May 6, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Everyday all of us have plans of what we hope might happen. We reserve a restaurant that can accommodate the many guests we are expecting. We excitedly plan out our dream vacation to see and visit all of the places that we have only read about. We attend a play upon the positive recommendation of friends and anticipate a great evening. All of these things that happen in our daily lives suggest that we have an ideal hope of what we expect will happen as they are meant to be.
After Easter
Now a month after Easter, we read in the Book of Acts that the church is spreading like wildfire into the world. At the first worship service in Acts 2, the church gathers and the Spirit descends like tongues of fire, the whole building rumbles, and it was only 9:00 in the morning.
Peter preaches a spectacular sermon and 3000 people came forward for baptism. And in Acts 4, we read, “Awe was upon all of them. Mighty wonders and deeds were performed by the apostles. They had not a needy person upon them. They shared their possessions. They went to the temple every day praising God. They ate their bread with glad and generous hearts. Everyone spoke well of them. The Lord added to their number every day.” This is the church as it’s meant to be.
According to the standard number of inches that a person takes to sit—18 inches per person, our sanctuary can hold 188 people. That is what the sanctuary is meant to accommodate. When we prepare the worship bulletins, we print up 140 copies anticipating that we would have 140 worshipers come every Sunday. This is what worship is meant to be at 10:05 Worship. But as you can see, we still have a few empty pews and the ushers can show you that we still have more bulletins to pass out.
Jews and Gentiles
While the church after Easter was exploding with awe, wonder, inspiring worship, open-handed generosity and on top of that 3000 baptisms, what the church after Pentecost thought was that the wall between Jews and Gentiles should still be up. Israel had survived through the ages because of the dietary laws that prohibited it from sharing at the table of Gentiles. There’s a clear distinction between the circumcised and the uncircumcised!
And yet, Peter, the premiere disciple, has done just that. He has gone among the Gentiles. He fraternized with them and shared food with them. Peter went out and filled the empty pews with Gentiles and gave them all Sunday worship bulletins! They have heard that Peter spent time with members of the Roman cohort in Jerusalem, with those who are oppressing them and occupying their territory. Scandal! How could this have happened?
So the church calls a council meeting and demands that Peter explain himself. He does so by repeating the vision of the sheet and the animals. In that vision Peter has learned that with God, there is no distinction. He told them that God has shown him that there are no unclean persons and that everyone is within the scope of God’s grace. The Jewish Christians thought that the church was meant only for them; forgetting the fact that Jesus welcomed everyone including the Gentiles.
The amazing thing in this story is not so much Peter’s amazing vision of God’s inclusive love. It’s not so much that Peter has changed his opinion of the place of Gentiles in the kingdom. The real miracle is Acts 11:18. The church, the whole church realizes that the love of God is boundless. God’s promises have come even to the Gentiles. This is the church that it’s meant to be.
Our Church
Maybe it’s unfair to compare ourselves with the church of Acts. They were the first Christians. We’ve been at this for 2000 years. I look at this church in Acts and I look at our church and I wonder if maybe the church critics are right after all. Things have been going downhill ever since!
In our church, when we have similar problems, people express their opinions, people discuss and argue, perhaps we have prayer, and then we agree to disagree and everyone leaves the meeting with exactly the same opinions that they brought to the meeting! That’s the real church, we say, not the ideal church.
Sociologists of religion say that one can document a cooling of initial religious fervor. Religious movements lose some of their initial passion and become institutionalized, fossilized, and only a shell of their formal selves is left. Have we become that fossilized shell of our formal selves? This is not the church that it’s meant to be. We want to be the church that God wants us to be!
At the All-Church Family Retreat Day a week ago, we idealized the gathering of members of our church from the four worship services that we have, from the different languages that we speak, from the different fellowship groups that we are members of and to model even if it was for just a few hours what the church as it’s meant to be.
It’s true that we had planned for more people to attend when we contracted with the Marin Headlands conference office. Diana Lee and Anna Wong prepared more food for breakfast than the number of people who showed up. But isn’t that the real world speaking after all? That’s the world of wanting to still prohibit Jews and Gentiles from eating together. That’s the world of seeing what’s only real is what we can account for with our five senses.
The reason why we have the All-Church Family Retreat Day or for that matter, any time when we as a church body come together, is to be the bride of Christ. It’s what the church as it’s meant to be! We believe that we need to be sisters and brothers in Christ even if it was just for a few hours!
Last Sunday was another example of what the church as it’s meant to be. At our annual Youth Sunday Service, the young people shared testimonies, sang an anthem, played the hand bells, invited prayer concerns, received the offering, led us in singing praise songs. Was it the best service we have ever attended? Probably not…but it was the church as it’s meant to be. No one was left out, no one was excluded, everyone had a part, everyone had a place to belong.
In the past couple of weeks, I have had the privilege of giving two tours of our church. One was for a group of junior high students from the Hamlin School in San Francisco. They were reading Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and realized that Amy Tan was at our church, that her father served here in the 1950s and that one of the characters in the Joy Luck Club was named Waverly after our street name.
And then this past Monday, we hosted about 50 religious chaplains here for their annual convention. They were interested in how we as an Asian American church provide pastoral care for our church family and in the community. In both of these occasions when I was asked to share about the history and ministries of our church, I took out our 125th Church Anniversary history book, Abounding in Thanksgiving to review and share with our guests.
I realized that when our writers wrote our church history for all to read and appreciate, we emphasized how God has been with us from the very beginning 127 years ago. Yes, we may have alluded to a few examples when there were some disagreements, but we mainly talked about how much awe we have with God. We talked about the mighty wonders and deeds performed by the church people, the missionaries and the pastors. We recorded how we did not have a needy person among us because there was always more of Debbie Allen’s tuna casserole. We documented how families shared their possessions of caring and support with each other. We identified how the Chinese went to church everyday praising God. We highlighted many photographs of dinners and picnics when we shared bread and rice with glad and generous hearts. And we listed the number of new members and new Christians that the Lord added to this church. Doesn’t that sound a lot like the church in the Book of Acts?
We all know that in our 127 years of history, we have had our share of disagreements and differences. Peter had his with the early church council when he ate among the Gentiles. But that is not what we need to remember or think is important. What Peter taught them and what he is telling us today is that the church is meant for everyone—there is no distinction. The doors of the church are wide-opened. In the course of our history, we have also learned that ultimately, what is more important is not what we disagree about but how we have lived out the church as it’s meant to be.
Easter Everyday
When we are together, God wants us to expect the excitement of Easter to last all year long and the spirit of Pentecost to inspire our worship every Sunday. God expects us to be in awe, in wonder, in worship, with open-handed generosity every day. God expects 3000 baptisms at every service!
Tony Campolo traveling in another time zone was having a hard time getting to sleep one night. So he walked down the street where his hotel was, and he came across an all-night donut shop. Soon after he sat down at a table and started eating, a group of prostitutes walked in, apparently finished with their night’s work. As he sat there, he heard one of them, a woman named Agnes, say, “You know what? Tomorrow is my birthday. I’m going to be 39.”
One of the other prostitutes snapped back, “So what do you want from me? A birthday party? Huh? You want me to get a cake and sing happy birthday to you?”
Agnes replied, “Why do you have to be so mean? I’m just saying it’s my birthday. I don’t want anything from you. I mean, why should I have a birthday party? I’ve never had a birthday party in my whole life. Why should I have one now?”
When the women left, Tony went up to the owner and asked if those women came into his shop every night. When he said that they did, Tony immediately got to work with the donut shop owner planning a surprise party for Agnes for the following night.
So the next night when she came in, everyone yelled, “Surprise!” and she could hardly believe it. As the people sang “Happy Birthday” to her, Agnes started to choke up and could hardly blow out the candles on her cake. When it came time to cut the cake, she asked if they wouldn’t mind if she didn’t cut it, explaining that since that was the first birthday cake she had ever been given, she wanted to take it home and treasure it for a while.
As the party was about to break up, Tony asked if he could say a prayer. The donut shop owner said that he had not realized that Tony was a minister, and so he asked what kind of church Tony belonged to.
He replied, “I belong to a church that throws birthday parties for prostitutes at 3:30 in the morning.”
The shop owner said, “No, you don’t. There ain’t no church like that. If there was, I’d join it. Yep. I’d join a church like that.” This is the church as it’s meant to be.
The reality is that we think that the church in Acts is too idealistic and if anything, we are more honest with ourselves in being realistic. But the truth is that with eyes of faith, we can see even at our church that we are a beloved community.
Is this being too idealistic about the church? Are we looking at our poor old church with rose-colored glasses, deceiving ourselves about the harsh realities of life? But the truth of the power of God at Easter is that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead and really intends to have a new people, a people gathered, not on the basis of our old, sinful, social, racial, national, and ethnic distinctions, but gathered on the basis of the power of the risen Christ.
God calls us to be the church that it’s meant to be.
Let us pray.
Gracious God, teach us to be the church as it’s meant to be—loving, caring, inviting, welcoming, accepting, and most of all, faithful to the Word in Jesus Christ. Show us not to be prejudicial and discriminatory but reveal to us that all people have been created in your image and that you love them all. Lead us to be Christ-like following in the footsteps of Jesus who taught us in his life on earth and his glory in heaven that forgiveness has come to all. Amen.