Ecclesiology by Sinatra--August 23, 2023

Ecclesiology by Sinatra--August 23, 2023

"[The believers] devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.  Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and they had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved." [Acts 2:43-47]

Frank Sinatra once famously sang, "Love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage, this I tell you, brother--you can't have one without the other."  The whole song just expounds on that theme--that, in the songwriter's eyes, you can't romantically love someone without also having the obligation of marrying them.  In fact, Sinatra double down in the bridge of the song:  Try, try, try and separate them--it's an illusion; try, try, try and you will only come--to this conclusion: Love and marriage..."

Well, let's set aside for a moment the way cultural mores and expectations have changed since the era of that song (and if you would like to have a conversation about why I still think the promises of marriage matter in a time when there is much less social pressure to get married, or if you would like to talk about what makes marriage more than a piece of paper, let me know, and we can have that conversation another time).  For now, what I want to zero in on is the idea in Sinatra's song that these two separate entities, "love" and "marriage" are really not that separate.  In fact, maybe, as the song would have it, one inevitably follows the other.  Maybe they're more like two sides of the same coin.  And maybe there are places in our life of faith that work the same way.

We've been looking all this month at the same kind of connection in the Scriptures to "love" and... "faith."  We've been exploring in passage after passage how the Biblical writers connect believing in God with growing in love, to the point that I hope it's clear that these are really inseparable.  In fact, you get the sense from the book of Acts that the first generation of Christians saw their belief and their practice all as one complete way of life, rather than just a matter of head knowledge or emotions in the heart.  As the narrator Luke notes, the Jerusalem church certainly learned and believed certain things--they were "devoted to the apostles' teaching."  But let's not imagine that was primarily a series of complex lectures in systematic theology--they were telling the stories of Jesus, reminding each other of the actions of Jesus, and passing along the teachings of Jesus.  To be sure, that would have meant also teaching things like, "When he rose from the dead, we became convinced that Jesus wasn't just a prophet, but the Messiah of God!" or even something like, "Jesus is what the heart of God looks like in a human life."  But those were also woven through and through with the practices of living in community.  

The early church wasn't just a primitive theology class--it was a community that learned love together.   They didn't just sit in a lecture hall as Professors Peter or Andrew read from their dissertations.  They shared food. They pooled their resources.  They took care of one another.  And they gave what they had so that others could have enough to live. In other words, they practiced love. And they apparently saw all of that as just as much a part of "being Christian" as it was to sing hymns to Jesus and believe in him as the Son of God.  They would have said you can't separate faith from love, or their relationship with God from their relationships with others.  "You can't have one without the other," as Sinatra crooned.

This is really important to notice, because sometimes in our day we church folks not only make the mistake of separating what we think of as "faith" from what we think of as "love," but we sometimes prioritize "faith" (often reduced to memorizing-the-correct-facts-about-God) over "love" toward other people.  Often over the last two millennia, we have settled for saying that Christianity is just about getting into heaven when we die, and that the way to guarantee you get into the right place when you die is to believe the correct propositions about Jesus, or the Bible, or how old the earth is, or how many sacraments there are, and so on.  And in my tradition, Lutherans in particular have sometimes painted themselves into an additional corner by saying things like, "We know that we can't do anything to earn God's love or favor by our good deeds or acts of love, so we should intentionally NOT talk about any of those things, and instead spend all of our time splitting hairs on doctrinal matters so we can find clearer and clearer ways of believing the right theology."  So we can end up with not only a separation of "love" and "faith," but you also end up smothering the voice of "love" altogether.  And when Christianity does that, you end up with a church that prides itself on its rightness while it ignores the needs of its neighbors.  

In our day we sometimes hear folks complain about the church getting active in matters of "social justice" or "humanitarian relief" because, folks say, the church's only job is preaching the gospel.  But again, that seems like it accepts the idea that there's a split between "faith" and "love" and that we somehow have to pick one or the other.  And it makes it sound like God only cares about the souls of people after they die, rather than the bodies of people while they live, too.  And that's just not what we see in the early church here in Acts.  This snapshot we get from Acts holds "faith" and "love" together, so that the early community didn't even see them as separate subjects, but limbs of the same tree, or maybe motions in the same dance. We learn from the teachers who help us understand what God is like and who Jesus is, and we care for the people around us, who also embody the presence of Jesus for us, too.  Both are true at the same time.  And every time we try, try, try to separate what-we-believe from how-we-love, we discover, like the song says, "it's an illusion."

Maybe the realization we need to recover in this day is that from God's perspective, God is not interested in making just merely people who know things in our brains, but people who live fully in light of Jesus--that will not only affect our heads but also our hands, our hearts, and our homes.

How will we follow the pattern we've seen here in Acts today--how will we connect what we have learned about God in Christ with the choices we make with our money, time, and resources?  And as we live out those answers, maybe we'll discover that our lives feel like they hang together more fully--like what goes on in our minds is really of one piece with what goes on in our actions, checkbooks, calendars, and hearts.

Lord Jesus, take all of who we are--not just what we believe about you, but also how we embody your love.