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April 30, 2000
In the first twelve chapters of Acts, Luke gives us at two places insights as to what was going on in the early church following the news that Jesus had risen from the grave.
At Acts 2:42-47 Luke tells us that in their daily life together, believers distributed their possessions as anyone among them needed something, they worshipped in the temple in Jerusalem, and they ate a celebratory common meal by households. And they grew in numbers.
The second insight is our text of today, Acts 4:32-35, and it informs us that people sold their land and homes and gave the money to the new community to be distributed by need. Let us hear this:
NOW 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. WITH GREAT POWER THE APOSTLES GAVE THEIR TESTIMONY TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE LORD JESUS, AND GREAT GRACE WAS UPON THEM ALL. 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. (Acts 4:32&emdash;35)
This sounds very much like primitive Christian communism. It is not practiced today, nor even admired as an ideal.
This entire text suggesting that the normal Christian life involves selling your possessions and mixing the proceeds into a common fund to support each person according to need, is so far from modern experience and values as to seem fantastic.
Many commentators believe, in fact, that Christian communism was never practiced and they explain away this text about life in the early church in several ways. Some say that Luke was not historically accurate because he was idealizing early Christian sharing. A phrase such as "there was not a needy person among them" is viewed as an exaggeration suggesting that Luke is only imagining an ideal primitive church.
Another explaining away is that Luke is probably historically accurate but that Christian communism prevailed only so long as believers were expecting the imminent return of Jesus. With such an expectation private ownership and the exploitation of possessions would seem not important since Jesus' return to earth was going to end history anyway.
But when it became clear that Jesus was not going to come back as they had expected, the early Christians promptly abandoned what was impractical anyway.
Yet a third explanation put forth by the early Protestant reformers maintains that Luke was speaking spiritually and that a true sharing of material possessions was always impractical but what Luke was really getting at was that the early church was "of one heart and soul" and that is a goal to which every church in every age can strive.
Whatever, we know that early Christian communism rather soon collapsed. And while there have been innumerable attempts throughout history to revive or reapply it to other circumstances, they have failed.
Today, there are a few thousand Hutterite Christians living in the wilds of Canada and some Mennonite and Brethren living in the U.S. who farm in common, share the produce in common, and reject possessions like telephones, cars, and any electrical appliances. In these Christian communities important decisions like whom the young shall marry and what improvements are to made from the common treasury are, indeed, laid at the feet of the apostles, the elders of the kinship family. .
There is, of course, the more prevalent and enduring example of monastic orders with brothers and sisters who commit to individual lives of poverty (not to mention sexual abstinence.) for the common good of the order and its work. But modern men and women are infrequently willing to undertake such vows.
And secular communism, the great experiment of the last century, has largely collapsed. And other idealistic and less perverse attempts at communal sharing, like the Kibbutzim in Israel, once so vigorous and exciting, are nearly finished.
The fact is that any kind of presumptive sharing and cooperative labor toward a common goal flies in the face of every value regarding individualism and freedom of movement and decision, and of capitalistic competition and achievement, which we have evolved in the last 300 years since the Enlightenment.
And yet I suggest that we should not brush aside this text. It is in the scriptures and it seems to me that Luke means business. He follows today's text with two dramatic examples of just how seriously the early church took its obligation to share all things in common. One of the early believers, named Barnabas, owned a piece of land which he sold and gave the money from its sale to the church leaders. About the same time a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, also sold a piece of property and pretended to give all the proceeds to the church family. But they held back a portion of that and for their deviousness both were struck dead.
So it seems that Luke meant business.
Our problem is that we lack any standards or norms by which to understand and accept this text because it comes from a society totally different from our own. We hear the text as middle class and upper income people; we read it from the perspective of Enlightenment values. Therefore, it seems plainly wrong and crazy that we should be expected to abandon our possessions and individuality for some kind of bizarre common sharing. And we can't believe that early Christians did it either.
To understand the text and find any relevance to our own situation we need to use some historical imagination about what was happening in first century Jewish society.
To begin with, it was not a society with any middle class whatever. Ninety per cent of the people were poor and maybe l0% were Hellenized Jews with wealth. Very, very few of the latter became Christians. The poor of Jesus' society were not like the desperately poor of India and China and Ethiopia where millions keel over dead of drought, starvation, and neglect. It took the modern world and its inbalances to produce a horror like Ethiopia.
The early Christians were poor but they survived because of their family kinship support system. Almost no poor lived exclusively in nuclear families of only one, two, three or four persons. Calamity hits such small family groups with regularity but when it came, those worst afflicted knew they could turn to members of their kinship network for some extra grain or fish. And they in turn when other members were sorely afflicted would expect to come forth with a little extra to share.
First century Jews, and to some extent poor gentiles, hearing Acts 4 would have heard it as not unusual. They were already sharing in varying degrees their meagre possessions and annual incomes in order to sustain themselves and their kinship group. Life was so simple and possessions so few that what Luke reports of the early church in Jerusalem, and presumably in the Galilee, would not have been radical. The poor were already, by necessity and long tradition, sharing and to some degree sustained by communal systems.
What would have surprised the poor people was who was sharing. The idea that complete strangers were to share was totally radical. Until the Christian movement you shared only with your kin, persons with whom you were related by blood.
But in Jerusalem, as the church began to grow, strangers flooded into the city from the countryside. Being uprooted they arrived on the threshold of the early church with little food and meagre possessions. AS they began to develop their faith, they had to be provided for. The only way to achieve this was for everyone to share into a common treasury and trust the church elders to distribute what little there was on the basis of need. It was need and a shared faith, rather than need and blood kinship, which shaped the first Christian economy.
And the early experiment was not doomed to immediate failure because there was some pragmatism attending early Christian pooling of limited human and material resources. Thh growing number of Christians who wanted to associate with one another brought their skills into the new Christian family: some were fishermen, some weavers, some carpenters, some bakers. As in the Jewish kibbutz movement of l800 years later, these separate skills and talents could constitute a significant pool of labor able to generate some income, especially in a largely barter economy, and to take care of the practical needs of the Christian kinship. The building of the Kingdom of God began with a kin-dom.
The early church had to organize itself so that all believers were taken care of. This assumed an attitude of hospitality with a welcome to the growing newcomers and then communal sharing, assignment of duties, and willingness to respect the authority of the leaders. All of this was achieved by the readjustment of moving from one community defined by blood ties where good were already largely pooled in common to a new kin group where everyone was related by allegiance to Jesus rather than by biological ties.
What would have astounded first century observers of this Christian movement was that the trust given to siblings and cousins in the extended family kinship circles could be transfered to a collection of strangers or acquaintances from different places, occupations, and somewhat differing strata of society.
As life was so different 2000 years ago, of what possible use is such a text for us today? Capitalism has replaced societies dependent on slaves or serfs. Communism, at least Soviet style, has collapsed. Are the theologians who say that such radical sharing of possessions is impractical right?
Well, let me suggest some ways we can and do interact with this strange text.
First, communal sharing is not dead in the modern church. Right after church we are all invited to descend to the Executive Club on the Third Floor and partake in a common meal. Everyone is invited. You are invited whether or not you brought food to share or not. Now some people at every potluck give more than others; some take more than others. Few worry about it because it is Christian communism at a simple and hospitable level.
A more universal application of Christian sharing is the annual church budget. While I have not been informed that any among you sold any possessions in order to make your annual pledge, the church has to assume that people are giving proportional to their means to share.
And then there are some further, even more universal applications of this text. Early Christian communism was possible in part because possessions, to start were relatively few. Early Christians did not have to think about buying a large screen TV for the family this week, and then and then turning around and buying individual TVs for every child in the family. They did not have to assess nearly infinite models of computers and determine where they are to be placed in many rooms; and then go through the harrowing anxieties of the technical breakdowns and fixing up. They did not spend up to an hour sorting through the dross of 50 daily e mails to find a few nuggets of true communication.
In short, they did not have to contend with the excessive variety, the time consuming petty decisions, the clutter and the obsessions which attend us who are children of the capitalist and consumer society. This makes early Christians not only different from us; but radically different. Were they also possibly happier?
Many traditions, and not just Christian teachings, keep reminding us fixated materialists that there is greater happiness in simplicity than in multiplicity; that a special kind of joy comes in giving it away and a special anxiety seizes us in grasping to it. There is a practicality and relief which arises when instead of buying one more closet organizer to fit in more shoes and ties and blouses, we simply don't buy any more clothes and stop organizing closet space which has a limited elasticity anyway.
There is a new joy which comes when we look up from our crowded diaries and take time to visit actually with a friend, or even to read the entire book of Acts. Consumer experience is not the same as first hand experience.
A final suggestion that comes from this brief text from Acts which has real and challenging application is its teaching that Christians can identify with total strangers, with people who are very different from us. We may embrace others who are different from us politically, ethically, socially, even religiously.
Do you know your neighbors well enough to ask a ride to work in a personal emergency, or to take the rare opportunity to offer them a ride when you know busses aren't running and taxis are scarce?
The other morning I was waiting for the Central Plaza shuttle at Star Ferry. . The 8:20 shuttle didn't come. The line kept growing. The 8:40 shuttle didn't arrive either. Now there were about 20 persons growing disappointed. Then a thoughtful woman walked along the queue informing us that the shuttle bus was broken down.
With typical Hong Kong speed all twenty of us swung immediately to the nearby taxi stand. Did anyone take time to ask to share a taxi given that all 20 were going to the same destination?. Of course, not. We are individualists and consumers, so 20 different taxis were claimed. And that extended across the globe is crazy!
It's rare but I do know that someone one or two among you actually invite a stranger to share lunch after worship. Sometimes one among you actually buy lunch for a visitor at our worship. But it's rare.
My impression is that most of us are still locked in the traditional kinship preferring to spend meal time with our own blood, or our friends like us. We confess the kin-dom of the family of Jesus Christ but hesitate to invest ourselves in its fellowship.
Who among us has in the last year has stepped out of the familiar comfort zone to visit Christian or non-Christian prisoners; to visit a homeless shelter, to go to an orphanage. Last Saturday some of us visited the Home of Loving Faithfulness and I presented a check from us of HK$60,000 to the staff. But it's an exception, isn't it!
Our text in Acts 4 reminds us of how truly radical the gospel of Jesus Christ is. We are called to displace the primary loyalty to our own blood and kind of people because we as believers are all equally accepted by God's grace and not because of where we studied, how much we earn, how savvy we are, or how smartly we are turned out. Because of our commitment to Jesus, we are called into the same kin-group and through sharing our lives and possessions with one another to build the Kingdom. Acts 4 is still radical and still relevant. The Kingdom is found in our kin-dom.
Pastor Gene Preston
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The Rev. Gene R.Preston14th Floor, Blk 36, Lower Baguio Villa Tel : 25516161 Fax: 25512114E-mail : gpreston@netvigator.com |
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