Argentine Mennonite Church Sandeep Thomas

As I read these words today, I want to reflect on my time with the members of Argentine Mennonite Church and the practical ways you have expressed your faith in Jesus Christ.
There are many things I could share but let me highlight a few.
Firstly, this congregation has been one of the most diverse congregations I have ever come across. AMC has had people who are rich and poor, Caucasian, African American, Hispanic, Asian Indian, educated and not so educated, traditionally Mennonite and completely non-Mennonite, young and old, formally dressed and informally dressed, able bodied and disabled. I can’t think of a category of people that AMC has not been able to welcome. To have diversity in a large congregation is easy. But to have diversity in a small congregation means that anytime you have a handful of people together you have diversity even in that setting. That is what we had here at AMC.

Today we are going to look at one of the problems the early church faced and how the Apostles solved it. Our passage is in the start of the 6th chapter of Acts. Scholars who do the chronological research tell us that we are about 5 years past Pentecost at this point. The church at this time is growing extremely fast and when you grow that fast you are crossing into new ethnic groups. In this case the ethnic group that is coming into the church are the Greek speaking believers who were originally Jewish. They were Jews who grew up in other parts of the world and therefore had different mother tongues. But these Jews had returned to live in Jerusalem at the time. We also know that this community many widows. How so?

When I preached last Sunday, the text I used went all the way to the end of chapter 5.
My focus was on looking at Professor Gamaliel’s thinking that helped navigate a very
difficult situation. He did not try and convince them of an new truth that they not
already believe. Rather he simply take the elements of their existing world-view and
come up with an action plan that would avoid spiritual harm and keep open the
possibility of discovering the truth of who Jesus Christ might be. So, we looked at how
professor Gamaliel saved the day but we also looked at how his reasoning can be
applied to the issues we are facing today.
But there is something we did not look at. And that is the last three verses of last
Sunday’s text. This deals with what happened to the Apostles after their Sanhedrin clash
and that is what I am going to focus on this week.

The passage we are going to work with today is something that interests me in a special way because I have meditated on Gamaliel’s approach and thinking for a long time now. The portion we are looking at today is a long one. I could not break it into smaller chunks because we have to take in the whole story and then look at the competing forces going in there and then draw out the principles being put forth for our understanding. This is our task for today.
First let’s take a quick look at the story.

Returning to our journey through Acts, this weeks passage you may have noticed is not a narrative of dramatic events. This week’s passage is instead a summary statement of the early church. We saw another summary statement previously at the end of chapter 4. That statement talked about how much unity there was in that church and also how much they shared their possessions to take care of each others needs.
In contrast, this summary statement focuses on the healing ministry of the early church. Just recently in Acts chapter 3 you will remember, we witnessed a dramatic healing story of the man who was born lame and begged in front of the temple gate called beautiful. In our passage today, we are told that there were many such stories. In in verse 15 and 16 it says, “As a result of the apostles’ work, sick people were brought out into the streets on beds and mats so that Peter’s shadow might fall across some of them as he went by. 16 Crowds came from the villages around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those possessed by evil[a] spirits, and they were all healed.”

Last Sunday we looked at the end of Acts 4 where the early Christian community was at its best almost ideal state. They had an incredibly high level of unity of mind and spirit, they had boldness to witness to preach the Word of God and they had a community in which no needs went unmet. As a result, the author declares that God’s great blessing was upon them all. That kind of blessing, I hope is the goal of anyone who is walking the Christian life.
But even in those days it was not like 100% of the members of the church were in of the same mind and spirit. There will always be those problematic individuals everywhere. Ananias and Sapphira were a couple who were not of the same mind as everybody else. And God chose to use them as negative examples and a warning for everyone. But this is also a very unique story that has almost no exact parallels in other parts of scripture and so it is one of those stories that is extremely hard to interpret. Yet it is an important story meant to teach us something. So that is what we will wrestle with today and examine how God is speaking to us through it.
When dealing with difficult territory, it is always helpful to start by defining the boundaries, by identifying what it is not. So that is going to be where we begin.