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.
