Acts 6:1
Acts depicts an idyllic community of love and sharing that emerges in the wake of Pentecost. Present day Christians who assume that God is fond of capitalism are often uneasy when they read its description. "All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need." But Acts lets us know that there were always threats to this community. First we hear of hoarding by the couple Ananias and Sapphira. And in today's reading, we read that Hellenist widows weren't faring as well as Hebrew ones.
There aren't many details in the story, but one thing is clear. Hebrews get better treatment than Hellenist. (This seems to be a division within a church that is entirely Jewish, some who able to worship and pray in Hebrew and/or Aramaic, and some who can speak only Greek.) The problem is quickly resolved as Stephen and others are selected to lead this service. But it points to a problem that has plagued the Church from its infancy, fights and divisions about boundaries, about who's in and who's out, about the requirements for inclusion.
Despite statements about there no longer being Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, about all becoming one in Christ, the faith has been remarkably good over the years at coming up with grounds for and exceptions to genuine unity. In today's reading it is cultural and language differences, but that is just a start.
In the book of Genesis, the Tower of Babel story is a mythic explanation of how humanity became divided. But in the Pentecost story of Acts, the gift of the Holy Spirit undoes this division. Yet we in the Church keep honoring the old curse rather than living into the new day of the Spirit.
The struggle for full inclusion in the Church by LGBT people is a very current example of the curse's persistence. But division over race is America's most profound experience of this curse, and one we seem unwilling to confront fully.
It is easy, and often convenient, to forget the deep, religious roots of American racism. Slavery in the Bible was not racially based, and thus was more fluid than the US version. American slavery required that Africans be less than fully human to justify slavery as a status conferred at birth, and the Church was more than willing to help in this effort. It succeeded so thoroughly that even many abolitionists assumed that freed slaves would never be able to take their place as full citizens in America.
Slaveholders actively discouraged slaves from becoming Christian, for obvious reasons. And when the Civil War brought an end to slavery, it hardly brought an end to deeply held and religiously buttressed ideas that those of African descent were not full human partners. I think many would be surprised at the number of people who still hold to such ideas. But even for those who do not, the legacy is still a curse on our society.
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In the aftermath of the Emmanuel AME Church murders, there are signs of Pentecost-like possibility. People have reached across the divide to say, "We are one!" But there are others who are waiting and hoping for things to go "back like they were." And if people of faith do not seize this moment, inertia and long standing practice will be on the side of those who prefer the curse of division to the new community of love Christ proclaims.
The writer of Acts cast the Apostle Paul as his leading hero, and Paul struggles mightily to push the Church beyond the boundaries it had inherited from Judaism. It is well past time for the Church in our day to actively struggle against the boundaries and divisions and inequalities that we inherited and have too often helped maintain.
Last Thursday, the Rev. Tawnya Denise Anderson, a PC(USA) pastor, posted a blog entitled, "'Allies,' the Time for Your Silence Has Expired." She spoke of white friends and their willingness to listen and offer sympathy toward the plight of black America. But then she said, "White allies, I thank you for your thoughtfulness in this regard. Now allow me to be your stopwatch; Time’s up." And she went on to share a Facebook post of a colleague who she said captured her thoughts. "If you love me and mine, fight for me. If you are unwilling to fight for me, clearly there is no way we can walk together."
Too often the white church's work to break down the curse of racism has looked a bit like the advocacy of country club members who insist that these things take time, that the best way to go about it is gently to convince more and more members that being more open is a good idea. Very rarely has the white church been willing to act like the Apostle Paul, who fought the church leaders in Jerusalem and risked his very life to remove the boundaries that Christ had made meaningless.
Very often, we white Christians have been unwilling fully to acknowledge how pervasive the curse of racism is. Perhaps because to do so would be to demand more action and more confession of our own willful blindness and culpability than we can handle.
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When Acts tells us about how divisions began to sow trouble in the Church's post-Pentecost Paradise, it is a segue into the story of how Paul and others took on the biggest division for the early Church, that between Jew and Gentile, and eventually overcame it. We Americans have a division problem of similar magnitude, one with roots in the churches we attend and serve. Surely Christ is calling us to do everything we can, to struggle and to risk, until we truly live into our oneness in Christ.
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