Hanging onto the Best Things (Acts 2:42-47)

All who believed were together and had all things in common, the writer of Acts says. They’d sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent time together in the temple, they broke break together at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Now, it may very well be that this earliest description of the church is nostalgic, an idealized account of something that never really existed in quite the mist-enshrouded way everybody liked to remember it, except in the imaginations of those who longed for a church that only seemed possible in simpler times.

But so what? So what if we’re getting a sepia-toned picture of an idealized past? Because the “ideal” is precisely what I’m after. If the question is “What should the church be?” it seems plausible to go back to the earliest idealized accounts of what the church was supposed to look like.

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Sermon text: [ web][1] | doc

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