When we look at the history of the church there are plenty of chapters in that history that are nothing to be proud of, and when we look at the controversies surrounding the church today they do start to make Hinduism and Islam look a lot more attractive!
Why celebrate the birth of the church? It's a good question, and behind it is an even more painful question: 'Does the world really need the church?'
In as much as we love our little Christian community, we do need to recognise that the institution of the church is not viewed by most as God's greatest gift to humanity! Did the world ever really need it? After all, what was wrong with the good ol' synagogue?
It's a fair question, but if you look at the story of Acts chapter 2 that marks the birth of the church, you get the impression that the disciples of Jesus felt that there was plenty to celebrate! It's a story filled with excitement and passion and noise and carry-on and all sorts of wonderful miracles that indicate that God joined in that party too!
What went wrong? Did we forget something?
I think we did forget something. Perhaps we forgot a lot of things, and that's why it's so important that we hark back to the birthday of the church every now and then and take a a course in miracles look at what we were created to be. It's all here in the Pentecost story, Indeed, I believe it's all contained in the miracles!
Miracles play a very special role in the Bible. Yes, miracles play a special role for anyone who experiences them - giving us encouragement and strength and joy - but they play a very specific role in the New Testament as 'signs' - signs of things to come. Indeed, the word normally translated as 'miracle' in the New Testament is the Greek word 'semeion', meaning 'sign'.
Miracles are signs. They point to something. They point to the identity of Jesus, the miracle worker, but more often than not they also point to the future - to what the Kingdom of God will be like when we one day reach it - a place without sickness or hunger, where 'the earth is as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea' (Isaiah 11:9). The miracles of Jesus give us a glimpse of that future, and likewise the miracle of Pentecost - the miracle that takes place at the foundation of the church. It gives us a glimpse of what the church is destined to become!
You can't work it out in reverse unfortunately. I tried! It doesn't work!
What I mean is, if you forget for the moment the story of Pentecost, and start with the church today, and then guess what miracles might have taken place that foretold what it was to become, you get very erroneous results!
Try it!
Let's assume for a moment that the story of Pentecost was lost and that all we knew of the birth of the church was that the disciples were gathered together and that God came upon them and that wonderful miracles started taking place.
My reconstruction - projecting backwards from the church today - is that the Heavens must have opened and amazing gifts of administration must have fallen upon each of the disciples!
All of a sudden, a group of hapless fishermen who barely knew which way to hold up an abacus were turned into geniuses of accountancy, meticulous minute-takers, prodigious producers of protocols - persons who now had the nous to transform their poverty-stricken band into one of the most wealthy and powerful institutions ever known to humanity!
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