April 15, 2012 (Easter 2) – Acts 4:32-35
Acts 4:32-35
A Community of Generosity
Second Sunday of Easter – April 15, 2012
First Lutheran Church – Winnipeg, MB
The front of our worship space this year beautifully images a garden.
And this year it’s not only because we imagine – thanks to John’s Gospel – that
the setting for Jesus’s tomb was a garden, and that
the place of death is actually a place of life.
It’s also because Jesus’s spirit that was unleashed in the resurrection
creates new life.
In John’s Gospel this morning, we have John’s version of Pentecost,
of the sending of the Holy Spirit on the disciples.
It’s Easter Sunday evening, the disciples are scared and have locked their door.
But Jesus – never one to take subtle social hints – pays no attention,
appears among them, and breathes on them.
At creation, the breath of God not only swept over the face of the dead waters and
created life.
At creation, God also breathed life into us human beings, a very tender and intimate action,
that brought us first to life.
What Jesus does here is breathe much needed new life into his disciples in their fear,
in their uncertainty, in their guilt at having betrayed him.
The resurrection recreates us.
It starts us over.
It says, “Things don’t have to be this way, you know.”
It’s God’s way of starting over. Of beginning us again.
Of returning us to some primal hope.
Of returning us to a time before there were brutal, inhuman empires.
Before there were haves and have nots.
Before there were big deals and little deals.
Before there were slaves and free.
The garden reminds us of that first garden, of Eden,
when all was new, when God first breathed into the first humans,
when they cared for one another and the earth.
Before lies, before deception, before jealousy, before greed, before murder, before death.
Before all the very worst aspects of civilization shaped our life together.
It’s the new beginning that happens when the spirit that lived in and animated Jesus
lives in and animates and shapes the life of an entire community.
This week I’ve been a book that has called all this to mind.
About 4 years before he published Moby Dick, Herman Melville published a book called Typee.
It’s a thinly disguised autobiographical tale about his adventures as a young sailor in the
South Pacific in the 1840s.
After spending several dreary months at sea on a whaling ship,
he and a friend decided to desert when they landed at Nukuheva, in the Marquesas.
They did, and made their way across the island on foot.
They ended up among the Typees, a tribe of Polynesians who, up to this point,
had had almost no extended contact with any Europeans whatsoever.
Melville ended up living for about a month there alone among the Marquesans.
In a green valley filled with breadfruit and coconut trees,
he writes eloquently about this experiences
. . . the influence exerted over the people of the valley by their chiefs was mild in the extreme. . . . During the time I lived among the Typees, no one was ever put upon his trial for any offence against the public. To all appearances there were no courts of law or equity. There were no municipal police for the purpose of apprehending vagrants and disorderly characters. In short, there were no legal provisions whatever for the well-being and conservation of society, the enlightened end of civilised legislation. And yet everything went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled, I will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious associations of mortals in Christendom. . . . The disquieting ideas of theft or assassination never disturbed them. . . . There was not a padlock in the valley. . . . (293-294)
There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no bills payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; or to sum up all in one word – no Money! That root of all evil was not to be found in the valley. (183-184)
During my whole stay on the island I never witnessed a single quarrel, nor anything that in the slightest degree approached even to a dispute. The natives appeared to form one household, whose members were bound together by the ties of strong affection. The love of kindred I did not so much perceive, for it seemed blended in the general love; and where all were treated as brothers and sisters, it was hard to tell who were actually related to each other by blood. (299-300) (Herman Melville, Typee: A Real Romance of the South Seas (Boston: L.C. Page and Co., 1892)
You can see why I was struck while reading this this week: Luke could almost have written it
in the Book of Acts.
Is there some intended state of community to which God in the resurrection seeks to turn us?
Luke describes the new community born out of the resurrection:
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. 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 had any need.
That was what resurrection looked like in that time and in that place.
That’s what Easter looked like back then.
That’s what the resurrected body of Christ looked like back then.
As New Testament Professor Mitzi Smith observes,
God “resurrects” us not just for ourselves, but for our fellow human beings.
(http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?lect_date=4/15/2012)
In short, Luke here in Acts signals to us that out of God’s great generosity in
giving us Jesus and raising him from the dead for us,
is born a community of deep, deep gratefulness and generosity.
An Easter community is a community of generosity.
Or it is not an Easter community.
It is not a community within which lives the Spirit of the great generous giver.
Luke describes his own first century community in Acts this morning.
But we don’t celebrate Easter as something that happened 2000 years ago.
We continue to celebrate Easter as something that God does over and over again in
the lives of faithful communities across the ages,
turning us in the power of Jesus’s Spirit to our intended state.
In the second century, the Greek Christian Aristides wrote this to
the Roman emperor Hadrian about his community:
He who has gives to him who has not, without boasting. And when they see a stranger, they take him in to their homes and rejoice over him as a very brother; for they do not call them brethren after the flesh, but brethren after the spirit and in God. . . . And if there is among them any that is poor and needy, and if they have no spare food, they fast two or three days in order to supply to the needy their lack of food. (quoted at http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20120409JJ.shtml)
A couple of hundred years after this, the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate,
who was no friend to Christians, was forced to acknowledge this:
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. (Ibid.)
Since then, communities of financial and social generosity have sprung up repeatedly
among Christians through the ages: from Eastern monks and the first Franciscans to the Shakers, the Catholic Workers and the base communities of Latin America. (Daniel Clendenin, ibid.)
Today the resurrection spirit is still alive and well, even among us.
I have mentioned before that one of our confirmands last year received
a substantial gift of money on her confirmation day.
She gave it all away: she placed all of it into the hands of one of our other members,
Bob Granke, in his capacity as Executive Director of Canadian Lutheran World Relief.
With it she ordered some “Gifts from the Heart,” a program of CLWR that purchases
useful gifts for those in need in Africa and elsewhere.
What I learned this week from our National Bishop Susan Johnson, also a member here,
from her recent trip to Africa, is that when a couple of goats, for instance,
are given to villagers in Africa, the first pair of male and female goats born is
given away to other villagers, and then the first male/female pair born to that family is given away to still other villagers,
and so on and on and on, so that the generous gift keeps on giving.
The generosity of one confirmand will ultimately have a huge impact not just on one family,
but on an entire village.
That’s Easter, that the resurrection Spirit at work.
Want me to go on?
Okay.
This week at Food Bank I met up with a fellow I’ve been desperately trying to help find
a clean, affordable apartment to live in, not an easy thing to do in the West End.
He’s been taken in by a friend who is also a frequent guest of ours at food bank,
whose apartment is already full of family and friends who are in similar situations.
What else can you do? He asked me. You have to help.
It was a moment of being judged by the gentlest mercy imaginable.
For this person has far fewer means than I do for taking in a brother in need.
But it was also a tremendous witness to me about the Easter that is happening in this community.
If you look for it, it is there. He is living. And that is good news.
So let us receive his life-giving spirit again.
Let us share this bread and wine generously made and given to us by some of our members.
Let us – in this sharing – image a community in which gifts are shared for the good of all,
a community in which there is enough,
in which none receive too much and none too little.
In which the spirit of this kind of love is given us again to live lives of generosity and care in
world that is often mean and grasping and which encourages us to hoard.
Let us receive it and live the lives that we were meant to live by our creator.
Lives of generosity and grace.
Lives that set aside time to pray for others.
Lives that give of their time to those in need.
Lives that give of their time to one another for listening.
Lives that give of talents for the common good of this church community and
this neighbourhood.
Lives that are financially generous to the mission of this congregation as it is expressed in
our food banks and kids club and all the rest.
Lives that give testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.
Lives that witness to the great grace that has been given to us all.
So together let us say, “Amen.”
Pastor Michael Kurtz
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