Easter 4A - No Man is an Island

The reading from Acts gives us an amazing example of what the early Church was like. A short time after the Ascension of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, the Church is growing by leaps and bounds. St. Peter has been preaching and people have been converting on the spot.

For us Christians, this does not seem all that radical, but it really was. Imagine encountering a man preaching a new sect of your religion on a street corner, being cut to the heart by the message, and then giving up everything to join this preacher’s small group. That was the early Christians did – and that is what the Truth can do when it is preached. The people converting after hearing St. Peter come to live together in a community after having sold off everything they had, and giving the proceeds to the community to give equally to those in need.

The people who are gathered together in this community are known to hold to the apostle’s teaching and fellowship and to continue in the breaking of the bread and in the prayer. These words may ring a bell as we say them every time we baptize someone and renew our own baptismal vows.

The apostle’s “teaching and fellowship” was how these early Christians learned about Jesus and how to live as a Christian. As Americans who are culturally steeped in a certain type of Protestantism we often times think of the Church being built around the Bible. Sometimes we talk as if the Bible simply dropped from the sky after the Ascension of Jesus with a sticky note on it that said “run the church by this book!” Here we see that the Church in its earliest days molded itself around the authority given to the Apostles as Bishops of the church and the Holy Tradition they passed on to the followers and embodied in their acts.

We also see that they held together by the breaking of bread. Once again I think it’s easy to hear these words to mean table fellowship of shared meals. However, when the Book of Acts is read in the context as the second part of St. Luke Gospel like he tells us in the first chapter of the book, the term breaking of the bread points back to the Eucharist the Christ instituted. The early church gathered frequently as a community to meet the risen Christ in the Eucharist.

The prayers that are mentioned seem to mean both daily prayer amongst themselves and prayers at the Temple. At this early date, the Christians did not see themselves as a part of a new religion, but instead a fulfilled Judaism. As such they still went to the magnificent Temple in Jerusalem to join with their Jewish brethren in prayers.

What I think is really the most striking part of this section of Acts is the overt attention paid to the communal aspect of the early Church. People did not accept Jesus and then go on their merry was as individual followers of Christ. Following Christ meant joining a community and learning to live with that community as the holy Body of Christ.

The whole book of Acts points to this understanding of Christianity: it is a communal religion, not simply a belief held by an individual. To be a follower of Christ means to give yourself to others. It means to consult with others and accept their wisdom. It means to understand God, and how His image is in us, we need to look at the whole.

One the great Caroline Divines, John Donne, a priest and poet of the Church of England in the 1600’s wrote about this communal nature of man. “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” (Meditation XVII)

Donne was speaking of humanity in general, but this outlook on humanity was formed by a man that saw all things as a Catholic Christian. He saw the inter-connectedness of humanity to be part of the Divine ordering of the world.

This understanding needs to be in operation for a modern Episcopal parish church to function. We are a community that emphasizes communal knowledge and the authority of tradition handed down to us. In order for us to grow into this model we need to talk to each other, listen to each other, teach each other and learn from each other.

As the supervisor of Youth Ministry and Christian Education I have seen a lot of this in action. Mother Ede and I get paid to be teachers, and we do that. We teach confirmation, book studies and special one-off presentations for Feasts and Fasts. What is much more impressive however, is when people who don’t have “teaching” in their job description feel called to it volunteer to do it. And at Nativity, this happens frequently.

When I came here last summer, one of my first challenges was to transition the Christian Education model over to a committee model that valued and utilized the talents and efforts our all our members. I called a church wide meeting in August, and crossed my fingers that someone would show up. The words “Ye of little faith!” came into my head as person after person came to that meeting to discuss our Godly Play programs. A month later when I began to look for teachers I was nervous, thinking back to the three overworked people who ran Sunday School at my home parish back in Boston. I ended up with more teachers than students!

This community always steps up to teach, to lead and to give. The numerous people who stepped up to the plate two weeks ago to give supplies and drive them up to the tornado ravaged areas of our state are just the most recent example of how this church understands this communal instinct in the parish and in the world.

So often preachers stands up and find themselves saying “There is something wrong with this church, this country, this denomination etc etc. I want to take this opportunity to say there is something right with this church. This parish knows deep down that serving others and giving of your time, talent and treasure are essential parts of Christian life. When the organ broke, it wasn’t Debbie’s problem, it was everyone’s problem and the money was raised by everyone. When the vestry decided we needed a bell to complete the architecture of this church, boom, there is a bell. When I asked for Sunday School teachers, so many people volunteered. Even people that had already paid their dues and raised several teenagers were willing to step in and teach. There is something right at Nativity.

I do want to suggest that there is a growing edge for us here a Nativity too. We are long past the notion of children are to be seen not heard, but we are still not quite sure what to do with them. There are two things I think we, and all Christians in the West, need to work on. The first part is encouraging responsibility and ownership in our youth. We used to live in a society that was overtly Christian, and we could assume that the schools and the nation would instill Christianity in our children. It no longer does, and we can’t assume it will again anytime soon. We need to pick up the slack left by the void in our society and spend extra time encouraging our youth to always think as Christians with an obligation to God and His Church first. The second thing we need to do is to listen more to them. If you want to know what will attract a young adult to your church, ask them directly!

The next time you get to talking to a young person here at church, ask them what they like and don’t like about the church. Ask them what is important about this community. Then take these answers and observations and share them with the rest of the church, and encourage the young person to do so too. Pretty soon these ideas will circulate in our community and we all together, will learn a little more about what it means to follow God.