Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's May 29, 2005 Sunday worship service.

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An ethics professor has an interesting exercise that he uses to open one of his classes. He reads aloud a letter from a parent to a government official. The parent complains that his son, who had received the best education, gone to all the right schools, and was headed for a good job as a lawyer, had gotten involved with a weird religious sect. Now members of this sect controlled his every move, told him whom to date and not to date, and had taken all of his money. The parent is pleading with the government official to do something about his weird religious group.

“Who is this letter describing?” the professor asks his class. Some think it is describing the Moonies or the Hare Krishnas, or maybe the Wiccans or maybe David Koresch’s Branch Davidians, or some other such group some might label a cult.

No. These modern day do-called cults are not the right answer. Correct answer: the letter is a composite letter drawn from the actual letters of third century Roman parents who are complaining about the involvement of their sons and daughters in a new religious group called the Church.

Funny, isn’t it, whether some religious group is really weird or abnormal is often in the eye of the beholder.

In all honesty, we should probably feel like these bewildered Roman parents when we read this mind-boggling description of the early church at the end of Acts 2: No one told us when we signed up that Christianity meant selling one’s possessions and giving the proceeds to those in need, did they? Who said being a follower of Christ meant you were to gather in homes in praise and prayer with other believers on a daily basis? The gospel of the early church, indeed, can sound quite strange to American ears with our frenetic schedules and wide-ranging interests.

We might have never thought about it much before, but the Jesus movement, especially in its earliest stages, generated some very real and clear boundaries between who was in and who was out. A very high level of commitment was required. The old way of synagogue practices was no longer adequate; there was a rejection of the social and economic values of the Roman majority. This text from Acts reflects the exuberant mood of a new movement pulsating with the life of the Spirit, but a new movement no less strange in its power to lead its followers into a completely new way of life.

This passage at the end of Acts 2 comes at the conclusion of Peter’s inaugural sermon on the day of Pentecost. It is clearly an idealized portrait meant to put the fledgling church on the best terms possible, typical of the way primordial beginnings are often sketched. In retrospect, we tend to look at the beginning of a movement, a group, or even a nation in romantic, highly idealized terms, and this description of the earliest church is no exception.

This is what Luke, the writer of the Book of Acts, does here as he looks back on the beginning of the church perhaps a half-century or so after it began. We are shown a community of believers solid in their commitment to the apostolic faith that brought them into existence, but equally solid in their commitment to one another in their common life. It bears all the earmarks of a vital religious community.

There are at least six traits that characterize this new community.

One, they are absorbed in religious teachings. They learn and grow together as they bridge Jewish heritage with the new teachings of Jesus. There is a red-hot intensity of commitment. There would seem to be little that could distract them from this almost addictive experience of being part of this new Jesus movement.

Second, they share in regular fellowship in both social and religious settings – meeting daily and enjoying fellowship in the context of the sacred meal. A spirit of oneness and singleness of purpose pervaded these gatherings. Whatever divisions there might have been seem to have evaporated in the overwhelming love and kindness of the common, group experience of worship and fellowship.

Third, they continued steadfastly in prayer. The text doesn’t exactly say that, but we know it was a common practice to enter into prayers of thanksgiving whenever the common meal was shared. Indeed, we know from other passages in Acts and in the early letters describing the spiritual practices of the first Jewish-Christians, that prayer was both fundamental and indispensable for their life together.

Fourth, what to our capitalist ears is the most radical practice of all, they held all things in common, that is, the goods and possessions of individuals were sold and the proceeds given to those in need, which was an early form of biblical communism.

Fifth, there is a profound sense of awe and wonder before God, at all the amazing things God is doing among them. It would seem that the first Pentecost with its tongues of fire, mighty wind, and multi-lingual exchanges had set a pervasive tone of wonder and amazement about the whole of religious experience.

Sixth, they grew and flourished. Originally, on that day of Pentecost, it was reported that 3000 joined the new Christian movement, and at the end of Acts 2, the numbers are increasing daily as testimony to God’s power and the power of the word to convict and transform and offer the chance for a new beginning.

To me, this passage from the end of Acts 2 is church history at its finest. Luke, our most famous New Testament historian, takes what had to be one of the first century church’s earliest memories and holds it up as exhibit A in why the church will continue to be successful. When he writes the book of Acts fifty years or so after the events he describes, he wants his readers to know just what it is they should be shooting for in their life together.

Now we, of course, 2000 years removed from Luke’s bit of idealized history, know that churches at every level – local congregations, denominations, and the church universal – are more fractured than this portrait allows. We also hardly practice a belief that a radical communal sharing of all our possessions is the only, or even the best, form of responsible sharing and discipleship. We believe there are other forms of discipleship such as alms-giving and showing hospitality that are equally valid ways of being a follower of Christ and helping others. We also know that fidelity to the gospel may not necessarily produce numerical growth. For whatever reason, churches may teach, pray, worship, and share and still not grow numerically. That is, perhaps, the cruelest lesson of all.

So, we have to be careful about beating ourselves too much when it comes to questioning whether we have failed in our own day to live out this early vision in the Book of Acts of what the church can do and can be.

What the text doesn’t say explicitly, but what I believe is perhaps the key to incarnating the model of Christ in the church’s communal life, is something that must have been implicit, or else the Christian community of Acts or even the church of today could hardly ever hope to survive its pride and self-delusions.

Did all of these things – the commitment to absorbing religious teachings, to fervent prayer, the unity of fellowship, the shared meals, sharing of goods and possessions, the increasing numbers – did all of that produce a genuine sense of community or “Koinoinia” as it is called in the Greek New Testament? In the midst of all they were doing, were they vulnerable to one another, willing to be wounded, willing to suffer for the sake of others within the koinonia, the fellowship of the church?

The Christian psychologist and popular author Scott Peck writes that “Jesus taught us that the way to salvation lies through vulnerability. When Jesus was alive he walked vulnerably among Romans and tax collectors, among outcasts and foreigners, Canannites and Samaritans, among the diseased, the demoniacs and lepers and infectious. And when the time came that he should die, he vulnerably submitted himself to the killing wounds of the entrenched Establishment of his day” (A Different Drum, 227).

To be in community is to risk being vulnerable – to one another and even to others we don’t know who come among us.

We live in a diverse, cosmopolitian, multilingual, multiracial, multireligious fragmented, eclectic society, riddled by extremes of all kinds, and a society more than a little bit violent and self-possessed. We can easily feel dislocated and off-center, alone and afraid in a world we never made.

I can’t imagine that it was really all that different for the first Christians as participants in the Roman empire, a time when the solidarity of the empire was giving way and new social configurations were in the making and everyone worried about moral degradation. In other words, it was a time a lot like our own times.

And into those times, then and now, God calls people into the vulnerability and commitment of a community. To worship, to study, to pray, to break bread, to tell stories, to be in fellowship. When you are called to be God’s community, who knows what might happen next?

There is an old story called the Rabbi’s Gift. The story concerns a monastery that had fallen on hard times. Only an abbot and four monks, all over 70 years of age, were left. The order was in imminent danger of death. In the woods surrounding the monastery, there was a hut that a rabbi from a nearby town occasionally used for a hermitage. One day, learning that the rabbi was in the hut, the abbot decided to pay him a visit and ask for his advice about his dying order.

The Abbot explained the problem. “I know how it its,” the Rabbi exclaimed. “The spirit has gone out of the people. It is the same in my town. Almost no one comes to synagogue anymore.” So the two of them spoke of deep spiritual matters and wept together. As the Abbot started to leave, he asked, “is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give me that would help me save my dying order?”

“No, I am sorry,” the rabbi responded. “The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”

When the Abbot returned to the monastery, the other monks wanted to know what advice the rabbi had given. “The only thing he said, just as I was leaving, was that the Messiah is one of us. I don’t know what he meant.”

In the days and weeks that followed, the old monks wondered whether there was any possible significance to the rabbi’s words. The Messiah is one of us? Do you suppose he meant the Abbot. Yes, he probably meant this one who has led us all these years. On the other hand, he might have meant Brother Thomas. He is a holy man, a man of light. Of course, he could not have meant brother Eldred. He gets irritable at times. But come to think of it, even though he is a thorn in people’s sides, when you look back on it, he is usually right. Maybe the Rabbi did mean brother Eldred. But surely not Brother Phillip. He is so passive, a real nobody. But somehow, mysteriously, he always has a gift of being there when you need him. Maybe Phillip is the Messiah. Of course, the Rabbi didn’t mean me. I’m just an ordinary person.

As they contemplated in this manner, the old monks began to treat each other with extraordinary respect, just on the off chance that one among them might be the Messiah. And on the off, off chance that each monk himself might be the Messiah, they began to treat themselves with extraordinary respect as well.

Because the location of the monastery was beautiful, people still occasionally came to visit to picnic on the lawn, to wander along its paths, even now and then to go into the dilapidated chapel to mediate and pray. Without even being fully conscious of it, these people sensed this aura of respect that now began to surround the five old monks and seemed to radiate out from them and permeate the atmosphere of the place. There was something strangely attractive, even compelling about the place. Hardly knowing why, people began to come back to the monastery more frequently to picnic, to play, to pray. And they began to bring their friends. And their friends brought friends.

Then it happened that some of the younger men who came to visit started to talk more and more with the old monks. After a while, one asked if he could join. Then another. And another. And thanks to the Rabbi’s gift, the monastery became a thriving order again, a vibrant center of light and spirituality in the kingdom. (A Different Drum, introduction)

Could the Messiah be one of us?