However, a man named Ananias, along with his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property. 2 With his wife’s knowledge, he withheld some of the proceeds from the sale. He brought the rest and placed it in the care and under the authority of the apostles. 3 Peter asked, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has influenced you to lie to the Holy Spirit by withholding some of the proceeds from the sale of your land? 4 Wasn’t that property yours to keep? After you sold it, wasn’t the money yours to do with whatever you wanted? What made you think of such a thing? You haven’t lied to other people but to God!” 5 When Ananias heard these words, he dropped dead. Everyone who heard this conversation was terrified. 6 Some young men stood up, wrapped up his body, carried him out, and buried him. 7 About three hours later, his wife entered, but she didn’t know what had happened to her husband. 8 Peter asked her, “Tell me, did you and your husband receive this price for the field?” She responded, “Yes, that’s the amount.” 9 He replied, “How could you scheme with each other to challenge the Lord’s Spirit? Look! The feet of those who buried your husband are at the door. They will carry you out too.” 10 At that very moment, she dropped dead at his feet. When the young men entered and found her dead, they carried her out and buried her with her husband. 11 Trepidation and dread seized the whole church and all who heard what had happened. (Common English Bible)
“The Way: The Post Jesus, Pre Paul Church,”
Week Eight
“They pedal.”
That was my dad’s repeated refrain to
me every single morning that I got up at a ridiculously early hour every July
to watch the Tour de France live on television (ridiculously early because of
the time difference between Kansas City and France). It didn’t matter what would be happening on
the screen, the retort was always the same:
“They pedal.”
But then the race would move into the
Alps or the Pyrenees, and the mountain climbs would separate the contenders
from the pretenders:
“They pedal.”
Or the race could be only a few hundred
yards from the finish line for the day, and the entire pack had broken into a
mass breakneck sprint for first place:
“Oh, they’re pedaling faster.” He was utterly nonplussed. And this is a guy who is a big fan of soccer
(wait…I’m a big fan of soccer too…)!
And I envy that utter lack of
impression in a way, because I was completely and totally enthralled with the
world of the sport: the team tactics that were difficult to see with an
untrained eye, the drama of a mountain climb so difficult that it was
classified as “beyond category,” and, of course, the myth and legend that
surrounded the post cancer comeback of one Lance Armstrong, who in January of
2013 famously confessed on Oprah Winfrey’s television channel in an interview
with her to using performance enhancing drugs to win his seven Tour de France
titles, and to repeatedly bullying and slandering those who knew and threatened
to expose his great secret.
And I remember just thinking, what this
guy has withheld from the world is just staggering, solely because he ended up
valuing his own myth and money more than the people who walked alongside him
throughout the way. And that is
basically what happens here today, in the story of Ananias and Sapphira: two
people who decide they value their things more than they value their
relationships.
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, which is how chapter 4 ended. We begin the next chapter today with very
much a contrasting tale to the wholehearted generosity of the church: the tale
of Ananias and Sapphira.
By
itself, this is a story that should cause each of us to recoil. The punishment for giving to the church is
death on the spot? That’s one hell of a
stewardship message if you’re bent on pasturing your church via fear, but that
isn’t really what we’re about here. A
dollop of fear may be an inherent part of life, but part of Christianity is the
great and sacred task of equipping all of us with boldness and courage in the
face of fear. In other words, it is
okay, even inevitable, to be afraid, but we must always be able to respond to
it.
So how do
we respond to this story of summary execution for a husband and wife couple who
withhold some of their assets from the New Testament church? By taking the entire episode in its context. If you remember last week’s passage that I
preached on (and if not, you can just turn one chapter back in your Bibles!),
the social contract was that members of the church, the ekklesia, would give
all of their assets to the church so that it could be distributed out according
to need.
Ananias
and Sapphira, by withholding some of their cash, are saying, effectively, that
they value their money more than they value their fellow people, their fellow
Jesus followers. The social contract
they elected to follow meant little to them, and Peter consequently sees right through
their charade.
And it is
purely a charade, because in the end, all of this stuff we have belongs to God
anyways. Bible professor Paul Walaskay
puts it perfectly:
The story should remind the reader that his or
her “gift” to church, school, and charity already belongs to God. God claims it all and God’s grace gives us an
abundant allowance; even those who tithe keep 90 percent. Yes, most of us work “by the sweat of our brow,”
the hot sweat of physical labor or the cold sweat of anxiety keeping an
enterprise viable. And many of us
mistakenly assume that the paycheck is compensation to us for our labors. Rather, we are being compensated for God’s
gracious gifts of life, energy, strength, intellect, creativity, and
talent. That paycheck is God’s. We take out our living allowance, which is
usually quite generous, and share (not “give”) the rest with those in
need. Lying about the source of our
resources is self deceit and arrogance, and it puts “the Spirit of the Lord to
the test” (verse 9)…the story of Ananias and Sapphira is a tale for our own
time, and we dismiss it as an absurd curiosity to our individual and national
peril.
It is
especially to our peril that we ignore this tale because it is not the first
time in Scripture that we will have heard this lesson, for there is a prelude
to this entire episode in the Old Testament.
It comes from book of Daniel, the Israelite man who spent his prophetic
career in exile, teaching in the court of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II
and then Nebuchadnezzar’s heir, Belshazzar.
And one night, Belshazzar throws a banquet for one thousand of his
nobles, and he calls for the gold and silver goblets stolen from the Jewish
temple when Jerusalem was sacked by Babylon.
It is another example of someone putting things before relationships: in
this case, any relationship Belshazzar might have had with the one true God.
And Belshazzar
only realizes this when the writing literally appears on his wall, reading MENE,
MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN. He summons Daniel
to translate the writing, and Daniel, after rebuking Belshazzar, begins his
translation, and in so doing interprets the word “tekel” to mean, “You have
been weighed on the scales and been found lacking.” Belshazzar was found to be lacking on the
scales of God’s justice, and just like Ananias and Sapphira, he was put to
death that very day: that night, as Daniel conveys, Belshazzar was murdered.
These twin
stories can teach us a couple of things: firstly, never assume that you can
simply get away with something that you know in your heart of hearts is
wrong. You will be amazed at what God
sees and what eventually comes to light even for us humans to see. And secondly, there does still come a point
in time where God looks at what someone has purportedly done either by their
own power (in the case of Belshazzar) or by God’s own power and in God’s own
name (in the case of Ananias and Sapphira) and God does indeed eventually and
resoundingly say, “NOT IN MY NAME!”
And I
want to, have to, need to believe that God can and does still respond with
justice to the evils we claim to do in His name. And there are a great many evils that we have
done, and are doing, in God’s holy name.
The
conflict between Palestine and Israel isn’t just about land, it’s about THE
Holy Land.
The
conflict turned ethnic cleansing in Iraq isn’t just between ethnic groups, but
between ISIS and Iraqi Christians.
And
closer to home, even the so called “culture wars” that we insist on fighting
rather than focusing on spreading the Gospel of the Prince of Peace.
We should
expect the God in our Scriptures to oppose us, and so we instead build up these
elaborate illusions of what God wants based on twisted, horrific
interpretations of Scripture by men of evil intent, and we end up worshiping
not the God, but the interpretation. We
end up worshiping the ways we justify our wrong deeds instead of worshiping the
God who forgives us for them.
I have no
doubt that Ananias and Sapphira probably had come up with justifications to
themselves for why they did what they did.
I have no doubt Belshazzar did as well, although his might well have
been, “I’m the freaking king!” But one
of the best rules of thumb I have ever found to live by is this: the more you
have to justify something to yourself, the more likely it is that doing it is
wrong.
Ananias
and Sapphira had to know what they were doing was wrong. They did it anyways.
It’s what
we do all the time to one another as well.
At least until we stop, and realize what it is we are doing, and
remember that God has not, does not, and never will call us to do wrong like
that to one another or to Him. He will say to us, in the powerful and
profound way that only He can, “NOT IN MY NAME!” And so we in turn can do the same, and say
the same, to the evil done around us: Not in my name!
And today, in this moment, that message may be exactly what we and our world need.
May it be so.
Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
August
10, 2014
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