Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, Luke loves to summarize. We are grateful for this, because we know that the life of the church is not the most exciting life from a historical point of view. If I were to write a history of the last five years of our congregation, noting who came and who left, what we talked about at each fellowship meal and prayer meeting, how the singing sounded on a particular Sunday, that summer when the air conditioner was broken, and so on, would we find that particularly edifying or even interesting? Of course not. The ubiquitous presence of movie cameras has taught us that scenes that are just fine when you live them are incredibly boring, tedious, even painful when you have to watch them again. For instance, my kids like to record a minute or two of daily conversation between my wife and me as we clean up after lunch. The conversation was good while we had it, but in the recording, it becomes lame and sounds dumb. Well, Luke avoids that recording of the banal and instead gives us some of the highlight moments from the early church — Peter's Pentecost sermon, the healing of the man born lame, Ananias and Sapphira (which we'll get to next week). But he collapses the daily and weekly life of the church into these summaries, for which we are all profoundly grateful. The summaries give us the major features of the church as it's supposed to be, and edify the body by presenting us with a glowing picture of a healthy church. We saw in the major summary in Acts 2 that word, sacrament, and membership are the church's "top three." This summary in Acts 4, rather than going over that same ground, covers another facet of a healthy church.
