Acts 2:42-47
May 10, 2009: Fourth Sunday of Easter
What a beautiful vision! “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” As we continue to look at what it would mean to understand Christ as verb – as opposed to a name that always follows Jesus – this week we look at Christ as “share”.
Many years ago there was a book that became wildly popular called, “All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten”. Robert Fulghum believes the ethics of living can be simplified into the basic concepts we learned as children. I have to admit I never read the book, but I’m guessing Fulghum listed, “sharing with others” as one of those things you learned in kindergarten that you should still do as an adult.
I like the idea of Fulghum’s book, but I think the Christian ethic can’t be boiled down into something so simple. We might talk to children about sharing toys with their friends, and that may translate into adults sharing all kinds of resources with people they know. But this passage from Acts is clearly something far beyond that. People share absolutely everything in common. It is no longer a matter of me sharing what I have with you; the concept of me having anything disappears completely. That is an incredibly beautiful vision.
And these early Christians weren’t just sharing out of obligation. Surrounding this description of radical sharing is an atmosphere of incredible joy. If we called it happiness, that wouldn’t begin to cover it. We’re talking about ecstatic joy. This joy comes from two amazing events that happen just before our passage. First, there was Pentecost. This is when the closest friends and disciples of Jesus are blanketed with the Holy Spirit. They once again have God living among them – and now in them – in a way that they can feel. They begin to rejoice – in multiple languages no less. And those who are witnesses to this event can hear and understand every language being spoken. Not a bad day at church, huh?
The second event comes after Peter gives an sermon directed at those witnesses to Pentecost, who were at first skeptical that God would bestow anything on these common folks who followed Jesus, a common criminal. But when they heard Peter’s sermon, they were immediately moved to repentance and chose to be baptized into this new community, joining their lives to the risen Christ. They were born again and the exuberance is uncontainable.
So first there was the miracle of Pentecost, then this scene of mass conversion and baptism, and then, before they got around to sharing everything in common, we read that they saw unmistakable, tangible signs of God’s presence among them. It says, “Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles”. It doesn’t give details of these signs and wonders, but surely if they were anything like Pentecost, they were very convincing.
So we have a beautiful vision of community which comes about in the midst of great joy fueled by a deep and abiding sense of God’s presence. There we have it – our instructions for being the church. So, let’s stop worship and while I run home to get my computer and bike and dining room table and everything else I own, you all can go get all your possessions and we’ll met back here in an hour. We can just store it all in the room next to my office and then sell it at our next garage sale.
The Christian ethic always seems to call us one or two or ten steps farther than what we learned in kindergarten, doesn’t it? If someone asks you for your shirt, give them your coat also. Forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven times. Feed 5,000 people even when you barely have enough for a small family. Give everything you have to the poor. Even those who look with lust upon their neighbor are committing adultery.
Some claim these commands in the bible are hyperbole – and most of the time, I’m one of the them. But, I think we have to at least stop for a moment and consider the possibility that we are to take these things literally. The author of Acts is describing a picture of the earliest church community and we should at least stop for a second or two and consider that this is not only possible for us but preferable.
But whenever I do pause like that, this Christian ethic inevitably evokes in me a sense of defeat and frustration – and no small amount of guilt. I realize there is no way to get from here to there. I go back to understanding these ethical guidelines as hyperbole because that is the only way they can apply in a realistic way to my life as it currently stands.
Part of what impedes us on the path getting from here to there, I think, is that our daily lives don’t look much like what was happening in this dramatic scene in Acts. Maybe if I was caught up in something that big, that powerful, that ecstatic and dramatic, I would have more motivation to live like they did. Where the heck are our wonders and signs? If I had just a couple I might trust in the vision a little bit more. Where are our Pentecost and our baptisms that lead to mass transformation and rejoicing? Without these, it is hard, if not impossible, to make such a dramatic change in our lives. We are different – very different from those early Christians. So of course our lives will not look like theirs.
The truth is, if these dramatic things happened to us, most of us would find it terrifying. And by we, I mean most of us mainline, reserved Presbyterian types. We tend to recoil from the ecstatic religious experiences. There’s a reason we’re not all Pentecostal…so to speak. And really, there are some good reasons for this. Sometimes that kind of bigness, that level of intense emotion, leads to big badness. In other words, ecstatic, emotional experiences are not always from God, yet clearly they can have the reach and power to impact a lot of people. And in our mainline habitual humility and refusal to claim our truths as the only, universal truth, we can never be sure if such an experience is from God or not, so we err on the “safe” side. That is, we err on the side of less dramatic change in our lives.
So, given this unbridgeable gap between us and these early, Pentecostal, Christians, how do we let this passage work in us and change us? And, do we give up completely on the radical Christian ethic that will, Jesus assures us, bring about nothing less than the kingdom of God here on earth?
I think the answer might lie in going back again to the larger context in which this passage sits. Right before the descending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the scripture tells us: “They were all together in one place.” They were together. The resurrected Jesus had just ascended into heaven – left them again. Yet even as sadness and despair started taking over again, they still came together. And when you read all of chapter two, you see that they listened to Peter read scripture and then give a sermon. They prayed, they were baptized, they had 3rd Sunday potlucks and ate with glad and generous hearts, and they broke bread together. All of those things are present in the formation of this early community. And of course, we know, they had been doing these things over and over, long before the dramatic experience of Pentecost. And, what do you know? We do all those things too.
Now, I doubt my sermon will have the affect of bringing 3,000 people into our church – as Peter’s sermon did. I doubt that when we baptize Slane, we will be inexplicably moved to ecstatic joy and bring everything we own, sell it and give to the poor. But, we do come together, we pray, we break bread and baptize. And I would say that we do some pretty radical sharing compared to what goes on in our culture today. We give – a lot. We choose to care for those beyond our immediate family and closest neighbors. We take an offering every single week. This small group of committed Christians gives $120,000 a year to the church because we believe in the mission of this church.
The fact is we live in the “meantime”. Most of us are somewhere between the day of resurrection and the coming again of God in such an obvious, physical, miraculous way at Pentecost. This fantastical passage sits in the midst of the entire story of the people of God, found in this huge book we call the bible. To open ourselves to a new kind of sharing and the necessary transformation to live it out, we just need to keep living the story: Coming together over and over, in good times and bad, during times of God’s presence and absence, with people of all sorts, to listen for God’s word, to pray, to baptize, to break bread together. In the meantime, we continue our work as Christ in this world as we share to the best of our ability – and we can celebrate the signs that point to our generous hearts.
I love baptisms. Who doesn’t? They are so joyous – the promise of new life in the face of a death-filled world. Hope embodied. This one small life feels like an infinite set of possibilities. But I also love baptisms because they are one of the sacraments. Unfortunately, in the absence of ecstatic, dramatic things happening when we baptize and share communion, we can forget what a sacrament is. It is an act that for a moment bridges the gap between us and the earliest Christians who were so changed by their baptism – starting with Jesus. It is our response to what we believe is the in-breaking of God into our world.
God came as Jesus to share this holy meal with us in the most intimate way possible, so we continue to share this meal with as many people as we can in this most intimate setting. God came as the Holy Spirit compelling people to repent and be baptized, and so we baptize as our response to God’s spirit moving among us today. Sometimes, I admit, they are just acts, routine rituals when we are as likely to be thinking about our mountain of laundry as we are God’s inbreaking. But, we keep doing them, because I believe our continued practices of coming together to share in such sacraments, to listen as best we can for God’s word that too often feels distant, to respond in the many ways we do even if it falls short of some ideal – I believe this is how we prepare ourselves to see the wonders and signs.
As we baptize this baby, our newest member who will join us in this life-style of church from her first days on earth, maybe we will see the wonder of that, the sign of God’s inbreaking. Slane will be steeped in our Christian practices and stories her whole life. That is the promise we are all about to make. She is grafted into the body of Christ, of which we are all a part – a body that moves in this world at times revealing a little bit of what the kingdom of God looks like. As we baptize Slane, maybe we will see that not only is there hope that our world will one day look like the ultimate ideal, we will realize that it is inevitable.
Dan and Sara shared with me an experience they had one day as they were gazing upon Slane as only new parents can. They contemplated how Slane was a part of them biologically even before she was conceived. The makings were already there. They said that as they held Slane, they realized that they also held their grandchildren. The coming of the kingdom of God is inevitable. It’s not biology that binds us to our faith ancestors and descendants; it is the unceasing practices of the church. And so we celebrate this baptism as the sign that God’s kingdom, and in that we allow for the possibility that the drama will unfold, if not for us, for the Christian community of the future. The makings are already here. Amen.
