“Moved by the Spirit” A sermon based on Acts 16:12-15 November 29, 2009 Advent 1 Glen Ayr United Church

From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. We stayed there several days. On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, who was a worshiper of God; God had opened her heart to respond to Paul's message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. "If you consider me a believer in the Lord," she said, "come and stay at my house." And she persuaded us.
*****************************************************************************
Today’s text is part of Paul’s second missionary journey. Paul's intent was follow-up on all the churches he had planted on the first trip. Here, Paul goes to Philippi where there was at least one church. Philippi was a Roman colony, in the area of Macedonia. The first convert there was a woman named Lydia, who traded in purple cloth. Tyrian purple was a very rare and expensive color made from a Mediterranean snail, reserved for kings and royalty. Lydia was not poor; she had a good business, and was probably well-regarded in the community. Yet when Paul told her about Jesus, she and the members of her household were moved to become followers. She talked Paul into using her house while he was in the city - and her house was probably the first church - ekklesia - in Europe.

We have to remember that for the first three hundred and fifty years after the death of Jesus, there was no such thing as Christianity. The first followers of Jesus were all Jews, but as Paul travelled throughout the Middle East, Greeks and Romans also became converts. They didn’t meet in the synagogue, they didn’t meet in cathedrals - they met in homes. There were no churches in the sense we think of them.

As Paul was travelling, he also wrote letters to the newly-established house churches. In the early days, there were no written gospels. Paul’s letters to the churches were written long before the Gospels were, and probably after the death of Paul as well.

People being people, they hadn’t been in community long before differences about worship, the role of women, membership, and leadership arose. In large places like Corinth, there were several groups; so we have to take into account that there were many different communities of small house churches, with many different ideas about community and leadership.

Philippi was a Macedonian city , but also a Roman colony, so its house church communities would be based on a Roman model and Roman construction. One or more families formed a single house church, according to size of the household. Congregations met in the homes of more affluent members because they owned larger houses. Everything in such a situation favored the emergence of the host as the most prominent and influential member of the group. Eventually the strong leader of one house church might assume leadership throughout a city or section.

Some of the women did not behave in the way expected in Roman culture. They headed households, ran businesses, were independently wealthy, and traveled with their own slaves and helpers. In the congregations, women took on the same leadership roles as men. In Roman society, the assumption was that subordinate household members would share the religion of the head of the household, but that wasn’t the case in the house churches.

So - in the midst of a predominantly Greco-Roman political and religious world where there is a plurality of gods and worship styles, we find a minority religion called Judaism which worships one God - and emerging from that Jewish faith a smaller group of people who were labelled heretics. In every way, the Jesus movement was an emerging faith group.

The early house churches which formed the basis of what later became Christianity, emerged out of a messianic movement within an existing established faith tradition. But sometimes new forms of church come about because of political need. For example, the house church movement in China. They operate independently of the government-run Three-Self Patriotic Movement, China Christian Council for Protestant groups and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and the Chinese Catholic Bishops Council. As non-registered religious groups they cannot independently own property, so they meet in private homes, often in secret for fear of arrest or imprisonment.

The Chinese house church movement developed after 1949 as a result of the Communist government policy which requires the registration of all religious organizations. This registration policy requires churches to become part of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement/China Christian Council set-up, which may involve interference in the church's internal affairs, by officials approved by the Communist Party of China's United Front Work Department. During the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1976 all Christian worship was forced underground. The official churches were closed, and the underground house church movement filled the need.

In the 1980's and 1990s in Japan, a movement called “mukyokai” began to emerge. Mukyokai means essentially ‘outside the church’. It was a house church movement, an attempt to establish small mission communities which incorporated understandings of the early house churches of Paul’s time. This movement emerged largely because of dissatisfaction with the rigidity of the established denominations in Japan.

The current “emerging church” movement is a product of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. It is variously described as evangelical, post-evangelical, liberal, post-liberal, charismatic, neocharismatic and post-charismatic. Participants seek to live their faith in what they believe to be a "postmodern" society. Proponents of this movement call it a "conversation" to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its vast range of standpoints and its commitment to interfaith dialogue rather than verbal evangelism. What those involved in the conversation mostly agree on is their disillusionment with the organized and institutional church and their support for the deconstruction of modern Christian worship, modern evangelism, and the nature of modern Christian community.

This is a really fast overview of some Christian church history - but it is clear that as long as faith and religion have been around, there have been emerging movements, groups which pushed change in the way we see the church. The Reformation started by Martin Luther is a good example. Emerging churches can be found all over the world. Some are independent churches, some are house churches, some are traditional Christian denominations. There is no one standard or “norm” for emerging church. The one commonality is that they are all struggling to find new ways to be church, to find ways to re-frame what it means to be church in a new world, in an ongoing way.

Today, the world in many ways has come full circle. With travel and the kinds of communication we have, we are back into a world where the Christian God and the Christian church as we knew it is once again, like the small groups in Philippi, a new form of church emerging. It is a long, slow, and often frustrating process. It is easy to want to stay with old habits because they are comfortable.

Advent, the first Sunday of a new church year, is also a time to begin to re-tell the story of faith - just as Paul and the early Christians did. We have to recognise what it is about our faith that is really important, and we have to tell the stories again - in some ways, we have to evangelise ourselves. I don’t mean nostalgia for a past time which we see through rose-coloured glasses. I mean we have to take the time in Advent to tell the stories again of why we are, who we are, and whose we are. We have to be willing to find new ways of speaking the stories to others, and to each other.

So today we turn our eyes to a star, to a birth, to a beginning of something new in the world. May the story be fresh in our hearts and on our lips, as we look for illumination, on the road to Bethlehem and beyond, to find a new way of being church.

Sources:
1. http://gbgm-umc.org/UMW/corinthians/housechurches.stm
2. www.churchinchina.com
3. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_house_church
4. www.kantohousechurches.com
5. “A Lot More Here than Meets the Eye”, Acts 16 sermon by Michael Fischer.

The End of All Things???? or the Beginning??? Acts 2:1-41 November 15, 2009

There is a scene in the Lord of the Rings stories, just near the end. The two hobbits, Frodo and Sam, have carried the ring of evil all the way to Mount Doom, where it was created. They have thrown it back into the fires where it is destroyed. They just get out before the mountain erupts - and we see them marooned on a huge rock - lava flowing all around them, the mountain blowing rocks and flames. They weep about what might have been, and Frodo says to Sam “I’m glad you’re here with me, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things.”

The city of Jerusalem was a busy place during the celebration of the first harvest, the Feast of Weeks known as Pentecost. Pentecost was part of the Hebrew celebrations in the religious year, and for the disciples it was a natural thing to go to Jerusalem for their religious observances. Many people would be there, to be part of this celebration to commemorate God's bounty to them in the first harvest of the year. Others would be there on a pilgrimage, or to study there, or just soak up the richness of their Jewish heritage. It was in this time - around 30 AD - that the unexplainable happened.

Jesus had already promised the coming of the Spirit. On a much earlier occasion, Jesus had stood, at the later harvest celebration, the Feast of Booths, and offered an invitation:
"If any one is thirsty, they can come to me for drink. The Scripture says that whoever believes, from their “innermost being rivers of living water shall flow.'" John tells us that the disciples had not yet received the Sprit, because Jesus was not yet glorified.”

Well, why Pentecost now? Didn’t we just have Pentecost in the spring? Yes, we did. But Pentecost is not just one Sunday, nor even really one season. Pentecost - the coming of the Spirit - should be all year every year. In our church year, today is the last Sunday in the season of Pentecost. Next Sunday is the last one in the Christian church year - known as Reign of Christ. The Sunday after that is the beginning of a new church year - the first Sunday of Advent. We also have a study group beginning, called “The Church We Are Becoming”, based on the Book of Acts. The very first part of the book of Acts is about the coming of the Spirit, and the time of Pentecost.

There is something extremely important here, which is crucial to our life as a community. If you minimise, or remove, the work of the Spirit, you have taken the very core out of Christianity. Without the Spirit, Christian discipleship would be impossible. There is no life without the power which gives life, no community without the Spirit.

The disciples were all together on the day of Pentecost, and they really had no idea what was going to happen. They only knew that Jesus had told them to wait in Jerusalem. The sudden-ness of the arrival of the Spirit took them all by surprise, and they were taken aback - and likely frightened. It was a noise like a mighty rushing wind, "a violent, rushing wind," and all the people were totally "immersed" in the Spirit.

Together with this mighty wind, appeared "tongues as of fire," offers us a marvelous picture of what the Spirit was doing. But we need to be careful that we do understand what the passages here mean. The kind of tongues mentioned were known languages - much as Danish, Swiss and Austrian are related to German, or so the languages heard were similar, and yet different. Far from being simply noises or sounds, they were able to communicate in the known languages or dialects, and be understood. Nor was it a forced or artificial experience, but the Spirit making it possible, opening them to understanding in a new way.

In the same way, today, the Holy Spirit is working in us. We want to be sure that we don’t do anything to inhibit the work of the Spirit. The great German theologian, Jurgen Moltmann, talked about the church in the “power of the Spirit”. For Moltmann, the church is the open community of the Spirit, and the active ministry of the church community. It cannot happen without the action of the Spirit. This means, of course, that the church is always “becoming” something else. It means that the church always has to be in the process of reinventing itself - or perhaps I should say being reinvented by the Spirit.

I come back to the two small hobbits, Frodo and Sam, there at what appears to be the end of all things. They both believe that their lives are over. They weep for what might have been. But the cataclysmic changes, far from being the end of all things - turn out to be a new beginning in which the worst side of the human condition is overcome, and replaced by true peace, true shalom.

It seems to me that is the meaning of Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit, A fresh wind blew through Jerusalem, and with it came dramatic changes - but for a reason. What may appear to us to be the end of things, or the end of something as we know it, has all the potential to be a beginning for something fresh and energetic, something which calls on the discipleship of all of us, to do whatever it is we can with optimism and energy. May it be so.