This is the sermon delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, April 7, 2024, drawing from Psalm 133, 16 and Acts 4:32-35
There’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot in church over the years, something I first remember hearing when I was very young and trying to figure out what a consistory was, why we voted on things, and how the institution of church worked overall. When I first heard it I was utterly baffled, because it sounded like nonsense:
“Nobody likes to see how the sausage is made.”
I’m sure many of you have heard this one before too, right? In our American, English-speaking world we can find this phrase being used for a wide variety of things, dating back to the late 1800s when it was literally about making sausage. And it makes sense, when you think about it; sausage is pretty tasty, but if you start thinking too hard about how that sausage made it to your plate…it gets quite a bit harder to enjoy that tasty, tasty sausage.
Nowadays of course, we use this phrase more metaphorically than literally, applying it to any number of situations ranging from politics to…well…to church. And every time we use it we basically mean the same thing; that’s it’s often better for us to enjoy a thing without investing ourselves in how that thing comes into being.
Enjoy the results, and don’t worry about the process.
Of course, this seems like a perfectly benign, even healthy way to think about things at first glance; there’s nothing wrong with protecting our mental health from overthinking and unnecessary stress, after all. On an individual level it would seem to make perfect sense, but despite the constant insistences of American culture, life isn’t just about our individual experiences. We live in communities, build societies, practice our faith in church communities; all these things ask us to be part of larger systems and structures that benefit everyone. Rather than just sitting back and enjoying some nice tasty sausage, being part of any community requires us to be participants in the sausage-making process, to understand how the whole thing operates, and to work together to make it so that it functions better.
Otherwise, nothing would ever work.
Church is no different; though the motives of a church community might be entirely different than a political body like a congressional district, the principle of working together to grow and improve together remains the same whether you’re doing so out of a shared faith, or the simple fact that you all live in the same place and would prefer to have things like running water, functional schools, and the like. Which is why it’s all the more baffling when we hear this phrase getting tossed around time and time again in church communities, because one would think that Christians, of all people, would be all about “working together to make a better community for all of us,” right?
But, ideals aside… things don’t always work out that way, do they? How many of us really know how our church communities work, really understand the systems that we’re a part of, and how it is that we do the things that we do? Do we know how our churches are organized, do we understand the systems that we have built to keep us on the path that Jesus has set, now that he’s gone on ahead of us?
How many of us really understand how the sausage is actually made?
You know, it’s a very common, easy thing to reduce the whole institution of church down to just…worship. In fact, I have been to - and even served at - a number of churches where everything about the entire institution was pointed squarely at the worship service. Every system, every structure, every rule - both written and unwritten - was all about making sure that the worship service was polished, perfect, and flawless. In fact, in places like that if you let your standards slip for even a moment during worship, presenting something unpolished, imperfect, or otherwise not 100%, it can be grounds for termination of employment, excommunication, and outright banishment from the community.
I've seen it happen! I've even had it happen to me!
Once, many years ago, long before I became a pastor and while I was still just a performing musician, I was working for a church like this, and during a service where I was set to perform an oboe solo my reed - that's the little wood thing you blow into - split in half right as I started to play my first note. Totally random; nothing I could have done to prevent it or anticipate it, and nothing I could really have done to mask that it'd happened. Once the reed split, I had exactly two options; stop the entire performance, get another reed from my case and try again, or try to force my way through with an instrument that was only capable of screeching and quacking like an unmedicated duck that had just sat down uncomfortably and unfortunately on top of an exploding firecracker.
Neither of these options allowed for me to hide the fact that an error had absolutely occurred. The flow of the service was, in that moment, irrevocably broken. The polish had been power-washed away in an instant of painful and unanticipated reality and the show could no longer go on. That heady, foggy, emotional magic that so many of us mistake for the presence of God evaporated like smoke. Reality broke through the haze with all the grace of a large wet dog who’s just discovered the joys of bright white, fluffy shag carpeting, and suddenly, we were just…people.
People sitting in a darkened, repurposed concert hall while all the injustices of the world continued outside utterly unaffected by by the perfect, polished performance we had been, until just that very moment, putting on ostensibly “for” God.
Naturally of course, I was fired before the church doors even closed for the day. It didn't matter that this had been a random, unpredictable happenstance; didn't matter that there was absolutely nothing that anyone could have done in that situation. There was no consideration of any of the good work I had done, or the calling of God on anyone's hearts in the community. The magic of worship had been broken, the imperfect had become visible and people had been forced to confront for just a moment, the mundanity of a community where human beings, in all their fallibility and brokenness, still have to work at getting it right.
For that one, unforgivable moment, the whole community got to see the sausage being made.
And it wasn’t polished, flawless and perfect. It wasn’t a carefully crafted emotional display made to convince us that we were experiencing some sort of explosion of spiritual ecstasy.
It was just….people. Flawed, imperfect people, trying honestly just to do whatever they could to help with the broken tools in front of them.
This is why I think the Sunday right after Easter is so important in our journey together as a community. We’ve just had our resurrection Sunday, and if there ever were a day for just going nuts on a big plate of metaphorical sausage, that was absolutely it. We love Easter, and for good reason; it is our day of celebration, our day of victory! Our savior, Jesus Christ was put to death in the most brutal, inhumane way possible, but he got better! He came back from being dead, and all for the love of each and every one of us! That is absolutely a day worth celebrating, a moment for all of us to set aside the work and turn our eyes upon Jesus in celebration and wonder!
But what about…after that? What do we do when the resurrection has passed, when all the Easter eggs have been found, when the church has emptied out and we’re left, on Sunday next, feeling like everything is so very, very small in comparison?
How do we go forward when it’s not Easter Sunday?
What’s the through-line from the empty tomb to that wonderful verse from Psalm 133, “How very good and peasant it is when kindred live together in unity?”
That’s where Acts comes in; a book that I absolutely love. Of course, in church we love to settle down into all the preaching and action of the second half of the book - Pauls journey to Rome, Stephen’s dramatic sermon, and stuff like that - but right here, in the beginning parts of the text, we get to see exactly how the Apostles and all those with them walked out into the world after the resurrection.
You see, its a little-known fact that the book of Acts isn’t some separate text; it’s actually the second volume of a two-volume set, the first volume being the Gospel of Luke. So the first parts of Acts are literally the continuation of Luke’s account of the Gospel message.
And the way they carry that message forward is by….organizing. By doing all that boring, meticulous, structural organization that most of us really don’t like getting involved in. In fact, the VERY first thing they do once Jesus has ascended into heaven, is sit down as a group and have a congregational meeting.
Seriously! Acts 1:12-26 involves exactly two things. The first is Peter saying of Judas that, “he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry,” thereby acknowledging that for all of Judas’ sins, he was one of the leaders of their church, and before they could replace him they had to acknowledge that and take ownership of the evil that had come out from within their community. The second is them discussing, and then voting on which of several offered candidates will serve to fill the now-vacant spot on their leadership team.
Now if that isn’t making the sausage, I don’t know what is!
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with Pentecost and the aftermath, but then we arrive in Chapter 4, today’s passage, and we can start to see all the system that has been built in order to support the ongoing work of the Spirit among them.
We love to think of the early church as this great, spontaneous movement, but here we see the nuts and bolts made unapologetically plain. They’ve built a whole system for property management, and the equal distribution of assets and resources throughout the community, so that “…there was not a needy person among them.” While the larger story spends its time on the more dramatic moments of the early church, it is in moments like this where we can get an idea of just how much of the apostle’s time was spent with the far more mundane work of administering resources, sharing, and distributing to those in need.
The institutional machinery of grace, mercy, and kindness.
That machinery is the answer to our question of “what’s next,” the answer we find when we wonder just what it is that we’re expected to do as a community in the weeks and months and years that follow the resurrection. Despite what so many would have us believe, despite what our own instant-gratification-atrophied selves so desperately want to believe, the forward press of Christian community isn’t measured in progressively greater and more dramatic moments, not marked by tears of constant ecstasy, hands lifted high as things just get better and better for us personally. The forward press of Christian community isn’t crafted by a bunch of perpetually happy folks who just happen to share the same place by sheer spiritual coincidence, not formed out of the ether by a collection of spiritually-minded people who just want to worship in peace without really considering anything else. It’s not made by a handful of wealthy donors who only turn up on Christmas and Easter to check on their investment, nor is it made by those who just want to follow Christ in their own way unbothered by the limitations of form or structure.
Christian progress is forged by the daily, mundane work of community in action.
So when step out of the shadow of the empty tomb and ask ourselves “what’s next,” the answer isn’t going to be “Pentecost.” The answer isn’t going to be “a revival,” or “a somehow-even-better worship service with a full band and two fog machines for some reason.” The answer is never going to be exciting, dramatic, or spiritually fulfilling, because as much as we might love the gratification of stretching out the emotional high of Easter all the way to Pentecost, and then trying to see if we can’t wrap the whole thing all the way back around again until we hit Advent again, the lesson of the apostles isn’t one of constant spiritual ecstasy and emotional high injected into our souls via polished and perfected worship once a week…
…it’s the boring, plainspoken, work that is conducted by people of faith, sitting together in an otherwise empty room and planning, figuring out how to fix what’s broken among us, and do the hard work of community that comes without witness or reward, but sees those in need being made whole by a system that is built to see them, to care for them, and to share with each as any had need, leaving us all united as one in heart and soul.
So my friends, this Second Sunday of the Easter season, with the power and pageantry of Easter squarely in the rearview mirror, let us roll up our sleeves, turn away from the temptations of the dramatic, and get down to the mundane business of walking, together, in the footsteps of Christ.
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