One Big Story: “A Family Out Of Strangers” by Jack Varnell Lyrics
- Acts 2:37-47; Ephesians 3:10
We’re continuing our series on the One Big Story of the Bible this morning in six acts. Act 1 – creation – God created the world/humanity in God’s image to be his representatives in the world/God called creation supremely good. Act 2 – the Fall – humanity rebels against God and goes their own way. Act 3 – Israel – God chooses to renew and restore the entire creation by blessing all the families of the earth through a particular people called Israel to be a light to the world/who ultimately fail at their task and need saving just like everything else. Act 4 – Jesus – God’s King arrives opening up the kingdom of God and inviting all people to become a part of it. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus comes to put our hearts back to right and creation along with it. And anyone who joins their life to Jesus becomes a participant in the new creation here and now.
Today we are looking at Act 5 – the church. In the book of Acts we find that God’s Spirit arrives with power and people want to join up with the disciples to become a part of what God is doing. Our text shows the people begging Peter to show what they must do next. Peter says, “Repent, change your hearts and lives, re-think everything about your life in light of Jesus, be baptized, and come and join us on this new journey of being God’s people.” That initial gathering resulted in three thousand people being baptized and committing to follow after Jesus.
But that wasn’t all – they didn’t return home/ back to the way things were. Next they devoted themselves to the apostle’s teachings, to community, to eating together, and praying together. They became one – sharing their money as any had need, worshiping together, growing together, becoming a family out of strangers. Jesus commissions this group called the church to be his witnesses out in the world. They are to go and be the church and live out the truth that Jesus really is Lord of the entire world. And the book of Acts records this group of believers living such beautiful lives, their love was so evident, people were so captivated by them, that the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Through the church, God will show the world a new way to live. Through the church, God will demonstrate what life is supposed to truly look like. In Ephesians 3:10 Paul says that now through the church God is going to show his wisdom to the rulers and authorities. You see, God creates the church to be an alternative community that will reflect God and God’s ways to the world. The church will be an unconventional body that centers on Jesus as the true Lord of the world and will practice the ways of Jesus in their living with one another. The church will be the people who live out the new creation in the midst of the old. The church will be the people who are a preview of the coming attractions of what God will one day do with the entire world.
When you go to the movie theater, what do they show before the movie? Movie previews. Previews for upcoming films. It gets on my nerves now that they show nine of them in a row. But one or two isn’t bad. The point of the previews is to entice people to see the movie, capture their imaginations. The church is very similar – we want to capture people’s imagination, entice them to become a part of God’s new creation themselves.
Remember, from the very beginning God has been about the business of the rescue and renewal of creation. Through Jesus, God has brought this about. God’s new creation has broken into our world through Jesus. One day this will be fully realized throughout the earth but until then, the church lives as a foretaste of God’s renewal and rescue. In the NT, the church never exists for itself. It is never meant to retreat behind closed doors and hide away from the rest of the world. No, the church is meant to be for the sake of the word, a light to the world, continuing the mission of Jesus to bring about the healing of all creation.
The NT also shows us a man named Paul – a devout Jew – who didn’t see Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s story. He thought it was heresy and he sought to wipe the Christians out. He worked towards the extermination of the church until one day Paul meets the Resurrected Jesus and he does a complete one-eighty. He becomes convinced that Jesus is indeed the world’s true Lord, the fulfillment of Israel’s story, God’s true King come to bring healing and renewal to the entire creation. And much of the rest of the NT records his missionary journeys, planting churches, teaching the church how to be the church, experiencing persecution, and eventually giving his life for the sake of the gospel of Jesus.
You may be wondering what in the world could get Paul killed – Paul’s message was that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, not Caesar. Allegiance to the Roman Empire was not the going to be the way of the church but rather allegiance to Jesus the Messiah alone. The church was going to be this minority people who centered their lives on Jesus; who took Jesus seriously; who put his ways into practice in the world. No matter what the cost – if it cost them their lives, if friends and family ridiculed them and made fun of them, if they lost their standing in society, they were going to be true to Jesus. Jesus was their King and their entire lives revolved around Jesus and his ways.
Entrance into the church was rigorous as people were baptized into a new way of life centered on Jesus and his teachings. Through that center, the church practiced worship, prayer, discipleship, radical generosity, and sacrificial service. Through these odd and peculiar ways of living they stood out among the world as people of Jesus. They were people living into the new world as God’s people inviting the rest of the world to join along with them. Now one of the really interesting things about the NT is that Jesus never tells his followers that it is their job to take over the world through political power. Jesus never calls the church to impose Christian laws on an unchristian world. When Jesus is resurrected, he doesn’t head down to Rome to assume his seat of power as the head of the government and make it Christian.
Instead Jesus calls the church to live the Christian life; to be the church; to be an alternative body to the ways & means of this world. The church is commissioned by Jesus to show to the world a new way of living, a true way of being human. The church in the NT does this by witness, example, and radical love. Not violent force. Not politics. Not power. Jesus had a lot to say about violent force, politics, and power – and none of it was good. So for the first three hundred years after Jesus, the church lives up to this calling. They live as this set apart community – they take care of one another, serve the poor, they weren’t too concerned with making as much money as possible or acquiring many earthly possessions. They even take Jesus so seriously that they would not serve in the military or participate in any violent acts of force.
What they saw in Jesus they lived out for themselves – they would be willing to die but they would never be willing to kill. They had something worth dying for but never worth killing for. And many of the early Christians did indeed die for their faith. Martyr is the word we use today. But things did not remain this way. This all began to change early into the fourth century when the Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman Empire (the very same empire that put Jesus to death on the cross). The government and the land becoming officially Christian – that sounds like a good thing, right? Except it wasn’t. The church got into bed with government and political power and it started to lose its distinctiveness. The church began to look more like the world than it looked like Jesus. Roman armies began carrying the image of the cross before them in battle as they slaughtered their enemies.
Constantine made it a law that everyone was to become Christian. But get this, as Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, in a place where everyone is a Christian through force and law, no one really becomes Christian. That’s not the way the church was to grow. The church was meant to grow through baptism and witness, not violent force. The church was to live as a gracious and loving invitation to the world, not compel people to come in with swords and laws. You can just look down the list of history at things the church has participated in, the Crusades – men, women, and children slaughtered in the name of Jesus with the cry of “God wills it” carrying through the air, the Inquisition – using torture to rid the church of heretics, witch hunts, slavery – buying, selling, and owning human beings made in God’s image like mere property, it doesn’t take much to see that throughout the years the church has often allowed Jesus to be the figurehead while abandoning most of his ideas along the way.
Well, what does this mean for all of us here this morning? The history of the Christian church is often not very pretty. While the church has done some very good things, the church has also done things that can only make us weep in repentance. The church has much of the time failed to look like Jesus. Why? Because we forgot who we were and what we are about. We forgot our original purpose and God’s design for us. This morning I see it that Jesus is calling us back to being the church as he envisions. I think Jesus is calling us back to following Jesus, practicing the ways of Jesus, living as a set apart people that look like Jesus in the midst of a world that does not. And from what I see in Scripture, that has nothing to do with taking over the government and ruling with political power.
I don’t believe that the church has a Christian mandate to take America back for God whatever that means. I believe we have a Jesus-given mandate to be the church – to practice a different way of living, a different way of doing things, a different way of being in the world. And that way is the way of Jesus – radical love, blessing our enemies, reaching out to serve the poor, eating with sinners, extending grace to those desperately in need of it, inviting the world through our witness to come and know God. J.D. Walt says we must renounce our love for power and be remade in the power of God’s love. The church has a mandate to live in such a way that every single person on the planet is captivated by the love and beauty of Jesus Christ in us.
Of course we can still vote our conscience. Of course we can have opinions about political issues. But we’re clear that getting the right people in office will not be our salvation. We’re clear that we don’t have some divine call to take over the governmental powers to establish a Christian government. Jesus never even comes close to suggesting such a thing. Not once. We know that the hope of the world is not in government but in Jesus Christ and in his church willing to live like Jesus in all that we do.
That means we don’t get too excited over election results nor do we get too depressed over election results. That means we don’t turn into handwringing people consumed by fear if our candidates don’t win. That means that we don’t spend more time watching MSNBC or Fox News daily than we spend reading our Bibles, praying, and serving the world in love daily. That means we don’t get more fired up for our political party and its platform than we do about Jesus, his church, and living as witnesses to the new creation.
I’ve got to be honest with you all this morning – living in such a way will make us odd. It’s not a popular stance. I think Jesus would say, “You’re not called to be popular. You’re called to be the church.” Flannery O’Connor once said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” She was right. We’ll be odd. We’ll be peculiar. We’ll be different. And I think Jesus would say, “Yeah, that’s the point.” In Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe the main character, Ian Bedloe kind of floats through life marching to a different beat as he is described by another character as “unusually Christian.” Can the world say the same thing about us? How would we have to live differently for the world to look at us and call us, “unusually Christian?”
It all starts with going back to Jesus – reading and re-reading the gospels, looking at his life, looking at his words, looking at his ways and saying, “I’m doing this. I’m putting this into practice. And I don’t care what happens to me because of it.” Get a handful of people to say yes to that and the church may just once again become a witness to the good news about Jesus. And that witness may just spread from Folkston to the ends of the earth. Jesus says that we will be known by the kind of fruit we produce. It’s not about calling ourselves Christians. It’s about the fruit of our lives looking like Jesus. What kind of fruit will we bear? What fruit will this church produce in the next ten years, twenty years, fifty years? What fruit will we be known for? It is God’s desire that we will bear the fruit of Jesus and the kingdom of God.
Jesus says that we are called to be a people of salt and light. Through us, the church, may the world come to see the new creation put into effect. May we attract the world, capture the world’s imaginations, show the world that God is healing the entire creation. May the world see God giving out new hearts and new spirits and God’s people living new lives. And most importantly, may the world come to see and know and experience, through us the church, Jesus. In all of his love. In all of his goodness. In all of his beauty. Glory Hallelujah.
Amen.
We’re continuing our series on the One Big Story of the Bible this morning in six acts. Act 1 – creation – God created the world/humanity in God’s image to be his representatives in the world/God called creation supremely good. Act 2 – the Fall – humanity rebels against God and goes their own way. Act 3 – Israel – God chooses to renew and restore the entire creation by blessing all the families of the earth through a particular people called Israel to be a light to the world/who ultimately fail at their task and need saving just like everything else. Act 4 – Jesus – God’s King arrives opening up the kingdom of God and inviting all people to become a part of it. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus comes to put our hearts back to right and creation along with it. And anyone who joins their life to Jesus becomes a participant in the new creation here and now.
Today we are looking at Act 5 – the church. In the book of Acts we find that God’s Spirit arrives with power and people want to join up with the disciples to become a part of what God is doing. Our text shows the people begging Peter to show what they must do next. Peter says, “Repent, change your hearts and lives, re-think everything about your life in light of Jesus, be baptized, and come and join us on this new journey of being God’s people.” That initial gathering resulted in three thousand people being baptized and committing to follow after Jesus.
But that wasn’t all – they didn’t return home/ back to the way things were. Next they devoted themselves to the apostle’s teachings, to community, to eating together, and praying together. They became one – sharing their money as any had need, worshiping together, growing together, becoming a family out of strangers. Jesus commissions this group called the church to be his witnesses out in the world. They are to go and be the church and live out the truth that Jesus really is Lord of the entire world. And the book of Acts records this group of believers living such beautiful lives, their love was so evident, people were so captivated by them, that the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Through the church, God will show the world a new way to live. Through the church, God will demonstrate what life is supposed to truly look like. In Ephesians 3:10 Paul says that now through the church God is going to show his wisdom to the rulers and authorities. You see, God creates the church to be an alternative community that will reflect God and God’s ways to the world. The church will be an unconventional body that centers on Jesus as the true Lord of the world and will practice the ways of Jesus in their living with one another. The church will be the people who live out the new creation in the midst of the old. The church will be the people who are a preview of the coming attractions of what God will one day do with the entire world.
When you go to the movie theater, what do they show before the movie? Movie previews. Previews for upcoming films. It gets on my nerves now that they show nine of them in a row. But one or two isn’t bad. The point of the previews is to entice people to see the movie, capture their imaginations. The church is very similar – we want to capture people’s imagination, entice them to become a part of God’s new creation themselves.
Remember, from the very beginning God has been about the business of the rescue and renewal of creation. Through Jesus, God has brought this about. God’s new creation has broken into our world through Jesus. One day this will be fully realized throughout the earth but until then, the church lives as a foretaste of God’s renewal and rescue. In the NT, the church never exists for itself. It is never meant to retreat behind closed doors and hide away from the rest of the world. No, the church is meant to be for the sake of the word, a light to the world, continuing the mission of Jesus to bring about the healing of all creation.
The NT also shows us a man named Paul – a devout Jew – who didn’t see Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s story. He thought it was heresy and he sought to wipe the Christians out. He worked towards the extermination of the church until one day Paul meets the Resurrected Jesus and he does a complete one-eighty. He becomes convinced that Jesus is indeed the world’s true Lord, the fulfillment of Israel’s story, God’s true King come to bring healing and renewal to the entire creation. And much of the rest of the NT records his missionary journeys, planting churches, teaching the church how to be the church, experiencing persecution, and eventually giving his life for the sake of the gospel of Jesus.
You may be wondering what in the world could get Paul killed – Paul’s message was that Jesus is the true Lord of the world, not Caesar. Allegiance to the Roman Empire was not the going to be the way of the church but rather allegiance to Jesus the Messiah alone. The church was going to be this minority people who centered their lives on Jesus; who took Jesus seriously; who put his ways into practice in the world. No matter what the cost – if it cost them their lives, if friends and family ridiculed them and made fun of them, if they lost their standing in society, they were going to be true to Jesus. Jesus was their King and their entire lives revolved around Jesus and his ways.
Entrance into the church was rigorous as people were baptized into a new way of life centered on Jesus and his teachings. Through that center, the church practiced worship, prayer, discipleship, radical generosity, and sacrificial service. Through these odd and peculiar ways of living they stood out among the world as people of Jesus. They were people living into the new world as God’s people inviting the rest of the world to join along with them. Now one of the really interesting things about the NT is that Jesus never tells his followers that it is their job to take over the world through political power. Jesus never calls the church to impose Christian laws on an unchristian world. When Jesus is resurrected, he doesn’t head down to Rome to assume his seat of power as the head of the government and make it Christian.
Instead Jesus calls the church to live the Christian life; to be the church; to be an alternative body to the ways & means of this world. The church is commissioned by Jesus to show to the world a new way of living, a true way of being human. The church in the NT does this by witness, example, and radical love. Not violent force. Not politics. Not power. Jesus had a lot to say about violent force, politics, and power – and none of it was good. So for the first three hundred years after Jesus, the church lives up to this calling. They live as this set apart community – they take care of one another, serve the poor, they weren’t too concerned with making as much money as possible or acquiring many earthly possessions. They even take Jesus so seriously that they would not serve in the military or participate in any violent acts of force.
What they saw in Jesus they lived out for themselves – they would be willing to die but they would never be willing to kill. They had something worth dying for but never worth killing for. And many of the early Christians did indeed die for their faith. Martyr is the word we use today. But things did not remain this way. This all began to change early into the fourth century when the Roman Emperor Constantine declared Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman Empire (the very same empire that put Jesus to death on the cross). The government and the land becoming officially Christian – that sounds like a good thing, right? Except it wasn’t. The church got into bed with government and political power and it started to lose its distinctiveness. The church began to look more like the world than it looked like Jesus. Roman armies began carrying the image of the cross before them in battle as they slaughtered their enemies.
Constantine made it a law that everyone was to become Christian. But get this, as Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard said, in a place where everyone is a Christian through force and law, no one really becomes Christian. That’s not the way the church was to grow. The church was meant to grow through baptism and witness, not violent force. The church was to live as a gracious and loving invitation to the world, not compel people to come in with swords and laws. You can just look down the list of history at things the church has participated in, the Crusades – men, women, and children slaughtered in the name of Jesus with the cry of “God wills it” carrying through the air, the Inquisition – using torture to rid the church of heretics, witch hunts, slavery – buying, selling, and owning human beings made in God’s image like mere property, it doesn’t take much to see that throughout the years the church has often allowed Jesus to be the figurehead while abandoning most of his ideas along the way.
Well, what does this mean for all of us here this morning? The history of the Christian church is often not very pretty. While the church has done some very good things, the church has also done things that can only make us weep in repentance. The church has much of the time failed to look like Jesus. Why? Because we forgot who we were and what we are about. We forgot our original purpose and God’s design for us. This morning I see it that Jesus is calling us back to being the church as he envisions. I think Jesus is calling us back to following Jesus, practicing the ways of Jesus, living as a set apart people that look like Jesus in the midst of a world that does not. And from what I see in Scripture, that has nothing to do with taking over the government and ruling with political power.
I don’t believe that the church has a Christian mandate to take America back for God whatever that means. I believe we have a Jesus-given mandate to be the church – to practice a different way of living, a different way of doing things, a different way of being in the world. And that way is the way of Jesus – radical love, blessing our enemies, reaching out to serve the poor, eating with sinners, extending grace to those desperately in need of it, inviting the world through our witness to come and know God. J.D. Walt says we must renounce our love for power and be remade in the power of God’s love. The church has a mandate to live in such a way that every single person on the planet is captivated by the love and beauty of Jesus Christ in us.
Of course we can still vote our conscience. Of course we can have opinions about political issues. But we’re clear that getting the right people in office will not be our salvation. We’re clear that we don’t have some divine call to take over the governmental powers to establish a Christian government. Jesus never even comes close to suggesting such a thing. Not once. We know that the hope of the world is not in government but in Jesus Christ and in his church willing to live like Jesus in all that we do.
That means we don’t get too excited over election results nor do we get too depressed over election results. That means we don’t turn into handwringing people consumed by fear if our candidates don’t win. That means that we don’t spend more time watching MSNBC or Fox News daily than we spend reading our Bibles, praying, and serving the world in love daily. That means we don’t get more fired up for our political party and its platform than we do about Jesus, his church, and living as witnesses to the new creation.
I’ve got to be honest with you all this morning – living in such a way will make us odd. It’s not a popular stance. I think Jesus would say, “You’re not called to be popular. You’re called to be the church.” Flannery O’Connor once said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” She was right. We’ll be odd. We’ll be peculiar. We’ll be different. And I think Jesus would say, “Yeah, that’s the point.” In Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe the main character, Ian Bedloe kind of floats through life marching to a different beat as he is described by another character as “unusually Christian.” Can the world say the same thing about us? How would we have to live differently for the world to look at us and call us, “unusually Christian?”
It all starts with going back to Jesus – reading and re-reading the gospels, looking at his life, looking at his words, looking at his ways and saying, “I’m doing this. I’m putting this into practice. And I don’t care what happens to me because of it.” Get a handful of people to say yes to that and the church may just once again become a witness to the good news about Jesus. And that witness may just spread from Folkston to the ends of the earth. Jesus says that we will be known by the kind of fruit we produce. It’s not about calling ourselves Christians. It’s about the fruit of our lives looking like Jesus. What kind of fruit will we bear? What fruit will this church produce in the next ten years, twenty years, fifty years? What fruit will we be known for? It is God’s desire that we will bear the fruit of Jesus and the kingdom of God.
Jesus says that we are called to be a people of salt and light. Through us, the church, may the world come to see the new creation put into effect. May we attract the world, capture the world’s imaginations, show the world that God is healing the entire creation. May the world see God giving out new hearts and new spirits and God’s people living new lives. And most importantly, may the world come to see and know and experience, through us the church, Jesus. In all of his love. In all of his goodness. In all of his beauty. Glory Hallelujah.
Amen.