The Making of the Church

Acts 1-2: Ascension & Pentecost

Some of us here heard a guest speaker last week at a presbytery meeting, tell all about how we need to grow our churches—the right kind of churches with the right kind of beliefs, that is. He was articulate and persuasive about it, but if I were boiling down his message into a super simple summary sentence, I’d say it was, “Hey, we PCUSA Presbyterians have a really special product here, a great religious perspective for today’s problems, and we need to sell that product well.”  

He was careful to say he wasn’t talking about growth for growth’s sake, and I believe him. I really think he believes we have a better religious product than most other ones out there.  One that can do good in the world and help people, that includes people who feel excluded by other religious products. We should be trying to impact more lives.

Then, as proof that this was our job, he used the Pentecost scripture, the beginning of the church, saying that on the day of Pentecost, they grew the church, in faith and in numbers, and that is what we are called to do. (Notably, our paraphrase today didn’t seem to think the numbers part was important to include, but the original says their 120 people grew to 3000 that day).

I am not faulting this individual. What he was saying is what any good leader of an organization should be saying in our competitive, capitalist world. It only makes sense. If you have something good for the world you should promote it well and get it to as many people as possible.
If the world were only what we can see and touch, and our lives were entirely about what we make of them, then I might agree with him. And I’m a person who needs outside structure and appreciates community, so I would find a good enough religion to commit to so that I could do some good with my life. Because in the whole sum of things, some kind of ethical system and higher power thinking is both good for my personal self-improvement project, and good for helping the world be better.

In fact, I am going to have to talk to some high schoolers about Christianity in a couple of weeks for their world religions class. I’m on the Abrahamic religions day, after Judaism and before Islam. It would be really easy on that day to slip into this role: defender of the faith, peddler of the goods, recruiter for my team. What make your religion good (subtext: better than others)? What beliefs is it shaped around? What ideals direct you?  I would possibly even fall into arguing how my kind of Christianity is better than other kinds, (even though we are all, technically, the Church, I would have to break it down into ‘churches’ so I could parse out which ones are better), and one way we’re better is that we are more welcoming of other religions than those other Christians are, so that’s why my version of my religion better than other versions andother religions. It’s complicated. And exhausting. Frankly, the whole thing is exhausting, and if I am really honest, it’s boring. 

And when I really let my mind go there, as if this is how it all is, as if this is all there is, life becomes flat and tedious. Then, just behind that, the pain of this world begins to feel scary, terrifying, even overwhelming, because the things that are supposed to be strong and hold us together, like our government, and our leaders, and our laws, and our freedoms, and our morals, feel weak and paper thin, and I am not sure where to put my feet or my heart. 

And if God is just this great idea or good thing I can get my hands around to pass off to people, then God is not bigger than the evil that threatens to undo us, or even more powerful than the ordinary human selfishness and stupidity that, like a snowball down a mountain, has picked up so much destructive momentum and force it will inevitably wipe us all out.

And by this point in the mind game, I am so very far from Jesus, and the stories of resurrection we’ve been hearing from one another. I am unmoored from the deep gratitude that’s been washing over me lately watching you all love one another, and care for your neighbors, and listen to deep stories of lives wrapped up in lives through love. And I can no longer find the joy I had just yesterday, digging in the dirt in my yard marveling that by the grace and wisdom of a God I can’t understand, microscopic things I can’t see, in this enormous earth I can’t direct, under this vast sky with sun and rain, will make these tiny plants grow and all I did to join into this miracle of new life was dig a hole. 

Life is miraculous, and the things that are the most real, the deepest, truest things, are not things we can control, we can only receive and participate in them. This is how God most often moves: in the small, the ordinary, the unnoticed; the possibly of God's act exists in everything, anything even, especially in nothing.

But this all depends on a real God, who so far beyond us, that all we can say truthfully is ‘God is God.’ (Barth)
Which brings us back to Pentecost and the “beginning of the church.”

Except, this is not actually the beginning of the church.  Where it starts is where we started our reading today: Jesus telling the disciples to wait for the Holy Spirit to lead them into what is next and then disappearing. 

In fact, this moment we call the ascension is so powerful and central to the making of the church, that it shifts the nouns used for the humans. Luke actually tells it twice: it’s the finale to the book of Luke—his narration of God coming embodied into the world in Jesus—where the humans are called disciples, which means ‘followers.’ Jesus is the subject and the disciples are oriented to him. 
But when the same moment again opens of the book of Acts, which is Luke’s narration of Jesus embodied in and through the Church, making us the Body of Christ, now they are called apostles, or ‘sent ones.’  This does not mean, however, that they become the subjects. The subject remains Christ; the power and story is still in the hands of the one doing the sending. 

This is the moment the Church begins, when two things happen. First Jesus tells sent ones what they’re sent to do: they are to wait and watch for what God is about to do next. And second, the flesh and blood Jesus vanishes from their sight. This is so jarring and confusing that they stay rooted to the ground, staring up into the sky for so long that God has to send in some follow-up messengers to prod them on, and tell them to get to it: go back where you were and wait for God to act. 

Now, they had some trouble just waiting, and I get it. They felt like without Jesus right there verbally giving the orders, surely they should do something.  It’s on them now to lead this thing! So, they hold a committee meeting, and pray, and ask God to choose for them, and draw straws to replace Judas in the 12 disciples with a new leader, Matthias. Which is sweet and honorable, and shows just how wide their imagination could reach and no further. Matthias is never mentioned again in the Bible. Immediately after he gets the gig, the Holy Spirit descends and all holy mayhem breaks loose, and the 12 disciples wasn’t even a thing any more after all; they have already become 120 sent ones, about to be 3000 and counting, because God is creating the Church God’s way.  

And God’s way, on that day, was to give the faithfully waiting ones words to speak right into people’s lives the good news of God’s redeeming love and the new life Jesus’ resurrection brings to us all. God chose a day when the city was filled with people from all over, and then gave those new apostles  words to say that they couldn’t even understand. (Maybe that made them a little braver right out of the gate). When they obeyed the Spirit’s promptings and spoke those words, even though they made no sense to their own ears, passers-by, strangers and foreigners heard through the open windows and the mouths of these country bumpkin Galileans truth that set them free. And God grew God’s Church. 

For the first 40 days after his resurrection, before Jesus disappeared again, only these 120 people knew the whole world had changed – they knew it not by their own great wisdom but because they kept running into the risen Lord in all these ordinary places of their ordinary lives. Here he is again! until they began to trust that indeed this is Jesus, and indeed we are in a new thing. But their imaginations are not completely ready for this new thing.  (Do you notice, just when he’s about to leave, those dear ones bring up their old misunderstanding of him! “Wait, when, again, Jesus, are you going to restore Israel? Just so we can know when to expect the salvation we assumed you were about. Even though you told us it was different. And then showed us. For the past 40 days). When Jesus gave them a new identity as sent ones, and then sent them to wait for what God would do next, and then left, it was made clear: the resurrection did not just bring back a private, embodied, singular Jesus just for them to follow and obey. Jesus now lives in the Body of Christ sent into the whole world. 

God is not a product we rate highly and recommend widely.  God is God. Our very imaginations are not capable of accessing God. And so certainly, our words and ideas, our efforts and goals, our church-making and religion-building can’t begin to capture or even hope to say anything substantive about God. This is the God who holds us.
 
Only God can reveal Godself. And God reveals Godself to us in Jesus. Jesus is still the subject. Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.  This has been the Church’s shorthand for the whole sum of the gospel for thousands of years. Christ has died: There is no death, loss, evil or suffering into which God does not go with us and for us; death does not get the final word. Christ has risen: bringing life out of nothingness, hope from despair, newness from impossibility is what God does, is doing, will keep on doing. And Christ will come again: the story is ongoing, the end to which this is all heading is the love that came from God’s being, brought all life into being, and will return all things in love to the very heart of God, and nothing can derail the trajectory of things.
 
The Church begun Jesus told them to wait for the Spirit is happening right now still, in every place in the entire world among the people who have surrendered their life into the Life of Christ lived in and through us.  God is forging a new community whose imaginations keep expanding, and whose lives take on the shape of the love that makes up God’s own being and bears witness to the resurrection life of Christ moving in the world even now, right in the places of brokenness, fragility and death.

And if the terribly uncontrollable feeling of surrender doesn’t suit us, and the waiting is so uncomfortable that we fill it with tasks and build our idea of what the church is and should be, at least we are in good company. The apostles do it in the first minutes of being Church, and the whole book of Acts and Paul’s coming letters to the Church will be filled with this back and forth between imagination-busting astonishment at what God is doing through them by the Holy Spirit, and falling back into misunderstanding, self-sufficiency and well-laid plans. Then being reminded (sometimes by a quite grumpy Paul) and redirected again to what this whole apostle and being Church is really about, then, when God does something through them that defies the limits of their imaginations, they’re astonished anew, humbled and awed, and so it goes. 

So, Church, while we keep running into the risen Lord in all these ordinary places of our ordinary lives, and telling our resurrection stories Here he is again!, first and foremost, we will wait together for the Holy Spirit to draw us into the most real, deepest, and truest things in ways that rewrite our imaginations for what God can do, and teach us to trust in what God is up to in the world, and make us ready to join in, ready for what God will do next. 

Amen.