Acts 2:43-47 (NRSV)
Life among the Believers
43 Everyone was filled with awe, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.
44 All who believed were together and had all things in common;
45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
46 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,
47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.
And day by day the Lord added to their number
Ephesians 4:1-6 (NRSV)
Unity in the Body of Christ
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called,
2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,
3 making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,
5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
6 one God and Father of all,
who is above all and through all and in all.
Life among the Believers
43 Everyone was filled with awe, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.
44 All who believed were together and had all things in common;
45 they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.
46 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,
47 praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.
And day by day the Lord added to their number
Ephesians 4:1-6 (NRSV)
Unity in the Body of Christ
I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called,
2 with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love,
3 making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,
5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
6 one God and Father of all,
who is above all and through all and in all.
Reflection
World Communion Sunday celebrates the church near and far and seeks to help us understand what unties us as followers of Christ.
You know there are lots of different kinds of churches in the world; different buildings, different liturgies, even different beliefs on how to join the church. Yet, we are all followers of Christ, we are all children of God, we are all filled with the Holy Spirit.
My story includes several of those churches. My grandmother who brought me up was a Roman Catholic, who married into the Church of England, one of those high Anglican churches which never fully embraced the term Anglican and never gave up the incense.
So I was baptized into the Holy Catholic meaning universal church in that church and attended on a few Easter Sundays. In my teens I attended the Salvation Army, a Pentecostal house church, a Baptist church, a United church and the Anglican church. Later, I also attended Roman Catholic services because I had Catholic friends. Still later I had opportunities to attend the evangelical church and a spiritualist church. In my mid-twenties I felt most comfortable in the United Church and I never looked back.
All this to say; I found good people in all these places, and I have a healthy respect, indeed love, for the many different ways we have to worship and find spirit-filled connection. World Communion Sunday is all about connection.
In the earliest community in Jerusalem, Jews, the first followers of Jesus, gathered “at the temple and broke bread in their homes”. We might dismiss this as not being very strange, after all, lots of Jews gathered around their rabbis at the temple and then went home to eat. But in our scripture from Acts this morning we are told that this was different because these Jews; “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.”
So when we say “they broke bread at home” we understand no one went hungry, everyone had a home to return to, no one was left out- this community included everyone.!”
Maybe you still aren’t impressed. Acts 2:41-42, so just before our scripture passage today, reads: “ Many of them believed Peter’s message and were baptized, and about three thousand people were added to the group that day. They spent their time in learning from the apostles, taking part in the fellowship, and sharing in the fellowship meals and the prayers.”
They shared their table, they shared their meals, over three thousand people from a group that started out with just the apostles, some unidentified women, Mary, the mother of Jesus and Jesus’ brothers and about 120 followers (Acts 1:14-15).
The group included Pharisees and tax collectors, men and women, rich and poor – people who ordinarily avoided contact - were eating together, praying together, talking together. They cared about and for each other; not in some abstract way, not at arm’s length through the agency of the temple, they really cared about each other.
They got to know each other as people brought together by their common belief that being followers of Jesus and following The Way brought them closer to God. I’m impressed!
I’m even more impressed that Peter, the one who denied Jesus, the one who ran away, is now in the forefront, bringing people to Christ with his faith. Peter, who later with Paul, is one of the disciples who opens the way for Gentiles to be fully accepted into the assembly of Christ without the need to convert to Judaism through circumcision. Acts 15 describes what is called the Council at Jerusalem:
5 Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.”
6 The apostles and elders met to consider this question. 7 After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. 8 God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. 9 He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. 10 Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? 11 No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
We live in a time when the whole world seems to be splintering into smaller and groups based on politics, religion, sexuality and gender identification, ethnicity, culture, skin colour, vaccinated or not, what you eat or don’t eat, and I guess, whatever else people use to identify themselves as a group to which some people belong and others don’t.
We aren’t so different from the people in those New Testament times, we want to know who belongs and who doesn’t. Peter and Paul both remind us that it is not up to us to say who belongs. it is God who brings us together. It is through God’s grace that we are united together as a family, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul, in the passage from Ephesians (4:4-6), reminds us:
4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,
5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
6 one God and Father of all,
who is above all and through all and in all.
The use of Father in these verses is really important because both Paul and Peter want to include Gentiles in the community of Christ. Remembering that Judaism is a bloodline, hence, the importance of the linage of Jesus in Matthew, we see Peter and Paul working through how the Gentiles are included in the history and future of Israel through the bloodline of Jesus.
They do this in different ways, Paul in Hebrews by grafting the followers of Christ onto the tree of Israel and Peter in 1st Peter by placing the Gentiles along side of the Jews. The idea for both is that the Jews are not being displaced or replaced as God’s people, and yet God’s people is being enlarged to wholly and fully encompass Gentiles or pagans who through baptism, and their profession of faith, are brought into the body, into the family of God.
Peter’s plea at the Council in Jerusalem has such important ramifications. There are no second class members in the church, just as Paul tells the Galatians (3:28) “ There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Imagine the power of that verse in the first century:
imagine what dignity a slave is given, imagine the respect the voice of a woman is given, imagine the recognition of the worthiness of a pagan at these early worship and fellowship gatherings. That is good news to the slave, women and the pagans!
And now imagine the Jew previously holding themselves apart and in high regard from the Gentiles, Samaritans, women and the poor, those who had diseases, tax collectors, garbage collectors, butchers, imagine these pious and or rich folks acknowledging the Spirit at work in those they previously avoided. That is Good News to the Spirit filled follower of Christ.
And all of it is good news for us! The world wide church is one, there is no right church and wrong church, there is no correct church and incorrect church, there is not only one way to worship. We are all brought together by the word and life of Jesus the Christ, we are all embraced by a loving and gracious God, we are all a Spirit filled people.
In this place we are all equal, we all come bringing with us our broken hearts wanting to be healed, we all come bringing our stories and gifts wanting to be heard, we all come hearing the call of Jesus who says “Come and follow me” and responding with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.
May it be so.
Amen
World Communion Sunday celebrates the church near and far and seeks to help us understand what unties us as followers of Christ.
You know there are lots of different kinds of churches in the world; different buildings, different liturgies, even different beliefs on how to join the church. Yet, we are all followers of Christ, we are all children of God, we are all filled with the Holy Spirit.
My story includes several of those churches. My grandmother who brought me up was a Roman Catholic, who married into the Church of England, one of those high Anglican churches which never fully embraced the term Anglican and never gave up the incense.
So I was baptized into the Holy Catholic meaning universal church in that church and attended on a few Easter Sundays. In my teens I attended the Salvation Army, a Pentecostal house church, a Baptist church, a United church and the Anglican church. Later, I also attended Roman Catholic services because I had Catholic friends. Still later I had opportunities to attend the evangelical church and a spiritualist church. In my mid-twenties I felt most comfortable in the United Church and I never looked back.
All this to say; I found good people in all these places, and I have a healthy respect, indeed love, for the many different ways we have to worship and find spirit-filled connection. World Communion Sunday is all about connection.
In the earliest community in Jerusalem, Jews, the first followers of Jesus, gathered “at the temple and broke bread in their homes”. We might dismiss this as not being very strange, after all, lots of Jews gathered around their rabbis at the temple and then went home to eat. But in our scripture from Acts this morning we are told that this was different because these Jews; “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.”
So when we say “they broke bread at home” we understand no one went hungry, everyone had a home to return to, no one was left out- this community included everyone.!”
Maybe you still aren’t impressed. Acts 2:41-42, so just before our scripture passage today, reads: “ Many of them believed Peter’s message and were baptized, and about three thousand people were added to the group that day. They spent their time in learning from the apostles, taking part in the fellowship, and sharing in the fellowship meals and the prayers.”
They shared their table, they shared their meals, over three thousand people from a group that started out with just the apostles, some unidentified women, Mary, the mother of Jesus and Jesus’ brothers and about 120 followers (Acts 1:14-15).
The group included Pharisees and tax collectors, men and women, rich and poor – people who ordinarily avoided contact - were eating together, praying together, talking together. They cared about and for each other; not in some abstract way, not at arm’s length through the agency of the temple, they really cared about each other.
They got to know each other as people brought together by their common belief that being followers of Jesus and following The Way brought them closer to God. I’m impressed!
I’m even more impressed that Peter, the one who denied Jesus, the one who ran away, is now in the forefront, bringing people to Christ with his faith. Peter, who later with Paul, is one of the disciples who opens the way for Gentiles to be fully accepted into the assembly of Christ without the need to convert to Judaism through circumcision. Acts 15 describes what is called the Council at Jerusalem:
5 Then some of the believers who belonged to the party of the Pharisees stood up and said, “The Gentiles must be circumcised and required to keep the law of Moses.”
6 The apostles and elders met to consider this question. 7 After much discussion, Peter got up and addressed them: “Brothers, you know that some time ago God made a choice among you that the Gentiles might hear from my lips the message of the gospel and believe. 8 God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us. 9 He did not discriminate between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith. 10 Now then, why do you try to test God by putting on the necks of Gentiles a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear? 11 No! We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved, just as they are.”
We live in a time when the whole world seems to be splintering into smaller and groups based on politics, religion, sexuality and gender identification, ethnicity, culture, skin colour, vaccinated or not, what you eat or don’t eat, and I guess, whatever else people use to identify themselves as a group to which some people belong and others don’t.
We aren’t so different from the people in those New Testament times, we want to know who belongs and who doesn’t. Peter and Paul both remind us that it is not up to us to say who belongs. it is God who brings us together. It is through God’s grace that we are united together as a family, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. Paul, in the passage from Ephesians (4:4-6), reminds us:
4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling,
5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism,
6 one God and Father of all,
who is above all and through all and in all.
The use of Father in these verses is really important because both Paul and Peter want to include Gentiles in the community of Christ. Remembering that Judaism is a bloodline, hence, the importance of the linage of Jesus in Matthew, we see Peter and Paul working through how the Gentiles are included in the history and future of Israel through the bloodline of Jesus.
They do this in different ways, Paul in Hebrews by grafting the followers of Christ onto the tree of Israel and Peter in 1st Peter by placing the Gentiles along side of the Jews. The idea for both is that the Jews are not being displaced or replaced as God’s people, and yet God’s people is being enlarged to wholly and fully encompass Gentiles or pagans who through baptism, and their profession of faith, are brought into the body, into the family of God.
Peter’s plea at the Council in Jerusalem has such important ramifications. There are no second class members in the church, just as Paul tells the Galatians (3:28) “ There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Imagine the power of that verse in the first century:
imagine what dignity a slave is given, imagine the respect the voice of a woman is given, imagine the recognition of the worthiness of a pagan at these early worship and fellowship gatherings. That is good news to the slave, women and the pagans!
And now imagine the Jew previously holding themselves apart and in high regard from the Gentiles, Samaritans, women and the poor, those who had diseases, tax collectors, garbage collectors, butchers, imagine these pious and or rich folks acknowledging the Spirit at work in those they previously avoided. That is Good News to the Spirit filled follower of Christ.
And all of it is good news for us! The world wide church is one, there is no right church and wrong church, there is no correct church and incorrect church, there is not only one way to worship. We are all brought together by the word and life of Jesus the Christ, we are all embraced by a loving and gracious God, we are all a Spirit filled people.
In this place we are all equal, we all come bringing with us our broken hearts wanting to be healed, we all come bringing our stories and gifts wanting to be heard, we all come hearing the call of Jesus who says “Come and follow me” and responding with all our hearts and all our souls and all our minds.
May it be so.
Amen
