Kendall Smith, No-Div
Kendall is an elementary science teacher and an avid lover of books, nature, and long walks. She is easily distracted by thunderstorms and loves a good conversation over coffee.
At least four times in the last two years I have exclaimed to my daughter, “Seriously! This is the BEST NEWS EVER!” after reading the Bible, listening to a podcast, or reading a book. It’s like I’m hearing the Gospel for the first time. The thing is, I’ve heard “The Gospel” (as we evangelicals like to say) a THOUSAND times. And it is good news. But the Gospel that I’ve been hearing and learning over the last few years blows my mind. In the best way.
What I missed for the first three decades of my life was the idea that God’s purpose in creating humans was Oneness--with God, with people, and with creation. Tyler explained two weeks ago that God is love and embodies community. Love exists within community. God created people for love in community, and this was God’s good intention for all of humanity. FOR ALL TIME. The fall broke this. It created fractures between us and our Creator, each other, and God’s good creation. And boy have we felt it’s effects.
The story that plays out, starting in Genesis and moving throughout the Bible, is all about God reclaiming Creation for His original purposes. It is good and beautiful and unbelievably true! In this blog post, I want us to dream together about what it looks like to live in a world where the Church has embraced both women and men as equally-gifted partners in the Gospel. Where we are working alongside God, as we were always intended to do, to bring the fullness of God’s reign in this world.
This is, in every sense, the good news that Jesus preached.
This is the good news that Jesus passed on to his disciples and they preached.
This was the reason the apostles traveled all over starting house churches.
And it is this good news that changed people’s lives and turned the world upside down.
Jesus’ gospel was as much “here-and-now freedom and wholeness and healing” as it was the promise of heaven when you die. In fact, in the gospels, when we see Jesus offering healing or wholeness, this is the same idea as our word for salvation! The Gospel, for Jesus, was embodied. And I have a feeling it was because Jesus wasn’t just rescuing people from the fall, but for restored community--with God, with others, and with all of creation.
Sometimes we like to look at the first century churches--these little house churches that were started by Peter, Paul, Barnabas and others--and assume that they were the perfect model of how to live like a Jesus-follower. So we emulate them in our churches or use the letters that Paul and others wrote as our manual for how to create successful churches. The only problem is, we are peeking into a letter written to a small group of people meeting in someone’s home, dealing with a particular issue... 2,000 years ago. And it is from these letters (part of our Scriptures, for sure!) that we get some really confusing messages.
Karmyn walked us through some of these challenging passages last week. No doubt, there are challenging passages. And I’m so thankful that there are scholars who are pouring their lives into this work--the work of understanding Paul and his intentions in these letters and passages. But this isn’t where I want to settle today. I want to hang out in Acts 2. In every way, this is the culmination of Jesus’ ministry: he had spent 3 years with a group of twelve guys who learned from him, followed him, and still had no clue what they were supposed to do. (feel any better about your life?) But after Jesus rose from the dead, he showed up again for a few weeks...and then went back to heaven. I’m sure his disciples were dumbstruck: “Now what are we supposed to do?!?!?”
But rather than write out instructions for them--he sent His Spirit. This is the same Spirit who was there at Creation--hovering over it, filling it, sustaining it. This was the same Spirit whom Joel prophesied would be “poured out on all people…” including sons, daughters, young and old, even servants! And guess what? In Acts 2--it happened! Exactly as God, through Joel, had promised. Peter even recognized this! He didn’t pull out the Peter Standard Version for his sermon to the masses and exclude women (since surely they weren’t gifted to prophesy!)...but included them in the new thing that God was doing! Women were gifted in every facet of this new thing: pastoring, hosting house churches, supporting churches and missionaries financially, mentoring… Everyone got to be in on what God was doing! John, from the Bible Project, says, “Pentecost marked the beginning of an unstoppable march across the known world--and our world--that would culminate in a global Eden.”
If Pentecost was the beginning of a global Eden--then our call, as the Church, is to move with God in that direction. What a beautiful picture: women and men, young and old, slave and free, people from all cultures--together, we are the Image of God on the Earth. And we all get to be in on this New Thing that God is doing. This is the best news!
***So much of my learning in this area has been by reading and listening to amazing people. My top 3 favorite resources? The Blue Parakeet, by Scot McKnight; The Mary’s of the Bible, by Boaz Johnson, and The Bible Project podcast.