On this Second Sunday of Easter, Luke, the author of Acts, invites us to dream very concrete dreams: Now that God has raised the Lord Jesus from the dead – who shall we be and what shall we do?
We heard from Mark last Sunday, the Sunday of Sundays, how Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. The news was overwhelming. To them, the question, “Who then shall we be now that Jesus is risen from the dead?” was not one that opened them to possibility, at least not at once—it was all too much, and so they ran, trembling with amazement.
We know they did not remain silent. We know they found their voices: They spoke, they declared and proclaimed what God had done. We know they found themselves immersed in a world that was at once familiar and completely changed—the resurrection was to them no longer merely something that happened to the body of Jesus, but rather a reality that also raised them up, that inspired and emboldened them—it was a new life, a new world, a new creation. What are the possibilities, we wonder with them, and Luke invites us to dream very concrete dreams.
With confident strokes he portrays the earliest Jerusalem church. He shows us a community united in purpose, “of one heart and soul,” and bound together in mutual belonging. “Imagine this!” he declares, “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. And imagine this: There was not a needy person among them.”
In the Gospel, Luke was careful to record Jesus’ teachings about the dangers and the proper use of wealth. “Take care!” Jesus declared. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” And then he told us the parable of the rich man whose land produced abundantly; who thought he was wise in planning to build bigger barns to store the bumper crop—but God called him a fool. “So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves, but are not rich toward God,” Jesus said at the end of the story.[1] Luke also made sure we hear about the rich man and Lazarus, the poor man at the rich man’s door,[2] and how Jesus continued to stir the pot by teaching about treasure in heaven and saying, “How hard it is for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”[3] Thankfully, Luke also told us about Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus, the tax collector who was very rich, and how this encounter led Zac the crook to give half of his considerable possessions to the poor and make fourfold restitution to anyone he had defrauded.[4]
And today Luke invites us to dream very concrete dreams: the brief reading from Acts shows us a community where Jesus’ teachings, his utter lack of selfishness, and his compassionate concern for the wellbeing and salvation of others was fully realized. And in this community being of one heart and soul didn’t mean that they all sang from the same hymnal, but “there was not a needy person among them.” Not one who didn’t eat so the kids would have a little more. Not one who cut their pills in half so the prescription would last longer. Not one who rolled out their blanket on a piece of cardboard under the overpass because they couldn’t keep a job.
Yet Luke didn’t paint policy solutions to economic challenges. Luke’s Easter postcard shows us a community where the life of Jesus found embodiment, and “there was not a needy person among them.” The picture is not a blueprint or an instruction manual for Christian community—although it has inspired movements from the monastic orders to the Shakers and the Catholic Worker houses—but it does show how profoundly our life together can be transformed in the Spirit of Jesus, when we are bold, not only in proclaiming the death and resurrection of Jesus, but in living it.
Earlier in chapter 4 of Acts, Luke tells us about Peter and John who were speaking to the people when several temple leaders confronted them. They were furious that the apostles were teaching the people and announcing that the resurrection of the dead was happening because of Jesus. So they seized Peter and John and put them in prison. The next day they had Peter and John brought before them and asked, “By what power or in what name did you do this?” Then Peter, inspired by the Holy Spirit, testified, and the council was caught by surprise by the confidence with which Peter and John spoke. After all, they understood that these apostles were uneducated and inexperienced. They ordered them to wait outside, and began to confer with each other. “What should we do with these men?” When they called Peter and John back, they demanded that they stop all speaking and teaching in the name of Jesus. Peter and John responded, “It’s up to you to determine whether it’s right before God to obey you rather than God. As for us, we can’t stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.”
Three times in this chapter, Luke mentions the apostles’ boldness, their free and fearless confidence, their cheerful courage in speaking and teaching in the name of Jesus.[5] And Luke wants us to see the same boldness, the same free and fearless confidence, the same cheerful courage in the lived proclamation of the community of believers, in the embodied witness of their generous solidarity: 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. In the name of Jesus, they broke down social barriers that distinguished between the worthy and the unworthy, the respectable and the unrespectable, the deserving and the undeserving. They subverted social hierarchies along with conventions of envy, avarice and accumulation—not to write the manual for Christian socialism, but to live boldly in the Spirit of the living Christ, in a community where belonging was not a question of income, social status, ethnic background, gender, or political affiliation. Everyone belongs because we’re each made in the image of God together. Everyone belongs because Jesus didn’t die for some, but for all. Everyone belongs because the Spirit of the living Christ is being poured out on all flesh.
Matt Skinner noted that “something greater than charity … is surging through this passage; believers are living out a commitment to belong to one another”[6]—a commitment to recognize, respect and treat one another as equally beloved children of God. And because money and possessions are commonly used to create distance and barriers between people, they become, in the commonality of resurrection life, tools to dismantle the distance and barriers between us,[7] be it through donations, restitutions, or reparations.
To give you an example, few of us believe that our system of taxation is just, and it will take a lot of time and attention from many to make it more equitable. But that doesn’t mean we can’t act in the spirit of equity and redistribution. For several years, some of you have made donations to the church from your tax refunds, and just recently, one of you signed over their entire stimulus check, knowing that we use it to help folks with low or no income to pay rent or their light bill, or to buy groceries. Those generous acts, regardless of donation amounts, won’t solve the many issues of poverty in our community, but they are concrete, tangible ways to live out our commitment to belong to one another. God has raised Jesus from the dead, vindicating his life of radical welcome, affirming his startling teachings, and empowering us to act with free and fearless confidence in including the excluded.
Many have asked over the years, “Did the church in Jerusalem really live like that?” Matt Skinner says, “It’s a fair question, for the stories display extraordinary self-giving and no other passages in Acts or the Epistles describe the same kind of communal dynamics.” But there can be no doubt that encountering the living Christ profoundly changed the lives of the earliest believers because they asked, “Who shall we be now that Jesus is risen?” There can be no doubt that they saw all things in new ways and that many of them walked away from lives governed by financial calculations and status-based privileges.[8] Justin Martyr (c. 100-160 C.E.), in the second century, just a few decades after Luke, wrote,
We who once took most pleasure in accumulating wealth and property now share with everyone in need; we who hated and killed one another and would not associate with [people] of different tribes because of their different customs now, since the coming of Christ, live familiarly with them and pray for our enemies.
And more than two centuries later, the Roman emperor known as Julian the Apostate, who vehemently opposed Christians and stripped them of their rights and privileges, acknowledged, “The godless Galileans feed not only their poor but ours also. Those who belong to us look in vain for the help that we should render them.”[9] I think the emperor said it well. There’s a table at the center of our life. A table where the living Christ is host. And at this table, there is no us and them. Everyone belongs.
[1] Luke 12:15-21
[2] Luke 16:19-31
[3] Luke 18:22-25
[4] Luke 19:1-10
[5] παρρησία Acts 4:13, 29, 31
[6] Matt Skinner https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-easter-2/commentary-on-acts-432-35-5
[7] See Willie James Jennings, Acts (Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2017), 50.
[8] See Skinner, note 6
[9] See Dan Clendenin https://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20090413JJ.shtml