Do You Recognize This Church

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 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.

In the weeks immediately following Jesus’ resurrection, the followers of Christ began to witness to their resurrected Lord in and around Jerusalem. The text we just read provides a glimpse of those earliest days of what would come to be called the Christian church. In the verses just before today’s text we find a sermon Peter preached on the day of Pentecost — we’ll look at that a bit more on May 15th, Pentecost Sunday — and in the verse immediately before today’s text we see the result. “So those who welcomed [Peter’s] message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.” (Acts 2.41)

Then, the beginning verse of our text today: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Clearly, Luke, the author of Acts, wants readers to see the power of the church doing what it is supposed to do. And what he describes have long been considered the true marks of the church: devotion to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, breaking bread together, and prayer. The obvious implication seems to be that if the church does those things, it will grow amazingly: “day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

So I want to grapple with an important question this morning. Do we recognize here the church as Acts describes it? Is that the church that we see today here in Sudbury?

Beginning an answer to this question requires that first we talk about the problem. For if these characteristics — devotion to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, breaking bread together, and prayer — mark the church, then church today as we experience it may not be recognizable as church. To be sure, we do these things. We study the Bible; we have fellowship; we observe communion, and we pray. So why are we not growing, with the Lord adding day by day to our number those who are being saved? What’s the problem?

Certainly there is teaching and preaching here. But how well do you really know the apostles’ teaching, which is to say, the New Testament and the Old Testament on which it is based? Yes, we have fellowship — a Fourth Sunday Brunch every month and lots of other gatherings too. But is there spiritual power in our fellowship or is it mostly just friendly, warm-hearted socializing?

What about the breaking of bread? That’s a phrase unique to Luke in his Gospel and in Acts. Did he mean Eucharist or communion or was this the agape meal that early Christians often shared together? We don’t know for sure but either way, we practice it. Sort of. We certainly have communion, once a month, sometimes more often. But is there really anything powerful in our observance of the sacrament or is it just something we occasionally do? And prayers. Okay, we pray. But how faithful are we about it, really?

Of course, I haven’t even mentioned yet that the text goes on to talk about having “all things in common.” This is just about the last thing American Christians would want. We quite easily talk about almost anything in our lives except our financial circumstances — how much we earn, what our portfolios are, how we spend our money. And the thought of having everything in common, well, forget about it. If such things are the marks of the church, can we recognize the church here?

So let’s come at this in a different way by talking about sports. It’s a good time to talk about sports in Boston. The baseball season has started and the World Champion Red Sox — sounds good, doesn’t it? — are off to an okay start. Not great but okay.[1] The Celtics are in the playoffs. The World Champion Patriots were just at the White House a week or so ago. Boston is a great sports town and it’s fun to cheer our players on.

When we think of sports, we tend to think of those moments when something truly special happens. We think of being in what is often called the “Zone.” You know what the Zone is. In baseball you enter the Zone in the batter’s box, when you have no trouble getting a hit, because the baseball looks as big as a watermelon. Curt Schilling was in the Zone last fall when the strike zone was as big as the side of a barn, and he was hitting his spots, winning two games and doing it with a ruptured sheath around his right peroneal tendon, blood seeping through his sock. So far he’s not in the Zone this season!

In basketball, you’re in the Zone at the foul line when the basket looks like a hula hoop. In golf, every swing is effortless and every ball flies straight and true, and if you’re Vijay Singh you win 10 tournaments and almost $11 million last year.

According to college coaching legend Dean Smith, the Zone is “where time stands still and performance is exquisite.” Think of Barry Bonds hitting moon-shot home runs. Or if steroid abuse troubles us, we can recall another era of Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams. Michael Jordan was often in the Zone leading the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships. Tiger Woods can be incredibly in the Zone. He’s been out of it for a couple of years. Maybe, with his Masters win, he’s entering the Zone again. Lance Armstrong knows about the Zone, winning an unprecedented sixth Tour de France. All of these athletes have found the magical place of perfect performance. The Zone.[2]

But what is this place, the Zone, and how do we get there? Richard Keefe, the director of sport psychology at Duke University talks about this in a book he wrote where he describes the Zone as “a state of mind and body in which action and reaction seem to happen automatically, a state that people can enter while hitting a ball, playing a musical instrument, or even typing on a word processor.”[3] In other words, the Zone can be entered in almost any dimension of life.

The text today seems to describe a church in the Zone. “Awe came upon everyone,” Acts tells us, “because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.” It appears those first Christians found the Zone of faithful Christian living and the results were amazing. Day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. And this is often interpreted to mean that if we would just get into the same Zone of faithful Christian living, the results would be equally amazing.

This is where the problem arises because we reverse things and always thing from results to cause: if the results are not amazing, the performance must be flawed or weak or faithless. And there may some truth to that in sports or music or many other things. But when applied to the church, it leads to a bitter end. It leads to a bitter end because it makes numbers and success and size the only criteria of faithfulness.

Think of it this way. Many times during the final days of Pope John Paul II and during his funeral, various commentators reported that he was the head of a church with one billion members. A billion Roman Catholics! Do you know how many Presbyterians there are in the United States? Not quite 2.4 million, by comparison, less than three-tenths of one percent of worldwide Catholics. Comparing our sizes makes Presbyterians insignificant.

What’s more, the Presbyterian Church (USA) is losing members and has been for more than thirty years. In 1976 the membership of the Presbyterian Church[4] totaled 3.5 million members. With a current membership of 2.4 million members, this means we have declined by 31.4%. It isn’t just national. About five years ago this congregation reached a peak of 278 members. We are now officially 192. That’s a decline of 30.9%.

Even if we don’t compare to Catholics, in this age of megachurches — Willow Creek in South Barrington, Illinois has nearly 7.000 members, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California has over 20,000 worshipers every Sunday! — we seem insignificant size-wise and we continue to decline. Bookshelves and journals are filled with learned analyses of the decline. Many voices around the church point fingers and cast blame, arguments I find wearisome. But the “results” suggest that we are so far out of the Zone of faithful Christian living that we can’t recognize the true church here.

So what do we do with this? Instead of looking at numbers and success and size first, I want to look at the church here in another way. Maybe there is a different kind of zone that we should be talking about.

I got to thinking about this on the Saturday night before Easter when here in this sanctuary we observed the Great Vigil of Easter. For many of the 35 folks who gathered here, it was their first experience of the Great Vigil, a service the traditions of which go back to the earliest centuries of the church. And I was reminded of a book written by Garret Keizer who serves as a lay minister in a small Episcopal church in Vermont. He describes an Easter vigil service at which only he and two other people showed up. He began the service by lighting the Paschal candle and praying very much like we did here: “O God … grant in this Paschal feast that we may so burn with heavenly desires, that with pure minds we may attain to the festival of everlasting light.” But as he prayed, he was struck by the ambiguity of the situation.”

He wrote, “The candle sputters in the half darkness, like a voice too embarrassed or overwhelmed to proclaim the news: ‘Christ is risen.’ But it catches fire, and there we are, three people and a flickering light in an old church, on a Saturday evening … The moment is filled with the ambiguities of all such quiet observances among a few people, in the midst of an oblivious population in a radically secular age. The act is so ambiguous because its terms are so extreme; the Lord is with us, or we are pathetic fools.”[5]

The Lord is with us. Or we are pathetic fools. I suggest that’s how you recognize the church. Not by numbers or success or size because by those standards we might as well have all slept in today. Look for the little groups of Christians who look like pathetic fools who are acting faithfully no matter what.

When you look at size and numbers, it’s easy to lose sight of this, that whether we are two or three, or thirty-five, or whatever, we are still gathered up into presence of the Lord and the great company of the saints. So if we want to recognize the church, we must take off our spectacles that are so impressed by size and look with clear eyes, not at ourselves or how many we are, but at the Lord and what we can do for the Lord.

So I’ll close today with just a little story. Actually it’s a legend from the Aztec people. But even thought it’s not a biblical story or even a Christian story, I think it says something important to us.

The legend goes that our Grandparents passed on a story that a long time ago there was a great fire in the forests that covered the Earth. People and animals started to run, trying to escape from the fire. The legend says that our brother owl, Tecolotl, was running away also when he noticed a small bird hurrying back and forth between the nearest river and the fire. He headed towards this small bird.

He noticed that it was our brother the Quetzal bird, Quetzaltototl, running to the river, picking up small drops of water in his beak, then returning to the fire to throw that tiny bit of water on the flame. Owl approached Quetzal bird and yelled at him: “What are you doing, brother? Are you stupid? You are not going to achieve anything by doing this. What are you trying to do? You must run for your life!”

Quetzal bird stopped for a moment and looked at owl, and then answered: “I am doing the best I can with what I have.”

It is remembered by our Grandparents that a long time ago the forests that covered our Earth were saved from a great fire by a small Quetzal bird, an owl, and many other animals and people who got together to put out the flames.[6]

“I am doing the best I can with what I have.” Look for Christians doing that and you will recognize the true church.

[1] Six wins against 5 losses as of April 16th.

[2] Some of the sports illustrations from Timothy F. Merrill, ed., “The Effortless Present,” Homiletics 17.2 (2005): 62.

[3] Richard Keefe, On the Sweet Spot: Stalking the Effortless Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003) 10.

[4] This was before reunion and the number on December 31, 1976 reflects the combined memberships of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church in the United States.

[5] Garret Keizer, A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry (New York: Viking Penguin, 1991) 73.

[6] Margaret J. Wheatley, Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to Our Future (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002) 158.