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"Marks of the Church" by Rev. Charles Hoffman

April 21, 2002 Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 2:42-47 I Peter 2:19-25

As with some of you, I've spent my entire life in and around the church. In our home you went to Sunday school and worship on Sunday morning and to another service on Sunday evening. Prayer meeting was on Wednesday evening and youth group on Friday evening. I guess they thought that if they could keep us at the church we would stay out of trouble.

I met a woman when I first moved to California who spent a lot of time at the church. She worked with the youth, and at the time she had a couple of older daughters and a younger son. She spent long hours at the church and often had her little boy with her. One time someone asked the boy where he lived and he said, "At the church."

Well, I've lived here my whole life. So I find it interesting to read stories about how it was in the early days of the church, in the time immediately following Easter. Each of our lessons for the day addresses this subject. The reading from Acts 2 actually takes us to the Day of Pentecost, a day sometimes referred to as the birthday of the church. The setting is Jerusalem where Saint Peter has just preached his heart out and where three thousand people have been added to the church roll.

Can you imagine that? Three thousand! By the way, let me tell you something about our own church membership. Each year the pastors are expected to set goals for the year to follow. Melanie sets her goals and I set mine. And then we set some shared goals. This year we decided that we'd like to aim for a 5% increase in membership and a 5% increase in worship attendance. Now I have to tell you that math was never Melanie's favorite subject. She made a first draft of the goals and put down a 25% increase, which would be quite wonderful but perhaps a little on the optimistic side. So I talked her into the 5% goal.

Well, it just so happens that if we grow by 5% this year our membership will finally reach 1,000. And if we grow by 5% in worship attendance our average will reach 500.

Now although we will be celebrating Pentecost in a few weeks, I think it would be unreasonable to expect 3,000 new members. So this is where you come in. In two ways: (1) keep up your excellent record of attendance and (2) bring a friend with you.

Someone once said that evangelism is simply one beggar telling another beggar where to find food. That may be a little crass, but the point is that if the church nourishes you spiritually then be alert to opportunities for sharing it with others.

Rapid growth was a mark of the early church. And it says in our text that "all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved" (Acts 2:44-47).

Earlier in the chapter it says that those new Christians "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (Acts 2:42).

Generous sharing, caring for those with special needs, joyful table fellowship, praising God in a spirit of accord: these were marks of that early Christian community. It was the honeymoon period of the church.

But things inevitably changed. The music faded and in time, although the same songs of praise were sung, they were sung with more authenticity. Why do I say that? I say that because in time reality set in and the church's short-lived utopia had to come to terms with that reality.

Do you remember the story of Chippie the parakeet? Poor Chippie, he used to sing with the best of them. He was living on easy street in a beautiful setting with a loving owner who gave him lots of tender love and care. So Chippie had lots to sing about.

But sadly things changed for Chippie. It happened one day when his owner decided to clean his birdcage with a vacuum cleaner. Just as she removed the hose attachments and stuck the hose in the cage, the telephone rang. And as she looked away to answer the phone the hose got turned on Chippie. I think you can guess what happened.

Chippie's mistress acted quickly, turned off the vacuum, and opened the bag. She found the bird still alive, covered with soot and dust, and not a little stunned. Quickly she took him to the bathroom, turned on the faucet and held him under the water. And when she saw that the poor little fellow was shivering with cold she got out a hair dryer to warm him up.

Well, you might say that she overreacted. And as for poor Chippie, he never knew what hit him. A few days after the event someone called to see how the old bird was doing. "Well," said his owner, "Chippie doesn't sing much anymore – he just sit and stares."

Sometimes life will do that to you. Sometimes life will do that to communities of people. And in fact that is what happened to that once idyllic First Church of Jerusalem.

You see, it wasn't long until people started getting in trouble for their faith. It wasn't long until one of their members, a man named Stephen, became the first of a long line of martyrs for the faith. It wasn't long until that blissful little community of believers faced daily hardships due to the simple fact that they were followers of Jesus.

It's so easy to be a Christian in America. We forget that in many parts of the world it is not this way. We even forget that in many parts of the world today it is very costly to be a Christian, that many people still pay a heavy toll for their allegiance to Christ. Talk to a Coptic Christian in Egypt or to an African Methodist Episcopal Christian in northern Nigeria or to a member of the underground church in Communist China. In each of these places you will find that there is a price to be paid if you decide to follow in the faith of Christ.

I've read that there are between one and three thousand Christians in Afghanistan. There are 48,000 mosques; there are no churches. In 1973 the former King Mohammed Zahir Shah bulldozed the only church in the country, a building in Kabul for expatriates.

Talk to Christians in Israel. I have, and I know that it isn't easy. And this is true not only for those who have moved there from other parts of the world but also for those who have lived there for centuries.

Beit Jala is a village in the suburbs of Bethlehem. There are over forty Christian churches in the area: Coptic, Ethiopian, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Armenian, Orthodox, Greek Orthodox and others. Eighty percent of Beit Jala is Christian.

But Beit Jala is caught up in an insanity that victimizes Palestinians and Israelis alike. It is a disgusting human story, a story of holocaust and a homeland, of eviction and possession, of dispossession and injustice, of intolerance and paranoia, of exploitation and revenge, of guilt and of innocence and of long and destructive memories that block all paths to peace.

To be a Christian in Beit Jala is difficult, says Gary Burge of Wheaton University. He asks the question. "If Christians protest against the young Palestinian snipers who fire their rifles at the Israeli settlement of Gilo – fire that is answered by shelling that reduces Palestinian homes to rubble – will they be perceived as unfaithful to the resistance against Israeli occupation?"

"What discernment it takes to be a Christian in Beit Jala today!" he says. Beit Jala has been under siege for months. Not so strange really, not if you consider the fact that the church in Palestine has known only three hundred years of freedom in its two thousand year history.

Now I want us to come back to the text from the New Testament letter known as I Peter. That letter is written to a church under persecution. The Pentecostal party is now a distant memory and the cold reality is that to be a Christian is to suffer. The text makes it clear that "Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps."

That doesn't make much sense to us. It sounds like words for another time and another place. We take our cues from the American dream. We live under entitlements and assurances of happiness. It reminds me of that question someone once asked: "If you were accused of being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict you?"

Why suffer? What does this mean? Does it mean that we should go out looking for trouble? Does it mean that we should just lie down and take it? No, it doesn't mean any of those things. What it does mean is that if you live in the light of the gospel you will suffer. And worse than all is that you will suffer unjustly. You won't deserve it. Why? Because you will have to take the flak. Anytime someone stands up for the truth of Christ there will be a negative reaction. Mark it down. The one who speaks and lives truth will pay a price (see Bruce Chilton in The Living Pulpit, A/J '95, p. 24).

That's exactly what the prophets of the Bible did and that's exactly what Jesus did. The truth will indeed set people free. But in most cases it will first make them very uncomfortable. It can make them angry, even violent, and rather than coming to terms with the truth they attack the messenger.

Preachers face this problem all the time. Our problem is that we want people to like us. So there is always the temptation to water things down, to make the truth palatable, to avoid controversy. I saw a cartoon that showed a preacher standing in his pulpit. He was wearing a suit of armor. And the caption said, "Yes, I admit that the sermon I will be preaching today is a little controversial." I'm afraid that more often than not preachers would be more appropriately pictured as wearing rose-tinted glasses.

The facts are that it's easy to pray for peace; it's hard to work for it. It's easy to decry poverty; it's hard to raise funds, gather supplies, face long hours of waiting at the border in order to haul relief to the poor.

It's easy to denounce violence in all its forms; it's risky to probe the question why? But if you don't ask the question as to why Palestinian boys throw rocks at tourist buses you may one day have to ask the question as to why young men and women throw their dynamited bodies at innocent Israelis.

To be the church, to emulate Jesus is to know suffering. It is to make oneself vulnerable to what the Bible calls the forces of darkness. "And this is the judgment," says Jesus, "that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed" (John 3:19-20).

We have all resisted the light at one time or another. And to some extent we still do resist it. But the light is our only hope. Truth is all we have. And the church is called to speak it and to live it.

G.K. Chesterton once said that "the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

Listen to a letter from a young Christian named Ihab Lulas. His home is Beit Jala, the Palestinian village near Bethlehem.

"Even the birds have gone," my mother told me this morning. Another dawn breaks in Beit Jala and we're still awake and the Israeli tanks and helicopters are preventing the sun from shining. This morning, we couldn't hear the chirping of the birds or the bells of the churches. Just the sound of the. . . killing machine and the crying of our mothers and tears of our men. They killed the boy. Musa was 19. . . He wasn't carrying any weapon. His only crime was that he was born Palestinian and his mistake was that he sat down to watch television with his family. The. . . bullets came through the window of his home and struck him in the chest, killing him and leaving his family in terrible mourning. . . For anyone who doesn't know, this is what is happening in this holy land, especially here in blessed Bethlehem, in the place where Jesus was born. . . I don't know if God is watching us now. I don't know what Jesus would have said to this innocent boy who bled to death in the place where he was born. I don't know what the world is seeing or why it is waiting. . . Pray to God to watch over me and my family. Ihab. Palestine.

The letter was dated October 28, 2001 and was quoted in the Haaretz Daily News).

Yes, I know that it would be all too easy to imagine the same letter coming from a young Israeli Jew. And this of course is the tragedy. The young men and women of two peoples growing up in a climate committed to violence and therefore bereft of hope.

Are we open to the truth no matter where it may take us? Are we willing to claim it? To risk suffering for it? Are we willing to take the chance of truly being the church? May God help us. Amen.