The Church is a We

Acts 2:42-47

What we have in Acts today is this beautiful, idealized image of what Church could be like, what life could be like. The early church is a place of mutual caring and sharing. Where each person is seen as important, they are encouraged to think about life as abundant and all live an abundant life. All things are shared in common and there were no needs. 

There are usually a few reactions to this text. There are 2 that I see most often: 1: Suggests that it is an idealized way of living in the church that is unsustainable. No, they say, the early church was not some idealized version of communism--and even if it were, Paul was often fundraising for the church in Jerusalem so maybe their experiment failed. Or the other way: this is the way of living we ought to be doing, not just striving for. This is the goal. And often shame is given to those who don’t. Honestly, there is usually shame and judgement from both of those camps when it comes to this text. 

In the text we didn’t read today, Jesus tells the disciples that he came to bring life, and to bring it abundantly. I don’t think this has anything to do with wealth and possessions, Jesus didn’t have any. His disciples never had much. When Jesus sent them on missions into towns and villages, they were clearly instructed not to take anything with them. No, abundance isn’t about things. So letting go of things, for the sake of each other, maybe that has something to do with abundance. 

Sometimes I worry we’re so busy trying to make sense of the stories, to see if they are something that we can really do, or something that we can really put into action, or even something that really happened, that we miss the opportunity to learn anything, or to really hope for a better world, for a kin-dom world and Spirit filled church.

Our story is after Pentecost, which liturgically hasn’t happened yet. So… this could be a bit confusing. The disciples have transitioned from hiding in the upper room, to being a community in the city. 

Here is the part of the sermon where I make a 15 year old pop culture reference and reveal how uncool I am…

There’s a song, 15ish years ago, by John Myer called Waiting for the World to Change. In it, he sings that he and his friends and his generation, which is my generation, too, see that the world is not all that it ought to be, it’s not living into an image of justice and mercy and kindness for all of creation, but we’re waiting for the world to change. I think that it reaches its most important point when he sings:

It's not that we don't care

We just know that the fight ain't fair

So we keep on waiting on the world to change

Sometimes the world ain't fair. 

But I think about those disciples in those first churches, in people’s homes, traveling and preaching on the streets. The world wasn’t fair. They were occupied people living in an occupied land. Their reader had been executed by the state. The religious leaders had chosen to align themselves with the powers of the world rather than be a force for their people, rather than speak a prophetic truth. They were wanted on all sides. They were fishermen and farmers living in a city. They had little. Most of them couldn't read or write. They spoke with the accents and the words of the poor and uneducated. Everything was stacked against them. The fight wasn’t fair. And yet, they weren’t waiting. They weren’t waiting for certain leaders to die off, they would just be replaced with their children. They weren’t waiting for the structures to change, they weren’t waiting for society to be more comfortable or interested in this movement Jesus had started. 

Waiting wasn’t going to change anything. Hope, with action, just might. So these few verses, they tell us what those first followers of Jesus did, after the resurrection. 

They committed themselves to the stories, to the teachings of Jesus that they could hear first hand from those who had followed and travelled and had conversations with Jesus. They got to interact with Peter and John and Thomas and Thadeous before they went on whatever journeys they would depart on. We get to read their stories, handed down to us by those first believers, passed down through the generations. We can learn the stories, do this: learn what they mean for us today. We do this alone and we do this in community. We know Jesus' voice by studying what he said, by learning to hear his voice in the voice of each other, in the voice of a stranger. The voice of God might surprise you when it comes unexpected places, calling us to places unknown, but we have to know how to recognize it. It’s the voice that calls for caring for the outcast, marginalized, forgotten, unloved, and unloveable. It’s Jesus saying feed my sheep. It’s the voice that says the kin-dom of God is coming, and you’re a part of it. 

The disciples committed themselves to worship and breaking bread in their homes. A little like this, but kind of not. There were no church buildings in those early days. As time would go on, churches would be built on top of those first homes, to honor and continue the sacredness of the space. But for now, they were worshiping in homes. We call worship a practice. It is a practice because we’re putting into action what we believe, because we do it over and over again, because it is imperfect, because we are practicing what it means to live in the world with each other--community, sharing, confession, forgiveness, reconciliation, peace, living with curiosity and learning. We practice what it is to live together in our time of worship, in our interactions, in our community that is church. 

They committed themselves to generosity among each other. It doesn’t matter if they really sold everything they had to share with those in need, they were committed to caring for one another, that there wouldn’t be needs among each other. 

Over the generations, there have sprung up from time to time Alternative  Monastic movements. These can be found in the Catholic Workers Movement and Dorothy Day; larsh L’Arche communities of Adults with disabilities and those without living in community together. More recently it has been Shane Claiborne and the New Monastic Movement--calling people to live in intentional communities and co-parent, share cars and lawn mowers, pool resources not be part of capitalistic structures like insurance. They have taken these verses and tried to live them out in new ways. 

That’s probably not us, although, sharing a lawn mower sounds nice and we have accidently shared our shovel by not hiding it. We have to find other ways to care for each other. To live in mutual support and care and kindness, and reaching out. These days have meant that we have to be more intentional. We have to seek people out to check in, to see what their needs might be. But maybe it has made it easier, we have so much time! We can start new practices of checking- in, radical vulnerability and generosity. And I don’t know any of you well, but I know there are those in your community who have abundance they are willing to share: time, friendship, food, listening ear, some even have some extra money. I celebrate your generosity and the Spirit’s movement of creativity in your midst. 

The first church in Jerusalem, filled with at least some of those first disciples of Jesus, practiced good will toward everyone else. Think about that: their leader had been killed, rejected by the people of Jerusalem, and there were those who still had it out for the Jesus followers. And yet, they did not move in the world with anger and vengeance, they did not move in the world with suspicion and caution. But instead, with goodwill, which I think is both hoping goodness for another and expecting goodness from another. It’s so easy these days to not have goodwill for others. Maybe you’re a committed mask wear-er when you’re out at the grocery store and you can’t come up with a good reason why the person in the aisle with you wouldn’t wear one. Or you’re not a mask wear-er, and you can’t come up with a kind reason why you can’t get the things you need. I’ll tell you all the reasons why I think or function at this time the way I do, but, can we live having goodwill for all? Can we believe that we’re all just trying our best? Can we engage in conversations instead of accusations? Can we put our practices of worship into our practice of living? 

So maybe it doesn’t matter if it really happened this way, if the disciples and the church in Jerusalem sold their belongings and shared all things in common, or if they lost everything, or if they were Marxists, or if they, for a moment, created a utopia. Maybe what they did was give us a model, a way to grow and learn and live as Christian community, to live out what it means to be church, a beloved community. It’s imperfect. We’re going to live into this way of being imperfectly. It is the nature of being human. But John Wesley, the founder of methodism and the church of my childhood, those roots grew deep in me--Wesley said that we go onward in perfection, and we grow in perfection by how we love. This is what they were doing. Loving each other and the world around them. This is the lesson we learn, we live in hope and we live out love. It’s practicing how peace and reconciliation, it’s generosity, it’s goodwill. That is the first thing it means to be church, how we care for each other, how we live the call on all our lives. 

So beloved community, live as church.