Reading Luke/Acts Together #47 – Intro to Volume 2

Back at the turn of the year, I invited you to join others in our church, and also across our Western N.C. Conference of United Methodists to read through Luke and Acts together. I shared then that Luke and Acts were written and then circulated as a two-volume work. With last week’s two emails, we’ve finished Luke, and now we embark upon a reading of Acts – a book filled with high drama, and many surprises.

Why didn’t Luke, the author, just stop with the story of Jesus? Clearly for him, the story of Jesus began with Jesus, but then continued in the life of the early Church. Jesus came not to be amazing but to form a new community of people who would be his representatives, his enactment, his Body on earth.

Acts begins as Luke did: with a personal dedication to Theophilus. Was he a patron who paid Luke’s way? A leader in the church? A symbolic person (as his name means “lover of God”)? And both books begin by clarifying that these words will provide “assurance” that the divine plans are truly being fulfilled in Jesus and his church – and assurance was needed! As Darrell Bock points out though, “Two aspects of that claimed fulfillment would be troubling: a dead Savior and a persecuted community.” The Theophiluses of the world might have wondered if this Jesus was just dead and gone. I mean, risen from the dead? And what about a tiny, persecuted band of believers? Was it their righteousness in a harsh, evil world? Was it a sign they were just plain wrong, a band of deluded misfits? Or many devout people might have wondered if those very first Christians were sorely mistaken to widen their net to include Gentiles – and the persecution was God’s judgment on them for doing so?

The persecution was to be expected when people are holy in an unholy world, when a set of values at odds with the culture’s are being embodied. Kavin Rowe, in his appropriately titled book on Acts, World Upside Down, calls Luke’s second volume “a highly charged and theologically sophisticated political document that aims at nothing less than the construction of an alternative total way of life, one that runs counter to the life-patterns of the Graeco-Roman world.” He clarifies then that “Luke’s remarkable – if offensive – claim that the culturally destabilizing power of the Christian mission is not to be construed as sedition or treason but rather as the light and forgiveness of God.” To claim Jesus’ superiority involved invalidated the power claims of the world. Christianity in its early days, and still today, has as its business to destroy belief, beliefs in all the world holds dear, as it creates new belief, beliefs in what is in the heart and mind of God.

A tragedy that unfolds in Acts is the early stages of the long, gradual divorce between Christianity and Judaism. At times their relationship was peaceful. But more often, tensions led to rage, judgment, and eventually even violence. The once persecuted Christians became the persecutors.

And so we begin reading Acts. My plan is to begin fairly slowly, just a few verses a couple of times each week, then we’ll breeze along faster toward the end of our study. Keep an eye out for what Luke the author is doing. Willie Jennings calls him “the master storyteller who follows God on the ground.” That’s what the story of Jesus, and then Jesus’ church has been and can be: God on the ground. That includes you and me, as we read, ponder, and then live into this alternative way of life. Thanks for joining me in this journey!