Geoff Pritchard April 13 2008, Evening.

Acts chapter 2, verses 41 on. Some verse by verse comments.

Tonight’s passage is about the very beginning of the Christian Church. The resurrection has happened, and Peter has preached an evangelistic sermon, as we would now call it, ending with a call to repentance and to baptism in the name of Jesus Christ for forgiveness of sins. Verse 41 reports the outcome of his endeavour: “Those who accepted his message were baptised, and about 3000 were added to their number that day”.

It may seem surprising that such a very large number of people were converted on one day. Yet much larger numbers have been reported to respond to an isolated sermon by evangelists in Africa within the last 20 years. Much larger numbers—up to 15,000--- are also reported to have joined the church in China every day in the past year, 2007, although not as a result of one sermon.

Note: the verse does not say 3000 people were converted to Christ; it only says that they were added to the group of disciples. No attempt is made to establish whether they truly repented. It becomes clear later that some at least fell away, or gave up, but many persisted.

The whole Jewish culture laid great stress on the need to get forgiveness, usually through offering sacrifices. It is difficult for us therefore to base our lives on the New Testament, even those parts of it that are addressed to non-Jews, without talking about sin.

The need for forgiveness of sins must be put across differently in 21^st-century Britain, but there is no point in devising a completely different gospel every so often. Christians have always believed the gospel makes a difference even to a man on his deathbed; because it makes a difference to people’s eternal destiny. When we talk of salvation, ask what from?

So, anyway, we can now begin the passage for this evening. It tells us what all these 3000 people got up to.

Verse 42: they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching. This is only what we would expect. Anyone who “finds God” or “gets religion” almost invariably feels a great hunger to know more. Conversely, those who find all sermons boring, not just mine, should kneel down and ask God to help them, because for sure no-one else can.

These people did not have churches to go to. They just had the apostles, and some meetings in the temple courts or in private homes, probably very cramped ones with no air conditioning. The verse continues: “ they devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and to the fellowship”… the meaning of this term fellowship is never explained in Scripture, but we can take it to mean “enjoying the friendship and support of like-minded people”.

Strangely enough, some churchgoers have no interest in fellowship.

There is a type of Anglican who thinks of religion as entirely vertical, that is, an up-down relationship between God in heaven and a human being on earth, and this type of person has no interest in relationships between individual Christians.

When I was a boy there were lots of horses in the streets pulling carts, delivering coal and bread and that sort of thing. They wore blinkers so that they could not see anything either side of them, otherwise they would be frightened by the traffic, although there wasn’t really very much traffic in those days.

I once belonged to a congregation where people reminded me of those blinkered horses. They would pick up their hymnbooks at the end of the service, dump them on the table and charge out of the door, without a sidelong glance. To be fair, they had been brought up in a tradition where to speak to anyone in church, sitting next to them in the same pew, would have been considered bad manners. It was a well-intentioned attitude, arising from the belief that every moment spent in a church building must be spent in prayer to God.

So it would be an impertinence to interrupt people’s devotions. It overlooks the fact that many people, including most children and teenagers and several older people, cannot sustain such an attitude of intense meditation.

The verse finishes : “they devoted themselves to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

The apostles remembered that Jesus had asked them to repeat that action of breaking the bread, which he had first done in the upper room. The first Communion services were probably nothing remotely like we have today. They would not have had Common Worship service books and it seems likely they would not have had any set words at all. Paper was only just being invented, and handwriting on other surfaces was a skilled profession.

The first communions were probably shared meals with a few symbolic actions.

There is nothing in the Scriptures that requires the person presiding at communion to be a priest, although there is an implication that everything should be done decently in some kind of order. Certainly there is nothing wrong with the church authorities specifying that certain tasks should be restricted to certain people, but the present system is beginning to cause acute problems in the countryside.

As for prayer, we are given no indication what sort of prayer it was. The only thing we can be fairly certain about, again, is that it wasn’t out of a book. Again, there is nothing wrong with using prayers from a book. If you have to prepare intercessions several weeks running, it is amazing how easily the well of originality dries up. But in small groups, it is difficult to convey exactly what you mean with prayers from a book.

It is reported that some Anglican clergyman met for a big conference in Chicago in the 19^th century, on the day that the great Fire of Chicago began. They broke off from their deliberations to pray, using any available devotional books. When it was over, nobody had prayed about the fire at all. Fires were not in the book. Prayer books deal in generalities.

Verse 43 says that everybody was filled with awe, and that “many signs and wonders were done by the apostles”.

It would be worthwhile to spend some time on this, because modern Christians take any one of a number of very different attitudes to signs and wonders,

but it really needs a sermon to itself, and that would mean we haven’t got time for the rest of the passage.

So let us move on to the really controversial stuff. Verse 44: “All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.”

Someone wrote these words on the Internet the other day:

I wondered why this text from Acts 2 about sharing did not constitute the normal lifestyle for Christian communities today. When I asked people why not, the answers usually fell along one of three lines:

1. “This was just because people were temporarily far from home in Jerusalem.”

2. “It doesn’t actually mean we have to do that.”

3. “Are you a communist?”

I guess that if the PCC decided we should have everything in common in this church, or even just a few things in common, there would be a sudden spate of resignations.

Our lifestyle today is very much concerned with private property, private space, and individual freedom. I am like that myself. Even if we don’t like it, we cannot change Western culture overnight. In New Testament times, there were rich people and poor people, as everywhere, but the overwhelming majority were poor.

They had so little in the way of material possessions that they had nothing much to lose by sharing, especially when you consider that what they had was not secure. You can find societies like that today.

The other day, I attended a literary lunch, and the speaker was a novelist who had lived in Guiana in South America. She said some of the more primitive tribes there, forty years ago, shared everything; they had everything in common.

If they caught some fish that day, everybody was rich, but if they caught nothing, everybody was poor for the day. Then some American Christian missionaries came and taught the natives about sin, giving as an example stealing from one individual by another. This was apparently quite new to them, because they had no concept of individual property.

So we had Christians teaching people not to do what the early Christians had thought right. Culture is really important.

In New Testament times there was crime, probably some vandalism, and little or no insurance against fire or theft. This is not to say the insurance industry didn’t exist, because there were systems for insuring commercial goods during long journeys even 2000 years before the time of Christ, and the Romans had a form of insurance against the cost of funerals, but it does not seem to have been available for ordinary people.

Jesus’s remark, Lay not up treasure on earth, where moth and rust do corrupt, and thieves break in and steal, therefore made a lot of sense. Even today, many people find it attractive to travel light.

A few of the new converts were better off than the rest and possessed some land, such as a field, which in those days put them in the middle classes. The book of Acts tells how two couples dealt with the handing over of the money from a field.

It would be very difficult to introduce this system today, although there have been several attempts, and I have a few friends who have lived in sharing communities, not all under the same roof, for as long as 25 years. Some of them found the experience very fulfilling and satisfying, although there always seemed to be a bust up eventually. They said it felt like divorce.

My wife and I had two couples as our friends, who between them ran a Bible class for about 15 years and knew each other very well. One couple was reserved, and the other was very self-confident, relaxed open and inclined to have lots of guests in every day.

One day the husband from the second couple went to the first and said,

“Our car is on the blink and we have to make some important journeys; you have two cars, and the Lord has led us to borrow your second car next week”.

The first couple consulted together, and quickly took appropriate action. They moved to Kent. This was not because they were particularly selfish, far from it, but they knew the thin end of a wedge when they saw one.

The request to borrow the car could have been made more skilfully.

Nevertheless, something was salvaged from Acts Chapter 2. The church recognized in Paul’s time, and still does recognise that it is not acceptable for rich Christians to enjoy enormous wealth while others in fellowship with them do not have enough to eat.

Paul spoke about giving between Christians, (it’s not about charity in general) in 2 Corinthians 8:

“And here is my advice about what is best for you in this matter. Last year you were the first not only to give, will also to have the desire to do so. Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means. Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality.

At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need.”

This was sharing to help fellow-disciples. But even this can be difficult to put into practice in a church that opens its doors wide to all sorts and conditions of men, not just to the prudent, competent and self-sufficient people who live in smart suburbs.

Second example: (James 2:15-17)

Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?

It often seems as if poverty in our welfare state is caused insoluble problems; by long term illness, or fecklessness, or addiction, so short term giving solves little. It may be helpful therefore to ask what we would do in our own extended family; suppose we had a wayward son or an adopted daughter who was very hard up. Suppose we knew it was because of addiction to substances, or plain stupidity, or clinical depression and consequent inability to hold down a job, or gambling, or laziness. Would we turn and look away?

And the church is, after all, meant to be a family, we are brothers and sisters; we are all adopted sons of God; ours is not a state benefit service. Rather surprisingly, the Mormons have developed better support mechanisms than many mainstream Christian churches.

We come now to the last bit of today’s passage. Verses 46 and 47: “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.

They broke bread in their homes, and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people.”

Surely this is the easy bit? Christians are good at meeting together. Many of us share meals in our own homes and we praise God, though whether we enjoy the favour of all the people is another question. My own impression is that we don’t; there is increasing hostility to all forms of religion, including the Christian religion, in England today. Google Ireland Ltd is even trying to ban the advertising of religious websites. The Christian Institute is threatening legal action.

Hostility is still mostly under the surface, but becoming less and less so. It became distinctly worse on the 11^th of September 2001. We are not Moslems, but to the average atheist, that’s a fine distinction. We are religious, that’s what matters. Irrational. Dangerous.

I have missed the last bit of verse 47. The chapter ends by saying “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved”. We are not quite so good in that respect. I once met an Indian from the south of India, who remarked,

“It is not surprising that your churches do not grow in England. Back home we do things for each other, we share our burdens, for example we help the next village to dig a well. I don’t see that happening in the UK.”

It would be useless to point out to this man that the Christian principle of sharing has been incorporated in our national life, that we all give up some of our income. The whole nation has a lot of things in common. As a result our elected representatives ensure that nobody goes without a basic water supply, electricity, health service and food. Whereas in India there are still huge differences between the urban rich and the abject poverty of the rural communities.

The point the Indian was making was that Christian churches as such are not particularly visible when it comes to practical acts of community self help.

The state has taken over most of our role as the rescuers of the deprived. And the state does not always do it very well.

However, the great need of many people today is different. It is not for money alone, or for anything the state can provide. Try as it will, the state cannot provide love, or a sense of purpose, and it cannot provide meaningful relationships and absorbing interests. These things matter.

END