Fourth Sunday of Easter

On the Sundays during the great 50 days of Easter, a lesson from Acts of the Apostles takes the place of our usual Old Testament lesson. I’ve mentioned the great 50 days several times since Easter and some of you have asked me about it. In the Episcopal Church we follow the ancient tradition of observing Easter from the Sunday of the Resurrection through the Feast of Pentecost – thus 50 days of Easter. That’s why we are still wearing white and will continue to wear it until we switch to red on Pentecost. When the stores put the candy eggs and marshmallow peeps on the discount shelf on Easter Monday, we really are just getting started. Today is day 22. It’s like the 12 days of Christmas, only four times as much fun.
Acts of the Apostles is almost certainly a second book created by the author of the Gospel According to Luke. That could have come about in a number of ways. Some New Testament scholars think the two books are about the same age – written in the year 85. That’s about 50 years after Jesus’ death and a generation or two after Paul’s earliest letters. If that is true, the answer to the question why two books could be as simple as the author coming to the end of one reasonably sized papyrus scroll and continuing his story on a second one. If that’s how it happened, then Luke-Acts is unique among New Testament books. It is something more than simply a gospel – a book about the life and ministry of Jesus. It could also be true that the author set out deliberately to create two different works: one a gospel, the other a narrative about the early church with the apostle Paul as its main character. And some scholars argue that this second book is not as old as the gospel – that it was written in the early first century, around the year 110.
If Acts was intended as a single work, why are the two books separated in the New Testament canon? One explanation for that is similar to the positioning of Matthew first in the order of the gospels, even though Mark was the earliest. The content of Matthew’s gospel is a bridge between Israel and Jesus. Acts is the bridge between Jesus and the apostle Paul; thus its placement between the fourth gospel and Paul’s letters in the New Testament.
Paul’s genius is shown first in transforming the paradox of a crucified Messiah into the triumph of the cross – a sacrifice that ultimately became a victory over death. But he took that a step further and made Jesus, with his firm roots in Jewish tradition, intelligible to the gentile community. Paul did that so well, that the church, which began as a subgroup of the synagogue community ultimately became a gentile institution. It makes sense that Luke identifies with Paul and idealizes him. Luke, whoever he actually was, was undoubtedly a gentile and his gospel is directed toward a gentile audience, as was Paul’s ministry. One way of describing the central idea of Acts of the Apostles is that it makes the claim that the church – the gentile church - is the true heir of Israel.
It appears likely that for a while, Jesus’ followers were able to continue as a sub-group within the synagogue community. But tradition and practice may have evolved until eventually the two groups were doing things so differently as to make that relationship impractical. Circumstances and events outside the realm of religion put additional pressure on the relationship. And, Paul’s ministry to the gentiles also required an answer to the question what must one do to be a member of the church? Did you have to observe Jewish tradition to be a follower of Jesus, or was there another way for a gentile to become a Christian? These issues are part of the narrative of Acts. Paul and his gentile converts win all of the arguments.
Reading Acts as history gives the impression that the church was born in moments and grew to institutional size within a few weeks. In reality it almost certainly took a lot longer. One thing that Acts does is give us a big picture view of the efforts that Paul’s letters describe in more specific detail. Paul preached Jesus’ story to the gentiles. He established the idea of humanity’s salvation by way of Jesus’ self-sacrifice on the cross as the cornerstone of Christian theology. Given who and what he had to work with, it was a remarkable accomplishment. We don’t really see it that way, because what Paul envisioned has come to us as a finished product, heavy with the authority of tradition. The author of Acts has a clearer understanding of what Paul accomplished and makes him the hero of the book. And with the implication that the church is Israel’s heir, he sows the seeds for centuries of claims that the church has superseded God’s covenant with Abraham and that Christians are beloved of God and Jews are not.
We have had the opportunity to observe and reflect upon the centuries of persecution that this claim has brought about. We have minute to minute access to information about violence fueled by ongoing claims of religious superiority. How do we fit our responses to that information together with our understanding of the authority of scripture? We have plenty of examples of people who use religious violence as a justification for their claims that religion is dangerous and useless. If you’re here, you probably don’t agree with that position. But if you take seriously what you believe, sooner or later, you have to figure out what that really is.
There are plenty of churches whose mission is little more than to provide a simple answer to that question. Our tradition has had a tendency to leave the complications out in the open and let everyone wind their way through them as they will. We sometimes have to work with people from more straightforward traditions who are attracted to our church by the way we worship, but get surprised when they discover that there are lifelong homework assignments that involve working out the details. Acts of the Apostles is one of those.