Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: Explosive Beginnings (Acts 1-2)
Date: June 11, 2023
One of the things we so often miss when we go to the Scriptures is the humor. We start reading and even in our heads put on our “Bible reading voice” and make it sound all dry and boring. The truth, though, is that it is anything but boring, and it is often very funny. Our passage last week as we challenged our graduates (and, really, all of us) is a perfect example. You can’t help but to appreciate the humor of Moses’ doing his best to wiggle out from under the thing God was calling him to do (and which He was abundantly clear was going to end successfully if he would just go do it). But one of the passages that has long been the funniest to me comes right at the beginning of Luke’s historical record of the early church we call, “Acts.”
The story picks up right on the heels of where Luke’s Gospel ends. (I’m really not sure why the first four Gospels are ordered like they are, but Luke really should have come last to make the connection between the two works clearer for readers. They obviously didn’t consult me on the decision.) Actually, like most serial TV shows today, Acts begins with a section that might as well be titled, “Previously, in Luke’s Gospel” because the end of the one and the beginning of the other overlap. Jesus has all the guys standing around Him on the Mount of Olives, and He is ready to give them their final marching orders. Just before He does, though, the guys reveal they still don’t understand what His movement is all about. “Lord, are you restoring the kingdom to Israel at this time?” they asked Him. Summoning all of His divine strength to avoid a gigantic facepalm at their being so obtuse, Jesus responds by essentially telling them they are asking the wrong question. Instead, they are to wait in Jerusalem until the Holy Spirit comes, and then bear witness to Him in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. Then, right before their eyes, Luke tells us, Jesus rises up into the heavens and disappears into a cloud.
We can work through all the particulars of this another time, but what has always caught my attention is the fact that when Jesus left, the group all just stood there staring up into the sky after Him. They were utterly dumbfounded. I mean, sure He had just given them some instructions, but they didn’t really understand them. So, they just kept staring up into the sky. They stood like that until a couple angels showed up beside them from out of nowhere to tell them to get moving. In fact, they were so preoccupied with where Jesus was, they hardly reacted to the angels. This is one of the very few times when angels didn’t lead with, “Don’t be afraid.” They didn’t care about the angels, they just wanted to know where Jesus went.
And that, my friends, is how we got our start. There was no grand plan or secret meeting in some dark, smoke-filled room. There were just a bunch of followers of Jesus who were intensely disoriented following His departure sitting around together and wondering: Now what?
It is really pretty hard to get our minds fully around what they had been through over the past few weeks. Jesus’ life and ministry were amazing. Then there was the agony of seeming defeat in the crucifixion. Not a single one of them expected that, and all of them figured that was the end of the ride when it happened. Yet just when they were getting ready to exit to the right, collect their belongings, and head back out into the park, the third day came and explosive news that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Then there were His incredible post-resurrection appearances and teachings about which we don’t really know very much, but which I suspect show up in the letters written by Peter and James and Paul and John. But then Jesus rose back into the heavens leaving the group standing there staring up after Him wondering, “Now what?” Now what indeed. Well, if history is any witness, “now what” is a very good place to be. It is a place ripe with potential for incredible things. In fact, out of the disciples’ wrestling with “now what” came a new movement to advance the kingdom of Jesus, and the world has never been the same.
This morning we are going to launch out on a new journey that will take us through the summer months. We are going to spend the next few weeks looking at exactly what came next for Jesus’ closest followers after He left. We are going to examine their wrestlings with “now what,” and what came of that. We are going to do this for a couple of reasons. First, the way they answered the question has a pretty direct bearing on how we should be answering it. Second, our journey as a church is on the cusp of heading into some new and exciting territory, and I want to be sure we all understand exactly how everything coming at us in the coming months fits within the larger story of what God has always been doing through His church to advance His kingdom into His world. The name of this new teaching series is, “The Story of Us.” We are going to take a fresh look at our story so that a better understanding of who we are can inform where we’re going.
For their part, the answer of these early followers of Jesus to the “now what” question” launched a movement geared at continuing what Jesus had started that has become known as the church. In the 2,000 years since, the efforts of the church in advancing the work the disciples started have transformed the world. And yet, sometimes today it doesn’t seem like we have come all that far. What’s more, everybody knows it whether they are inside the church or have never set foot inside one. Church people still struggle with some of the same issues we always have. In at least this culture traditional churches are a dying breed. For a variety of reasons, some outside of our control, some very much within it, the opinion of the church and church people is very low. Most people know much more about what the church is against than anything it’s for. There are certainly some places where things are rocking and rolling, but on the whole, the church is in a place where it might be wise to take a step back and reevaluate where we are and what we’re doing.
Taking time, however, to do a detailed analysis of what Jesus’ followers were doing then and how we can copy that is not, I think, the way to go. After all, there is not any one right way to do church. There is no one method or approach which is going to be useful in every place and at every time. Therefore, trying to simply copy the methods of our forebears isn’t going to do. Churches who try this usually just wind up making a mess. Still, by all accounts, the church was doing really well then. It was on track with the mission of Jesus and was attracting people like iron shavings to a magnet. They were regularly connecting people to Jesus. While we can’t just copy their methods, we can see if there are any principles we could draw from what they were doing that might reshape how we look at and think about the church. Again, though, a detailed analysis isn’t going to help us go about looking for these. Instead, I want to simply tell you some of the stories of those early days and we’ll see if we can’t uncover some truths in the context of the stories. This collection of stories is all found in the sequel to Luke’s Gospel called Acts. If you have a copy of the Scriptures with you this morning, find your way to Acts 1 and we’ll start there. In this first part of the story, Luke writes about how the church actually got started, and what made it so powerful in the beginning. This is an incredible story. Are you ready?
Like we already said, Luke begins part 2 where he left off in part 1: with the disciples standing around with Jesus receiving His final instructions before He leaves the scene. Picking up just after where we stopped a second ago, we find the group of Jesus followers, numbering 120 men and women, settled back in Jerusalem and praying together. That’s how all the best Gospel stories begin. Their praying led them to the conclusion that they were going to need to address an important order of business. Jesus had originally formed the disciples as a group of twelve for a reason. And yet sitting there, only eleven were left. Judas, in grief over his betrayal of Jesus, had gone out and committed suicide after throwing the money he’d been given for his dirty deed back at the priests in a belated attempt to stop what he had set in motion. The priests, not knowing what to do with the money since it was—ironically—ceremonially unclean decided to use it to purchase the field where all this happened and named it the “Field of Blood.” Luke tells us that everyone in Jerusalem knew about this infamous field. Little details like this, by the way, help confirm our sense that this isn’t all just made up to be a good story, but is actual history. The historical reality for the disciples, though, is that they need to replace him.
It’s Peter who takes the lead on this point. If you think about it, this in itself is pretty remarkable because Peter was a wreck after the crucifixion. With his vigorous denial of Jesus, Peter was about the least likely candidate to be the leader of the group. If anything, John should have taken that role since he actually bothered to show up for the crucifixion and was entrusted with the care of Jesus’ mother. And yet, Peter was still Peter. With what can only be called his resurrection confidence fully on display, Peter looks at the group and says, “Brothers and sisters, it was necessary that the Scripture be fulfilled that the Holy Spirit through the mouth of David foretold about Judas, who became a guide to those who arrested Jesus. For he was one of our number and shared in this ministry. . .For it is written in the Book of Psalms: ‘Let his dwelling become desolate; let no one live in it; and Let someone else take his position.’ Therefore, from among the men who have accompanied us during the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us—beginning from the baptism of John until the day he was taken up from us—from among these, it is necessary that one become a witness with us of his resurrection.”
The group then got together, settled on two possibilities who checked off all the relevant boxes, laid the whole process before the Lord in prayer, and cast lots to decide which man was the right choice. Now the whole casting lots thing here feels kind of weird to us since it seems like they should be, you know, trusting the Holy Spirit and prayer for this kind of a decision. But we need not let ourselves get hung up on it because, 1. casting lots was how people made big decisions like this back then, and 2. the Holy Spirit hadn’t come yet so they couldn’t ask Him. Well, when the lots are cast they point to a man named Matthias who replaces Judas as the twelfth apostle. This, by the way, is an important language change. From this point forward, all followers of Jesus are referred to as disciples. The original eleven plus Matthias are now consistently referred as the apostles, or “the sent ones.” They are no longer simply learners, they are leaders sent by Jesus to accomplish a mission.
For the next few days the group continued to gather together to pray and wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Then it happened. The day happened to fall on the Jewish festival of Pentecost. Pentecost was one of the two major harvest festivals for the Jews. Because of where it happened to fall in the year, travel conditions were such that it was the best attended of any of the Jewish festivals. Tens of thousands of people from all over the region crowded into the already crowded city. It was during this celebratory moment that the full group of Jesus followers was gathered together and suddenly it sounded like a tornado had blown into the room. As the disciples—again, I’m talking about all 120 men and women gathered there—try to make sense of this wind that’s not a wind, suddenly a symbol that looks like a candle flame appears over each of their heads. Then, as if all of that weren’t enough, they all began spontaneously speaking in languages other than the Aramaic native to them. Now, if something like this happened here where we have thick walls with brick exterior and closed doors, short someone pulling out their smart phone and posting a video to Facebook or YouTube, no one would know about it. But, in a house with open windows and thin walls and in a city so packed with people as to make walking around Concord Mills at Christmastime seem like a lonely stroll in the woods, the sound of all these different languages being spoken at the same time and in the same place drew a crowd.
The crowd included people from all over the known world. There were people from Parthia, Media, Elam, and Mesopotamia to the east of the Empire, from the Arabian Peninsula to the south, from Egypt, Libya, and Cyrene along the northern coast of Africa, from Cappadocia, Pontus, Pamphylia, Phrygia, and Asia to the north, from Crete out in the Mediterranean, and even from as far away as Rome. All of them heard the group of disciples not only speaking in a language they understood, but heard them proclaiming the mighty works of God. This kind of an experience went completely beyond what they were equipped to interpret or understand. The more thoughtful members of the crowd marveled while the more juvenile mocked: “They must be drunk!”
It was into this chaos that Peter, whose resurrection confidence was now paired with the limitless power of the Holy Spirit, proclaimed the Gospel publicly for the first time. Like any good preacher he began by making a connection: We’re not drunk. It’s only nine in the morning! Once he had their attention he got a bit more serious. Look at this with me starting in Acts 2:22: “Fellow Israelites, listen to these words: This Jesus of Nazareth was a man attested to you by God with miracles, wonders, and signs that God did among you through him, just as you yourselves know. Though he was delivered up according to God’s determined plan and foreknowledge, you used lawless people to nail him to a cross and kill him. God raised him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by death.” Continuing in v. 32: “God has raised this Jesus; we are all witnesses of this. Therefore, since he has been exalted to the right hand of God and has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit, he has poured out what you both see and hear. For it was not David who ascended into the heavens, but he himself says: ‘The Lord declared to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”’ Therefore, let all the house of Israel know with certainty that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”
With the full power of the Holy Spirit filling Peter’s message the words cut straight to the heart of the crowd who could only respond: “Brothers, what should we do?” In other words: Now what? Peter made it plain: “Repent and be baptized, each of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” And Peter went on like this for a great while, but at the end of the day, some 3,000 people embraced the message and mission of Jesus.
And while this was another powerful moment in a great string of powerful moments, they were still left with yet another “Now what.” So the Jesus movement had exploded into something exponentially larger than its beginnings. How did it happen? What allowed this to take place? What elements are present in churches today that are reproducing the incredible movement and excitement of this initial gathering of Jesus followers? How did their answer to the “now what” give rise to what we have today? What do we as a church do with this story?
Well, somewhat helpfully, Luke includes a little summary at the end of this piece of the story to help clarify what is most important here. From 2:42: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles. Now all the believers were together and held all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple, and broke bread from house to house. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. Every day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”
Now, before we wrap this up, think about that. Every single day there were new people coming to faith in Christ. Every single day there were Gospel connections being made. What would it take for something like that to be true of us? As a church, how can we make sure we are actively seeing Gospel connections happen? What was it that this group of Jesus followers was doing that resulted in so many people connecting to Christ? And, by the way, if you are here and you’re not totally sure what you want to do with the whole Jesus thing or maybe you aren’t totally sold that this is the church where you want to commit your energies, you can check out for the rest of this because I’m going to talk to the regulars for a few minutes. Although if you listen closely, you’re going to get a bit of the picture of the kind of church you’d be taking part in.
I think there were three things that allowed this to happen and it takes all of them. With Peter’s initial sermon as their guide, the Jesus followers powerfully proclaimed the Gospel message: Jesus lived, Jesus died, Jesus rose, you need to believe in Him. The disciples did not merely proclaim Jesus’ words, though, they lived them. They practiced the radical love of Christ. They were radically generous. They each gave what they could and beyond and used the money to meet physical needs around them. Historically speaking we know all of this continued because 300 years later a pagan Emperor complained in a letter that the Christians were better at loving pagans than the pagans themselves were. The first two pieces here, then, are powerful words and loving actions. Powerful words and loving actions are absolutely essential to our seeing the disciples’ answer to the “now what” continue to roll in our churches today. But there is one more necessary piece: an attractive community. They enjoyed the favor of all the people. That third ingredient completes the secret sauce. Gospel connections happen through word, deed, and community.
There are ministry groups out there today whose focus is on powerful words and loving actions. They do a lot of great work in Jesus’ name. But rarely do they see lives changed on a consistent, sustained basis. The reason for this is that they are missing by virtue of not being the church the final critical element: an attractive community. I use both of those words intentionally. The disciples back then could have simply formed a tight-knit community, gone out to proclaim Jesus’ words and perform some loving actions, and came back together to pat themselves on the back for how good they were doing at continuing Jesus’ mission. Indeed, Gospel connections happen through word, deed, and community.
But it’s not just any community that will do. The disciples created an attractive community, a community that everyone wanted to be a part of. It wasn’t a community where people showed up, did their duty, and then went back home to focus on their own thing. It was a community where everyone shared life together. They fellowshipped together, they broke bread together, they served together, they learned together. They all had a place, and to the extent they were capable with the Spirit’s help they filled it. There were expectations of them that were high and there were meaningful repercussions for not meeting these. It was a community where everyone was accepted just as they were regardless of any social distinctions and yet they were never left there. They were all consistently and intentionally called to become fully who God designed them to be. In other words it was a loving community. A community like this draws people in. They can’t resist it. When you pair an attractive community with powerful words and loving actions, life change is a regular occurrence. And this is what the church was designed to be from the beginning: to be a community where Gospel connections are a regular thing. Indeed, Gospel connections happen through word, deed, and community.
So then, what do you do with this when I pray and send you out of here in just a minute? Here’s what you do. I suspect many of you are wrestling with your own “now what.” Indeed, I can only think of a couple of reasons why you wouldn’t be pondering a “now what” from time to time: you either don’t care or you have everything figured out. If the former I can’t help you much, but if the latter I’d like to hear how to solve everything. In any event, as you wrestle with your “now what” as it relates to this church let this principle from the first church guide your thinking: Gospels connections happen through word, deed, and community. Are we proclaiming Jesus’ words powerfully? If not, how can we do it more effectively? Are we practicing the radically loving actions of Jesus consistently? If not, how could we better seek to remain committed to these? Do we have an attractive community? Is our community a place where all people, but particularly unchurched people, love to be? Are we doing everything possible short of sin to create a place where people absolutely know they can connect? Are we investing in their spiritual growth and development? Are we effectively equipping them to make more disciples? How could we do this even better than we already are? This is something we are figuring out together with God’s help through the Holy Spirit. Dream with me a little bit here, friends: what would it be like to say that God was adding to our number daily those who were being saved? What are we willing to do to see that happen? Gospel connections happen through word, deed, and community. Let’s make sure we’re following the first church in pursuing all three.