The community of believers was one in heart and mind. None of them would say, “This is mine!” about any of their possessions, but held everything in common. 33 The apostles continued to bear powerful witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and an abundance of grace was at work among them all. 34 There were no needy persons among them. Those who owned properties or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds from the sales, 35 and place them in the care and under the authority of the apostles. Then it was distributed to anyone who was in need. 36 Joseph, whom the apostles nicknamed Barnabas (that is, “one who encourages”), was a Levite from Cyprus. 37 He owned a field, sold it, brought the money, and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. (Common English Bible)
“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,”
Week Seven
The Gap
which overlooks the harbor of Sydney, Australia is not a clothing store…it is a
series of cliffs that, if you look for it on Google images, is absolutely
gorgeous; from a distance, you can see the layers of rock that have formed over
millions of years of geologic creation, and the tops of the cliffs are covered
in green and trees, and, of course, it is right on the Pacific Ocean.
With all
of that beauty, naturally, folks will strive to build homes there. But with the sheer height that the cliffs
afford, folks also come there to, sadly, try to end their lives as well. And that is where one resident of the Gap, a
fellow by the name of Don Ritchie, comes in.
As the journalist Paul Loebe writes:
A local, Don Ritchie, has lived in a house
adjacent to “the Gap” for over 40 years and has been deemed a hero. He is responsible for saving hundreds of
people over the years since he first moved there. Both he and his wife were aware of the
reputation of the Gap prior to moving into their house, (and) the main window
to Ritchie’s house faces directly to the jumping point for where people
jump. Whenever Ritchie sees someone who
lingers too long at the spot, he rushes over to them and invites them over to
his house for tea.
His coaxing does not always work, and he has
even witnessed people jump being the last person they speak to, but for all his
effort over the years, he has been awarded a place in the Order of Australia
and a bravery medal.
But what
makes this not as much a feel good story for me but a story that really and
truly convicts me is the detail that follows:
The government has been looking into installing
cameras and high railings but it has stalled due to the enormous cost ($2.1
million American).
If you
divide that $2.1 million cost by the 160 lives
this one man has saved over the years (that is, over the operational lifetime
of a high railing fence), you get a sum of a little over $13,000. And if you divide the $2.1 million price tag by
the 50 people every year he is unable to save, you get a sum of $42,000.
$42,000 is my annual salary and housing
stipend here at First Christian. To the
dollar. And that’s what it would cost,
per suicide victim in one year, to ensure there were no more victims of the Gap.
A total giving of my resources, one
hundred percent of them, would at least account for one person’s life saved
this year, and total giving is the model that is in fact proscribed by the New
Testament church ere in Acts 4, because that way, resources can be given in
accordance to need: and the preservation of life, I think both now and then,
would have been seen as one of the greatest needs of all.
This is a sermon series that has been
ongoing now for a while! We began it
several weeks ago for two reasons. One
is that the day of Pentecost (the day when the Holy Spirit comes down upon the
remaining Apostles) fell on Sunday, June 8, this year, and oftentimes, when we
preachers preach on Pentecost, we just do that one story about the Holy Spirit,
but then we go on to something else, neglecting the many amazing stories that
follow. The other is that it’s summer,
and summer is the season for action movies at the cinema, and (increasingly
frequently) their sequels, which may or may not be as good as the
original/worth attending at all/a blatant money grab by movie studios
(depending on just how bad the sequel is!).
The Gospels have their own sequel in the New Testament: Acts of the
Apostles, commonly referred to simply as Acts.
Acts is written by Luke (the writer of the Gospel which bears his name)
precisely as a sequel in his two volume set of historical accountings of
Christ’s ministry and the early church, and it is, to my way of thinking, far
better than many of the sequels we are used to today! So this is a sermon series meant to take us
through a Biblical sequel to the Gospels in addition to picking up where the
Pentecost story leaves off, and we began with the massive response to Peter’s
first sermon: a conversion of 3,000 people, and today, we actually sort of
rewind to the beginning of the series when Luke more or less restates an
accounting that he also includes in Acts 2, after Peter’s sermon, about how the
early church lived out the faith.
And on
its face, this is a passage that should challenge us greatly, because it is
just about as much of a polar opposite of what Western, American Christianity
does today. Because of the influence of
our nation’s Founding Fathers, the Enlightenment, and a variety of other
philosophical influences, we are a nation built upon the altar of individual
property. And so what the early church
practices here: the pooling of all resources and then the distribution of them
to each according to need, would be anathema to all of us here, in 21st
century America.
And I do
not use that word ‘anathema’ lightly, even though I am fully aware that I am
calling the Bible anathema to our present context. Because honestly, sometimes Scripture has to
be, needs to be, must be, outright heretical to our way of life for it to be
doing its job. (Uh oh, the pastor just
referred to the Bible as heretical…better slip out now before the brimstone
starts raining down…)
Scripture
must always be challenging us, and at the point it stops challenging us, either
we have stopped following it or Jesus has come back as promised and filled in
all the gaps for us. And seeing as how
the latter has yet to happen, I’m fairly confident in doubling down on the
possibility that the former is what ends up happening.
What does
that say about us as a church, as a people, as a community? Well…the short answer is that we like to
follow the stuff in Scripture that is easy for us to follow. For instance, honestly, it’s pretty straightforward
for a heterosexual person to conform to the Levitical laws against same sex
intimacy. And if you’re a man, well, you
needn’t worry about Paul’s commands for women to remain silent in church,
because there is absolutely zero chance of you breaking that prohibition.
But
giving everything you own to the church and allowing it to distribute what you
own not as you see fit but as they all see fit?
Well, hold on there for just a cotton picking minute, because that
sounds an awful lot like communism!
Well, if
the (red) shirt fits (also, insert a joke here if you'd like from Clue about communism as a red herring)…yes, what is being described here with the very early
church is, well, a commune. Only instead
of sitting around in a drum circle smoking the peace pipe and growing hemp,
they proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
So, does
that make it okay? Does it make it okay
for a church...well, not just any church, but the Biblical church, to engage in
a model that we clearly have moved past, if not outright rejected?
The
entire problem with that question, of course, is the premise that the Biblical
church needs our permission to live out its faith. If anything, it needs to be the other way
around: are we comfortable in asking the Biblical church if it is okay that we
have strayed so far from their model that an expected tithe isn’t 100 percent,
but only 10 percent? Or where resources are
allocated not on the basis of need but on the basis of the annual budget?
Let me
put it a different way: the Biblical church was profoundly countercultural and
remains profoundly countercultural to this day, because I don’t think we can
scare to countenance actually running our church the way the ekklesia in Acts
of the Apostles is run.
That’s a
funny Greek word, by the way: ekklesia.
It literally means “the assembly,” after the governing assembly of
Athens during the Classical era of ancient Greece. But between Classical Greece and New
Testament Israel, the term took on an even more profound meaning as the name
for a congregation, an “assembly” of believers.
And an assembly, by definition, is, well, assembled. It is put together. And the ekklesia, the assembly, of the
Biblical church was assembled by people and all that they both spiritually and
materially had to offer.
And if
you assemble an assembly with less, do not be surprised when that assembly is
not all that you wanted or expected it to be.
On its
face, that sounds more like something that would come out of a stewardship
sermon, and y’all probably know by now that that’s not really my forte. But I
am talking about a wider sense of stewardship here: a stewardship to humanity
itself. Humanity is our assembly. Humanity is our ekklesia. And we are called by God to give all, to give
our all, on its behalf.
That also
entails us giving all to God by accepting His calling for us. And we are just as bad at that as we are at giving
all to one another…and we’ll get to that a bit more with next week’s sermon,
but we talk a lot about the need to surrender everything to God, and then
selfishly hold something, or an awful lot of somethings, back for ourselves. We say in one breath, “everything belongs to
God,” and in the very next breath to someone else, “Hey, that’s mine!”
I realize
you may be thinking, “Well, why can’t something belong to both me and God?” It can.
But guess who gets dibs on how that thing, whatever it may be,
ultimately gets used? It ain’t you. And that’s where our selfishness comes into
play. That’s where our greed and self
centeredness comes into play. We want to
put our interests ahead of God’s interests, and honestly, I think those two
interests are aligned a whole heck of a lot less frequently than we let ourselves
believe.
But every
so often, they do align. A retired man
in Australia finds a home he wants to live in, and God uses him as a vessel of
love to save the lives of literally dozens of dozens of people by sacrificing
his home, his privacy, and his day to day life in the name of saving theirs,
but his government cannot or will not sacrifice funds to save even more lives that
he alone was unable to.
And that’s
the difference that we’re talking about here, that Luke is talking about in
Acts 4. It isn’t enough to simply give,
you give until the need has been met.
Giving a starving person a lone potato chip doesn’t do one bit of
good. God calls us to more. God demands of us more. And He has every right to, because that is
what His church has done literally for millennia. Let us not lose sight of that tradition now. Especially now.
May it be so.
Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
August 3,
2014
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