Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.
Sharing Life
Scriptures: Acts 4:32-34 1 John 1:1-5
Our Acts lesson gives us a fascinating vision of the first reaction of the church to being on its own after the resurrection. Everybody got together, sold their stuff, and made sure that all the followers of Jesus had enough to live on.
It followed the model that Jesus had lived with his disciples. They had travelled around together, sharing everything, living simply, trusting God to provide for them. In those days, some of their major support had come from some women who joined them who had financial resources and paid for their needs.
Now, in Jerusalem, they were a rapidly growing community, and they shared whatever they had. The desire to share equally to supply the needs of the poor and the rich fit very well with Jesus’ teachings about the first being last and the last being first.
You can even mutter about communism or socialism if you wish, but the fatal flaw in this early Christian system is not the sharing but the expectation that Jesus was going to return at any time and provoke a general resurrection and a new Kingdom of God.
In other words, it wasn’t sustainable. It wasn’t expected to have to be. Selling assets and living off the proceeds can only last so long; eventually this kind of planning led to the Apostle Paul having to ask for donations from the churches in Asia Minor for the “Saints at Jerusalem”.
It’s rather sad. As an experiment in living an ideal Christian communal life, we can only wonder how it would have changed over time. In reality, the Romans destroyed Jerusalem about 40 years later and the first Christian community with it.
Many Christian monastic communities have tried to create a sustainable version of this early system, with a lot of extra rules added so that spirituality would be the focus. Frequently this included celibacy and the separation of men and women. But not always: monastic communities in the early Celtic Christian church often contained both men and women who were allowed to be married and have children. When the church of Rome gained power in the British Isles, these were dismantled and re-created with all the celibacy and separation rules in place.
That first Jerusalem community was trying hard and they wanted to live up to the ideals of Jesus; but they were also human
Shortly after this lesson we read about Ananias and Sapphira, a married couple who wanted to look like they were doing the right thing but also wanted to hold on to some of their wealth. They sold a property, gave part of it to the church community and declared that they had given everything. They got in trouble, not for withholding – it was clearly their property and they didn’t have to give it at all – this sharing everything was not a rule; it was an option. People were allowed to keep personal wealth (see? It was not Communism) but if you know the story, you know that next they were struck dead by the Holy Spirit for lying to God.
I’m not going to go into that. A lot of preachers have gotten a lot of mileage out of this story over the centuries and I’m not going to expand on that right now. I don’t think that God needs to strike us down when our own dishonesty has ways of doing that already, whether we are dishonest with ourselves or each other.
The point I want to address is that this is typical church stuff: we have an ideal, a principle that we want to live by, but we don’t want to give up everything. We also don’t want to look like we’re doing less than the others, so we cut corners and in doing so we miss the point of what God is trying to do with us:
- God wants to transform our way of being;
- God is not trying to do it with rules or coercion;
- Everything about what God offers us as a community of faith is voluntary;
- It only really works if it is voluntary.
It’s not about looking good, or right, or righteous: it is about responding to God’s love with love of our own. It may well involve pushing our boundaries and doing more than we thought we’d ever be comfortable with, but we have to get there by choice or by coming to the understanding that it’s needed.
There were other stumbles on the way. The Jerusalem church tried to organize everything with the 12 disciples in charge of all the sharing. Then, people started complaining because the widows, who were basically the most vulnerable church members, were not being treated equally. The local Jewish widows were getting better fed than the Jewish widows who were from Greek-speaking regions.
The disciples threw up their hands, declared they were overworked and asked the church to elect seven Deacons to help them take care of the needs of the people.
They were inventing something quite new at the time and it was a very human process, with the humans seeking God’s wisdom and inspiration every time they hit a problem.
What it came down to is that the church is about the followers of Jesus trying to find a way forward together. Sharing and helping is at the core of what it means to be the church. These were the very first people to hear the words of Jesus and try to live them out. Their first efforts were all about a shared life together, like the opening words of our United Church New Creed: “We Are Not Alone”. Not only do we live in a universe created and pervaded by God, but we have each other.
And in working out what it means to share life as God’s people we have to make mistakes, and discover new ideas, and figure out which principles and ideals we take literally and which ones need to be developed.
Look at those first lessons the church learned: sharing our resources and challenges is good; expecting the end of the world tomorrow is not: we’re still figuring out that sustainability is important, aren’t we? That seems to be a really tough one to get through our heads.
But those early efforts should still inform and inspire us as we take the teachings of Jesus and make them real today. Some new Christian communities are trying that shared living thing in a 21st century way: intentional communities, most often young people, buying up old houses, apartment buildings or hotels, fixing them up and sharing resources and accommodations as an expression of faith and a practical effort to re-capture the spirit of Jesus’ teachings.
Yes, the affordability of housing is forcing people to consider these options, but the vision is strong: some even predict that this will shape the future of Christianity in our post-Christian culture. Who knows? We have to work out for ourselves what it means to share life as Christians; as people of faith; as followers of Jesus.
That is our task: to discover the way forward and I am hopeful about that because I believe that with all our very human limitations and challenges (and sometimes, perhaps, because of them) we can discover wonderful things within ourselves and each other.
I believe that God’s Spirit is there to guide us, and help us as we go forward together, living our shared life of faith.
Amen.
Knox United Church Nepean 