Scripture: Acts 2:42-47; 1 Corinthians 1:18; Matthew 18:20; Matthew 5:5 Series: 2023
Preaching on Acts 2:42-47 as part of an Easter series on the early church’s question ‘What do we do now?’, Pastor Wilson frames ‘holy conferencing’ as the holy storytelling and shared life of the gathered church. He argues that naming Acts 2 (or the Sermon on the Mount) as too perfect or unachievable sells short God’s grace, since Scripture is meant to transform us into the beloved community, not offer impossible ideals. Drawing on early Methodist history (Wesley’s traveling preachers, women preachers, the 1744 conference agenda and ground rules), he calls Bee Creek UMC to the vulnerable, uncomfortable work of showing up, meeting, and sharing life together around Jesus Christ rather than around shared affinities, living the story rather than merely believing it.
Illustrations: whole-brain-child-name-it-to-tame-it, tell-the-story-of-your-fears, dull-word-conference, dorothy-day-dont-call-me-a-saint, sermon-on-the-mount-unachievable-ideal, adam-bede-dinah-morris, 1744-conference-agenda, golf-pickleball-kiwanis-rotary, trusting-a-person-with-your-children
May 7, 2023
Holy Conferencing
The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers. A sense of awe came over everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. All the believers were united and shared everything. They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved. - Acts 2:42-47
Storytelling has an amazing capacity to excite us and draw us in. When you’re around a great storyteller, it’s really fun and interesting. Jokes function a lot in this way. A joke is a form of storytelling. Storytelling isn’t just stories of your life, it’s stories in general. I’ve never felt like a good storyteller. It’s always one of those things that if I feel like I have a good story, I can tell a good story. But if I don’t have a good story, it’s hard to tell one. It’s hard for me to tell a story about most of my everyday life unless something interesting happens. It’s like, “Well, I went to the office, called some people back, wrote some emails, read the Bible, worked on a sermon, worked on another sermon, had some lunch.”
Something that’s come to my attention recently is the impact that storytelling has on our brain and how, when we tell stories, especially when we tell stories about ourself, it actually effects our brain. We’ve been reading this book called The Whole Brained Child, which has been interesting. One of the ways it talks about storytelling is in a moment of crisis, when your child is having a tantrum experiencing fear, to get to the point of letting them tell their story, encouraging them to tell the story. In the telling of the story, a child is able to calm down and integrate their brain. They are able to integrate their emotional brain with their rational brain. The authors use this memory tool, Name It to Tame It, in order to help parents remember how important storytelling and words are for our own self-understanding.
It shouldn’t have been such an insight to me because this is also something I tell people as pastoral advice who are going through a crisis. “Tell the story of your fears.” Either write them down or, share with a trusted friend because our fears are always greater in our head. When we speak them out, they’re manageable. Not just manageable in the sense that we can make a list of steps to address all our fears and accomplish those achievable goals. But sometimes we are able to get to the point where we realize we’re not afraid. You don’t need to be afraid anymore. In Acts 2, after Peter’s great sermon and the conversion of thousands, the church gathered together, they shared everything, and they started to live a new story. They told the story of Jesus again and again. They were not afraid. They started to live a new story with Jesus and with each other. And they started to share that story. This is what holy conferencing is.
Series intro.
In the season of Easter, we’re going to take the time to look through the beginning of the Book of Acts where the disciples are left with the question:What do we do now? For Bee Creek United Methodist Church, that is the season that we are in: What do we do now? And as we worship together over the next few weeks, I want us to be praying and thinking through and responding actively to God’s movements as we not only ask this question, but answer this question, what do we do now?
Today, Holy Conferencing.
Sharing the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is an exciting thing. Conferencing is not an exciting thing. There are very few things in life that sound more dull than a conference, at least to me. Maybe some of you have had really positive experiences of conferences. I have not. I’ve been to conferences. There is a conference I attend pretty much every year, annually, and it’s called an annual conference. The United Methodist Church is organized around these conferences that happen annually instead of a diocese or presbytery in the Presbyterian Church. We have an annual conference that meets once a year for the business in order of the church. It is a dull word: conference.
The word “Conference” comes from confer, to confer together. Church’s have had councils and synods and conferences all throughout history. Conferencing at its best comes back to this moment in Acts 2. The disciples were gathered together. They were sharing everything every day. They met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone and needed them. Now, one of the ways we often preach about this passage is that this is the pinnacle of the church. And it’s been downhill from there. They had all their stuff together here at the end of Act 2 at Pentecost. It’s great. Everyone’s sharing everything. And then it all starts to fall apart. And that the history of the church is this downhill trajectory from May of 33 AD until this day. Now, I think that there’s some fair points to be made in that, but we miss out on the substance of what’s going on here in Acts two by dismissing it as being too perfect. Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement, once said “don’t call me a saint. I don’t want to be dismissed too easily.” She is currently in the process of being canonized by the Catholic church and so it seems a strange phrase at first. “Don’t call me a saint. I don’t wanna be dismissed too easily.”
But when you designate someone as a saint or something as holy, it separates that person from you and their life becomes something that you can never achieve. This happens a lot with the Sermon on the Mount. People preach or talk about the Sermon on the Mount as this unachievable ideal. Blessed are the meek. Blessed are those who mourn. Turn the other cheek. Who is good enough to do this?
At the moment we name it unachievable, we’ve already sold ourselves short of God’s grace and power in our lives. The Bible is not there to give us unachievable ideals. Everything is achievable or else it wouldn’t be there. All the messages and sermons of Jesus are offered to us not to give us impossible aspirations, but to transform us into the body of Christ and the beloved community where we sacrifice and share together.
The reading for today in Acts 2 also gets to issues of political economy and how society is organized that I am not going to address today, but it is there.
The point for today is this holy conferencing of the people gathered together. This is holy storytelling together. This is the holy sharing in the life of the church. This is a holy willingness to talk to each other about what God is doing and to learn from those experiences and from each other. None of us are experts. We are all students together. The word disciple means student. To be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be a student. To admit that you have things to learn, that you don’t know everything. It’s impossible to teach anybody anything if they think they already know everything. They are shut off. If you feel like you’ve already got everything you need to know in life, then you are a closed book. One of the great powers of the Christian faith is to come in the face of people who have shut themselves off from change and show that radical change is possible through grace, not through efforts. Sharing stories is a part of that change because people are drawn in by stories. People are connected by stories. Sports are great because they give us a story to share with each other.
Methodist History
During the early Methodist movement, after Aldersgate, after John Wesley started preaching, he started sending out people to preach in different areas. Local pastors is the term that we would use today. Lay speakers who hadn’t gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but had experienced God’s grace and were willing to share about it. Wesley sent out women to preach, a radical scandal that was stopped by the church after he died. The reality of female methodist preachers is shown best in the George Eliot novel, Adam Bede, where the main character, Dinah Morris, is a female Methodist preacher who shares the Good News of Jesus Christ.
With all these preachers, men and women, Wesley would try to gather them together at least once a year to talk through what they had done. Here are some of the questions on the agenda from one of the first annual conferences (1744)
- Doctrine
- What do we meet for?
- To consider before God:
- What to teach?
- How to teach?
- What to do? i.e., doctrine, discipline, and practice
- Are we justified by faith alone?
- What is justifying faith? Assurance, or…
- How is faith made perfect by works?
- What is sanctification?
- What is the Church of England? How are we of it? How far do we defend it?
- Discipline
- Is field preaching lawful? Expedient?
- Where shall we preach?
- Do we not undertake too much, and thereby do less than we might?
- E.g. Are nor more sinners converted when we stay a month in Newcastle than by us preaching in any new place?
- Practice
- How far is it lawful to bear arms?
- Can we unite any farther with Mr. Whitefield? With the Moravians?
- Is any conference with either advisable?
They also laid some ground rules for the conference.
- That all things be considered as in the immediate presence of God;
- That we may meet with a single eye, and as little children which have everything to learn;
- That every point may be examined from the foundation;
- That every person may speak freely whatever is in his heart; and
- That every question proposed may be fully debated, and bolted to the brain.
The structure offered a way to tell the stories of ministry and include each other in the whole story of the movement of God.
It is a lot easier to go alone than to work together. When someone does something you don’t like, it is easier to move away than confront them. It is much easier to not meet than to meeting. Meeting together takes time. Meeting together as a church opens us up to the reality of the humanity of each other. We err. We sin. We say things we shouldn’t. We don’t live up to the example of Christ.
Before we come to the table, we confess our sins. Christians are unique in this. We think we should share even after we sin, even after we harm. Our communion is greater than our individual moral standing because it is not based on our individual moral standing. It is based on Jesus Christ.
If we gather for any reason other than Jesus Christ, we cease to be the church. We become a social club that has a different story. Golf clubs have a different story. Pickle ball and Kiwanis and rotary have different stories. We gather not because of who we are and what we like, but what God has done and what God will do. God calls us to be a part of the greatest story. This story is more than just a story. It transforms us if we don’t push it away.
The Bible is the story of God’s loving interaction with creation and the people of Israel. Through the cross of Jesus Christ, we have been grafted on to this story and we can live this story. The christian faith is not just about believing in a story, but living in a story.
It is one thing to believe that something is true. It is another to live it.
It is one thing to say that you trust a person. It is another to put your children’s lives in their hands. It is one thing to say that you believe in God. It is another to live God’s story. Doing the things of God. Feeding the hungry. Clothing the naked. Caring for widows and orphans. Healing the sick. Doing the things that Jesus did again and again. Sharing life with people who make you uncomfortable. Sharing life with sinners.
Do we believe in God enough to be uncomfortable for God?
Christ gathers together his body, the church, to do these things together. We have a resource in each other if we are able to act in faith together. We are not limited by time and space because where two or three are gathered together, Christ is there. Not where 200 or 300 are gathered, but two or three.
We can share life together. Like the early church. Like the early Methodists. It starts by meeting. It starts by greeting and staying in relationship with each other. We then get to sharing and mercy and love and commitment and discipleship, but the first step is showing up.
God offers a chance to be a part of a new story. And even when we are scared, when we tell this story, there is peace.
It is a vulnerable thing to tell a story. What if people don’t like it? What if its not entertaining? In that space of doubt is the opportunity for faith. As Paul says, the message of the cross is foolishness to the Greeks, but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God.
Let us encourage each other to share this life together and let us look forward to what God is doing here, even if we may look a little foolish.
Let us pray,
Heavenly Father, your Spirit was present in the early church, gathering the people together to be of one mind. May your Spirit be present with us this day so that we may be of one mind in you, living out your story together. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.