Sermons & Services

So here we are, post Easter.  Another week of news, and threats, and changes, and reversals, and uncertainty.   I remember as the results of the presidential election became apparent last November, one of my first thoughts was: “It looks like the church will become countercultural once again.”  Over these past 97 days, our American world has become more and more like the Roman world in which Christianity first emerged.  In that world, an elite group controlled most of the wealth and resources, and used their power to silence critics and threaten those who failed to conform to their idea of how society should be organized.  And yet, the early church emerged against all odds, even when all seemed hopeless.

This Easter season, during these 50 days between Easter and Pentecost, we’ll be exploring together what we can learn from the early church that can inform our church today as we look to the future together.  All year, we have journeyed with Jesus through his ministry of teaching and healing and feeding.  During Holy Week, we recalled the terror of the trial and the devastation of the crucifixion.  Then, after the women discovered the empty tomb on Easter morning, and told the disciples, after Jesus appeared to the disciples behind locked doors where they were hiding, what happened next?

Every year, the lectionary texts for the Sunday after Easter include the same story from the gospel of John.  I’ve preached on that text many times, as have most preachers, and I’m sure you’ve heard a number of sermons on “Doubting Thomas.”  Usually, the readings vary from year to year over a three-year cycle, but the week after Easter, it’s always the story of Thomas, who missed that Easter evening appearance of Jesus to the disciples, and said he wouldn’t believe it unless he could see him and touch him and thereby know that the Resurrection is real.  Then, a week later, the disciples are in the same place, and Jesus comes again.  This time, Thomas sees him and touches him and believes.

By the time they were writing all of this down, and telling the story with the “resurrection lens” that Mike spoke about last week, they realized that not everyone was going to have that first-hand experience.  And so Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  That blessing is meant for all who have come to believe long after those first eyewitnesses.  If the believers were limited to those who were there, who walked and talked with Jesus, then the movement would soon die out.  There are plenty of examples of charismatic leaders who were great while they were present, but then when they were gone, their followers dispersed, their passion a distant memory.  Would this time be different?  Would the followers of Jesus scatter or continue?

I didn’t choose that familiar gospel reading for this week because we’re going to fast forward a generation beyond the original followers of Jesus, to focus on the early church and what it can teach us for our own day in the midst of the challenges we are facing in our country and our world.

These are not my centuries; I am more familiar with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church history.  So I had to go on a sort of archaeological dig to the basement boxes and find my notes from my New Testament class and a course on the History of Christian Thought, covering the first thousand years.  I also consulted with Wikipedia and google, asking questions like “How many people lived in the Roman Empire two thousand years ago?

Putting all of this together, I remember one of the first interesting things I learned about the New Testament was that the book of Acts, also known as the Acts of the Apostles, is a sequel.  It’s a second book, also written by Luke.  At Christmastime when we treasure the first two chapters of Luke, we often skip the first 4 verses, in which Luke basically says, there are many gospels out there, so I too decided … to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus … And then Acts 1:1 says, “In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day when he was taken up to heaven” … and then in Acts, the author launches into what happened after that.  One author, two books, fifty-two chapters to tell the story.

Why did Luke divide his writing into two books?  Was it simply that what he wanted to write was too long to fit on one roll of papyrus?  Or is there a natural division between the first book about Jesus and his followers during his lifetime, and the second book about those who came after?  I wonder if the early followers of Jesus were as excited about Luke’s season 2 as I am about the third season of the Diplomat, or the 4th season of Ted Lasso?

Our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles is a description of how the community related to one another, from the 4th chapter, a translation that Mike shared with me by David Bentley Hart:

32 And both the heart and the soul of the multitude of those who had come to have faith were one, and no one said that any of the possessions belonging to them was his or her own, but everything was owned among them communally.  33 And the apostles of the Lord Jesus bore witness to the resurrection with great power, and great grace was upon all of them.  34 For neither was anyone among them in need; for as many as were proprietors of lands or households were selling them and bringing the profits of the things sold, 35 and laying them at the feet of the apostles, and there was a redistribution, to each according as anyone had need.

What do you hear in that description of the community?  Does it sound very foreign to you?  Comforting?  Or frightening?  An easier life?  Or a more difficult one?  It’s a very different way of life.  But we have to remember that this Christian community grew out of a very time, not out of a world like ours, or an economy like ours.  However, there are places where we do pool our resources, joyfully and gladly, whether that is with family or friends.  Think about those places in our own life.  What is it that makes a difference for you?

Did you see the comment that Pope Francis’ net worth at the time of his death was valued at just $100?  I’m a bit skeptical, since I don’t know why an Argentinian man living in Italy would have his net worth measured in US dollars, but it does make sense.  Francis didn’t accept the traditional pope’s salary.  He kept his Jesuit vow of poverty and trusted that the church would take care of his simplified needs.  It was a different approach than most of today’s world, and a different approach to the papacy.

2,000 years earlier, the earliest Christians also had a different approach than the world around them.  What was their Roman world like?  It was not comfortable for the vast majority of the people.  Throughout the Roman Empire, 90% of the people labored to provide for the 10% elite.  There was constant anxiety about the availability of food and water.  It was dark and filthy and full of disease and danger.  The Roman authorities were not interested in providing what ordinary people needed to survive, but instead could enslave them or arbitrarily imprison them.  Those trained in medicine gave up on those who were hopelessly ill or injured, leaving them to die, even though the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm” had been a part of the practice of medicine for five centuries.

I read a fascinating article on CNN.com on Easter Sunday by John Blake about the origins of Christianity.  He writes, “Before Christianity became a religion, it was the Resistance — a poor people’s campaign that began in a Roman backwater, took on one of the most ruthless and militaristic empires in world history, and won.”  He asks, “what can today’s resistance movements facing tyrannical regimes learn from their success?” [1]

The early Christians had a simple message: God is love.  But they didn’t just talk about their beliefs, they acted upon them with compassion, providing comfort and hope for a better day.  They nursed the sick and the dying, collected money for the poor, and shared their food.  They built poorhouses for people to be sheltered.  Jesus taught and preached about economic justice.  The early Christians put it into practice.  And that, it turns out, made all the difference.

People saw a different way to relate to one another and the movement began to grow.  Instead of the fatalistic hopelessness, they found meaning and hope in following this new way of life.  Those who had never seen Jesus of Nazareth came to know him through his followers, and became followers and believers themselves.  And those followers, by living the life that Jesus taught, brought along their families and neighbors.

All of this, then, is prelude for the lectionary reading for this second Sunday of Easter, from the 5th chapter of Acts.  It is a story that comes after the high priest and Sadducees arrested the twelve apostles and put them in the public prison.  During the night, Acts says, an angel of the Lord opened the prison doors and told the apostles to go to the Temple to teach.  The reading begins in the morning, when the high priest called for the prisoners to be brought to him, and discovered that they weren’t in the prison, but were teaching in the Temple.

26 At that the captain, along with the Temple guards, brought the apostles in—not by force, because they were afraid of the people and feared that they, the guards, might be stoned—27 and, leading them in, they made them stand before the Council. And the chief priest interrogated them, 28 saying, “Did we not issue you an order, commanding you not to teach in this name?  And look: you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching, and you wish to impute this man’s blood to us.” 29 And in reply Peter and the apostles said, “It is necessary to obey God rather than human rulers. 30 The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed, hanging him upon a tree; 31 God exalted this man to his right side as a prince and a savior, that he might give the people a change of heart and forgiveness of sins. 32 And we and the Spirit, the Holy one that God gave to those obeying him, are witnesses to these things we say.”

The message that the apostles preached, and that the early church put into practice could not be contained or silenced.  The power was shifting.  The Roman authorities “were afraid of the people.”

John Blake reminds us that this early Christian movement built a coalition that was unlike the Roman world that enforced hierarchies and divisions.  The early church was radically inclusive.  You know Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”  The early church was compassionate.  The early church recognized the leadership of women, and called them deaconesses.  The early church cared for and welcomed all, and the movement continued to grow.

Within just a few decades, the Roman Emperor granted Christians official recognition, exempted them from paying the Temple tax, identifying the Christian movement as separate from the Jewish religion.  By the end of three centuries, it was estimated that 10% of the Roman population was Christian.  After that, it continued to grow exponentially, so that by 350, more than half the people were Christian, 56.5% according to Wikipedia [2].  At first, this seems like an impossible increase, but actually, just 3.5% of growth per year increased the numbers from 10% to 56%, leading to the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380.  Christianity was no longer counter-cultural, at least for a time.

Of course, this has echoes in our own time.  We are facing the destruction of our American social safety net, civil rights, public infrastructure, and the rule of law in an attempt to shift even more wealth to the currently governing elite.  What then can we learn from the ancient church?  I hear three things: 1) The message can be simple: God is love.  2) Compassion and care are central, meeting the very real needs of the people.  3) Community is contagious.  Ultimately, it was the power of the people that prevailed.

Luke’s main purpose in writing this second book was to show how the movement grew.  Like the gospels that were written through a resurrection lens, we look back through the lens of our experience, knowing that the church did grow, and that the church has been a part of the dominant culture, for better or for worse, at many times over the past two millennia.  That has shifted in our lifetimes as well, and we know now that we are in a very new and unprecedented time together.  In all of this, being together empowers us to pay attention, to abandon the indifference in which we’ve attempted to shelter ourselves.  Being together empowers us with the courage to make a difference in our world, not just for ourselves, but for our neighbors now and for generations to come.

So may we learn from our sisters and brothers in faith 2,000 years ago, because as difficult as these next weeks and months and years will be for us, I don’t think it will be as difficult as it was for our early church sisters and brothers.  May we remember them, learn from them, and do our part to build the counter-cultural church in our time.  Amen!

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[1] John Blake, Before Easter became a holy day for Christians, it was the beginning of the Resistance, cnn.com, April 20, 2025

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_imperial_Church