THE CHURCH—BOTH HUMAN AND HOLY?

Acts 2:42-47

The Fourth Sunday of Easter

April 13, 2008

Pastor William S. Waxenberg

(The baptized) devoted themselves to the

apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the

breaking of bread and the prayers.

The Golden Compass. Last December, the movie by that name caused a great stir among believers and unbelievers alike.  Based on the first book of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, entitled His Dark Materials, the three stories are allegedly about the destruction of the church and the death of God.  Philip Pullman is an avowed atheist, living in England, who evidently has made it his mission to wipe out Christianity from the hearts and minds of children. 



Many faithful folk were upset by The Golden Compass because they felt the movie watered down Pullman’s true motives.  And many of the unfaithful were just as upset because they felt that the movie’s watering down of his true intent wasn’t in keeping with Pullman’s mission.

Well, people angry with the church or with Christianity isn’t new. And, truth be told, there’s often much to be angry about! The church hasn’t always lived up to being the faith-filled, Spirit-filled community it was created to be. Looking back across 2000 years of landscape, it’s fairly easy to see the destruction the church has caused: from the Crusades to the Inquisitions to the persecutions of those who were her critics; from the subordination of women to the abuse of children; from the blending of its spiritual power with the power of the state to its failure to speak a prophetic word to the world. Anger toward the church is often justified. Even necessary.

But the church’s best critics have always been those who haven’t been on the outside looking in—the followers of other religions, the atheists, the agnostics—but the church’s best critics, her most insightful critics, have always been those on the inside who do, in fact, love the church.

It’s been ever thus. During the days of the Old Testament, when Israel was called to be the faithful people of God, her best critics were called prophets. And these prophets—people like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos and Micah—these prophets could be hyper-critical, not because they hated Israel, but quite the opposite, in fact. For the prophets loved Israel, and were critical of Israel precisely because they did love her, and they wanted her to be the faithful people God had called them to be.

This past Wednesday was a day in the church calendar to remember one of the church’s most beloved critics. Sixty three years ago, on April 9, 1945, Lutheran pastor, teacher, and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hanged by the Nazis during the final days of World War II. Bonhoeffer had been an outspoken critic of the idolatrous relationship between the Third Reich and the German church. He, along with many others, began an underground movement called the Confessing Church, in which they called the church back to its roots, back to being a church that didn’t cooperate with the Nazi regime, but to being a church that confessed the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

Critics like Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller, and more recently Martin Luther King, Jr., criticized the church from the inside because they loved the church and understood that the church was far more than just a gathering of like-minded people who were also sinners. They knew what the writer of the Acts of the Apostles knew in our reading for today, that the church was made up of the baptized who were called to devote themselves to holy endeavors:

to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, to the

breaking of bread and the prayers.

Now, these rituals sound so familiar to us, don’t they. And they are. These are some of the very things we do each and every week. We listen to apostolic teaching as it comes to us through the Scriptures. We enjoy fellowship with each other during and after worship. We celebrate the Lord’s Supper. And we pray. But these actions are both very human and very divine. Very mundane and very holy.

Not unlike Jesus himself. One of the great struggles of the early church was trying to explain Jesus. There were some who said Jesus was human but not divine, a man but not God. Others said he was God but not really human. Oh, Jesus may have looked human, they said, but he was more like a phantom, so that when he walked along the seashore he didn’t leave any footprints.

The church finally made a monumental decision, however, when it confessed that Jesus was both human and divine, both God and man.

And in a very real sense, this also describes the church: both human and divine. It’s not by accident that the apostle Paul calls the church “the Body of Christ.” It has very human qualities about it. But it also has very godly, or very divine, or very holy qualities too, as expressed in these actions of apostolic teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer.

We invest a lot in the reading and the preaching of the Scriptures. They carry with them an apostolic authority. Whether we’re listening to a reading from Genesis or I Samuel or the Psalms or one of the prophets, or whether we’re listening to a reading from one of the Gospels or from one of the letters of Peter or Paul or James or John, we believe that their words carry with them an authority that’s worthy of our attention. So much so, in fact, that we say these readings are a word from the Lord, that the holy God has something important to say to us each and every week through this very human book we call the Bible. And that the apostles who taught and preached and wrote carried such an authority that the very Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, now speaks through them to us. This apostolic authority is very human—and yet very divine. Very human and very holy.

So it is with the fellowship we enjoy. The word that’s used for ‘fellowship’ in today’s reading goes a lot deeper than simply just enjoying one another’s company. It means more than a word used to describe what happens at a dinner party, or Fourth of July cookout. The word is koinonia. Koinonia signifies a fellowship that’s beneath the surface. It carries with it a spiritual depth. It’s the same word used by the apostle Paul in one of his letters to the Corinthians. You’ll recognize it because its one of our greetings each Sunday morning:

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of

God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be

with you all (2 Corinthians 13:13).

The word translated as ‘communion’ is koinonia. We could just as easily say, “…and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” For koinonia indicates that the fellowship we have with one another is a spiritual fellowship, a fellowship that grows out of God’s fellowship, or God’s communion, with us. It’s the kind of fellowship that leads to the other two human and divine encounters in our text: “the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

“The breaking of bread” is, of course, a euphemism for the Lord’s Supper. Breaking the bread and drinking from the cup were the ways in which Jesus continued to be present among those early disciples. Just as the bread and the cup are the ways in which Jesus continues to be present among us.

The very human event of eating and drinking is combined with the very divine event of Jesus’ being present among us, “in, with, and under the bread and wine,” as Luther liked to say. This koinonia meal, this fellowship meal, this meal of Holy Communion is far more than simply a memorial meal. For Christ himself, crucified and risen, is now present among us by the power of his Holy Spirit.

Next Sunday during the 8:30 service, nine of our children will receive the bread and the wine for the first time. They and their parents have attended four sessions taught by our youth minister Scot, our intern Kathy, and myself. One of the things we’ve emphasized with them is that this sacrament is based on a promise, the promise of Jesus to be present among us. “This is my body,” he says. “This is my blood.” This is my communion, my koinonia, my fellowship, with you.

Eating, drinking.  Jesus is here.  Human action and divine presence.

As are the prayers we offer up. For our prayers are more than merely words spoken. They’re more than just the thoughts and ideas, the wants and the needs, the praises and confessions of our hearts. Paul is very clear in his letter to the Romans that our prayers are the words of our hearts reshaped by the Holy Spirit so that they can be heard by our heavenly Father.

“…the Spirit helps us in our weakness,” he

writes, “for we do not know how to pray as

we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes for

us with sighs too deep for words” (7:26).

Prayer is both a very human and a very divine endeavor. There are, of course, a variety of ways in which to pray. We can pray the words that come to us from our mothers and fathers of the faith, like St. Teresa of Avila or St. Augustine. We can pray the words that we were taught when we were children. We can form our prayers by using certain guidelines. We talked about this in confirmation last Wednesday evening, using the acronym ACTS—Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Or we can pray the words that come from the deep recesses of our hearts. But know this: that whatever form or formula we use, our words are taken by the Holy Spirit and offered up to our Father in heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ. So that prayer is a very human and a very holy endeavor.

And this very human and very holy endeavor is what the church is all about. So imperfect, to be sure. So wrong in much of our history. But remember this:

Christ loved the church and gave himself

up for her, in order to make her holy by

cleansing her with the washing of water

by the word, so as to present the church

to himself in splendor, without a spot or

wrinkle or anything of the kind…so that

she might be holy and without blemish.

(Ephesians 5:25-27).

The church: human—so very human. And yet so very divine—for Christ Jesus himself is present here: in teaching, in fellowship, in Holy Communion, in our prayers. The church: human and holy.

Amen.