What Now? Week 3: Set Apart

When Jesus was crucified, the Apostles almost immediately went into hiding. It’s not hard to see why – they figured, with good reason, they were probably next to be arrested and killed. So after Jesus died, his followers were probably hunkered down and hiding out, maybe in the home of someone they knew who was willing to shelter them.  

I’ve always thought the bravest people in the story were the women: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of Jesus, Salome, all the others the stories name. The Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke all tell how they follow and watch while he’s tried and crucified and while he dies. They even go to his tomb the next morning to prepare his body for burial, even though they had to know the tomb could be watched and they might be arrested or followed.  

But once the other disciples get word from the women that Jesus is not in his grave, once they’ve met the risen Christ for themselves, the frightened, confused disciples experience a sudden change. They begin proclaiming  loudly and publicly that they are followers of Jesus. They lose their fear of the Romans and the temple leaders. They get death threats. They’re beaten, they’re arrested, they’re thrown in prison, but they keep coming back, they keep at it. Somehow, the resurrection changed everything for them.  

So this Easter season, I wanted to look at what they do early on, after meeting the risen Jesus. What kind of community do they create to reflect their new life? What values and practices do they take on to show the world that they are the followers of the risen Messiah? 

Like I said over the last few weeks, I think this question is not just historically important. I think it’s important to us now because those first Christians were trying to answer a question that all of us have to answer if we want to consider ourselves followers of Jesus: what does it mean to live a Christian life? How is a Christian life different than the life of the non-Christian world around us? Those first Christians, they were just figuring that out. They were making it up as they went along. They had the teachings of Jesus, their memories, their stories. But there were no clear guideline or instructions about how to create a Christian community. The New Testament, the specifically Christian part of the Bible, wasn’t even written yet. Before them, no one had ever gone to church – because there was no such thing as church. They were inventing it, and I think we can learn a lot from their experiments.  

So two weeks ago we looked at their decision to hold money and property in common. People in the Jerusalem church, the first group of Christians, sold their houses and land and pooled their money so that everyone could have food, clothes, and a place to live. Like I said then, I don’t think that was a protest against private ownership so much as it was a statement of radical equality. For the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem, the resurrection somehow meant doing away with private ownership sothat they also did away with the hierarchy of rich and poor, privileged and marginal, honored and dishonored, that defined so much of Roman society.  

Last week, I talked about how the first Christians opened up their new community. At the beginning, Christianity was a Jewish movement. But early on in Acts, we hear two stories about how the Apostles begin to reach beyond those old boundaries. The first was about an Ethiopian court official, an outsider if ever there was one, being baptized into the new faith. The second was about Cornelius, a Roman military officer, also being welcomed in – even though as a Roman officer he would have been viewed as an enemy of Jews living in Jerusalem. Neither Cornelius nor the Ethiopian are valued in the religious community of that region. But the first Christians recognized that part of their Jewish tradition was not only radical hospitality, but radical inclusion – the inclusion that led them to recall their covenant with God, the ancient promise that through them all families of the earth would be blessed.  

In today’s reading from the 13th chapter of Acts, it’s very clear the Christians in the Antioch church have continued inviting all kinds of different people into the new faith. Barnabas is a Levite, a member of the Jewish priestly lineage, and he’s from the Island of Cyprus, off the coast of Turkey. Simeon is probably an African from somewhere South of Egypt. Lucius is from North Africa; Manean started out as part of the Jewish nobility in King Herod’s court, and now he’s become Christian, which probably makes for some awkward conversations at Thanksgiving dinner. And then there’s Saul (who is later called Paul; it’s the same guy, the one who wrote most of the New Testament.) Saul is a Pharisee who studied with a famous Rabbi named Gamaliel in Jerusalem. And now he’s become Christian. So these guys are different from each other in just about every conceivable way: geographic origin, religious origin, language, economic class, skin color, you name it. If they weren’t all male, they’d probably win some kind of workplace diversity award. It’s kind of a miracle that the early church held together at all and didn’t just come apart in the first ten years or so because of all these different cultures and histories included in it.  

But I think in this reading we heard, we begin to see one reason the new faith held together. Christians began to organize themselves into specific roles within the church, and they recognized that each one of them was necessary. At first, the movement was led by the Apostles, the people who knew Jesus personally. And the Apostles did everything: healing, teaching, preaching, administration, giving out food to people who needed it, making all the decisions. But then they realized that wasn’t sustainable, and they decided to have other people run the food distribution. Then in Antioch, a few more jobs developed. There are Apostles, prophets, teachers, and food passer outers or whatever they were called. Then in today’s reading they add a fifth job, people who are assigned to go out and start new churches.  

Throughout the early church movement, that list of jobs keeps expanding. In First Corinthians, the Apostle Paul lists “Working for the common good, the utterance of wisdom, the utterance of knowledge, the gift of healing, the gift of prophecy…” Or in Ephesians, the jobs are listed as Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, Pastors. There are different ways of conceiving the various jobs it takes to help run a church. But whatever those jobs are, the new Christian movement was built around the idea that to be Christian is to be in ministry. This runs completely counter to our consumer culture. When we are part of a church, we are not consumers of the ministry offered by the church staff. We are ministers of the Gospel. We invest together – our time, our money, our expertise, our presence – to be part of God’s work transforming the world, redeeming God’s creation. We are privileged here to be a small part of restoring the world to the holy purposes for which God intended it.   

Two nights ago, on Friday, I was both honored and saddened to be part of a vigil held to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the Columbine massacre in 1999. There were a few hundred people there, and it was held at First Baptist church, downtown across from the Capitol. The event was a memorial; a time to grieve; a time to comfort people who’ve been traumatized by gun violence; a time to find hope for the future. My role was very small; I was asked to offer the opening prayer and the concluding benediction. And I found the whole service profoundly moving.  

Partly, I imagine that was because the world seemed to change that day 25 years ago. There had been school shootings before Columbine, and there have been more than 300 since. But Columbine caught everyone’s attention. Like a lot of us, I have a distinct memory of where I was and what I was doing when I learned what was happening from live radio reports that day. And in my ministry, I’ve known youth who were present at school shootings or had friends who were. So that’s probably part of why the service was such an emotional experience for me.  

But the other reason I found the service on Friday so powerful was the number and variety of people who organized and led and took part in it. The obituaries of each Columbine victim were read by youth, or by former Columbine students, or former administrators who were there that day. The event was co-led by a very impressive young woman who’s part of a youth gun violence prevention organization called Team Enough. There were representatives from other faith communities there, lending their support to those who’ve lost loved ones and been traumatized by gun violence. Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was there. She stood up and spoke, despite the fact that she was herself shot in the head in a mass shooting in her Arizona District more than 10 years ago. One of the former Columbine students who was in the school that day told us about his experience and what it was like to be there, and the aftermath in his family. Tom Mauser, whose son Daniel was murdered, shared his thoughts and his hope for the future. And as I hear myself say all that, I I know it sounds like a terribly depressing event. But it wasn’t. It was somber, for sure. It was serious. But it wasn’t depressing. In fact, I left the church more hopeful and more energized than when I arrived. I think that was because I was with several hundred people, all of whom felt themselves to be part of a larger effort; all of whom knew that they had a part in it, a job to do.  

There is no doubt that people working to prevent gun violence in this country have a long, daunting, difficult road ahead. But there was no doubt that those first Christians, trying to create a life-giving alternative to the death-dealing Empire in which they lived had a long, daunting, difficult road ahead of them. There is no doubt that we still do today. But I think that very early on in our faith, those Christians discovered something that would help them maintain hope and energy in their work. They discovered that doing anything, no matter how small, to bring life and joy to the world around them will in itself make us more hopeful and more joyful. They discovered that all of us can make a meaningful contribution to the church’s ministry and to a more peaceable and life-giving world. Knowing that, we know that we are not alone. Knowing that, we know that God is with us, and we are with each other – and we will find the resurrected Christ among us.