The Bible in a Year (with Fr. Mike Schmitz)
Introduction to the Church (with Jeff Cavins) (2024)
Sun, 17 Nov 2024
Welcome to The Church period! Jeff Cavins joins Fr. Mike to discuss the final time period of the Bible Timeline. They discuss the historical context of the early Church, why Rome and the early martyrs are so significant, and how the Holy Spirit takes on a major role. They also explain the differences between Acts, the epistles, and the book of Revelation. For the complete reading plan, visit ascensionpress.com/bibleinayear. Please note: The Bible contains adult themes that may not be suitable for children - parental discretion is advised.
Chapter 1: What is the Bible in a Year podcast about?
Hi, my name is Father Mike Schmitz, and you're listening to the Bible in a Year podcast, where we encounter God's voice and live life through the lens of Scripture. The Bible in a Year podcast is brought to you by Ascension. Using the Great Adventure Bible Timeline, we'll read all the way from Genesis to Revelation, discovering how the story of salvation unfolds.
And now we fit into that story today. We've just concluded the Gospel of Luke. And now today we're heading into that last age, last stage, last time period known as the church. But before we get to that, I want to let you know that there is a gifting campaign happening when it comes to the Bible in a Year. The Bible in a year has brought the word of God to so many people.
As you know, you're part of this community, changing lives in so many incredible ways. We're humbled to play this role in God's plan and consider it our ongoing mission to keep bringing the word of God to as many people as possible. So what I'm saying is the end of this year is not going to be the end of Bible in a year. So far, Ascension has been able to add the podcast to YouTube.
You might have found it that way. Maybe you're watching right now on YouTube. And also, we're working on translating it into different languages so you could have the Bible in a year in other languages than English. But, of course, this takes a significant investment to bring projects like these free of cost to our listening communities.
And we want to keep them free of cost to all those people who participate because we want to get the Word of God out there. And because of that, we have to rely on generous contributions from listeners like you to help defray these costs and to enable us to continually provide new audiences with this life-changing content.
So if you would like to help support the Bible in a year on mission, you can go to ascensionpress.com support. So that helps us move forward, helps us keep the Bible in the Year online in perpetuity, as well as developing those new programs and those new initiatives to bring the Bible in the Year to more people. If you want to support that, you can go to ascensionpress.com slash support.
Not only that, but also Jeff's joining us today, as you know. And Jeff also wants to introduce another thing. It's a companion, essentially, to the Bible in the Year.
That's right, Father. We have been working all this time on developing a book that we call the Bible in a Year Companion. You know, so many people throughout the year have been so blessed, and one of the comments is, man, I wish I had all of that in one place. I could go back, you know, and I could just look at it like kind of a devotion and go deeper. So that's what this is.
The Bible in a Year Companion is a book, and it has wonderful descriptions of every day, kind of the essence of that day from your teaching, and it has frequently asked questions. And we, as you know, we have been on Thursdays at two o'clock Eastern on Facebook, Ascension's Bible Study Facebook page, answering a lot of these questions that people are coming up with. And so
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of the early Church?
Well, you mentioned too, this is the launching. You know, that sense of, you mentioned, there were two words I just cued in on. One was explosion, which is, yeah, I mean, as Jesus even says in Acts chapter one, He says, you'll receive the power or the dynamis of the Holy Spirit. And that explosion, that's what happens.
But then the launching of the first Christians, launching of the church into the world to change the world, essentially, to redeem the world. Gosh, it just, yeah, as you said, the story of the Acts of the Apostles is where we get introduced to some of these people who I mean, the apostles, obviously, that Jesus recruited, but also you have Paul and you have Barnabas.
You have some of those characters that were part of that mission early on that were launched from this Acts of the Apostles time period and did exactly what you're saying. They went out and brought the gospel of mercy and hope and good news to the world. And we seemed unstoppable in so many ways, even though they definitely encountered opposition.
Well, to give you a kind of an idea of the atmosphere that the early apostles went out into, it was brave. It was courageous. This is a martyr business here when they went out because Rome was the world power. And people need to remember that right before Jesus, we had Julius Caesar, who proclaimed himself to be God, and Caesar was worshipped as God. He had an adopted son by the name of Octavian.
Octavian defeated Mark Anthony at the Battle of Actium, came into Rome with the honorary name of Caesar Augustus, and it was said of Caesar Augustus that the Nobody before, during, or after will ever eclipse the glory of Caesar Augustus, who is the son of God, the one who ushered in the Pax Romana, the peace, and the one who has given the euangelion, the good news, to the world.
Yeah.
And that's the atmosphere that the book of Acts takes place in.
You know, it's so interesting too, because as you're pointing that out, here's Rome, which is the world superpower at this time. And Peter and Paul, they don't stay away from Rome. They don't stay away from the place where everything's going down. I mean, you imagine that in so many ways. Up until this moment, the story is centered on the Holy Land.
Yes, the people of Israel had been exiled, whether that be Egypt or Babylon. But the idea was, we'll stay here. And now they're launching, once again, launchpad. They're launching from that place where Christ walked and that place that was the land of the promised land. into new lands to bring the Evangelion, the real good news to the world. I just think it's a shift.
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Chapter 3: How does the Holy Spirit play a role in the Church?
Right, and the early church saw this, and the early church was aware that Rome was started by Remus and Romulus. And there's actually artwork from very early on showing Peter and Paul, who are, in a sense, the new Remus and Romulus. I never knew that.
That's awesome.
Yeah, it's a new Rome now, and this is now the shift will move from the Holy Land to Rome as the seat of Peter, and it's like a rebuilding of Rome, which is a sign of a rebuilding of the world. And that's why Rome is very special to us as Catholics. It's not just, oh, they got good wine over there. But it really is the beginning of the new Remus and Romulus, the founders.
Sorry, I was kind of flabbergasted. I was like, what? I knew the Remus and Romulus part, but I never made that connection with Rome. St. Peter and St. Paul. Yeah. And especially when it comes to redemption, when it comes to renewal, when it comes to restoration, this is the mission.
And here is, you know, Rome that had done so much damage is being in some ways redeemed by the, that get restored by the two twins. We'll say twin apostles of Peter and Paul. Um, how, how much, you know, one of the things that's going to happen is he's mentioned acts. The apostles is, um,
is the context, but we're also reading the letters of Paul, we're reading the letters of Peter and John, all the New Testament letters as well. Is there anything that you would say, unless you want to stay on Acts of the Apostles for a second more, but is there anything you would say that, okay, here's some things to pay attention to when reading some of these epistles?
Right. Well, I would say, just going back for a moment to the book of Acts, that we have a structure that is very important, and that is that it is the story of the two super apostles. And so chapters 1 through 12 really focuses on Peter, and then 13 through 28 focuses on Paul. But here's what's interesting. If you read, and as people listen to you very carefully, they will notice that
Peter is imitating Jesus and the works that Jesus did. There is a direct correlation between Peter, his works, and the works of Christ. And the same thing is true of Paul in chapters 13 through 28. He is mirroring Peter.
And so both of them are mirroring Christ, and that tells us something, and that is that we, as the members of the people of the book of Acts, we're doing the work of Christ like Peter and Paul did. So that's a little structural thing that I think is really important to get. But the basic structure of the book of Acts is that we have, first of all, in Jerusalem. It's a witness in Jerusalem.
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Chapter 4: What can we learn from the Book of Acts?
So you mentioned explosion earlier, and that is that it starts in Jerusalem and boom, it just explodes into Judea and Samaria, places we wouldn't normally go. And people we don't really know, and then to the uttermost parts of the earth. And the fact... that people are listening to you and me right now means it worked. Because you and I are in the uttermost parts of the earth.
Especially you. Well, two and a half hours further away from the center than you. Yeah, well, you know, even it's Acts 1, right, where Jesus says, you'll be my witnesses here in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, to the ends of the earth. And then as you're saying that, just telescopes for the rest of the book of Acts to that exact same pattern. That's phenomenal. It's incredible.
And not only that, I know that our people who are listening, journeying with us, one of the things that is noted by Luke in writing the Acts of the Apostles is that A lot of times what caused that explosion, what caused that launching was persecution. It was as a result of this persecution, the Christians, they went out and they began to proclaim Christ in other places.
And that's just, that can be backwards for us. We think like if it's going to be blessed, it's going to... It's going to be blessed in a way that just I like. It'll be blessed in a way that just fruits everywhere, but it's often not only the fruit of Christ and his Holy Spirit, also the fruit of suffering that's going to be giving new life to the church.
And that's something that Paul really understood that too, just exactly what you're saying, because it was in the second phase of this explosion in chapters 8, 4 through 12, 25, that this great scholar, Saul of Tarsus, was brought into the kingdom by the Holy Spirit, and he became a super apostle.
And then in the third part of the explosion, Paul has three missionary journeys, which are covered in the book of Acts. And every one of those journeys, he goes out first and he, what does he do? He establishes churches. And then in the second and third, he's establishing, but he's going back and he's nurturing the churches that he started.
And one of the things that people will find when they read the epistles of Paul, which Paul wrote more books, Luke has more territory in his writing. But when you read those epistles, Father, you're going to, as you know, see that that early church did experience the power of the Holy Spirit and the expansion of the church, but they also had problems.
And the problems typically were departing from the ways of the world and Roman customs in their temples and so forth. And so when you read the epistles of Paul, he's going to teach you theology. He's going to show you how Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. But then at times, he's going to say, hey, guys, we got a problem here.
And we got to deal with this if we're going to keep moving forward. And so I think it's key for people to read that in a twofold way. One is the mission. The other is, what about us as the church? Are we getting along? Are these stones in the temple causing problems? Right.
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Chapter 5: How did Rome influence the early Christian mission?
He's addressing them to a certain group of people, typically about a challenge or typically about their experience or some kind of way in which, whether it be the Corinthians. And here's what I've heard is going down in your community. Here's where you need to start living these new lives or even to Timothy. encouraging him to be the Christian he's being called to be and living in this world.
I think that there's something about that, that when we get the context for the letters, sometimes they become much more clear. It's kind of like the writings of the prophets where we can read them and say, I'm kind of getting stuff. But if we know the context more, here's what's going on at the time, then we recognize, oh, here is how not only this applied then and what they're talking about here,
But here's how it applies now. And I think so much more accessible and so much more like, as you say, oh, this is for me, not only for a community 2000 years ago, but this is for me. This is for us. This is for now.
Right. You mentioned in context, and that is very important, particularly with Paul's writings, because four of his writings he wrote not from the beach with a iced tea. He wrote them from prison. And when you're reading an epistle from Paul, knowing that he's in prison, knowing that his life is on the line, and then you read what he wrote, that's life-changing.
He wrote Philippians, Ephesians, and Colossians, and Philemon. Those are called the prison epistles. And for anybody who feels like, I'm in prison, whether it's in a relationship, at work, financially, whatever it might be, Pay close attention to those prison epistles because they're going to teach you an awful lot. We have a number of writers in the New Testament.
You have Paul, we have Peter, we have John, we have Timothy. You know, there's different authors who are telling you about their experience in teaching people as this gospel explodes. And I oftentimes think to myself, wouldn't it have been great to be back then? Yeah. and to experience this. Paul's coming to Minneapolis, the Xcel Energy Center. Wouldn't that have been really, really great?
But the truth of the matter is, we're in that period right now. You are the one. And I say you, those of you that are listening to this right now, And you're on the stage now. You're on the stage now. It's your turn to take this mission and continue to grow it, learning from Peter and Paul, learning from the early church and what Jesus taught them. And this is a time of expansion as well.
Yeah, and I love that you pointed that out because for many reasons, but one of those reasons is I think we can look back and say, well, you know, Paul's story is over and Peter's story is over and Barnabas and Timothy, all those stories are written now. They've been lived. Those lives have been lived and now they're enjoying the reward.
But we can realize that when they were writing these words, you know, here's Paul writing his prison letters. He was in the midst of uncertainty. He had no idea how it would all hash out. He had no idea how it would turn out. And so I think a lot of times we can look at that back then and think like, oh, that would have been so great.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did early Christians face?
a lot of us to be okay i'm gonna tap out here like i might not want to go any further because of the fact that i don't know okay i'm stranded you know he's shipwrecked what's gonna happen i mean he just says it as if i was shipwrecked a couple times you know as opposed to i would tell the whole story if it was me i'd be like okay there i was and here's the i had no idea what's coming next he just mentions it in passing as if there wasn't any uncertainty and yet of course there was because
Just like us, Peter and Paul and all the apostles and other early disciples of Jesus, they lived in the same broken world and same fragile world and same dangerous world that we live in.
And so it's so good to listen to our older brothers and sisters and see their lives and see how they're living because we recognize that, okay, that same danger, that same uncertainty, that same suffering is ours as well.
Exactly. People will look at Peter and Paul as they're listening to you read and they'll say, well, yeah, they're super apostles. And that's Paul, that's Peter, but I'm so-and-so from Omaha. I'm so-and-so from Pittsburgh. And you gotta remember, Paul was not aware that he was Paul.
I mean, he wasn't saying, in light of the fact that people are gonna be building churches in my name, I would say to you, no, what did he do for a living? He was a tent maker. He was a tent maker who was on a mission from Jesus, and he exhibited every characteristic that we would want to exhibit, the tenacity and the courage and boldness and the love.
And so we can, as you said, we can learn so much from our older brothers and sisters. But one thing to really pay attention to as you are going through the book of Acts is to pay attention to the reading in the context of that church exploding in the early church and how the church is changing and adapting as it continues to grow and the common problems that they face, the leadership issues.
We can learn a lot about the leadership of the early church. And I would say that really for the first time in our journey together, Father, the Holy Spirit now is really center stage. Not that he wasn't before. I mean, the Trinity is the Trinity, but now this is the age... of the Holy Spirit.
We were in the age of Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, our Father in the Old Testament, and now the Holy Spirit is going to usher us in. And I love what it says. Paul writes about it, and he said, he talks about the power of the Holy Spirit in his life to transform, and Jesus predicted this before.
Not predicted, I mean, he told us before that he was going to go to the Father, but he was going to send a helper to And that helper would guide us into all truth. And he did. And he continues to. In that word helper in Greek, paraclete is the one who comes alongside of us.
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Chapter 7: How do the letters of Paul address church issues?
is equally important in the sacraments of initiation because it is in confirmation that the Holy Spirit is given to the church to fulfill the baptismal graces and power and give us the courage to be, as the catechism says, official witnesses of Jesus. So I would say that anybody who is joining us that has not been confirmed, maybe you've been baptized, but you haven't been confirmed,
this is your period now. This is the time where you go to pastor and you say, you know what? I need to be confirmed. I have never been confirmed. I talked to one priest father a while ago and I said to him, how many people in your church have not been confirmed? And he goes, oh, I don't know, maybe 20 or so. I don't know. I said, why don't you do some work? Go into the database and check.
He called me back a couple of weeks later and he said, you're not going to believe this. We have over 500 people who have not been confirmed. And so I said, well, you can imagine what Easter Vigil is going to look like next year then. So I just say that as a sort of a word of encouragement that if you're reading this and saying, I want to live this way,
then you've got to be equipped the way the early church was equipped. And as Jesus went in Matthew 3 and 4, and he went into the water, came out of the water, the Holy Spirit came down upon him. That's how he began his ministry. And he said, as the Father has sent me, so I send you. And that is very powerful, the Holy Spirit in the life of this early church.
Well, that makes so much sense, especially even the role, particularly of confirmation, because you have the apostles, who had been baptized, the apostles who had been essentially ordained at the Last Supper, the apostles who had been given the gift of being able to forgive sins here at the resurrection of Jesus at the end of John's Gospel.
And yet still, they lacked this power of the Holy Spirit in this unique way, this power of Pentecost, the power of confirmation. And so, yeah, they had the Holy Spirit, and yet there was a certain charism of the Holy Spirit, a certain mark, a certain power of the Holy Spirit that had not yet been given to them. And so someone could say, well, I've been baptized. I have the Holy Spirit.
You are right. You are correct. You do. And yet there's more. And that's what did Jesus say? He says that anyone, bad fathers, bad parents you might have who would, you know, you wouldn't even give your son a scorpion if they asked for an egg. But how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks him? And, uh, that's an incredible thing.
Not only can you ask the Holy father to give you the Holy spirit now where you're listening to this, but also in that sacramental, that sacramental way, that way of power that comes through the sacraments of the church that Jesus had given to us is just. So essential and so powerful.
I'm glad you thanks for that reminder, because that's one of those where I think sometimes I just assume I just assume sometimes that, well, everyone's been confirmed or they've said yes to their confirmation. That happens to where we have we have people who, yeah, I was confirmed when I was however old.
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Chapter 8: What is the relevance of the early Church today?
And asking the Lord, come alive now in my life in the same way that you came alive in the lives of the apostles and the lives of those who were sent out and had lived radical lives, transformed witnesses to Jesus.
Yeah. And there's one book that you're going to be covering, which if you, when I take polls in the past and say, what book would you like me to teach? What book would you like to learn from? Overwhelmingly, the book of Revelation.
Of course, I was going to guess. You were going to guess.
I would have been right. Yeah, it is. Because it's such a mystery. And when our good friends will hear you reading the book of Revelation, just to put that into context, the book of Revelation was written by John. And John received quite a revelation from God about the end of that era, the end of the Old Testament era and the beginning of something new.
And there will be judgment on Jerusalem and Rome. And there will be this new beginning. But the book of Revelation is a mystery to so many people because it's not written the way the epistles are written. The epistles are letters. Hey, Father John, how are you doing lately? I hope you're... But the book of Revelation is called apocalyptic literature. In other words, it's written differently.
It uses code words and uses structures that are taken from the Old Testament to explain something that is about to happen. And that thing that is going to happen is the destruction of Jerusalem and after Jesus, that's what it's going to focus on. But at the same time, it's going to focus on the end of time.
So it's kind of like it has dual purposes, but it was written to the seven churches of Asia Minor, which that's modern day Turkey. And there was a formulaic statement that you're doing good in this area, but I have this against you. You need to correct this. And then there was the reward for that. That was the beginning.
Then we see the judgment on Jerusalem, the end of Jerusalem, and the beginning of this amazing family, the kingdom of God, the church. And it's so interesting because Whereas Paul and Peter and Timothy and everyone, they quote from the Old Testament. John doesn't. What John does is he alludes to the Old Testament over 500 times. And so as people have gone through the Old Testament with you,
Some of this is going to be like a rumble strip as they listen to the book of Revelation. Like, wait a minute, I've heard that. Wait a minute. I've seen that pattern before and you are right. You are right. So it is a great book. The highlight of it is the Lamb's Supper. It is the Eucharistic celebration in heaven, a new heaven.
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