For the next few weeks in this Easter season, I am going to be preaching from the book of Acts, focusing on the impact of Jesus’ resurrection for the community of the church.
Our short passage from Acts for today is a beloved one. Over the centuries folks from monks in monasteries to Anabaptists farming together to Catholic workers in cities have been inspired by and worked to make real this vision of prayer and shared property ownership and where everything was held in common and distributed to the needy. How did the resurrection make this possible for the early church? How does the risen Christ continue to give life to our church today?
Please pray with me: Risen Lord, thank you for overcoming death and fear and shame and scarcity. May your Word grow in us, so that by your grace we would be made into a community of Resurrection life. Amen.
I loved to play Legos growing up. My brother and I would play sitting on the floor for hours. Entire universes emerged as we clicked together those small plastic pieces. Our method for playing Legos was that if we got a new Lego set – we would build it according to the instructions and play with that for a little while. But not long after, the real fun would begin. We would dismantle the set and add its pieces to the big tub that held all of our pieces. From that big bin with its colorful kaleidoscopic jumble emerged space ships and castles and imaginary creatures and whatever else we could dream up.
Our text today from Acts 4 describes a group of Jesus’ followers sharing a tub of Legos. They’re gathered in Jerusalem, after his resurrection and ascension and after the outpouring of his Spirit at Pentecost. We’re told that, “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.”
In the four short verses of our text we have an image of what seems to be the ideal church. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus and great grace was upon them all.
There wasn’t a needy person among them because their resources were shared with any who had need. It is resurrection power that makes it possible for this early church to play out of a shared Lego bin. It is the resurrection of Christ that gives life to the community of the church.
We glimpse a miracle also in today’s gospel text from John 20 – the disciples are gathered in a locked house filled with suffocating fear and Jesus first offers them a word of peace and then fills them with the gift of the Spirit. The resurrected Christ transforms a traumatized community by offering peace and grace and giving them the boldness to continue following him with joy.
I think that a temptation can be for us to make this resurrection community only an ideal and not also a living testimony to the continuing gift of experiencing the risen Christ’s presence among us. I love the high bar that the early Jerusalem church in Acts sets for us as a model of prophetic preaching, communal life, and the elimination of poverty through radical sharing.
But we must never forget that the power and the grace and the generosity shared within that community is only made possible by Jesus’ ongoing presence with them. The resurrection isn’t just an idea to be contemplated but it is the creative power of God, a gift to be experienced, a force that brings the church community into being and sustains it with joyful boldness. We come to understand what the Resurrection means when we live in faithfulness together as a community of God.
And while all of this sounds a bit idealistic, the early church in Acts sort of brought this predicament onto themselves. Right before our passage describing the community of shared goods, the disciples prayed to God a dangerous prayer – they asked that God would heal and do signs and wonders – but for themselves they only asked that God would grant them the power to speak God’s word with boldness. And the message that they proclaimed was a “testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.” This testimony to the power of God to raise Jesus from the dead was also a testimony to the peace of Christ that overcame the fear of oppression, and it was a testimony to the miracle of grace that somehow brought a hodgepodge community together and it was a testimony to the miracle of generosity where people shared their properties and homes and money to give to those with need.
I believe that as followers of Christ we don’t have to prove the resurrection through the precision of our arguments – but we are called to point to and look with curiosity for the power of the Resurrection that is already at work in our world and in our lives. Whenever we see the types of communities of justice and joy emerging like this church in Acts 4 – we can see the power of Christ at work. Our resurrecting God not only raises up the dead, but also unclenches the fists of fear and scarcity that hold onto the myth that it is possible to truly possess anything at all.
By the power of the resurrection we learn that God has triumphed over death and is the author of all life – and so we’re reminded that our homes and investments and bank accounts weren’t ever really ours. Anything we claim to have or own is always first a gift to be received from God. Being generous in community is a miracle, where we are freed to extend to one another the gift of life that God in Christ extends to us.
But what this actually looks like is really complicated. We know this at CHMF – it takes work and organization to pull off a potluck or bring a MealTrain to someone after a big transition or loss or to borrow a tool from someone else when you need it. Money and budget decisions about giving and sharing and redistribution are never easy or clearcut. But money questions are resurrection questions.
Right after our Acts text, the story continues, giving two examples of what this shared community of goods looked like in practice: The positive example was a guy named Joseph who we’re told sold his field and brought the money he made from it and laid it at the apostles feet. The apostle’s give him the name Barnabas, which means “son of encouragement.” The negative example is the infamous story of a couple named Ananais and Safira. This husband and wife duo sold some property but withheld some money when they gave to the church, and then lied about about it when Peter confronts them separately. Both of them suddenly fall down and die and this incident, we’re told caused “great fear to seize the whole church and all who heard of these things.”
And even though it’s an Offering Sunday today – I don’t think that fear or the threat of death is an appropriate tactic to encourage generosity. But what this account in Acts is saying is that becoming a community of generosity is a life and death matter. To continue to hoard one’s resources and withhold from the needy corrodes the soul and hinders community and is a pathway to destruction. But because of the miracle of God overcoming death in the resurrection of Jesus – the community of the church is able to live generously.
This can take all sorts of shapes – and I’d be curious where you’ve experienced the gift of radical generosity in the church. An example of what this can look like that I read about recently was a white Mennonite guy named John Stoesz. When his family sold the family farm in Minnesota, inspired by Zacheus he gave half of his proceeds to indigenous groups to the Dakota-led land recovery project Makoce Ikikcupi and to Sarah Augustine leading the Anabaptist Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery.1
Stoesz described how, “in returning a part of my land inheritance I discovered healing for myself…This is a growing awareness that the meaning of life is not found in accumulation of material wealth, but in right relationships with others, including the original people of this land; with nature; and with the Creator.”
I couldn’t think of any sermon illustrations of somebody who died after not being generous with their money or land, but my brother and I had a good friend in the neighborhood that we would sometimes play Legos with. But our friend would build his Lego sets and then keep them fully assembled and sitting on the shelves of his bedroom…and he had some really cool Star Wars sets we were envious of. But he would never dismantle his sets and so he didn’t have a big tub of shared Legos for us to build anything new with.
I think that there are all sorts of ways to be faithful to God with our lives. Maybe taking intricately built Lego sets, dismantling them and chucking them in a big bin seems like a shame to you. Maybe to you the Christian experiments in shared possessions, redistribution and reparations seem impossibly idealistic in our world of expensive healthcare and rising housing prices and college debt.
But when we encounter the church in the book of Acts that emerged after Jesus’ resurrection what I hope we will understand is that their encounter with the Risen Lord sparked within them a creative fire that had to take material shape.
Faith in the resurrection is always embodied. To believe and proclaim that Jesus rose from the dead is to let our bodies and our shared lives be raised by God so that we might become more just, generous, gracious, and loving.
I’m so grateful that we get to wonder with curiosity together at how Jesus is transforming us. It is in our lives lived together that proclaim that indeed Christ is risen! So we give thanks that Christ rose from the tomb, trampling down all powers of death and destruction and giving life to all trapped in tombs of blame, shame, fear and guilt, and greed. And because of Christ’s resurrection we as a church can live in boldness and joy and generosity as an embodied testimony to what God has done for us all.
- Epp, Aaron “What do you do with an unjust benefit?” Canadian Mennonite. Feb 23, 2024. https://canadianmennonite.org/stories/what-do-you-do-unjust-benefit ↩︎