Romans 1-4

Romans 1-4

 

We’re covering the book of Romans for the next four weeks.

St. Paul
From the catacombs of Rome
4th century

I’m going to start out with some background that I think is important.

Some of you might know this, so it’ll be a bit of a review.

But I think it’s important to understand the letter.

This’ll be a little hybrid sermon/class thing.

Don’t worry, I’ve done this before!

 

So the letter to the Romans is written by Paul, the apostle,

to the Christian Church in Rome.

Paul did not start the Christian church in Rome.

There are 9 letters from Paul to various churches in the bible.

And Paul had started most of them.

It’s unclear who did start the church in Rome.

Maybe one of the Romans who were in Jerusalem on Pentecost.

Paul had never actually visited Rome before this.

He would be imprisoned in Rome twice, but that was later.

 

Paul would have written this letter while he was in

Corinth, in Greece and it was delivered and read

to the church by Phoebe, a deacon.

 

Romans is the first of Paul’s letters in the bible

coming right after Acts, but it’s not first because it was the first written.

The epistles or letters of Paul are put in order by length,

and Romans is the longest of the letters

of Paul that they had so it’s first.

 

Romans was probably written in the mid 50’s  55-57.

So about 20 years after Jesus was crucified and risen.

Thessalonians are the earliest letters,

and they probably were written in the late 40’s.

 

Paul is writing to the church in Rome for two reasons,

1. because he hopes to use the church in Rome as a jumping off point for his western ministries

 2. And most importantly, to heal a rift which had arisen in the church there.

 

A little context for Paul. Before he was a Christian,

Paul was a Pharisee, a Jewish religious leader,

who was tasked with maintaining a pure faith,

and his main job had become punishing

Jews who had converted to Christianity.

 

Then he had a dramatic visit from the risen Christ,

and he was converted to the Christian way.

His Christian ministry was mostly to gentile pagans

to teach them about Jesus and to start their churches.

 

The church in Rome was made up mostly

of Jews who had been converted to Christianity

and practiced it more as facet of their Jewish faith

than a whole different religion.

They kept the Jewish laws, including circumcision and dietary laws.

 

And there were also pagans

who had converted to this Judeo/Christianity.

In the early church, as we see in other writings,

there was a lot of discussion as to whether

Christians should still keep Jewish laws

and practices, or could they forego them.

Even though he was Jewish, Paul was of the mind they could forego them.

 

The church in Rome was apparently working this

out for a while and were worshipping together

for the first 10 or so years of the church there.

 

But then Emperor Claudius expelled all the

Jews from Rome in about 41.

He saw them as rebels and instigators.

This happens a lot to Jewish people throughout history.

 

After 5 years, Claudius died (or was probably murdered,

Roman emperors rarely died natural deaths)

and the edict ran out and the Jews were allowed to

return to Rome and therefore the church there.

 

But after 5 years, the church had changed a lot.

There was no longer the Jewish influence of the church

the Gentiles had left behind Jewish customs and laws

they weren’t making men get circumcised,

they weren’t following dietary laws,

and they were worshipping Christ with a lot of

Roman and pagan influences.

 

The Jewish people who were the leaders of the church at one time,

and the main influencers of theology and practice

and who had a lot more power in society before they were expelled,

now had the least power.

They had probably lost their customers, if not their businesses,

they may have lost their land, maybe their homes

so they didn’t have much civic power then either.

And the gentile Christians were now more in line

with the dominant Roman culture so it was

easy to marginalize further the returning Jewish Christians.

 

This unsurprisingly  led to conflicts.

The Jewish Christians returned wondering

what happened to the church they left.

They come back claiming that they are the

rightful owners of the church and Christians

must follow Jewish laws and customs.

 

And the gentile members claim that they

are the rightful owners now and everyone

should do it their way to really be Christian.

 

Then people start to dig in their heels

they start judging other people, and calling other people names,

saying that God doesn’t like them

and that they’re the reason everything is going

to heck in a handbasket.

We know how disagreements go.

Human nature hasn’t changed at all.

 

Who better to deal with the Jewish/Gentile

disagreement in churches than Paul

who had one foot in each reality?

 

This is the backdrop that Paul is writing his letter to.

 

Just one aside, I think when we think about

“the Church in Rome” we often think of gold

gilded cathedrals like St. Peters.

But that’s not what we find in the first century.

The church in Rome was in people’s houses    

and Paul was addressing the whole conglomeration

of house churches in Rome

 

In chapter 16, Paul says

Greet Prisca and Aquila, my coworkers in Christ Jesus, 

 who risked their necks for my life,

to whom not only I give thanks but also all the churches of the gentiles.

Greet also the church in their house.

 

Priscilla and Aquila were a Jewish Christian

couple who are mentioned in Romans, 3 times in Acts,

and in First Corinthians and second Timothy.

 

Paul was not writing to a strong, powerful church

(which only started to be strong and powerful after the 3^rd century. )

Paul was writing to a powerless church marginalized people

who were in a sect of a religion that the Romans didn’t like

who were living in fear of the brutal Roman empire.

And their very presence and actions,

merely in the fact that Gentiles and Jews working together,

was suspicious in Roman society.

 

So it’s ironic how the book of Romans has been used.

At best, it’s been used to call people to a strictly spiritual personal salvation.

Which ignores the context it’s written in completely.

 

And, at worst, it’s been used to defend empires, 

ignore the cries of the poor and marginalized,

condemn LGBTQ people, condemn Jews, 

and basically be call for blind obedience to the state.

 

That is not what this letter was, for Paul or the people who heard it

and if you’ve been used to hearing Romans

or Paul this in either of these ways,

I hope you can be open to hearing it in a different way.

 

And if you are just happy, happy to have Romans be a completely spiritual

book about getting into heaven, I hope you’re open to thinking about it a little differently.

 

Onto the letter.

 

Paul’s objective is to bring this young, conflicted church

together on equal ground.

His objective was not to settle the argument

and say who was right and who was wrong,

his objective was to bring them together again into one church.

And he does this in a grand way in the first few chapters.

 

Paul starts every letter with a nice introduction:            

Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus,

called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God . . .

To all God’s beloved in Rome, who are called to be saints:

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I thank God for you.

Then he apologizes for not having ever been there in Rome

in person.

 

And right after the introduction , before we even get out of chapter 1,

he gets into some meaty stuff.

In verse 18,                                                                                                                                              

 

¹⁸ For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and injustice of those who by their injustice suppress the truth . . .

Which is a very confusing sentence, isn’t it?

He starts out talking about a kind of an abstract group who, early on, rejecting God

“They exchanged images of God for  images

resembling a mortal human or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.

 

This is not just some unconnected doctrine for all times that he’s dishing out.

The readers would have recognized the Roman history of pagan worship

that they were all steeped in as residents of the center of the Roman Empire.

 

 

And right here, already in chapter one,

I have to stop, and digress, and take time to address  a passage that’s been so misused

by the Christian church to condemn same-gender relationships.         

 

It reads:

²⁶ For this reason God gave them over to dishonorable passions. Their females exchanged natural intercourse^[e] for unnatural, ²⁷ and in the same way also the males, giving up natural intercourse^[f] with females, were consumed with their passionate desires for one another. Males committed shameless acts with males and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.

 

I have an extensive explanation of Greco-Roman sexuality and

family structure which I will NOT give you right here,

but I can break into without much provocation.

 

But I will give you the short version, which is that what Paul is referring to,

and what was known in the Greco-Roman world, was not consensual,

same-gender relationships like we know them now.

That was not prevalent enough or known enough at the time for him to even comment on .

 

What was prevalent in the pagan world was using sex as part of worship in pagan temples.

Sex as formalized initiation processes for young men, actually teenage boys,

to get into politics or business.

And what was very prevalent was forced, sexual assault on slaves.

Which was overt and also absolutely socially acceptable.

That’s what Paul was commenting on.

 

Jewish men had their own sexual permissiveness that would

not be acceptable to us these days.

But Paul wants to accuse the dominant Pagan, Roman culture

at this moment in the letter, so he uses this example to distinguish

it from Jewish culture.

 

Regardless, what he’s describing is not loving same-gender relationships.

or even consensual, mutually gratifying encounters.

He is describing sex without relationship, without concern for the other person.

Sex for ritualistic purposes.

He’s describing sexual violence.

I think all of us can agree that all of it is unhealthy

and not what God intended for sexuality.

 

And when Christians put all their focus on same-gender

relationships and condemning that as sin,

they seem to forget the condemnation and objectification,

and power disparities and coercion, assault, and sexual violence,

which was truly the point of what Paul was focused on.

 

Here ends the digression.

 

Of course Paul goes onto describe other things:            

injustice, evil, covetousness, malice.

Envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, gossip, 

slanderer, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil,

rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

But those fire and brimstone pastors don’t seem to quote Romans 1

condemning those things in our society do they?

 

Everyone hearing this letter would have recognized this as a description of

Roman paganism, Roman culture, and especially the Roman ruling class

the emperor and their families.

 

Paul tells the gentile Romans that with that kind of background,

they have no place to judge people

Chapter 2

“¹ Therefore you are without excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others,

for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge,

are doing the very same things.”

 

The Jewish Christians must have been feeling pretty good right now,

hearing up to this part of the letter thinking that Paul was on their side.
But Paul goes into them pretty quickly, right at the start of chapter 2

 

He basically tells them, “You Jewish people know the law, but you ignore it.”  

 

you, then, who teach others, will you not teach yourself? You who preach against stealing, do you steal? ²² You who forbid adultery, do you commit adultery? You who abhor idols, do you rob temples? ²³ You who boast in the law, do you dishonor God by your transgression of the law?

 

(Temple robbers are not actually stealing things from temples, but those who profit off of temple worship, like making and selling pagan idols. )

 

He recalls the story of the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament,

which showed that Israel was just as

sinful, idolatrous, and morally broken as the rest of humanity.

 

Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law, but if you are a transgressor of the law your circumcision has become uncircumcision

 

Paul says that In fact, Israel could be more guilty than the Gentiles because they have the law of God and should know better.

 

So everyone is guilty. No one is worthy.

All good Lutherans should be able to see where this is going.

  

That’s when we get to the famous quote in chapter 3

 

For there is no distinction, ²³ since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; ²⁴ they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, ²⁵ whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement^[f] by his blood, effective through faith. 

 

I must say I was bogged down this week reading the dense,

first two chapters and trying to decipher what Paul meant,

and reading this line from chapter 3 is like

a breath of fresh air of clarity.

 

I’m so familiar with it I know it by heart.

And when I first heard the Lutheran interpretation of it

of Article 4 in my Lutheran confessions class

it inspired me to become a pastor.

It’s like a comfortable chair.

 

It was the inspiration for Luther’s criticism of the Roman Catholic church

and the scripture that propelled the Lutheran Reformation.

 

“No one can earn the glory of God,

but we receive it as a gift through Jesus Christ.”

 

This has, since Luther’s time, been understood to mean salvation.

Just eternal salvation. Just entry into heaven.

You can’t earn it, Jesus cross gives it too us.

Which is grace and it has brought many people to faith in Jesus.

 

And Luther used it to talk about dying and getting into heaven,

because the Roman Catholic church, which Luther was speaking out against,

was always talking about getting into heaven.

They used heaven and hell and purgatory as a threat,

and Luther took that threat away. Good job Luther.

 

Unfortunately though, I think, Lutherans haven’t taken this much

further than that. It remains an individualistic sort of

legal transaction between each person and God.

And I think when we stop there, we miss a lot of what Paul really meant in his letter.

 

The Biblical Scholar NT Wright said that

this Paul’s intent in Romans, and specifically Romans chapter 3,

was not just about individual salvation, but it was about belonging.

It was about inclusion in God’s story and God’s family and about diversity in it.

Which would make more sense in the context of the conflict this letter was addressing.

 

NT Wright says:

Justification by faith is the "badge" or marker that an individual belongs to the community of the Messiah. Anyone who believes has their sins forgiven and is welcomed into the same covenant

 

Because inclusion is based solely on faith in the Messiah, Jewish and Gentile believers are on equal footing. Justification creates a single, multi-ethnic family, proving that Gentiles do not need to follow the Torah to be part of God's people.

 

A community whose membership that’s not based on race, or birthright.

Where everyone is equal, Jew and Greek.

That’s Paul’s vision for the church in Rome

 

And this meaning of belonging is obvious,

if you actually march on to Chapter 4 and don’t stop with Chapter 3

like most Lutherans do usually.

 

Paul talks about Abraham and his covenant with God which we heard earlier.

Abraham, the father of all Judaism, wasn’t able to have children, but God promised him

that he would be the father of many nations

and that his descendants would number

more than the stars in the sky.

 

For if Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about, but not before God. ³ For what does the scripture say? “Abraham believed^[b] God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.” ⁴ Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due. ⁵ But to one who does not work but trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness. 

 

That’s a lot of words to say,

that this promise wasn’t given to Abraham because he followed the law

or did the right things –actually this promise came before the laws were written and

before circumcision was even commanded –

This promise was given to him and received by faith.

 

He believed in God’s promise and it was given.

Faith created the family of God, and faith creates the new family of God,

both Jew and Gentile, around the death and resurrection

of Jesus Christ and God’s promises.

 

Paul was not talking about just dying and going to heaven.       

In this letter, Paul was talking God creating a new community,

and about belonging to a new family in Christ.

 

A community that’s not based on religion, or race, or ethnic heritage,

or birthright, or social status, or gender, or income, or sexual identity.

That’s the vision.

The kingdom of God on earth.

 

This message, that Paul and the believers

were spreading and acting out was radical at the time.

It was disruptive to everything that Roman society was built on.

The gospel of Jesus, actually lived out in the world was revolutionary.

And it still can be today.

 

 

Next week we’ll look at chapters 5-8

The Trinity of Community

 Matthew 28:16-20 Trinity Sunday May 31, 2026

When God created the universe,

God didn’t intend for any of it to be alone.

The water, the land, the stars, the trees,

the animals, the sea creatures, and finally the people.

God created us to be together

and to work together.

The people need the plants and the animals,

the animals need the people and the plants,

the plants need the people and the animals,

we all need the air and the water.

 

You can call it an ecosystem, or natural dependence.

Or we can even call it community.

Interwoven lives and existence.

 

This is Trinity Sunday.

this is the day we celebrate the God who is three and yet one.

Separate and co-equal and eternal in majesty

 

Lots of sermons on Trinity Sunday are spent

with pastors and others trying to explain the Trinity

using apples, or ice and water, ice cream, clovers, or triangles,

and using sleep-inducing words like ”modalism” or  “Partialism”

 

But we should always remember and celebrate

what is underlying the doctrine of the Trinity,

which is that relationship is at the heart of God’s being.

Interwoven codependence was present in creation of the universe,

and even before that, it’s at the very heart of God.

God is a Trinity. God is three and God is one, together.

God does not ever work alone.

God is, in God’s self, a community.

  

The word community is one of those

words that can have a couple of meanings

The differences are subtle, but they’re different.

 

When we hear community,

we might think of neighborhoods or cities,

people in schools, or churches.

They use the word a lot in the news I’ve noticed.

They call a place a community just because

there are people who spend a lot of time in the same place.

And the dictionary does say that community is

a group of people living in the same area,

or having the same interests.

 

But it’s more than that, isn’t it?

Just because something is called a community

doesn’t mean that it’s a Community.

Just like Home with a Capital H.

We’re talking about Community with a capital C.

 

Community with a capital C brings along

images of more than just people who live

on the same street or share an interest.

It brings images of people who support,

and of love one another.

Who treat each other as equals.

It talks of shared respect, shared work,

being mutually accountable to one another

and helping each other.

Having love for one another that includes others.

People who are not all related to one another

that treat each other like family.

  

There is a lot of talk about Community these days.

Mostly , I think, people are talking about it so much

because we feel that it’s slipping away

 

Over time, Community with a capital C has become scarce.

We don’t easily form Communities here in the US

we don’t rely on them, we don’t seem to need it.

So for many people, Communities don’t even exist.

 

Lots of things have taken away our Communities

There’s technology which is giving us wider spread communities

but without human contact or responsibility.

We’re also more self-sufficient than we have been in the past –

when we’re more financially secure,

we don’t have to rely on others.

We can buy what we need ourselves.

 

And I think we spend a lot of our lives now

living in protection mode, there is a level of

paranoia that we seem to be living with,

and so we spend a lot of energy protecting what we have:

our families, our time, our privacy, our feelings, our things,

and with the need to protect everything so much,

it’s hard  to let other people into our lives.

In some ways it’s easier not to be part of a Community of any kind.

To just be responsible for yourself and your business.

It’s just simpler to be alone with family, a few friends.

 

But as much as people are avoiding Communities

with a Capital C, so many people long for it and wish they it.

Older people reminisce about it.

Younger people read about it and ask about it.

They see it in movies and on TV,

and they want to belong it.

People long for Community with a capital C.

 

That’s because God created everything to be in Community.

In everything we see and experience we know it.

It’s like a magnet, we are drawn back to it.

We are drawn back to the community at the heart of God.

 

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that

God is three in one.

All equally important parts who work together

Not just a couple but three.

A table for three, where more can always join.

It tells us that the nature of God is Community

 – with a capital C.

 

To be part of a Community is our natural state,

to be in relationships that stretch beyond family and

selected few friends - is in our DNA, it’s part of us.

 

The world would love us to live for ourselves,

and just our small family units

because we’re more manageable that way.

The market would love for us to surround

ourselves with things instead of people.

The devil would love us to be in separate silos

to not trust or rely on anyone else.

But Community is part of God,

and therefore Community is part of us.

 

In the Gospel reading for today,

we hear Jesus’ last words in Matthew.

On Easter morning, Jesus told the women

to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee.

The disciples find him there on a mountain and he gives them

these instructions, “make disciples of all nations.”

 
 

Now some have taken this command

that to mean that we should convert every person

to our culture and our religion – by force if necessary.

And sometimes it’s hard to look at this scripture any other way.

But that’s just another example of how humans

have taken Jesus words and made them into

a threat instead of a work of love.

 

Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations,

baptizing them in the name of that sacred Community,

the Trinity”. Gather people that are different than you,

people that you don’t know, people of all different colors

that speak different languages, people who have different

cultures and lifestyles, gather a diverse group of people,

and make yourself a Community.

 

Gather around the worship of Jesus.

Learn to love one another and care for one another.

Become sisters and brothers with one another.

Individual parts, but one body.

Co-dependent and Co-equal in majesty.

Go and make Community in my name:

Father Son and Holy Spirit

Creator, redeemer, and sustainer

God eternal, God in flesh, God in inspiration.

God in us, God for us, God through us.

However you want to say it,

 

We were created by a God that works in relationship.

We worship a God that works in relationship.

An equal relationship.

Sharing the pain, the glory the sorrow, and the joy equally.

The work of any one rests on the other two.

Any one would be less without the other.

God the Trinity.

 

And the Community in the Trinity,

that is the Community we imitate.

That is what churches are:

Not hothouses to grow theologians in,

not a place where people send their children

to so that they can learn morals.

Not a place of facts, but a place of celebration.

 

A place where we all go to learn how to live together

using the teachings of Jesus.

A place of Community, with a capital C,

imitating the God that we worship.

 

And Jesus said where two or three are gathered in my name --

Where there is an effort to form this love

across bloodlines, beyond family,

across cultures and languages, across our differences,

 

Then we will know that God

– the community in one –

will be there with us always till the end of the age.

Pentecost: Where is My Tongue of Fire?

 Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost

May 24, 2026

 

Pentecost is a Greek word and it means 50^th.

Because it’s the 50^th day after Easter.

I counted, it’s true, but you have to

count Easter as day one got get there.

 

But the name actually comes from another Jewish

festival called Shavuot, which Greek Jews would call Pentecost.

Shavuot is the festival of the weeks,

because they count seven weeks after Passover

7 weeks times seven days is 49 which is close

enough for religious math.

 

Shavuot is a Spring harvest festival.
But it’s also celebrated as the day

that God gave the Torah – the first five books,

the most holy of the books - to the people.

And a tradition is that devout Jewish people have an overnight vigil,

reading the Torah –or for some reason, the book of Ruth

which is not in the Torah – out loud on Shavuot or Pentecost.

 

So this is what people were doing on that day.

That’s why all those Jewish people who spoke

different languages were gathered together in Jerusalem.

And that’s why all those people knew that

they could not previously understand the disciples.

 

All this is encapsulated in the line,

“when the day of Pentecost had come” in Acts 2

Because all Luke’s original readers would have gotten all that.

 

And right in the middle of that gathering together for the

overnight reading for the festival of Shavuot (or Pentecost in Greek),

a violent wind comes over the 12 disciples

(they had replaced Judas with Matthias in chapter 1 of Acts)

and a flame lands over each of the disciples heads,

that makes all of the people there gather around the disciples

and these 12 disciples from the Hicksville town of Galilee

are suddenly able to read the Torah-- or the book of Ruth --

in languages that all those Jewish people

from different countries could understand.

 

Which causes the people around them to ask

if the disciples are drunk because that seems like a reasonable

explanation for the phenomenon even though

it was all the other people who would have been

feeling the effects and experiencing the hallucinations.

 

And having all their attention, Peter takes this opportunity

- to tell the crowds that no one is drunk cause it’s too early

(suggesting they might have been drunk later)

- and to quote the prophet Joel and the Psalms –

neither one of which is not in the Torah –

- And to tell them about Jesus of Nazareth a man

from the same backwoods town in Galilee

- and that Jesus is the Messiah that King David

foretold and that they had all been waiting for

 

And at this, the people who are listening

are “cut to the heart” and they want to know

what they can do and Peter tells them

that they should repent and be baptized

and join the way of life and justice

and community that Jesus had shown them.

 

And it said that 3000 people had joined the

apostles in teaching and fellowship that day,

and this action-packed chapter 2 of Acts ends:

 

“All who believed were together and had all things in common; 

 they would sell their possessions and

goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.

Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple,

they broke bread at home and

ate their food with glad and generous hearts,

 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.

And day by day the Lord added to their number

those who were being saved.”

 

This wild and willy story of Pentecost

is what most people call the birthday of the church.

And it’s true.

It’s the moment that the disciples stopped just listening to Jesus

and started telling other people about him.

It’s the moment that they started to

build a community around Jesus and his ways.

 

It’s the birthday of the church,

this church and all churches.

 

Honestly, very little of what we see here

in this story is visible in the church these days,

And this hasn’t been visible in the church at almost any time during

its more than 2000 year history.

I mean we have some of the bare bones:

the reading of scripture,  

the praying we still talk about Jesus in a gathering.

 

But what about the wind, the flame and the languages?

 

I mean, we light candles in church.

I’ve set the baptismal font on fire in one church,

(it all worked out).

And I’ve been to churches where people

were speaking in tongues,

Church revivals were big in the early 20^th century,

with thousands of people attending.

Some churches have smoke machines.

I was part of a church with no air conditioning

and we’d run an industrial fan,

so we did have a rush of a violent wind.

But none of that is the same at all is it?

 

And this story in Acts paints a picture of

diversity in our worship. Of people

of many cultures gathering to work

tougher in God’s name.

 

But that’s not been the truth of churches has it?

Martin Luther King called 11am on Sunday morning

the most segregated hour in America.

And that still stands 60 years later.

We have black churches

and we have white churches

And in the ELCA, we have 

Scandinavian churches and German churches

on the same square mile that still can’t figure out

how to talk to one another or work together.

 

Some churches are able to establish a

diversity of cultures, but those are the exception.

 

And then there’s the behavior of the community.

Distributing proceeds and having the

good will of all people as a priority.

 

And many churches like ours have made a good go at the

distributing goods to any who has needs.

But we’re the exception for the most part,

and I think even we could more of that.

 

But the community sharing all things in common,

and selling everything they have for the community

THAT is not very common in churches at all.

And there are very few examples in history

where this community sharing has gone well,

where it wasn’t a cult with someone

taking advantage of other people.

And I don’t think I could do it now, but I really long for a place

where that kind of trust and sharing could happen.

 

So where did all this stuff in Acts 2 go?

 

I love this story in Acts of the birthday of the church,

but I also can’t help feeling let down by it.

Did we grow away from this? Did we change?

I feel kind of embarrassed and sad.

Did we let Peter and the rest of the disciples down?

Have we let Jesus down?

Have we lost the church they created on that first day?

Have we failed?

 

I don’t think so, the truth is, the rest of the

story of Acts tells us they actually lost it early on.

  

For example that bit about sharing all things in common.

Right away in Acts 5, it goes off the rails.

A couple defies that community covenant and

keeps the proceeds of a land sale for themselves

and when confronted about it, they literally drop dead.

And “great fear seized the whole church.”

And that’s the end of it. No more talk about

sharing things in common.

 

Then the persecution starts and their community

breaks apart and moves away from Jerusalem.

Then Paul converts and joins them and becomes a leader

and he and Peter don’t see eye to eye on most things,

even though they’re both Jews and speak the same language.

 

And in Acts 15, Paul and his traveling companion Mark

have an intense disagreement and they part ways.

 

And all of Paul’s letters, it’s apparent the churches

he started have serious trouble with diversity,

and with sharing, and with remaining faithful

to the way of Jesus.

 

Even before the end of Acts, this church that

was born on Pentecost with wind and fire,

is a fractured church that doesn’t ever seem to

live up to it’s birthright and wonderful beginning.

 

And yet God’s Spirit is still with them,

every step of the way,

adjusting  to their stupidity and stubbornness

and other people’s stupidity and stubbornness,

and pushing them to the next challenge

and opportunity to make Christ known.

We didn’t fail. We haven’t failed.

We’re still doing it. The Church is a work in progress.

 

This birthday story in Acts 2 is a vision for what the church can be.

What a community in Jesus can be. It’s a vision.

Like Jesus first sermon in the synagogue,

Like the Beatitudes and the sermon on the mount,

like the feeding of the 5000 is.

 

We are given a vision of a community

that is devoted to teaching, fellowship,

and the breaking of bread,

that gathers all people, that loves and

celebrates all cultures, that feeds

and cares for all those in need,

that shares what it has without fear

of corruption or greed.

 

It’s not something that was handed to us

fully formed and then we lost it somewhere.

It’s something that we constantly work for, strive for,

it’s something that we set our sights on,

that guides our mission and actions and behavior,

 

It’s something we figure out and then reality interrupts

and our shortcomings get in the way,

and all the gory and practical, and seemingly

non-spiritual details happen in real time,

with real blood, and real broken hearts

and real broken relationships.’

 

And yet God’s Spirit is still with us

every step of the way, adjusting

to our stupidity and stubbornness

and pushing us to the next challenge

and opportunity to make Christ known.

 

Our work is not in vain.

We’re not a failure.

One day we’ll get there.

 

The spirit works more gently now than it did in Acts 2.

No rushing winds or tongues of fire.

 

But still with burning hearts and

visions and dreams

of a better church

and a better world.