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Foundry United Rev. |
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Steps of Discipleship: Connect (Christ means community) Sunday, September 17,
2006 |
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Acts 2: 41-47
Rev. |
There
are five components to the life of Acts 2 congregations: Three are internal:
1) study and learning, 2) community and fellowship; 3) worship and prayer.
Two are outward looking: 4) mission and service, and 5) evangelism and
sharing. We are
looking at these five components of the life of an Acts 2 church this fall.
They are a helpful way of thinking about our life together as a congregation,
but they are also helpful in our thinking about our personal lives as
disciples. Acts 2
disciples include these five things in their faith journey: learning,
fellowship, worship, mission and evangelism…maybe not all at the same time
but over the course of time. It might be interesting for any one of us to ask
if there is any one of these that has been missing from our lives. This
morning I’d like us to focus on the theme of community and fellowship. The
New Testament in its original Greek calls it koinonia. Acts 2:42 says of the first generation of Christians:
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teachings and [to] koinonia.” Koinonia is not an easy word to
translate from the Greek. We have no exact equivalent in the English language.
The word koinonia or a form of the
word appears 17 times in the New Testament, and is translated differently in
different contexts. It is sometimes translated fellowship, sometimes sharing,
sometimes communion, sometimes participation, sometimes contribution, depending on the context
and the particular translation. If you
check out this sermon on the web when it is posted this week, you will find a
link to a website where you can see all 17 times the word koinonia is used.[i] If this
were a Bible study, we would get out our Bibles and we would read together
some of the different places in the New Testament where koinonia is used. I wish we had time for that this morning. Let me just
give you a few examples: Koinonia
is used to refer to our relationship with God. I John 1 Talks about koinonia (fellowship) with God and
with Jesus Christ (1:3) and with one another (1:7). Philippians
3: 10 talks about koinonia as a sharing in the suffering of Christ.
Paul writes: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the
sharing (koinonian) of his
sufferings by becoming like him in death.” Second
Corinthians ends with the words: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love
of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (13:!3) In the
Greek it is the koinonia of the
Holy Spirit. And
throughout Second Corinthians, when the Apostle Paul is encouraging the
Christians of this affluent city to send money to help the impoverished
Christians of Jerusalem, Paul calls the contributions they are sending a koinonia. II Corinthians 9:13 says:
“You glorify God by your obedience to the confession of the gospel of Christ
and by the generosity of your kononia with
them and with all others.” Their gifts were an expression of koinonia – community, fellowship –
even with people they would never physically meet. Koinonia is a sense of belonging
together. The New Testament would say
that it is more than a sense of belonging together…that it is a reality
whether we sense it or not. If we belong to God, then we belong to one
another. In the New Testament writings koinonia
exists ontologically – it is – and what the church does is to
operationalize it…to incarnate it…to make it flesh…to make it overt. This is
not always easy for all of us…especially not type A, Washingtonian types. When
we get together we want to know what the agenda is. What our goals are. What
are we here to accomplish? We are busy people. Koinonia is not something we can engineer.
Not really. Not quite. Koinonia happens.
We can create conditions hospitable to koinonia
but we can not make koinonia
happen. We have to let it happen. You get
people in the same room…a potluck maybe, a retreat…and you try not to fill
the time with agenda and tasks…and you trust that koinonia will happen. People will begin to share themselves and
find connections beneath the surface of things. They will begin to discover
that they belong to one another. Koinonia.
In a
lot of our other activities, koinonia is
a byproduct if we will let it be. Disciple Bible study is as much about
discovering we are community and belong to each other – koinonia – as it is learning the content of the Bible. One of the
great byproducts of doing mission is that in the process of trying to transform
the world, we discover community and belonging…koinonia. Koinonia is especially important for
diverse churches, like the New Testament church was and like Foundry is. If
you are part of a church where everyone is pretty much like everyone else in
terms of cultural background and economic resources and physical abilities and
age and sexual orientation and political leaning, it is easy to feel
connected because there are a lot of things that connect you. But, as
This is
what Paul is trying to get at in the passage from Philippians 2 we heard read
this morning. “If
there is any encouragement in Christ, and consolation from love, any koinonia in the Spirit…make my joy
complete, be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and
of one mind.” (2: 1-2) In any
diverse community there will be distrust. It happened in the Acts church. Acts 2
is an idealized portrayal of the church. It is the way the church should be
if it were perfect. But the rest of Acts often shows the church the way it is
in the real world. Acts 6 is about culturally-based division and conflict in
the church. The Greek-speaking
Jewish Christians began complaining that the Hebrew-speaking Jewish
Christians were showing favoritism in the daily distribution of food to the
widows. The Hebrew-speaking widows were being treated better than the
Greek-speaking widows, or at least that is what the Greek-speaking Christians
felt. So
while the Acts church starts out in chapter 2 in this idyllic way, by chapter
6 there are problems, and conflict and mistrust, and it forms around the
places in the congregation where there is diversity. In any
diverse community there will be tension and distrust. But koinonia also exists. Beneath the
distrust we discover that we have a profound bond and that we belong
together, but it takes being together and staying at the table with one another
to discover the koinonia. Paul
writes to the Philippians: “If there is any encouragement in Christ, and
consolation from love, any koinonia
in the Spirit…be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord
and of one mind.” (2: 1-2) Koinonia is the path to accord and having
a common mind and even love. So koinonia is important to
congregations, especially diverse congregations that do not find their unity
in external things like ethnicity or class or culture. But it
is also important for us as individuals. Paul, in Philippians, goes on to
say: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he
was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be
exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born
in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and
became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” (2: 5-8) It is
through koinonia that we find two essential
things – we find our humanity and we find Christ. So much
in life that we carry as individual burdens is really part of our humanity,
but we carry them as though they were our unique burden. One of the things
12-step groups do is to bring together people who think they are struggling
with unique addictions and help them to see the addiction as part of their
humanity through what the New Testament calls koinonia. Part of
the reason we have affinity fellowship groups in church – GLBT, young adults,
couples, parents – is because in the same circumstances of life we are much
more alike, we face the same issues and problems, than we realize unless we
are connecting in a koinonia way. Socrates
said “Know thyself.” It was inscribed on the entryway to the The New
Testament says that I cannot know myself, unless I know you. It is in koinonia that we discover our
humanity. And it
is in koinonia that we discover
Christ. Christ is koinonia. Christ
is the name for people truly meeting one another. It means that God is
present whenever people truly meet one another. Toyoko
Kagawa was a Japanese Christian pacifist and poet who lived during one of the
most militaristic times in He
wrote a poem about finding a little girl in the gutter of the slum one night.
It was a time when parents might throw a baby away if it were born female. He took
the baby home with him and named her Isha, which means little stone, because
she was so hard, gray, and cold. In the poem he talks about working through
the night to revive Isha. By early morning he came to believe that nothing
would help. He sat down in a chair and held her in his arms. He felt
her pain, and his own pain, and the pain of all humanity. She was dying. He
remembered all those whom he had loved who had died. He remembered that he
would die someday. Instead
of someone he was trying to help and save, Isha became humanity. He and she
became humanity together. He
began to weep, and the force of his tears falling on Isha so shocked her that
she began to cry. The crying pulled air into her little lungs and life began
to return to her nearly dead body, and she lived to become a little girl and
a women. Kagawa
entitled his poem: “When Tears Are Mingled.” This is
the source of life. This is Christ. When our tears are mingled. When our joys
are mingled. When our pains and hopes are mingled. This is koinonia. This is Christ. www.foundryumc.org |
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