Sunday, April 8, 2024
/Easter 2
Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 20: 19-31; John 20: 19-31
The Rev. James M. L. Grace
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. AMEN.
Do you ever have one of those days where you wake up, and you know before your feet even hit the floor, that you just do not have much energy for the day ahead? Is that a familiar feeling? The feeling that once you get out of bed, you cannot wait until the day ends and you can place your head back on the pillow again to go to sleep? Some days are like that for us. That is true for the church as well.
In some churches, the Sunday after Easter is kind of like one of those days. It typically has less energy, and often fewer people, than Easter Sunday. It is on a Sunday like today where parishioners might approach me and say “wasn’t Easter Sunday great?” I interpret that statement as a polite way of saying “today is kind of a downer, the sermon isn’t as good as the one on Easter was, the energy in the room doesn’t quite feel the same.” When the mundane of the present fails to match the grandeur of the past, often we tend to look backwards in time. We look back to find a moment when things were really good. Like Easter Sunday last week.
We do this in our families, reminiscing about times when things seemed lighter, easier, maybe even more joyful. We do this as a nation, looking back to decades past, often romanticizing what was great about those decades while minimizing their challenges.
Since looking back to the golden age of anything seems to be wired into the human condition, perhaps it should not surprise us to see evidence of this phenomenon in scripture, which we do in today’s reading from Acts. I would like to reread just a portion of it, in which the author describes the beginning of the Christian movement as “one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. . . . [t]here was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.” Sounds rather good, doesn’t it?
In the Rector’s Book Club today we are talking about the book of Acts, and one of the things I will say is that Acts was written sometime between 90-100 CE, approximately sixty to seventy years after the bodily the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the beginning of what became the Christian movement. That means the author is looking backward some sixty to seventy years in writing these passages of the early church. How well do you recall events from sixty years ago?
Thankfully, we have the epistles in the New Testament, many of which were written much earlier than Acts. A careful study of each epistle reveals more of the story. Even a cursory reading of some of the Apostle Paul’s letters reveal that even in its earliest years, the church was often distracted and fledgling. In contrast to the reading from Acts today, early church communities disagreed over theology, which leaders they should follow, and whether or not they were willing to send the Apostle Paul money again to fund his travels.
Please understand as I share all this with you, my purpose is not at all to discredit, or diminish the book of Acts. And in full candor , if you just look to the next chapter in Acts (chapter 5) we see things fall apart very quickly when two members of this early movement hold on to some of the proceeds from a piece of property they sold, not laying all of their proceeds at the apostle’s feet, but rather putting a portion of into their own wallet. I will not tell you the rest of that story, but it is safe to say this gilded period of church history did not last long.
It is obvious that the early Jesus movement struggled and had growing pains. But that struggle is not the point of this sermon. The point of this sermon is that what is described in Acts for us today is not so much a description of the church’s past, but of its future. I choose to believe that the paragraphs we read from Acts today contain within them as fine a description of heaven as I have ever seen.
That is why looking back wistfully, often to a past we remember, but never really existed, is a waste of time. Because in turning to look back, we miss seeing the heaven that is right in front of us. AMEN.