Acts 16:9-10
The Scattered Church
Last week was Pentecost Sunday and I shared that I think we are in a Pentecost season for Pine Valley. This was a time when the first Christians were figuring out what it meant to follow in the way of Jesus after Jesus was gone. What kind of community were they creating? What did it mean to be a follower of the Way of Jesus? The gospels were teaching manuals for what we might think of as house churches or Christian academies. The New Testament letters are bits and pieces of conversations. The first Christians shared ideas, had disagreements, fumbled and stumbled. One of my favorite titles for a book of church history is The Apostolic Blunder Machine. They got a lot of things wrong, but they also got a lot of things right because they kept coming back to the same basic question: What does it mean to love one another?
I think that it is the question we have been wrestling with the last few weeks. We never said it in so many words. But that is the question. How are we going to organize ourselves as a community so that we can keep going? We faced the reality that the way we have been organized for the last decade or more is not working like we would like. We need to find a new way. So we talked about creating four Spirit Teams, or perhaps some other name. One is Building and Grounds, another is the Gathered Community– fellowship, prayer chain, worship, education, another one is the Scattered Community, and the Leadership Team, which is the church officers who have responsibility for the financial and legal affairs of the church and to help keep us coordinated. We are going to try this, live into this experiment, this summer and then at the end of August decide if this is going to be our new normal. There will be some challenges along the way. I am sure of it. So, when things aren’t going the way they were supposed to go, we will have to come back to the basic question. How do we learn to love one another?
So, I have been thinking this week about this question of community. Remember I asked you last week to pray for Pine Valley every day and to call at least one person in the church that you don’t know well. I want to ask you to do those two things again this week–pray for the church and call a new friend.
I’m going to take a few minutes to come at this scatter and gather community idea in a little different way than you might expect. I want you where you think about God’s place in all of this. Maybe you don’t want to use the word God, that’s ok. Maybe you have been so focused on the questions at hand that you haven’t even thought about God by whatever name. But I think the theological question is important in this moment in our life together. I also think the Bible is important.
So let me touch lightly on this question of how you understand the presence of God as it relates to PVCC today. If you haven’t been thinking about that, you are not alone. My guess is I am probably the only one who has.
So here we go. We are told that Paul has this vision in the night of a guy–a total stranger who lives in Macedonia–appears to Paul in a dream with an SOS message – “Come and help us.” And Paul and his buddies drop everything and catch the next flight to Macedonia to help this beleaguered fellow. There are a couple things you should know about this story. For the last 300 years the church has used this text as a basic text justifying Christian missionary work. White North American and European Christians in particular, have tended to define the whole non-Christian world as Macedonia. Today it is a text that White Supremacists and Christian Nationalists favor. You can see how it works. God is on our side. The other side is in darkness. We have the answers. They do not. A text like this in the wrong theological camp creates problems. And we could use the rest of the morning to talk about what some of those problems might be. But I want to show you that there is another way to interpret this story that is far more helpful–at least from my point of view.
You are going to have to go home and read the rest of chapter 16, but here’s my summary. Paul and Silas go to the city of Philippi, which is the largest city in the district. There they meet Lydia, a wealthy woman who is an ally, and they encounter a slave girl–or better she encounters them. And she follows them for many days around the city. And she is yelling at them. “These men are the servants of the most-high God, and they proclaim to you the way of salvation.” And finally, Paul has had enough. He gets really annoyed. He tells her to stop it, and he casts the spirit out of her, at which point the owners of the girl get very annoyed with Paul because they were making good money off of her and now, they cannot. So, they complain to the authorities, and Paul and Silas are thrown into jail. And that’s all there, in the Bible, Acts chapter 16.
Here’s my take on the story. The guy that appeared to Paul in the dream might have been in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. We don’t know. But somehow, he knew how to get a hold of Paul. He wanted help because then as now the world of empires and vigilants is a dangerous place for ordinary people and especially for children, and this guy in the dream had a vision of a new world that was a safe place for women and children and he actually believed that the Christian movement could help make that happen if we link arms with people who are exploited and marginalized and workers who are treated like cash cows instead of like human beings. And don’t forget Llydia and prayer. Read the story. They prayed a lot. And they organized. They found allies in the community. And that is how the early church grew. They did not believe they had all the answers. They did not believe that God is on our side. They believed that God is in the struggle for human dignity. God is at work in the world, working to create what Paul Friere calls a “people-oriented society.” The gathered community is important–absolutely. Worship is important. Bible study is important. Fellowship is important. It is essential that we create safe places to practice Christian love. We can and I think must experience in some meaningful way the presence of God in this place. But let us use our experiences here to sharpen our vision of where God is at work in the world inviting us to join in the struggle to make the world a sane and safe place for everyone.