I may have told you this story before, but indulge me because it’s one of my favorites so I’m going to tell it again. When I was a kid, probably eight or nine, my grandmother got a really bad case of shingles. Now shingles is miserable and awful no matter the circumstances, but for my family this was particularly difficult because my grandfather was disabled and my grandmother was his primary caretaker. But while she had shingles, their roles had to switch, and much of the caretaking responsibilities fell on him. The biggest help in that time came from their church family, who were able to swoop in and support both of them. This was wonderful, but did result in this one very funny incident.
Mom and I were home one afternoon when the phone rang. It was my grandfather, could we come over right away, there was a crisis and he didn’t know what to do. When we got there my grandfather was peering out the open front door, waiting for us to arrive. He rushed us into the kitchen and presented the problem that needed solving, and my mother bit her lip to keep from laughing. The “great crisis” causing us to rush across town was this: stacks of tin-foil covered containers adorned every conceivable surface of their kitchen. There had been a mix-up in the congregational concerns food calendar, and somehow a week’s worth of meals got dropped off at once. My grandfather, always very frugal, looked at my mother with real fear in his eyes and said, “What am I going to do? Your mother and I will never eat all these casseroles.”
Throughout the Easter season, the first readings are all from the book of Acts, which is a history of the early church as it spread out from Jerusalem after Jesus’ ascension. So I thought it might be fun to focus my sermons on these Acts readings instead of my usual practice of focusing on the Gospel. Just a little variety, you know, to keep things interesting.
So, having made that decision, I read the Acts reading for this morning, and I chuckled a bit, because this is a text that always seems to bring about the question when I read or preach on it, as to whether or not I am a communist. A question to which, depending on my level of snarkiness and/or annoyance at the person asking, I am liable to quip back that the fifties called, and they’d like their Red Scare back. By now I’m sure you all know my politics well enough to know that I probably do have a bit of a socialist leaning. But I think trying to read twenty-first century political thought into the book of Acts is to miss the point of the reading entirely.
One of the commentaries I read made the point, and I think it’s true, that when we read this text, we tend to get totally caught up in the possessions part. Why, we ask, is Jesus so keen in taking all our stuff?! So we do a whole lot of weird mental gymnastics to try and make sense of this passage and to justify our response to it. It was a different time back then, and people had to rely more on community. Or I earned this stuff, and certainly Jesus wants me to be generous, but it would be irresponsible to give away everything I own. Or, again, the communism argument, we know it didn’t work in Russia so that can’t be what Jesus meant. To which I say, you’re right, it’s not. The apostles were not secretly reading Marx and trying to overthrow the government any more than they were all free market capitalists. Friends, this was first century Palestine. You could literally buy something with a goat; there is no part of any modern economic theory that makes any sense with goat currency. Quite frankly, I think the fact that when we read this text our minds immediately go to possessions says way more about our obsession with stuff than it says about the text.
So what is this text about? Well, fun fact, the rhetorical structure of this passage is what is known as a chiasmus. Derived from the Greek letter “chi” which looks like and X and also happens to be the first letter in Christ—coincidence, maybe?—a chiasmus indicates that the most important part of the passage is at the center. “X marks the spot,” if you will. The center of this passage is the end of verse thirty-three and the beginning of verse thirty-four, “great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them.”
“Great grace was upon all of them.” Which sounds pretty great, but what does it mean to have “great grace”? Well, first off, notice that it was “upon” them. That word “upon” makes me think of it resting on them. There’s an airiness to it, like a blanket or a dusting. This etherealness reminds me that great grace isn’t the goal, because grace isn’t something we can strive for. Grace is a gift; it is given to us by God. The apostles don’t have great grace because they gave up of all their possessions; they were moved to a communal way of being because of the central experience of the great grace of God through Christ.
Rather than try to figure out exactly what this passage is instructing us to do in order to receive the great grace that was upon the apostles, let us start with the central premise that because of Christ’s death and resurrection, great grace rests on us, and then reflect on how we might live out that reality. Because, spoiler alert, I think that central truth is more powerful than any effort we might try, and more truthful than any system we might come up with. I also think that if we focus on living out of the great grace of God, we will find that living in the way the apostles described is way easier than we thought, because we are not forced to try to fit first century economic practices into our twenty-first century lives. Because, let’s face it, Meijers is not going to take your goat as payment, even though the Old Testament might say it is a perfectly acceptable trade.
So what might it look like to live out of the great grace of God upon us? The second half of the chiasmus said “there was not a needy person among them” and I opened with the casserole story because I think that’s an amazing example of that. My family had a need, and the need was not just met, but exceeded, by a rush of casseroles. One could argue that in fact the outpouring of the community then created a second need, the need for more freezer space, but let’s not get too bogged down in the details. If “great grace was upon them [and] there was not a needy person among them,” then it seems like the only thing we really need to do is find needs and meet them, and the rest will work itself out. I really believe that the work of Christian community is that simple. See needs, meet them, and everything else will fall into place.
And I know I’ve told this story before, but we have just about the best model in what this looks like right here in our building with the members of the Woman’s Co-op. Unlike so many social service providers, there isn’t a lot of thought put into how resources can best be distributed or what is the most effective distribution method, or what is the optimal ratio of administrative to programmatic costs. The model is literally, “your kid needs clothes, mine outgrew them, here you go. I need a ride to work, you drive past my house on the way to your job, you can pick me up.” Living from this core of meeting simple needs changes everything. You remember the mountain of canned goods in the hallway last week; I finally learned the story on that. That was a Co-op member who wanted to thank us for providing the space for her to get back on her feet. And she knew that the food pantry was important to us because every time she came into the office, there were always a few things sitting in the wagon. So when her tax return came in this year, she used a chunk of it to support a ministry she knew we cared about.
Dear friends in Christ, great grace is upon us. That’s what we celebrated last week on Easter, it is what we celebrate today and every Sunday when we come to the font and gather around the table. Great grace rests upon us as a gift from God. So let’s not get too caught up in making sure we live it out in exactly the right way. Being part of this community of believers is really, amazingly simple. Just go be the people of God in the world, in whatever way works in the place where you find yourself. The rest, I promise you, will fall into place. Amen.
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