SERMON SNAPSHOT: Sunday, April 14, 2024

Dear Friends in Jesus –

Our text is from the Gospel writer Luke describing the incipient church. Luke doesn’t list the doctrinal positions they held in common, nor does he describe them gathering in a room to argue the finer points of theology.

Instead, Luke writes that the testimony of the apostles to Jesus’ resurrection led to real, practical, life-changing action in the world. Perhaps this is what Easter is about, not theory but practice. Josh Scott in Christianity Today writes, “It’s the bursting into this world of a new creation that plays by different rules, where love calls us to work for the flourishing of every single person and of the whole creation.”

Should our response to Acts be to idealize the early church? It had its own set of issues and challenges. Instead, I think we are invited, even called, to join in and continue the work the early church began.

May we be an Eastered, Easter people.

In great anticipation,