If we read Acts 2.43–47 I wonder what word is most important after God. This is a short description of the church or perhaps we might say this is a short prescription for the church. It’s full of important words. Here are some potential ones: devoted, teaching, fellowship, bread, prayer, awe, signs, believers, give, home, praising, added.
We might say what’s most important is being devoted, its about being committed, being dedicated, being faithful. Your heart’s got to be in it, your body’s got to turn up.
We might say what’s most important is teaching. The most important thing is the Bible, reading and understanding it. This is the source of our faith, this is where we find truth and wisdom.
We might say what's most important is fellowship, lives being shared, supported, friendships being made and strengthened. We pray for the fellowship found, received and shared in the Holy Spirit.
We might say what’s most important is bread, the bread of Communion, the receiving of the bread broken for us. Jesus is the living bread who feeds our faith and nourishes our hope.
We might say what’s most important is prayer, the most important thing is a people who pray with energy, expectation, and enthusiasm. Nothing happens without prayer, it’s like breathing, we wither without it.
We might say what’s most important is awe, being taken beyond this plane into a higher plane, into an experience of the deep presence of God. We want the Transfiguration, Jesus in glory and us being there. We want to experience a vision of the throne of God like John of Patmos.
We might say what’s most important is signs, miracles, wonders, tangibles acts that point to the existence, the power, the heart of God to save, heal and transform. It's about evidence to a disbelieving world, it’s about the kingdom of God now.
We might say what’s most important is believers, it’s about people with faith, belief, trust, who can declare that Jesus is my Lord and Saviour. What changed the disciples, what changed the church was its faith, a faith worth dying for, a faith that trusted through fire and storm.
We might say what’s most important is the word ‘give’, it’s about sharing what we have received. Its about generosity, its about taking what we have and making sure no one goes without, its about fairness and justice.
We might say what’s most important is ‘home’, that place of living, eating, resting, playing, that place of warmth and safety, where we are surrounded by memories, and people we love.
We might say what’s most important is praising, its about worship and song, its about giving thanks to God for his mercies, its about being ‘lost in wonder, love and praise.’
We might say what’s most important is the word added. It’s about growth, about seeing people saved, lives changed, higher attendance, regular baptisms.
All those words are important, they all tell us something about being church. They are perhaps a checklist, a set of ingredients. In the church of your imagination is there somewhere for each of these words? If this is our checklist, our set of ingredients, I wonder how we are doing in lockdown, are any missing? Are we struggling anywhere? Are we doing better on any? I wonder how we were doing before lockdown? I wonder how we might do after lockdown?
There’s one other word I think might be important, it’s the word ‘together’, it crops up twice: 'All the believers were together' and 'Everyday they continued to meet together.' It's the word that connects — teaching, fellowship, bread, prayer, awe, signs, belief, giving, home, praise, growth is the result of this new community that is together; a community that is a response to the resurrection, a community that is being gathered by the Holy Spirit.
The whole story of the Bible can be summed up in the word together. The story begins with God, humanity and creation together, there is life and joy and friendship, and then they come apart, they become separated, when humanity turns away, we refuse the togetherness. We seek a togetherness without God, a togetherness without creation. We see only competition, power, scarcity and that threatens the possibility of togetherness, it creates the concept of the other as stranger and enemy, rather than friend or neighbour.
The rest of the story is how God acts to bring us back together again with Him and with creation. At the right moment God comes Himself in Jesus, to be with us, to be joined together to our life, our condition, in order to heal, liberate and transform us into those who know what it is to be together with each other, together with creation, together with God. The gospel is God’s togetherness plan, Jesus is God’s togetherness plan. In Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection we are invited by God to be with Him as God comes to be with us:we are adopted into God’s family, we are befriended into the Spirit’s community, we are made citizens of the kingdom, we are given a place in the body of Christ.
What is the church? It is a people who have been grafted into togetherness with God, with one another, with creation. God did not create us for isolation, separation, individualism, nationalism, but created us and creation in a story of gift and grace. At the heart of the story is God’s gift of grace Himself that creates a community of gift and grace, where we see we need one another, that we are given to one another for our shared health and flourishing, where we receive grace, but we don’t hold it tightly, but share it, we pass it on, knowing that it is abundant, that we are together in worship and prayer, in fellowship and mutual support, in faith and growth. This community of resurrected people described in Acts is a vision of a community together not just in worship, but in all of life, economic, domestic, social, cultural. This is what happens when Easter is joined to Pentecost, a community of hope and faith and love is born.
We are at the moment rediscovering what togetherness means. We are not together as we knew it, and we long to be again, but we are together in new ways and I don't mean just on zoom. I don’t want to idolise this current time, we’re too in it to see it properly; though I do think let’s be open to how God might be using this time to reveal, to renew, to resurrect something new or something lost about togetherness.
I am finding myself caught between two moods. The first is a longing to get back to being church like it was now eight weeks ago. The second is a wondering if this is a time to ask the question about what being church is. We are in this place where we are being church but not as we have known it. We are being church through zoom, through the telephone, through social media, through helping with shopping, through a brief conversation at a window or front door. Something has definitely been lost, we are grieving from being able to gather. But in that we are perhaps discovering (or might discover) being church as something more church than it ever has been. The first Sunday we can be back, will it be back to what was before or will it be forward to something new?
For Israel exile was the biggest low point, it was a deep trauma, an open wound, the promise to land, to monarchy, to temple, to people was unravelled as Jerusalem was destroyed and many were carted off to a foreign land. But it was also a renewal of its faith and life that never would have happened otherwise: dry bones lives again; a new covenant is promised, a new understanding of the uniqueness of God, the Creator and Redeemer, a new vision of social justice. For the disciples the cross and the resurrection was loss and gift mingled together, was pain and hope joined anew, it was a renewal of everything they thought they knew from Jesus, into something in which the future now was even bigger than the past.
Is this an opportunity to dream church again, to say in what does the church consist and how do we live that together? At the moment we are having to improvise, but is this all temporary? Or could it be a renewal? Is this time a catalyst to birth a new vision, a new understanding, a new conviction about what matters and what matters to God? Today is an invitation to lift our eyes up, to look around, to start imagining what we might learn in this time that we can carry forward into whatever will be after this. Israel was in Exile for 70 years, I don’t think we have that long (I hope not!), so lets not hang about. The God of Easter, the God of resurrection is into resurrection, into giving new life.
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