in doing research for this sermon, i discovered that liturgically, the sunday after easter is called "low sunday." but no one said why. the sermon is on Acts 4:32-35 and Psalm 133.
God's diverse yachad
Do you know, this short little passage from Acts has actually become fairly controversial? Maybe it’s not so surprising to see why... it seems as though the early church followed quite a communal economic model, doesn’t it? “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”
There is a lot of argument over whether this description of the earliest church is to be “normative” for the whole church. That is, we ask is this really to be the way the church should live? Isn’t it impossible when there are billions of Christians? Isn’t it impossible when we live in a world of credit and capital, an industrialized economy where money is more often numbers in a computer somewhere? The model of an ancient, agricultural society can hardly apply to us today, right? And really, do we have to talk about money in church again? Many scholars question whether the picture of the early community depicted here is even accurate; maybe it’s being remembered with “rose-tinted spectacles.” Or maybe the people who never really believed but came for free handouts is being carefully edited out.
I once had a professor who quoted a paraphrased version of this passage, and then she asked, “who said that?” And I answered, without raising my hand, “Karl Marx.” Most of the class laughed, but the professor said she would pray for me :)
But we like our stuff, don’t we?
Luke, who wrote the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, has some hard things to say about money. The most famous is probably the story he tells is the one we call “the rich young ruler,” where Jesus tells a young man to sell everything he has and give the money to the poor, and then come follow Jesus. One scholar notes, “Wealth is not, for Luke a sign of divine approval. It is a danger.”
I don’t really know if there are economic lessons we can draw from this passage. I don’t think Luke recorded it to give us a model for organizing the financial situations of our churches. Because of where it is situated in the narrative of Acts, though, I think Luke put it there to explain to his audience how we should live as followers of the resurrected Jesus. If there is anything perfectly clear from Luke’s stories and parables about wealth it is that the follower of Jesus should not be caught up in gathering wealth for their own sake. Wealth is good, but only if it’s used to build up the kingdom of God.
Luke follows this general sketch of the new community of Jesus-followers with two stories: one is of a man who sells a field and gives all the money to the apostles. The other is of a couple who also sell a field, but who keep back some of the money and then lie and say they are giving all of their profits to the community. Peter confronts both of them about the lie and they die suddenly, which Luke attributes to supernatural causes.
The point in their story isn’t that they kept some of the money back. It was their property, they could do such a thing. No, what they are accused of is lying to God. They wanted to make themselves look good by saying they were giving everything to the people of God. Their lie proved they cared more about themselves than and how they appeared than God or the poor. So we need to be really careful about insisting we can draw economic or financial models from this passage.
What is absolutely certain is that God wants his people to look beyond themselves and especially to the poor. You can barely open the Bible without being confronted on every page, Old and New Testaments, with the injunction to care for the community, to be generous and free with your money for the good of God’s people. And this isn’t just unique to Christians. Tacitus, a Roman historian who wrote in the second century complained that Jews are wealthy because “among themselves they are inflexibly honest and ever ready to show compassion.”
I also think the psalm selected for this morning picks up on another theme Luke is hitting on here. “How good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters live together in unity!” Psalm 133 is a very famous psalm in the Hebrew Bible; when I was growing up, we sang a song of that verse in Hebrew. Unity is also desperately desired by God’s people. The word in Hebrew is “yachad;” it’s one of the words the community which created the Dead Sea Scrolls used to describe themselves. They were not just an assembly, or a community, they were a unity.
But we have to be careful with that too. The yachad, the Dead Sea Scrolls community are known for their very strict discipline practices. It took at least three years to be admitted into their community, and it was very, very easy to be cast back out again for some infraction of the rules. As far as we know, women were not allowed at all. They clung to their charismatic leader, whom they called “the teacher of righteousness” and seem to have had a tightly controlled and administrated community purse, which is unlike Luke’s depiction of the early Jerusalem church in this passage.
It seems to me that the unity that God’s people are called to is not uniformity. God created a wonderfully diverse world full of all different kinds of people. I can’t imagine that all that diversity was a mistake. I don’t think God wants people to be identical, cookie-cutter clones. For one thing, people are given different spiritual gifts! Why in the world would God make people different if he wanted everyone to be the same? In a few more chapters, the apostles are going to create the first deacons to head up what we might call the social justice side of the community, because they see their primary role in the community as teachers and witnesses to the risen Christ, not as administrators.
And thank God for administrators and people who are good with money! The church needs them as much as it needs people to teach. I mean, I love reading and researching and teaching (you may have noticed :) but I’m just as happy to hand off details and logistics and finances to those who love it as much as I love my books.
This, I think, is the final lesson of Luke’s little snapshot here. Although it is the apostles who “gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus...great grace was upon them all.” The line about giving testimony to the resurrection is sandwiched in the middle there among Luke’s description of the community’s practical day-to-day living. What that tells me is that God is as concerned, if not more concerned, with how we live as a community than our public witness to the gospel. The resurrection is absolutely of central importance to the Christian witness, don’t get me wrong. But being a missionary or a pastor or someone in what they call “full-time ministry” is not the only way to worship God and it’s certainly not the best way to be a Christian. Being concerned with social justice and the poor, being concerned with how the church handles money is just as “full-time ministry” as the clergy roles.
By the way, I hate that phrase “full-time ministry.” For one, it uses “ministry,” which is a silly word only Christians use to begin with, but it implies that somehow living your life with those other gifts from God isn’t as full-time as anything else. As people of God, we’re all doing it full time!
So you know what? Live with the gifts God has given you. If you are rich, if God has given you wealth, remember why you’re given it and remember the radical generosity in the scriptures. If you love social justice, pursue it! If you serve behind the scenes, serve! If you’re artistic, make art! If God has given you something, you make us all poorer by not using it. As we brothers and sisters live in unity, supporting each other in our diversity, then we are living as God’s people.
So isn’t it funny that this short little passage is so divisive? It divides us into those who think Christians should live in communes and those who think capitalism is God’s chosen economic model. It divides those in “full-time ministry” from those who merely give money. It divides rich and poor. And instead Luke wanted to show us that “those who believed we of one heart and soul.” Luke doesn’t erase the differences between rich and poor or between the apostles and the rest of the community. But he insists that they don’t matter. The people who sell their property and give their money just as much serving God as the apostles are when they witness the resurrection. Rich and poor alike are part of the community. The priest is as much a member of his church as the accountant, the business owner, and the person who comes to the food pantry. We are called to a beautiful yachad, a unity with all the diversity of God’s creation.
Amen.
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