are probably thousands of people who have a life that matches that archetype. They’re alone. They don’t know anybody except some friends at work, and maybe they have some relationship with their parents or their siblings, but they don’t have a community. They haven’t grown up for 30 years with people who love and care for them. Nearly everyone in this room who has known me since then has impacted my life for the better. Where would I be without you guys? I don’t know. Alone in an apartment, watching Apple TV+. I don’t know. I wouldn’t be here, not without you.

And so when it says they devoted themselves to fellowship, that’s for today. We need to devote ourselves to fellowship, and we need to be the interruption in people’s lives. And we need to tell them, “There is a crisis that only you can solve. There’s a world that needs you to save it. There’s a kingdom that needs you to build it. And you are loved unconditionally. You are welcome. We want you to be a part of us.” There are probably people we encounter on a daily basis who, if we said that to them, it would change their life. So when we talk about devoting ourselves to fellowship, I think we do an awesome job here, and I’m really proud to be a part of Saint Michael’s. But, man, there are so many people who need an interruption in their life, to know that they need to be a part of us.

VI. The Breaking of Bread 20:18

Okay, the breaking of the bread. We have a really great understanding of the Eucharist table, that it’s the highest part of our worship. You encounter the presence of God. The breaking of bread: that’s what they were talking about. But they were talking about more than that, because at first they didn’t really have a theology of the Eucharist. They didn’t have a Eucharistic prayer. They didn’t have all the things they built up over time. All they knew was that Jesus told them, “When you gather, do this. This is my body; this is my blood.”

And so the table, when they invited their people and went from home to home having these things, changed the world. Because you know who was invited to that table? The slave and the rich man, the woman and the man. Everyone was invited. Eventually the Gentiles and the Jews sat at table together. Not only did the ideas of the apostles’ teaching, but the practice of the breaking of bread broke the world. It changed this hierarchy. It changed the relationships of one to another.

So my challenge today is: yes, absolutely, come to the Eucharist table. All are invited. Let’s bring people to the Eucharist table to meet Jesus. But also, let’s bring people to our homes to meet Jesus. Let’s invite people to dinner. Let’s have fellowship together, one with another. Let’s break bread together. Let’s change the world again; it’s still our calling. In the same way, one way to interrupt that guy who lives alone in an apartment is to invite him to a meal. There are people in here who do that really well. I’ve got to call out Liz and Nathan, who are awesome at reaching out to people, and these things change lives.

VII. The Prayers 22:21

Okay, they devoted themselves to the prayers. So this is a bunch of Jewish people. They have all these prayers from two thousand years, or however many years, that they’re playing with as Jews, and they’re trying to figure them out. And then Jesus comes, and everything changes. And then they look at the prayers, and they go, “That prayer was about Jesus. Look at that prayer; it was about Jesus. Oh, that prayer, we can change that to be about Jesus.” And they took all these prayers, and they made them the practice of their community. Because what you say when you talk to God, what you say when you come before God, actually shapes what you believe about God. So when we come together and we say these prayers, these prayers have been culminating for 2,000 years, as Christians have built on that foundation. They matter.

So they devoted themselves to these elements: the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of the bread, and the prayers. And then you say, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” “Well, you have to believe that Jesus died for you, and then you’re a Christian.” Not really. Maybe. If you’re a Christian, you need to devote yourselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and the prayers. And absolutely, belief is essential to that, but it’s not enough. Otherwise they could have just told the story of Jesus’ life and then handed out tracts saying, “Accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, and you’ll get to heaven.” No. We have an entire New Testament that’s exploring what it actually means to be the church, to be Christian. And at the very least, it means these things.

VIII. Awe and Generosity 23:23

So what happens in the church when they’re steadfastly devoted to these things? Well, it says, “Awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles.” We read that today: go out and heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, open the eyes of the blind. These are the things that should be happening in the church that’s devoted to these four things, that continues steadfastly. And I believe that for our church. We’ve seen people be healed. We’ve seen people be changed. We’ve seen people come to Christ who should not have come to Christ. They were spiritually broken, and God made them whole. That’s amazing.

Let’s continue. And then it says this crazy thing: “All who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.” That’s a challenging verse. I like my things. I don’t want to sell them and give them to everybody. What is the point here? The point is what happens when you devote yourself to a God who sent his only Son to die on a cross, who gave everything for us: you become generous. Because if your God can die on a cross for you, then maybe you could sell your car and give it to somebody who needs it.

Now, today I want to encourage you that God is actually moving something very particular in our community. I’m not going to give a whole message on giving, but I want you to know how good giving is. Because when we were praying at our Rector’s Council meeting, we felt like God had given us some things that he wanted to do in our church, and one of those things was that he wanted to make us a generous people. And really, at the heart of what giving is, is that you trust God’s generosity more than your own. Because he says, “Give, and it shall be given unto you: shaken together, pressed down, and overflowing” (Luke 6.38). So there’s nothing that you give that cannot be given back to you. And by that I mean… maybe he doesn’t give you that same car back, but he absolutely challenges us to test him in his ability to provide for us when we give.

And so, like I said, we don’t have time to go through an entire giving message, although I really want to, because giving is so good. It is so good. But I want to give you a little bit of what Paul wrote. He’s seen the early church, he knows the stories, he’s engaged with these people, and he’s going to another church and asking them for money, and this is what he has to say about it, because they need to support one of the other missions. Second Corinthians 9:6:

6 The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully. 7 Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver. 8 And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work. 2 Cor 9.6–8

I want all sufficiency in all things at all times. That sounds great. So how do I do that? I become a cheerful giver. The early church was not powerful because they had so much money. They were powerful because they were generous. It’s not about how much money; it’s about if you’re generous. You could be a billionaire and give far more money than anybody here and not be generous. Or you can be the widow and give two mites, and Jesus notices and says she gave everything she had (Mark 12.42–44). I know which one I want to be: the one who has sufficiency in all things at all times.

So when we look at that verse and we’re challenged (“they gave everything, and they had everything in common”), what’s the point? They were willing to lay down their lives one for another, and one of the chief ways to demonstrate that is with your money, because otherwise it can have such a hold on us.

IX. The Lord Added to Their Number 27:55

I want to be a part of a church like this. God’s building us into a church like this. And it says in verse 46, because they were doing these things:

46 And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, 47 praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved. Acts 2.46–47

That’s what God is building at Saint Michael’s. Yes, we’ve been that. Yes, we are that. But God is also making us be that again. Amen.