Acts 1: The church's marching orders

Did you know that Isaac Newton considered himself a theologian?  In fact, Isaac Newton devoted more words of his writing to discussing God, than he did to discussing science.  It’s a fascinating bit of biography from a bygone era when faith and science did not seem to be at each other’s throats.  One of the laws of motion that Newton is famous for articulating is the idea that an object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion, until an exterior force acts upon it.  In other words, if there is a change in an object, look for an external force exerting that change.  Newton applied the concept to physics, but what if we took the same thought and used it to consider the resurrection?

While Acts has often been described as history- and to a large extent it is- it is actually much, much more than that.  In the opening of Acts Luke refers back to the first volume of his work, which we know as the Gospel of Luke, and tells Theophilus that it was a record of all that Jesus “began to do and teach.”  There is an implication here, that though Jesus’ ascension is recorded at the end of Luke and the beginning of Acts, the book of Acts is a continuation of the story of what Jesus did and taught.  In fact, the open-ended nature of Acts’ conclusion implies that Luke views the story as far from finished.  Acts is not just the type of history we read, it’s the type of history we write ourselves as Jesus acts and teaches through us, his disciples. 

If we are going to be Jesus’ disciples and act and teach on his behalf, we must first change the way we see the world.  Jesus’ challenges his disciples, and by extension us as well, who have gathered after his resurrection.  The challenge is simple; stop thinking defensively.  While we think small, God thinks big.  The apostles must lose their vision of what “restoring the kingdom to Israel” should mean, and they must do so in order to gain the kingdom.   Just as they had to lose their lives in order to save them, Jesus now expands that vision to include not just us as individuals, but us as a community.  The two languages used to describe what has happened to Christ in Acts, the language of resurrection and ascension, are not languages of defeat, but of victory.  And so, Jesus gives them their marching order.  They are to serve as his witnesses “in Jerusalem” (Acts 1-7), “in Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8-11:18), and “to the ends of the earth” (Acts 11:19-the present).  Jesus is sending them out as heralds, announcing the fact that his reign has begun.  I am reminded of a story from the American Civil War.  In the aftermath of the battle of Gettysburg, General Lee was in retreat with the Confederate Army.  Lee’s army was beaten and bloodied, and was doing all it could to make it back into friendly territory.  He had almost made it back to Virginia when he reached the Potomac, and found its banks swollen from the recent rain.  His army was now in a possibly fatal position, with their backs to a swollen river, and a better-equipped army twice their size bearing down on them.  However, General Meade, the commander of the Union Army refused to attack.  He had just won a victory which had repelled the invading Southerners from Northern soil, and he seemed content to allow Lee to return to the South unmolested.  This infuriated President Lincoln, who was said to utter something along the lines of, “when will these people understand that it’s all our soil!”

We as the church are a lot like General Meade.  We are as well-intentioned as he was, but we also possess the same lack of vision.  We continue to remain on the defensive, huddled inside our church buildings, hoping for the enemy to come to us.  Meanwhile, God desperately wants us to understand that it is all his soil.  Every inch of sand or dirt on all seven continents, and every drop of water in from the smallest stream to the biggest ocean, it all belongs to him.  Every broken home in our community, every addict walking our streets, every neglected and abused child…they all belong to him. God’s desire is that we leave our church buildings, our places of comfort, and that we go and reclaim those broken homes.  God’s desire is that we go and minister to those wayward souls.  God’s desire is that we go and fight to protect the innocence of our children. 

I spoke at the beginning of Isaac Newton and his laws of motion.  An object at rest stays at rest, until acted upon by an outside force.  The church has been at rest for far too long.  We have been huddled together, just trying to survive for far too long.  We need a force to act upon us, to put us in motion.  It’s time we acted, it’s time we moved.  In the next post we will look at the identity of that outside force, which it turns out actually becomes an inside force.  In the meantime, consider our mission as a church, and what we are doing to fulfill that mission.  N. T. Wright says that “the church is either the movement which announces God’s new creation, or it is just another irrelevant religious sect.”  God forbid that our rest becomes irrelevance.