On May 15th the Church of Jesus Christ will celebrate its birthday on Pentecost Sunday. Depending on how one reckons the starting point, we will either be celebrating our 1983rd or 1986th birthday. That’s a lot of candles on the birthday cake!
The reason I mention this upcoming milestone is that the thought of it is something that makes me ponder the miraculous origin of the church. If someone were to come up and ask me why it is that I believe the things that I believe about God, Jesus, and the church, I would have to pin a lot of that on what happened in that span of 50 days that developed the church as we know it. Much of what I personally believe about God comes from what I have come to learn about God through Jesus. And why is it that I place so much stock in Jesus and what we believe about him? Those beliefs, it turns out, are based on the miracle of the church, itself.
What makes the existence of the church such a linchpin in my belief system? Simply put, like N.T. Wright, I can’t explain the existence of the church without the resurrection of Jesus and I can’t explain the mission of the church without the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Without a Risen Christ, there is no church. Under any other circumstance, the crucifixion of Jesus should have marked the failure of the Jesus movement: by rights, his followers should have either have scattered and gone off to other movements, or a successor would have tried to take over. None of that happened with the church. They didn’t scatter and there was no new “Jesus” type to take over the movement. They held on to the belief, until their dying breaths, that Jesus had appeared to them, and they believed that he was still present to them through the power of God’s Spirit.
Yet, as important as the resurrection was, it was not enough to give us the church that we know: that would require the Holy Spirit to guide and move this largely illiterate group of fisher folk into a dynamic world movement. Without the Spirit, the church may never have left the confines of Jerusalem. I can’t explain the church, the rise of the Apostle Paul, or any of the other things without the Holy Spirit, either.
So, happy birthday, Church! With all of the flaws and imperfections that we may have been party to over almost two millennia, we are still the Body of Christ to a broken world. It’s very existence is a testimony to the transforming power of God. What we shall become and form we shall take in the future remains a mystery, but there will always be the Church. We have God’s promise on that.
Your servant in Christ,
Rev. Jim Hoppert
