Peace, Love, & Understanding

Intro (with music): Peace, Love, and Understanding.

Steve Dehner: Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Steve Dehner. Starting this week, new episodes of Peace, Love, and Understanding will drop every two weeks.

Last episode, I portrayed church as a movie, and scripture as the book that it was supposedly based on, but not very faithfully. I promised that we would look today at the book. But first, I want to talk a little bit about how we tend to read this book. This can happen with any sort of reading in which we interpret what we read more in light of our own experience, biases, and presuppositions, than how the actual text reflects the intention of the author, and the cultural context in which it was written, and how it was originally read. We do this with scripture quite famously, and quite consistently. You do it when you read it. I do it when I read it. Let me use just one example. When we are reading the New Testament, we tend to interpret certain events or descriptions in light of our contemporary personal experience. When we read, for example, about communion, also known as the Lord's Supper, the Lord's table, the Eucharist -- whatever term you use to describe this -- we tend to see in the story of Jesus and the Last Supper, or in Paul's description of the Lord's Supper in First Corinthians chapter 11, the way in which we happen to practice it. So when Jesus talks about the bread, we see wafers, we see motzahs, soda, crackers, or oyster crackers. We see this hard tack that looks like it was retrieved from a fallout shelter. When Jesus speaks of the wine, we see a ceremonial goblet like the one we use in church, or we see little plastic cups. We see grape juice if we attended a church in which somebody determined in the 1800s that we should not be drinking actual wine. We see it administered by somebody who is standing in for Jesus -- a minister, a priest, a pastor. We see it as ceremonial.

But the proper reading is one in which the event is as it's described, not as we imprint our own experience onto it. It is the event as it happened, according to an appropriate understanding of the culture in which it took place. And it's not adorned with the figments of our imagination, the things that we fill in from our practices and traditions and theology. What happened at the Last Supper is that they were having a Passover meal. It was a memorial meal. But it was not merely ceremonial. They were eating a real meal together. The mood at that meal was solemn, it's true. But when the first Christians took up the practice of obeying Jesus in remembering his sacrifice when they ate together, they were joyful meals taken communally on Sunday, which they called the Lord's day because he rose on the first day of the week. They were times of joy, and love. And they were meals, they were not ceremonies. There were no special cups, there were no special kinds of bread. There wasn't even a special time other than a time of remembrance, that the bread they were eating represented Jesus body, and that the wine they were drinking represented his blood. There was no person officiating or administering it, or serving it to others. There was nobody authorized to do this. When you have friends over, do you require that serving the food be done by those with a master's degree or higher? No. It was a shared meal.

Now, I mentioned this because I want us to develop a practice in which we strip away our presuppositions and our modern experience and our modern mindset, as far as we can, so that we can see what's actually in the text. This is how we avoid reading into it, or missing what's there.

I promised that we will look at some parts of the New Testament relevant to the movie about church that I titled “Sunday Sunday.” I want to point out a few things first. First, we might notice how Jesus gathered people around him. For one thing, it wasn't a meeting. He was doing what he did to serve people. Those things that he did were teaching, healing, encouraging, listening, demonstrating His power and his love and His compassion. He made blind people see. He cured people suffering from leprosy and other diseases. He even raised people up from the dead. These things attracted people around him. And the gatherings were nothing more than many, many people wanting to see Jesus, listen to Jesus, and learn from him. And many, many came in expectation of receiving from his love and compassion, that is healing, forgiveness, a restoration of their relationship with God. That's what brought people to him, not a meeting, not a place, not a building.

When we look at these gatherings, we notice first of all that most of them are outdoors. It's an interesting side note that almost everything good and important that happens in the Bible happens outdoors. Most of it happens outdoors. There's a lot less that happens indoors. And of those things that happen indoors, many of them are very bad. Whenever we see confrontations between prophets and kings, or wicked kings at work, it's in their palaces, their places of rule. Moses encountering Pharaoh, Saul raging in his palace, Daniel before Nebuchadnezzar, John in prison, Jesus before Caiaphas, and Pilate, and Herod. But so many of the great things that God did, and the really important things that he did, were not indoors. They were outdoors. Just an observation.

Then, when we come to Jesus, most of his public life took place outdoors, the places where he gathered people, the places where he met people, the places where he said and did really significant things, were up on a mountain, in the streets, on rural roads, in the temple courts, on the lake shore, in a boat, in the Garden of Gethsemane, at the pool of Bethesda, at Jacob's well in Sychar -- and occasionally indoors: in a friend's house, like Peter’s, or Mary and Martha's in Bethany, or in the synagogues, or other homes where he accepted invitations, like Simon the leper’s. I'm not trying to say that these sort of gatherings represent church gatherings, but they do represent the type of gatherings that Jesus was a part of. He ate meals with people. He walked many miles with people. He went out on the lake in a fishing boat with people. He visited them in their homes, he talked to crowds in the open air parts of the temple in Jerusalem. A lot of the time, he had nowhere to stay and had to sleep outdoors. That's what was happening in Jerusalem when they were sleeping in the Garden of Gethsemane.

The second thing I want to look at is how and where the disciples met. After Jesus rose and ascended to heaven, the disciples began to make a habit of gathering on the first day of the week, Sunday, because that is the day that Jesus rose. It wasn't a replacement for the Saturday Sabbath or in opposition to it, or an alternative to it. But it was the meeting of the church, the ecclesia. When I say ecclesia, I'm just using the Greek word that the New Testament uses, it simply means a gathering, an assembly of people. But this meeting on Sunday was a gathering of the ecclesia that is small groups of people who believed in and follow Jesus. This meeting together was very important. And it eventually became universal among the Jewish and Gentile believers alike.

At its core, the Sunday gathering was meant to be a way of obeying Jesus and the apostles when they said we should come together regularly, to eat together, visit together, worship together, love each other, listen to each other, share life together, and share each other's gifts. When we look at the Book of Acts, we notice that at the very beginning, the day of Pentecost, there were about 120 people gathered in a house, and the miracle of the descent and the filling of the Holy Spirit came and they immediately emptied out into the streets.

When we look at the meetings that Christians were having, throughout the Book of Acts, we noticed that they were never tied to a single building. They were in people's homes, and they were in the open air sections like Solomon's porch in the temple, they were in the streets. And there's only a few exceptions to that. One would be when Paul was in Ephesus for two years, and he was using an academic building to teach in after he had to depart the synagogue. They were using a lecture hall in the heat of the afternoon after the people who normally used it we're done with it because of the heat.
The normal place for people to meet was in people's homes.

It's true that what we're seeing in the New Testament is descriptive rather than prescriptive. I mean by that, that very little of that is saying, ‘This is how we must be done.’ Instead, it's saying, ‘This is how it was done by the first believers.’ And for that reason, I'm not suggesting that it has been commanded to us to do it in this way. However, I do want to make these observations.

+I want to point out that there's a lot of stuff we do that wasn't done. And I think that we need to know whether there was a very good reason for not doing these things. For example, the earliest believers were all Jewish, and they were all used to attending Sabbath services at their local synagogue. The synagogue as an institution arose during the time of the Babylonian exile, which ended in 538 BCE. So this is five centuries earlier. It really developed as a place for meeting in Babylonia, and then the wider diaspora after the temple had been destroyed when the local Jewish communities needed a new focal point and wanted a place to meet. An interesting side note, during the exile, Ezekiel mentions twice the elders of Israel meeting together, where his house chapters eight and 20, if the first Christians had been so inclined, or if they'd felt that it was important to have a building, and weekly meetings in that building, or anything like a synagogue, they certainly had a model for it. And they certainly did not follow that model at all. In a synagogue had a lot of features that are modern churches also have regular orderly services, and floor plan that had a lot to do with dictating the manner of the meetings. synagogue meetings, are never spoken of against in Scripture that I'm aware of. In the New Testament, everybody goes to the synagogue, Jesus, the disciples, the religious leaders, nothing wrong with the synagogue. However, a lot of people did not feel welcome in the synagogue. Those would be the outcasts that Jesus loved to spend his time with the sinners. They couldn't just saunter into a synagogue on Saturday, they were outside the community life of the synagogue. Therefore, they were outside the community life of Judaism as it was practiced during the era of the Second Temple.

+The first Christians opted for not having a building. Instead, they met in each other's homes. And because they met in each other's homes, that meant that they did not have a sanctuary, they did not have a special place for meeting that was considered holy, or sanctified or set apart for a special purpose. They did not have any articles or furniture, or an arrangement of furniture or seating that was suited to the kind of meeting they were having. They did not have an altar, and they would not have had a pulpit, they would have met the way that Jesus and the 12 met when they were having their last supper. If you're thinking Da Vinci's painting, you can just set that aside, there would have been little to no furniture, unless the owner was wealthy. They would have been reclined, they would have been eating a meal together. The table was a straw mat, or an animal skin laid on the floor. And the house would have looked very different than any kind of building, or any use of a building, that would arise in the centuries to come. Since they were meeting in each other's homes, in all likelihood, they were fairly small groups.

Now, why did they gather this way, as opposed to say, putting something together that approximated the local synagogue?

+I think first of all, there was the example of how Jesus and his disciples met during His earthly ministry.

+They were poor.

+They were informal, and they were spontaneous.

Now there were pragmatic reasons for meeting the way that they did Jesus and the Twelve were itinerant, they traveled around they had no fixed homes at all. They relied on people's hospitality. And when the numbers of people who came out to see Jesus grew large, by necessity, they had to find outdoor locations together. So it makes sense that after Pentecost, the meeting somewhat resembled the kind of meetings that they had had when Jesus was still with them.

But I think we will also see that there were additional reasons for not seeking out something like the synagogue.

+Very shortly after Pentecost, there was a conflict within the Jerusalem church between those who spoke Greek and Aramaic, who called themselves Hebrews, and those who only spoke Greek, who we call Hellenists. The Hellenists very commonly were made to feel of a lesser stature or station within Judaism than the Aramaic speaking Jews. And the charitable distribution of food became very important when large numbers of people were congregating in and around Jerusalem, as new members of the Christian ecclesia. The apostles determined that seven men among the Hellenists be put in charge of food distribution to ensure that the distribution was fair among the two groups. Among those chosen was a man named Stephen. Stephen was interesting because he expressed an attitude that was clearly distinct from the apostles regarding the temple. And yet, Luke writes about him very positively. Even though there is not any anti-temple sentiment in Luke's writing, he has only glowing approval of Stephen. He calls him, ‘a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit.’ And later, ‘a man full of faith and power,’ and full of wisdom. Stephen was accused of blasphemy by the religious establishment and when he gave his testimony before the Sanhedrin, he didn't exactly exonerate himself. He concluded with a scathing rebuke of the ruling council, and he did not acquit himself of speaking against the temple when he said this:

“However, the Most High does not dwell in temples made with hands. As the Prophet says,
Heaven is my throne,
and earth is my footstool,
what house will you build for me, says the Lord,
or what is the place of my rest?
Has my hand not made all these things?”

This whole time, the apostles were meeting daily in the temple. Of course, Stephen was executed, and the man at whose feet the executioners laid their cloaks was Saul of Tarsus. Years later, as Paul the Apostle, he would echo Stephen’s sentiments about the temple in his famous address to the Areopagus in Athens, saying, “God, who made the world and everything in it, since he is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands.” That's Acts 17:24. Now, in making these statements about the temple, that Stephen made, and Paul made, there's clearly the idea that the notion of one building dedicated to the worship of God that's above every other place, is disputed by God Himself. God made everything and he's everywhere. And where his spirit is, he may be worshiped -- and his spirit is everywhere. In later years, the church would come back with the idea of a sanctified building, a house of God, but the statements that I've just given you seriously question that notion.

+In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives further reason for transcending the single man-made temple. The people in whom God's Spirit lives are the temple. Paul says, “You are the temple of the living God, as God has said,
‘I will dwell in them and walk among them,
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.’”

If God dwells within people, then people are His temple. Paul, Peter, and the author of Hebrews all indicate that the ecclesia constitutes the house and the temple of God -- a house that is under construction. Peter says, “You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. That's First Peter 2:5. And Paul says in Ephesians, chapter two: “Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fitted together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” I would contend that another reason that the early Christians never thought about constructing a building to meet in or renting or buying such a building was that they were taught and believed that they the people were the temple, the house, the building of God. And that was so much greater and awesome a reality compared to the temple, made with human hands, and made out of stone.

The other reason they would not have contemplated such a move as using a building, a special building, is that they knew they were a pilgrim people. They were staying here on the earth for a very short while, because the Kingdom of God was imminent, was coming soon. There was a reason, and this was it, for not settling in, not getting comfortable, and not making themselves at home in this world.

So we can see that the disciples did not use or buy or erect buildings for meeting. instead, they met in each other's homes, we can see that. That is because:

One, they followed the example of Jesus's earthly ministry.

Two, they understood themselves to be God's house.

Three, they understood themselves to be a pilgrim people, not long for this world in expectation of Christ's imminent return and the establishment of His kingdom.

And four -- I’ll add this: when they had money, they used it to feed people who otherwise would have gone hungry.

I understand that, merely outlining this as the situation of the first Christians does not settle for modern day Christians whether or not it's appropriate to own property, to buy, rent, or construct buildings, or to make those buildings the physical center of the Christian life for everybody who attends services there. But I would like to propose that while much of what we read in the New Testament is descriptive, rather than prescriptive, it nevertheless has in it a tremendous amount of wisdom about the kind of community that grew up around the advent of Jesus and His message.

Let's think about that for a moment.

Because if there is wisdom in it that transcends culture and time and place, then it may have much to teach us about how we can restore and maintain authentic Christian community in our own day. So let me just throw out a few things for us to consider in terms of the wisdom of meeting in houses instead of buildings.

The first is traveling light: buildings and property are voracious devourers of money, time, labor, and attention.

Two, they can also be the source of conflict, pride, and the misappropriation of priorities.

Three, homes provide for smaller, more intimate groups, and having smaller, more intimate meetings.

Four, homes makes sense for the type of meetings we do see in the New Testament. We'll be getting to that later.

Five, hospitality is a very core value and vital practice throughout the scriptures, throughout the Hebrew Bible, throughout the Greek Bible. House church allows everyone to offer and enjoy hospitality.

Finally, if the most important values in our faith are things such as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and self control -- those are the fruits of the Spirit -- and things like generosity, mercy, grace, forgiveness, gentleness, and compassion, then I would contend that meetings with dozens, or hundreds, or even 1000s of people in a building that makes it possible for us to only know a handful of those people and maybe know well a very few -- and few, if any, intimately. Those kinds of gatherings aren't really conducive to that kind of community. It is conducive to a kind of superficial friendliness, and everybody putting on their best face for a Sunday morning meeting, and few people really getting to know each other deeply or being able to present themselves in a genuine and authentic and transparent way. If big meetings in big buildings are not conducive to that, if rooms arranged like a classroom, all facing one direction and toward one person are not conducive to that, then perhaps there's more wisdom than we realized in the way that the first Christians met.

Our movie needs a different setting, I think.

Outro (with music): Peace, Love and Understanding.

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