(Ascension)
Acts 1:1-11 Ps.47 (or 93)
Eph.l:15-23
Luke 24:44-53

7 Easter B RCL
(Cel.Ascension)

WHAT WE GOT WAS THE CHURCH!

"Jesus came preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, but what we got was the Church!" - so said a preacher who was pained by the Church as it really is.
Scene 1 - the Book of Acts, Chapter 1:

It is strange, after all the excitement of Easter and the Ascension, to continue the Book of Acts with the mundane story of the election of Matthias to take the place of the traitor Judas. This humdrum election of a replacement apostle is so - so businesslike. There is also something a bit embarrassing. The story of the Church begins, not with exalted talk about the Resurrection and all the wonderful things going on in the community, but rather with honest, sober talk about the betrayal of Jesus. The Church is required to ponder first the tough truth that Jesus was betrayed by one of His closest followers.

Scene 2 - Today:

"This church is no better than - a business", said a man after a three-hour meeting of his church's finance committee. The Church - the Body of Christ - no better than, say, a shoe store? "Can't we get beyond all this, this business, and get on with the real work of the Church?", the man pleaded.

Surely you know how he felt that night. We come to church, the place where souls are fed and saved, where God is encountered, where the Kingdom is advanced, and we are met by budgets to be reached, Sunday school classes to be taught, perhaps unacknowledged racism at every level, cantankerous people to be mollified, and bills to be paid. A parish in an interim between rectors can become much oppressed with these realities.

II. Well, what is the real work of the Church? Where is the real Church? If you have been here during the Sundays following Easter Day, you know that we have been regularly reading from the Acts of the Apostles, hearing about the first heady, wonderful, scary days after the Resurrection of Jesus. The beginning of Acts tells of two mysterious, weird, wonderful events. First, Jesus ascends into heaven, departs from human sight, to be at the right hand of God. Second, the Holy Spirit comes, in the next chapter of Acts, to give power, for people to be witnesses of the risen Christ to the ends of the earth. These ordinary men and women will be Christ's witnesses to all the world. They will no longer have Christ's visible physical presence with them or among them. Yet, when Jesus leaves, He makes provision for mediating His teaching, His presence, His way, to future generations. Now how did He do that?

The answer, in the Book of Acts, comes between the Ascension and the Pentecost stories. And it may be a surprise.

Judas by his betrayal has vacated a very important position in the Church. Matthias is named, and numbered with the other eleven apostles. Obviously, something big is going on here, right at the beginning. Apostles are so important that the community cannot go forward without someone being elected to fill the vacancy left by Judas. They pray about it, take a vote, and Matthias becomes a leader of the Church.

So after Easter, after the Ascension, the Church has a business meeting. An election is held. A new leader takes office. And the Church continues. Why didn't they just have prayer, sing hymns and praise God? Why this nitty-gritty business, in what ought to be the exalted Body of Christ, the Church?

We North Americans are inherently suspicious of institutions and organizations. We view institutions as repressive of individual human freedom. The individual is good. Social institutions are repressive. Great hope is placed on the shoulders of the individual who somehow, out of nothing, is supposed single-handedly, to leave the world better than she or he found it. The adolescent's struggle against domineering parents has become the established world view of the average adult. "Please, Mom, I'd rather do it myself."

Back in the '50's, a writer (Brunner) said that the Church was supposed to be a pure fellowship without law or sacraments or institutional trappings. After some long church meeting or some messy church squabble, we have surely felt like that writer, that the Church was a little too fleshly, too bodily, to be divine.

We wish for a pure fellowship. Of course God would be easier to obey if He had never taken human, specific, fleshly form. The god of Sunday morning TV, the god of vague thoughts while walking in the woods, is much less demanding than the God Who meets us on the faces of our adopted brothers and sisters in the Church.

But Jesus Christ did not come to us with some noble, abstract idea, or some mushy inner feeling. He came to us in the flesh, as a Jew from Nazareth. Furthermore, He didn't work alone, momentarily touching people's hearts and letting it go at that. Jesus from the first called real flesh-and-blood people like you and me, and called us to follow - to take up our cross visibly, daily, and follow.

That's the Church. It's real. It's fleshly. Of course the Church sets our minds on heavenly things. But we don't live in heaven yet. We live here, at 75 Cold Spring Road, or wherever, among real people, who are sometimes lovable and sometimes exasperating, sometimes faithful and often foolish. And this is exactly where God meets us in the risen Christ.

So when you think about it, the election of Matthias, all that nitty-gritty business right after Easter, was a thoroughly Easter act. By that act, the Resurrection was given bodily form, expended, preserved in the life of the Church, offered to future generations, made real in the lives of believers with names like Mary, Martha, Peter, Matthias - and you and me.

You and I don't live on cloud nine. We don't make our homes in some ethereal never-never land of divine bliss. We live here; on Cold Spring Road, or wherever, among real people, who have bills to pay and children to raise and parents to be cared for, and questions to be answered. And the beautiful thing is, in Jesus Christ and His Church, God meets us here, gives us thoroughly human, visible proof of His continuing care for us.

The Risen Christ told us that He would not leave us alone: He would give us ongoing guidance, comfort and presence. Surprise: He gave us the Church!! That is the primary form which the Risen Christ has chosen to take in the world. The Church, as the institutional embodiment of Easter, is sometimes a pain for those of us in the Church, but it is a means of grace for us and for the whole world.

(Could use for conclusion: "O gracious Father ... ", p.816 BCP

Previously used St.Lukes Chelsea 5/15/94
Ideas from Pulpit Resource 5/15/94
Also used St. Michael's, Holliston 5/11/91
St. John's Charlestown 6/1/03