Set Free to Take Care of Each Other (Church Lessons, Part 1)

[This was shared with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, yesterday, the Second Sunday of Easter, April 8, 2018]

Acts 4:32-35

As is true every Easter season, the appointed Scripture lessons for Sundays include passages from Acts. So today, we begin a new series of Sunday messages based on Acts that we’re calling Church Lessons.

We start today with Acts 4:32-35.

To dip into this amazing book four chapters in, it’s necessary for us to set the scene. 

Acts begins with the risen Jesus reiterating the great commission to the eleven apostles and His whole Church. “...you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you,” Jesus tells them, “and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) 

In Acts 2, as 120 disciples were gathered in Jerusalem for prayer, the Holy Spirit descended on them and the Church was empowered to fulfill Jesus’ commission. By the power of the Spirit, they told the crowds from all over the Mediterranean who were gathered in Jerusalem for the Pentecost festival, in the diverse languages of those crowds, about God’s mighty works. Especially the mightiest act of all: God becoming human in Jesus, living a sinless life, dying on a cross for our sins, and rising from the dead to give forgiveness and new life to all who believe in Him. 

On that day, Peter then preached a sermon that brought 3000 people to faith in Christ. We’ll be celebrating Pentecost Sunday six weeks from now. 

After Pentecost, the Church continued to pursue its mission and ran into opposition for it. But instead of collapsing or falling to the temptation of returning violence or hatred to its persecutors, the Church, as well portrayed in the fantastic new movie, Paul: Apostle of Christ, prayed for boldness in lovingly sharing the good news, the gospel, of the crucified and risen Jesus with the world. 

It’s soon after this that we come to our passage for today.

Verse 32: “All the believers were one in heart and mind.” 

We need to spend some time talking about what these words mean and what they don’t mean. 

As we talked about a few Wednesday nights ago during Lent, the disciples in Christ’s Church did have conflicts and disagreement. They seem to have known the wisdom of the modern wag who said, “If two people agree on everything, at least one of them is irrelevant. 

To be of “one heart and mind” doesn’t mean that the first Christians always agreed with each other. They didn’t.

Among the many disagreements and conflicts, the one most consequential to you and me, maybe, is the one that raged for some time over the ministry to Gentiles, non-Jews, by Paul. 

There were Jewish Christians who insisted that Gentiles couldn’t be grafted into the Church or the Kingdom of God. They were sure that only Jews could be Christians and that Paul was blaspheming God by welcoming non-Jews, Gentiles, into the fellowship of Christ’s Church.

In Acts 15, we’re told about what’s now called the Council of Jerusalem. There, all points of view were aired and those gathered finally agreed to let Paul reach out to the Gentiles. As long as Gentile believers would respect Jewish Christians, Gentiles would be welcomed into the fellowship of Christ’s Church as fellow heirs of God’s grace given in Christ. That was a good decision for you and me, making it possible for us to know Jesus and the free gift of new life He gives to all who repent and believe in Him!

There are some non-negotiables for people to be part of Christ’s Church, of course. The Church expects believers to accept the deity of Christ, the Holy Trinity, the belief that we are saved by God’s grace through our faith in Christ, the witness of God’s Word in the Bible. 

But the first Christian disciples, led by the witness of the apostles and the Holy Spirit, concluded agreement about unimportant matters like times of meeting, the kinds of songs, the color of the carpet, or whether people wear jeans or suits and ties to worship, to put it all in modern terms, was unnecessary.

Scholars tell us that the phrase “one in heart and mind” refers to the Old Testament vision of God’s Kingdom. Deuteronomy 15 described something of what life in covenant with God would be like. Believers were to be part of a community in which, every seven years, all debts were to be forgiven and possessions lost restored. Deuteronomy 15:4, says to the Israelites who were about to enter the promised land (this is from the English Standard Version, which gives a better translation of the verse): “...there will be no poor among you; for the Lord will bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance to possess…” 

In other words, when you were part of God’s community, no one who is part of it should be in need. But Jesus has expanded the meaning of Jubilee. Through His once-and-for-all sacrifice of Himself on the cross, He has forgiven all of our debts and told His people that as we have been forgiven of our eternal debt to God, so we are to go about relieving our sisters and brothers in Christ of their debts to God, to us, to the world. "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," Jesus teaches us to pray.

This is really what Luke, the author of Acts, means when he says at the outset of our lesson: “All the believers were one in heart and mind.” 

The proof that he’s talking about the first Christian disciples taking care of each other’s needs here and not about always agreeing with each other comes in the very next thing he writes: “No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had…” 

This doesn’t mean that the first Christians sold off all of their homes and properties and lived off the land or on the streets. (Practically speaking, they would have had nowhere to meet for worship if they'd done that.) 

It means that all recognized that everything they had was from God. As James writes in his New Testament letter: “Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father…” (James 1:17) 

So, the first Christians did something far harder than agreeing with each other: They took care of each other. 

When their widows or other destitutes among them, who had no Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid to rely on, no 401k's or 403b's, were in need, their fellow Christians met those needs. 

To be the Church means, among other things, that we take care of each other. 

Many congregations have the attitude that the pastor is the hired caregiver. 

But that’s not the Bible’s vision of the Church. Acts tells us that the whole Church took care of the whole Church: in prayer, in ministering love, in shared burdens, and in money given in support.

Years ago, I wanted to take a group of young people on a weekend during which they would worship with hundreds of other Christian young people, meet to study, pray, and reflect in small groups, hear great speakers with inspiring messages geared to them, and do service projects in Jesus’ name. 

One of the boys in our group wanted to go, but his mom, a single parent struggling to make ends meet, couldn’t afford the modest registration fee or the additional expenses for things like meals during the trip. 

I went to the Church Council and laid out the need. The council spent the better part of a half-hour going over the pros and cons. Money was not an issue; the congregation had the money. Council members were afraid of the precedent that might be set if they authorized the expenditure of a few hundred bucks for one kid to experience something that might change his life. 

They decided against paying for the young man’s registration. I was shaken. This was a truly great congregation, but its leaders couldn’t see their way clear to helping a fellow disciple in need. 

The meeting ended and I wondered what I was going to tell the mom. "I'm sorry, but the congregation doesn't care about your kid?" "I'm sorry. We can't afford to invest in your child's discipleship?" Things were lean for Ann and me: I was willing to help, but I didn’t have all the money needed. Besides, I felt that this was a responsibility of the whole community, to help grow the disciples in our fellowship.

In this state, I was walking out of the building, when a member of the council approached me. “Pastor,” he asked. “How much is the registration and expenses?” I told him what I thought it would all add up to. He said, “I think that I can find a source.” I looked at him to be sure of what he was telling me. “I think I can find someone who can give what’s needed.” 

I knew that the man’s “source” would be his own bank account, though it was clear he wanted no credit for it. All I could do was thank him again and again.

That man, still a friend of ours, was, in that small way, living out the Biblical vision for the Church: He saw the needs of another disciple in Christ’s Church as something he was called and enabled by God to take care of.

Disciples in Christ’s Church live in the absolute certainty that as God has blessed them, they are set free to bless their fellow believers--and the world, strengthening our witness for Jesus. 

The rest of our lesson from Acts underscores this truth. Verse 33: “With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”

Notice that it was God’s grace at work among them powerfully that enabled the first Christians to take care of each other. Anyone who tries to do God’s will without an utter reliance on the grace--the charity--of God will fail. 

But when we let the gracious God we know in Jesus lead us, we can do anything that God is calling us to do, including taking care of one another in this community of faith, Living Water Lutheran Church, whether we agree on things like the color of the carpeting or whether men show up to worship in ties.

A not-very-good nineteenth century hymn was called, God Will Take Care of You. It has an atrocious sing-song melody. It's awful; I love it! It's message is right on point: The God we follow through Jesus Christ is committed to providing us with our daily bread. He will and He does take care of us. But sometimes a Christian sister's or brother’s bread will be sent to them from God through those of us who, at the time, have more bread than we need. 

Jesus says that the world will know that we belong to Him when we love each other (John 13:35). Acts shows us that loving one another isn’t about an attitude of friendliness. If, in response to God's grace, we set out to love others as Christ has loved us, there will always be a price tag attached, whether it’s in the sacrifice of convenience, time, status, money, sometimes our very lives. 

When we make sacrifices to take care of each other, we give witness that we can live in utter reliance on Him because Christ is alive and the gospel is true. The risen Christ assures that no matter how much we give of ourselves, He gives us eternity and more. Christ gives Himself to those who give themselves to Him. 

So, we are called to take care of each other. 

Church lesson #1: In all ways, we are to seek and are set free to seek to take care of the needs of our fellow believers so that together, we can be authentic witnesses for the new life God is establishing in all who confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. 

Amen!

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Americans and Our Stuff

"Possession is nine-tenths of the problem" (Dr. Winston O'Boogie, aka John Lennon)

I agree with my son who, when linking to this piece from becoming minimalist over on Facebook, said that the greatest threat to Americans, spiritually and in every other way, is our materialism.

In 21 Surprising Statistics That Reveal How Much Stuff We Actually Own, Joshua Becker catalogs some bracing facts, some that really might surprise or even shock you.

A sampling:

1. There are 300,000 items in the average American home (LA Times). [I worked for an inventory service when I was in college, counting by hand, items in grocery, discount, drug, and hardware stores from Columbus to Portsmouth, Lancaster to Nelsonville. It was tedious. But I have a feeling that counting items with the same techniques we used before the advent of bar codes and scanners would be more daunting in my own condo than counting the merchandise in those stores was.]

5. The United States has upward of 50,000 storage facilities, more than five times the number of Starbucks. Currently, there is 7.3 square feet of self storage space for every man, woman and child in the nation. Thus, it is physically possible that every American could stand—all at the same time—under the total canopy of self storage roofing (SSA). [I find myself chuckling almost every time I see the signs for self-storage facilities, imagining people walking into the units to store themselves overnight.]

7. 3.1% of the world’s children live in America, but they own 40% of the toys consumed globally (UCLA). [No mention is made here of how many children spend hours playing with the boxes in which their toys have been packaged.]

15. Americans donate 1.9% of their income to charitable causes (NCCS/IRS). While 6 billion people worldwide live on less than $13,000/year (National Geographic). [We ignore Jesus' words, I think, to our own eternal peril: "From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked" (Luke 12:48).]

19. Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours or 153 days searching for misplaced items.The research found we lose up to nine items every day—or 198,743 in a lifetime. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list (The Daily Mail). [I threw this one in because I so identify with it. It's frustrating, but it really is one indicator of having too much stuff, I suppose.]

Becker writes:

The numbers paint a jarring picture of excessive consumption and unnecessary accumulation. Fortunately, the solution is not difficult. The invitation to own less is an invitation to freedom, intentionality, and passion.* And it can be discovered at your nearest drop-off center.

I think that he's right. In the past few years, I've been flushing lots of my possessions, taking some to places like Goodwill, Volunteers of America, and Salvation Army, while taking books and some recordings to Half Price Books, more for the privilege of divestiture than for money, because Half Price doesn't hand out a lot of that. I've also enjoyed giving a lot of my classic vinyl records from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, to my kids.

Possessions and all that goes with them can hold us down. My seminary professor and mentor, Pastor Bruce Schein, used to tell us to never have so much or be so rooted in a place that we weren't ready to move on a day's notice. Schein was warning us, in part, against identifying our lives too much by our stuff, houses, neighborhoods, and such.

This wasn't just advice of practical expedience for future pastors. For all of us, being so tied to what we own that we're not able to respond to what God may be calling us to do at any given time can destroy our eternal souls.

Jesus once told a man, "Follow Me." The man evidently was drawn to Jesus, but said in reply: "Lord, first let me go and bury my father” (Luke 9:59-60). What's interesting about this exchange is that we don't know if the man's father was dead, or even sick, yet. The man was tied to a place, to a way of life, maybe to his stuff, and so, asked if he could hold off following Jesus for a while.

The man was looking for the right time. But the right time to follow Jesus is now, no matter how inconvenient or hard as it can be to do so.

I do often wonder these days whether the times I've left one place to go to another was really done at the prompting of the Holy Spirit. (I'm serving the fourth church I've pastored in thirty-two years.)A recent unexpected encounter at the Cincinnati airport with members of the second church I served has only added to questioning my motives for moving to the next church.

For all my uncertainty on that score though, I am sure that the unwillingness to move when Jesus says, "Follow" is wrong and often prompted mostly by both our natural difficulty with change and our revulsion at the prospect of moving our stuff.** Sometimes, we have reason to wonder, I think, if we own our stuff or if our stuff owns us.

And that is precisely the issue Jesus confronts the disciples (both first- and twenty-first century varieties) with when He says: "...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" (Matthew 19:24).

There's nothing inherently wrong with wealth. Nothing intrinsically evil about stuff.

But they both present a strong challenge to our souls in that they can become the means by which we identify ourselves and the definition we put on what it means to live.

Possessions allow us to insulate ourselves from the realities that most people in the world for most of history have had to deal with, to, in a sense, become gods unto ourselves. All of our stuff makes it harder for the truth about human sin (our sin), our need of God, and our accountability to God and to our neighbor, to penetrate our minds, consciences, and wills.

Jesus once told a rich man who earnestly sought Jesus out that in order to be free--in order to grasp the outstretched hand of God that offers to change us from God's enemies to God's friends for eternity--he needed to sell all his possessions, give to the poor, and follow Jesus.

Had Jesus been approached by a poor man, He likely wouldn't have given the same prescription. To be sure, Jesus still would have told the poor man to follow Him, whether that meant hitting the road or following Jesus right where he already lived. But, it's likely that the poor man would have other things of which his soul and his life would need divesting in order to allow him to take hold of Jesus.

But, as a member of the US middle class, I do stew about the power of stuff over my life and I stew about the power of materialism over our culture.

Materialism is a belief system, a religion that worships a false idol whose only desire is to appeal to our human egos and love of creature comforts.

As such, it drives a wedge between the God/Man Jesus Who came to save us from our sins--from our desire to "be like God" which materialism represents--and us, between life with God and us, between authenticity and us, and between eternity and us.

I think it's time for me to repent (again) of my materialism, to follow Jesus, and to clean out my closet for a trip to the local thrift store.

*I notice, with satisfaction, that Becker uses the Oxford comma.

**I wrote a song about the challenge of living with the possibility of God calling us away from places where we've grown comfortable and happy, especially with the friends we've made. It starts out:

Feeling fine
Drinking wine
Spending time with my friends
Love exchanged
Evil tamed
I thought it would never end
But when you're talking with the Holy Spirit
He may give you a call and you'd better hear it
Following Jesus is a Jenga game
He's going to tear down your bricks
You won't be the same

(c) 2016, Mark Daniels

[Blogger Mark Daniels is the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio.]