Yesterday, I had the honor of preaching at my own church. I felt a little extra pressure knowing that I see these people quite often and I don’t want to walk around knowing everybody thinks I preached a terrible sermon. Overall, the sermon seemed to go well–aside from the California heat of the sanctuary and a busy service. Though, I did totally botch up the benediction. What I appreciated about the sermon, though, was not merely its apparent “successful” delivery, but the opportunity to make some complicated stuff more accessible.
Somehow, I was assigned a passage that relates directly to themes I am currently addressing in my research. The text was Acts 2:37-47. The first part is the response of the Jerusalem crowds to Peter’s sermon and the second part is one of the famous descriptions of the early community life: sharing of goods, fellowship, etc. In my research, I am looking into sectarian impulses and mission impulses. In this passage, we have mission and we also have a strong internal community (I hesitate to use “sectarian”). Somehow there is a dialectic between the two. I find the combination intriguing. It’s not simply a “city on a hill” community–”Hey, look at how great we are! Wanna join up?” But there is an active, uh, “recruitment” initiative. It’s like a Billy Graham Crusade meets Menno Simons.
Mennonites tend to do better with the community part of this passage than the mission part, so I focused on the “mission” part as a challenge. The process of preparing the sermon, though, helped ground me a little bit. I think it has affected my perspective on my overall research, but I haven’t quite figured that out yet.
What an interesting journey this is–my career as a scholar of my own sacred texts. Last night, as I was in bed flipping through my Bible and considering the sermon and my research, I turned to my wife and said, “I love the Bible.” She handed me a bottle of pumped breast milk and asked me to go put it in the fridge. Life goes on. . .
