Having an Awful Effect

Acts 2:42-47

Introduction

I want you to imagine you were doing a public performance of some kind. It could be a speech, some music, presenting something you have made, whatever you are passionate about. You present your skills to the public. After the performance, someone comes up to you and says, “I was just filled with awe watching you.” How would you feel? The next person comes to you and says, “That was just awful.” Now how do you feel?

So is filling with awe a good thing or a bad thing? And just what is awe? And will our discussion about this be awesome?

We are told in this passage that the people who saw what was happening in the early church were filled with awe. Does that mean that there was a positive or negative effect on the people? And what would it mean for us to have an awful effect on our community? Is that something we even want?

The Early Church and Awe

What we have seen over the past few weeks is the birth of the Christian church. The Holy Spirit was poured out. Peter preached his Pentecost sermon and three thousand people were baptized. It was an exciting time.

In this passage we see how the church went from an event-filled day to the regular living of following Jesus. They gathered together to learn and to eat and to pray. We are told that the gospel message had such an effect on people that they sold their possessions and held everything in common. This was radical life-transforming beliefs. 

We are told that the apostles performed signs and wonders. This phrase “signs and wonders” was used earlier in that Joel prophecy and it appears numerous times in Acts.

What are signs and wonders? The sign part refers to the purpose of the event, the thing or person that is being pointed to. When you are on the highway, you look for signs for your exit not because the signs are pretty but because you want to go where the signs are point you. In this case, the signs of the apostles were pointing people to Jesus.

Then there is the wonders, sometimes translated at marvels. This is the reaction of the person who is witnessing the event. The Greek word originally referred to a monster. Monsters were seen as the activity on earth of the gods. The Greek word is the one that we get our English word terror. The idea of seeing signs and wonders in the church seems rather attractive until you realize what is actually happening.

Now we are not old the exact nature of the signs and wonders. It is likely that they were miracles similar to those performed by Jesus. It may be significant that the details are not given as we are meant to focus on the reaction to them.

The signs and wonders were not hidden from view but were witnessed by people outside the church. Remember that there were no church buildings for Christians to hide away from everyone. The people in the community were filled with awe. They literally felt awful.

What did this mean? We can feel in awe in different ways? There are times that I look up into the sky on a clear night and see all the stars and imagine how big they are and how far away they are and I am filled with awe. We used to live in a house that overlooked Georgian Bay. Because we had children that woke early, I saw many beautiful sunrises over that bay and I felt awe.

That is not the awe that these people felt at what the apostles were doing. The Greek word for awe is phobos, the word we get phobia from. It literally means fear. The Greek god Phobos was the son of the war god. Of course the meaning of the word expanded over time to something like our modern word awe. But it always meant an intense reaction to being in the presence of some great power. It was not fondness for that beautiful sunrise but perhaps being close to the edge of Niagara Falls but without any barriers.

Was this a positive or a negative experience for the people? The answer is yes. It was negative in that it must have been uncomfortable. It was challenging to who they were and what they believed. It demanded a response. It was positive in that it was pointing them to Jesus, someone who had the power to transform their lives. The people were filled with awe.

The Modern Church and Awe

Are we having an awful effect on our community? I mean, are people experiencing a sense of awe at the work we are doing as a church?

In our passage, that awe was created by signs and wonders. What are our signs and wonders? We may not see massive amounts of healings and other miracles but those things aren’t specifically mentioned in this passage either. Signs and wonders at their core mean the activity of God in our midst that point people to Jesus.

This is an extremely important question for us to be asking at this specific time in our church. For the past number of decades (or longer) we have been coasting along, doing our things, offering our ministries and programs. And then a few months ago COVID-19 hit. Not only did our programs come to a halt, we closed our doors to worship services on Sunday mornings. We need to ask if it mattered at all that our building was closed? Did people in our community notice that we were not open? Was there any sense of loss at what had happened? 

I’m thankful that I did hear from people inside and outside the church that noticed that we were closed and missed that we were open. There was a sense that God was working in our midst.

That is not to say that all of that came to a stop when our building closed. There were many things we couldn’t do but there were some things we could do. We were able to increase our giving to the food bank at a time when other people were hoarding food and donations were way down. I wish you could have seen the food bank volunteer’s face when they expected us to be giving a can or two of tuna and instead we had bags and bags of food. I would go so far as to say that there was a look of awe on their faces.

The goal of the church, our congregation and the church in general, is not just to have a pleasant time in our building. We are meant to have an awful effect on our community. The community should be looking at the church and recognize that God is at work, and yes, it should scare them a bit.

What this will look like, I can’t say. I can say that it probably will not be about duplicating all the things we liked about the past. For a long time, we were known as the Out of the Cold church. But we no longer host people over night. Many other things have changed and may not return to the way they were. But that doesn’t mean the signs and wonders will stop. Our job is to find out what God wants to do through this congregation as it is now, with the community we have now in the conditions we currently have. Everything was new for the early church and everything will be new for us in the post-COVID world as well.

Conclusion

We want people to look at our church and just feel awful. Not that we want them to be sick to their stomach but we want people to see the church as more than just a club of people who enjoy hanging out and talking about the old times. We want people to see that God is at work in our congregation. We want people to see signs and wonders. Wonders of the things God is doing and signs pointing to Jesus. We want people to have a sense of awe of what is taking place. This is an exciting time for us as a congregation as we get to rediscover these things for ourselves. The unknown may create a bit of terror in us, but that is okay. God’s power should be giving us a sense of awe as well.