Fourth Sunday after Easter

Last weekend I led a vestry retreat with the other All Saints Church in my life, All
Saints, Bentonville. Years ago I was involved with helping them get started as a
mission. I began the retreat by putting forth this question , “Looking at your entire
experience at All Saints Church, remember a time when you felt most alive, most
fulfilled, or most excited about your involvement in the church.?”

Inevitably what that question evokes is more than just specific examples and
content; more than just memories of the golden era or the good old days of our
parish. That question asked and answered creates an environment of creative
energy that is rooted into the deep levels of the respective parish's identity and
culture.

It's almost as if someone asked the author of the passage we heard from Acts this
very question. “Luke, can you tell us about a time in the early Christian church that
you felt most excited and energized?” This passage we just heard was in all
probability written about fifty years after it had actually occurred, so Luke was
thinking back, and he was certainly reminiscing with some romanticism and
idealism, because that’s just what we do as humans. Just prior to this passage he’s
telling about how 3000 people were converted and baptized on one day. How’s that
for a golden era. Of course, there is something about thinking back to the good old
days that glosses over the literal, stark realities of those experiences and renders
fond warm and fuzzy memories that can sometimes border on creative fiction.
And yet, I would argue that those romantic, idealistic memories, as inaccurate as
they may be, often carry a profoundly effective truth that we need to relive from
time to time. Those memories can carry important values and will continue to birth
creative vision. And I assure you that the picture that the apostle Luke draws of
the early Church can still speak to us today and once again foster that climate of
creative energy.

In last week’s sermon I described the four actions that Jesus carried out with the

two disciples on the road to Emmaus and at several other occasions. Jesus took
bread, blessed the bread, broke the bread and then shared it with those gathered. In
liturgics we speak of this as the Four-fold shape of the Eucharist. Well, what Luke
describes in Acts today could be described as the Four-fold shape of the Church.
The first act that he describes about the early church is that they were devoted to
the apostles’ teaching. This was more than just the basic understanding that Jesus is
Lord, the Messiah, or that God had become human in Jesus Christ.

Or that Jesus through his death on the cross had defeated death and brought the
power of his resurrection to our lives. The apostles’ teaching involved the
follow-up question to all these basic understandings, which is “So what?” “What
does all this mean to my life? How do we apply these basic understandings and
beliefs to our lives?

Well one way can be seen in the Baptismal Covenant that we all say together each
time we baptize and welcome someone into the Body of Christ and this Christian
family. At first it is simply the Apostle’s Creed in question/answer form, but then
there are these questions that really flesh that out. Will you persevere in resisting
evil... Will you proclaim the Good News... Will you seek and serve Christ in all
persons... Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the
dignity of every human being?

Those understandings from the creed are often lived out through our fellowship
together which is another element that Luke recalls. He says that in the early
Church they were devoted to fellowship, or the Greek word from the actual text,
“Koinonia,” which means community. Beliefs and doctrines are all well and good,
but where the rubber hits the road is when we exercise those beliefs in relationships
to others in Christian community. One of the great weaknesses of American
Christianity or American spirituality in general is the misunderstanding that if we
just have the correct belief or spirituality, that then it is enough to live that out in a
privatistic, individualistic fashion divorced from any connection or accountability
to a community. Just me and Jesus, my buddy. But the truth is we can’t do it alone.
We really do need each other.

I hope you know that it is always ok, in fact it is often a great help for you to
disagree and challenge one another here at All Saint’s. A Christian community

where it is safe to disagree with one another is a great gift that you can offer here in
the River Valley and to the world in the face of so many of our traditional
institutions becoming paralyzed by gridlock and conflict.

The third aspect that Luke describes is the breaking of the bread. That means more
than celebrating communion at Eucharist. In the early Church they had an
additional meal called the Agape meal. I suppose it was the precursor to the parish
potluck. People took time to break bread and share a common meal. We need to do
that as congregations and we need to do it as families. I can't tell you how many
times when I've talked to people about what they remember about their spiritual
formation as children and it so often is around a common meal or the preparation
of that meal.

The final characteristic that Luke describes about this fledgling Christian
movement in Acts is their devotion to prayer. They were devoted to both individual
and corporate prayer. They prayed in the temple and they prayed in their homes. As
Anglican Christians, Episcopalians, we believe that prayer is more than simply a
communication vehicle to petition God for our needs and desires. We believe that
devoted and consistent prayer shapes us into the persons God imagines and desires
us to be.

A devotion to the Apostle's teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread with one
another, and prayer shaped this relatively small movement of early Christians over
two thousand years ago into the Body of Christ that is Christendom today. It can
also shape you here at All Saints to be the local and immediate expression of the
Body of Christ today. You are about to round a corner and begin a new chapter in
your story and call a new Rector. I pray that you will hold onto these practices that
Luke describes, but I also hope you will retain those golden memories of the last
years and allow them to seed a fertile field of new possibilities and creative vision.
AMEN.

The Rev. Dr. Dennis Campbell