Sermon: Resurrection Shaped Community

 Acts 4:32-35
Resurrection Shaped Community
James Sledge                                                                                                  April 11, 2021

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.

That couldn’t actually happen, could it? I once heard a sermon where the preacher said that it never really happened. His proof didn’t come from any scriptural or historical research. His proof was that he had known a great many churches and it had never happened there, could never happen there, and so clearly, it never happened. He went somewhere with the sermon after that but I don’t remember that part.

Biblical scholars sometimes wonder if it were always quite so wonderful as the book of Acts would have us believe. They point to the book of Acts itself. Just a few verses from our passage, it tells of a couple, Ananias and Sapphira, who sold their property and claimed to give all the proceeds to the community but in fact kept some for themselves.

By the way, Ananias and Sapphira both fall dead as the result of their attempt to fool God and the community, but that’s a different sermon.

The biblical scholar’s answer to the question of whether the community described in Acts could have happened is a little more nuanced than that preacher I heard years ago. It might have partly happened, suggests the scholar, but it wasn’t quite so perfect as first reported.

What do you think? Could it have happened, even partly? Or does your experience with the human condition suggest even that would be impossible?

Let me ask you a completely different question. Do you believe in the resurrection? Perhaps that seems a strange question to ask on the second Sunday in Easter, a day when we open worship with “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” But resurrection seems to me a much more incredible and unlikely claim than one about a faith community that engaged in radical sharing.

What if you met someone who had never heard the first thing about Christianity, and you told them that there was once a community where everyone shared all they had with one another so that there was no one who was destitute? And you also told them that this community worshipped a man who had proclaimed a new day, God’s new day. But he stirred up so much trouble that the powers that be executed him. He died and was buried, but days later, he was raised from the dead. Which of those would this stranger have an easier time believing?

Yet we easily proclaim, “Christ is risen!” but then say, “That could never happen,” about the community described in Acts. Does the latter really seem that much more impossible, or have we simply heard the Easter story so often that we’ve become numb to how astonishing and impossible it is? Or have we, perhaps, never quite realized what resurrection means?

Sometimes I hear people talk about resurrection as though it were part of the natural order of things, like caterpillars turning into butterflies. Death is just a passage to something new and different. But that’s not what the Bible or Jesus mean by resurrection.

When I officiate at a funeral, I inevitably speak of resurrection. It is our grounds for hope. And so I suppose it’s understandable that people began to think of resurrection as being about dying and going to heaven, of an eternal soul that moves on after death. But that’s not what the Bible or Jesus mean by resurrection.

For Jesus and the Bible, resurrection belonged to the end of time, to the last days. It was supposed to be a one time event at the end of the age, but then Jesus was raised from the dead, a resurrection of one. In the aftermath of that first Easter, Jesus’ followers had to rethink resurrection. Clearly it was not yet the end of the age. No one else who was dead had been raised, but Jesus had. What did that mean?

Gradually, the Church came to understand that Jesus’ resurrection did indeed mark the end of an age, but the new age was still to come, a day the apostle Paul described this way. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we (referring to those alive at that time) will be changed.

In the meantime, the presence of the Holy Spirit joins us to the risen Christ and allows us to experience the power of resurrection here and now. Joined to Christ, we are new creations who belong, not that old age but to the new age to come. In essence, we live in a time between the times, and our lives reveal the age to which we belong.

The story of that remarkable community in the book of Acts is a story about the power of resurrection. That power was the lifeblood of the community, transforming it so that it looked nothing like the world around it. Instead, it looked like the age to come, the day when God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

If I do not believe that the Acts community could actually happen, that it is some sort of utopian pipe dream, does that mean I don’t believe in resurrection? Does it mean that no real newness is possible? Does that mean that God can’t or won’t do anything to transform the world, to make it what it could be, what it should be? 

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Perhaps you’ve seen the recent news reports about church membership in America dropping below fifty percent. And that is for all Americans. If we’re just talking about people under thirty-five, it might not even be twenty-five percent.

There are many reasons for this decline, some of which are completely out of the Church’s control. But I fear that one of the bigger reasons is that the Church has become largely inconsequential. It does not offer the world a starkly different possibility. It looks very much like the world, and so its claims of newness in Christ ring hollow. Its liturgies and practices are nurturing and comforting to some, mostly those long accustomed to such practices. But often there is little the world can see to suggest any real hope beyond that which can be found in myriad other places.

But once a year, the world is intrigued by Easter. Once a year people who have no church affiliation or involvement make their way to sunrise services and to Easter worship. And unlike Christmas, there is no secular frenzy pumping up the season. There is simply Easter with its incredible claim that Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

For one day the Church is truly consequential, proclaiming loudly that what no one thought possible is possible, that there is a power loose in the world that is stronger than death and corruption and emptiness and meaninglessness. There is hope beyond what we humans can create on our own.

And when that power, that hope lives in us, we start to look different. Maybe not as crazy different as the community in Acts, but more generous, more compassionate, more caring, more committed to justice and reconciliation, more in ways that mark us as different from the world around us. And then the world can catch a glimpse of resurrection through us and see that the news is indeed true. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Thanks be to God!