Sermon: Resurrection Shaped Community

 Acts 4:32-35
Resurrection Shaped Community
James Sledge                                                                                     April 7, 2024 

That couldn’t actually happen, could it? Would people ever willingly pool all their possessions so that no one went without? Could it happen here? I once heard a sermon at a presbytery meeting where the preacher said that it never really happened. His proof didn’t come from any scriptural or historical research. His proof was that his presbytery work had taken him to a great many churches over the years, and it had never happened there.

Biblical scholars sometimes wonder if it were quite so wonderful as what we just heard in the book of Acts, and they point to Acts itself. Just a few verses after our passage, it tells of a couple who sold their property and claimed to give all the proceeds to the community but in fact held some of it back for themselves.

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

What do you think? Could it have happened, even partly? Could it happen now, 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. Just last week we proclaimed, “Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” Of course we believe in the resurrection. But is resurrection any less outlandish a claim than one about a community of radical sharing where everyone held everything in common and everyone had enough?

Imagine that you met someone who had never heard the first thing about Christianity. Imagine you told this person about the first Christian community where everyone shared things in common and people sold what they had so that everyone had plenty.

Then imagine that you gave this person a thumbnail sketch of the Jesus story. You explained that Jesus preached and taught and performed miracles and proclaimed that the kingdom of God was drawing near, a day when God’s will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. But Jesus stirred up trouble. The Roman authorities didn’t appreciate talk about a new kingdom, and the religious leaders worried that Jesus was rocking the boat too much. And so the Romans arrested and executed Jesus after a sham trial. But to his followers’ amazement, Jesus did not stay buried. God raised him from the dead, and this risen Jesus appeared to many of those followers who then went on to found the Christian movement.

If this person you were talking to had never heard anything about Christian faith, which story would be harder to believe, one about a community of radical sharing and caring, or one where a revolutionary leader was executed but was then raised from the dead?

I have to think the sharing community would be a lot easier to swallow. Yet we don’t bat an eye when we say, “Christ is risen!” while doubting that a community like the one described in Acts could really happen, certainly not in our day. Does the community in Acts 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, bulbs emerging in spring or caterpillars turning into butterflies, death just a passage to something new. But that’s not what the Bible or Jesus mean by resurrection.

For Jesus and the Bible, resurrection belonged to the end of time. It was expected 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. 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 yet 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 allows people to experience the power of resurrection in the here and now. Joined to Christ, we become 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 the shape of our lives reveals the age to which we most belong.

The story of that remarkable community in the book of Acts is a story about resurrection power. 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, like God’s new day.

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

No doubt you’ve seen news reports about the decline of the church, something we are not immune to here at the Meeting House. There are many reasons for this decline, but I fear that one of the bigger reasons is that the Church shows so little resurrection power. It does not exhibit new or different possibilities. It looks very much like the world, like the old age, not the one to come, and so any claims of newness in Christ ring hollow. Its liturgies and practices may be nurturing and comforting to those long accustomed to them, but often there is little to suggest any real hope of something wonderful and new.

But once a year, the world is fascinated by Easter. Once a year people who have no church affiliation or involvement make their way to Easter worship even though there is no Christmas-like, secular frenzy pumping up the season. There is simply Easter with its incredible, impossible claim that Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!

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

And if that power and hope actually begin to live in us, we cannot help but look and act differently. Maybe we won’t match the radical nature of that community in Acts, but if resurrection power truly dwells in us, we cannot help being more generous, more compassionate, more loving, more committed to justice. We cannot help being different from the world around us. And when that happens the world can catch a glimpse of resurrection in us. It may even be tempted to believe that an impossible story is true.

Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Thanks be to God!