Acts 4:32-35

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. With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. 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 any had need.

John helpfully spoke last week about the background to this book of Acts that we are exploring this month, including the authorship, date, setting and so on. There is just a couple of things I want to emphasize. The Book of Acts is basically Book 2 immediately following the Gospel of Luke; they are meant to be read one after the other. Book 1, the gospel of Luke, is about how people came to follow Jesus during his life – they saw his ministry of teaching and healing, and they began to follow him. The followers grew in strength of faith and number through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Then, at the end of the book, Jesus ascends to heaven, and the disciples are left on earth, staring up into heaven, waiting for him to come back. And they wait, and wait and wait, but no sign of him. They soon realise that he may not come back for some time. So what are they to do? How do followers of Jesus follow him when he isn’t around to be followed, at least not tangibly?

This is where book 2 comes into play. Book 2, the book of Acts, describes how those early followers of Jesus continued to live after Jesus effectively disappeared; how they shaped their lives around his message, and how they spread His gospel to those in Jerusalem and beyond who may have heard about Jesus from others but who had never met him.

The passage we have this morning focuses on how these early disciples lived as a community in Jerusalem – how they existed as a group of people who loved and followed Jesus and acknowledged Him as their Lord and Saviour, in amongst a city of people who did not believe that that was the case – that the Messiah had not yet come. It seems that those early disciples living in Jerusalem adopted a kind of extreme Communist way of life – they literally sold their property, donated the proceeds, and then those proceeds were distributed by the church leaders to all those in need. Is this the model of church that we should be emulating? Show me the money, congregants!

To answer that, let’s do what good bible study should always do, which is look at the context behind this passage. This group was not the first group of Jews of that time to live communally like this. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, there is a reference to a covenant community who formed itself around someone known as the Teacher of Righteousness, who lived about 100 years before Jesus. That teacher claimed that through him, God had established a new covenant which was spoken about in the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament, especially in the books of Jeremiah and Ezekiel. We also learn that this teacher was vehemently opposed by the priestly hierarchy of the day, probably because he saw himself as the new High Priest. In any case, this Teacher of Righteousness and his community saw themselves as the community in which the ancient ideal of Israel being God’s covenant people was finally coming true. And so they literally shared all their possessions, as an expression of that community.

Around 100 years later, this passage says the early followers of Jesus in Jerusalem lived in a similar way, and I believe it was for the same reason: they believed that God had established the new covenant, not through that Teacher of Righteousness from a century ago, but through Jesus of Nazareth, their Messiah, and their new High Priest. So they were simply living out what God had always intended for God’s chosen people – sharing all things in common; they saw themselves as a covenant community in whom the ancient promises of God were coming true.

What ancient promises of God? Here is where the Old Testament again comes into play; we can hear about these promises of God all the way back in the book of Deuteronomy, which quotes God talking about what life might be like when God finally establishes that community. In Chapter 15, God commands God’s people that ever seven years there should be a full remission of debts – everyone who is owed money must remit the claim – and then God goes on to say “there will be no needy person among you, because the Lord is sure to bless you in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” And then in Isaiah, the writer talks about the year of Jubilee, which is every seven times seven years, when all debts are remitted entirely. This, it seems, is the will of God for Israel, God’s chosen people.

So what I am suggesting is that Luke is making a striking and controversial claim: that this early “Christian” movement as described in Acts was the embodiment of the true covenant community that God had always intended to create, and this community came into being through the total forgiveness of sin and debt by Jesus in his death. Yes, Jesus was not just about forgiveness of sin; Jesus spoke at great length in Luke’s and other gospels about the forgiveness of debt. Back in Luke 5 when Jesus narrates that famous speech: “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour”: that year is what was referred to in Deuteronomy and Isaiah, where there would be no debt at all.

So now, in this narrative, his followers were, in the most practical way possible, making real the promise of the renewal of God’s covenant. They would literally have no debts to each other, since all their property was shared in common. I should clarify though, that this does not meant that his followers sold the roofs over their heads, because without them, they would have nowhere to meet or indeed live. But anything they could afford to sell, they sold, and shared it with their wider community. And don’t be fooled – this was as massive back then as it would be today; selling one’s land was not just sacrificing economic assets; it was letting go of one’s ancestral heritage.

And it’s not like this was normal behaviour: to live communally like this, to proclaim that Jesus was the true High Priest – you can imagine that that would have caused some tension in Jerusalem, the centre of Judaism – tension that led to the eventual split between Judaism and what is now known as Christianity. There is really no word “Christian” in the New Testament; the early church had no word for who they were; they just referred to themselves as “the people who had been with Jesus”, or “the people who bore witness to Jesus’ resurrection”, or “the people who were filled with the Holy Spirit”, or simply “those who believed” – but they were still Jews.

Anyway friends, what does it mean to be a Christian community? How do we communally follow Christ, live out his commandments, and model ourselves on the example of his first followers?

The very first part of this passage gives us a clue: to be of one heart and mind, which is a concept often referred to in Paul’s letters, like to the Philippians and Ephesians. Does being of one heart and mind mean agreeing with each other on everything? Not necessarily. Certainly in any community, the desire is always there for the group to reach a deep, heart-level agreement on key issues of theology and values – but there is more than this. These early Christians, who again were still Jewish – they didn’t make as much of a distinction as we do between heart and mind matters, and practical life. For Christians, according to this passage, being of one heart and soul doesn’t just mean working to agree on all disputed matters, but to be ready to regard each other’s needs as one’s own.

Here again, there are more Old Testament echoes – from Jeremiah and Ezekiel – where God says “I will give them one heart and one way” – and Luke argues that this one heart and one way again occurred through Jesus, and this is the new covenant community where this vision is realised. So being in Christian community isn’t about being nice and warm to each other, at least not entirely; being in Christian community means sharing in all of life together, and being radically generous, sharing everything in common.

Indeed, when Paul tells the Thessalonians that since they already love one another, they must do so more and more, he is not saying that since they are already nice to each other, they should be nicer; he is saying that since they already care practically for one another, they must work at making that more and more of a reality, because that is the Kingdom of Heaven being made manifest here and now.

The church talks at length about being a family, right? There are countless hymns and songs and poems that refer to this analogy. But actually, from the inception of the church, the analogy is quite real. These earliest followers of Jesus lived as a single family. And when you’re in a family, you stop thinking about things and money as MINE or YOURS. When you’re in a family, the breadwinners don’t keep their earned money to themselves, but actively give that money to the whole household. When you’re in a family, you shouldn’t need slaves to do all the work for you (although some mums here might raise an eyebrow here!), because everyone pulls their weight. That is what it means to be a family. Families also fight and bicker and get on each other’s nerves and hurt each other’s feelings. But we still share everything in common.

Why do we do this? Why do we share everything in common as a family? Well, the early church had a word for this way of ordering life: the word agape, which means love, but not in the shallow, feelings-y way that we often use it. Agape love is not just about feelings; it is about what you do with your stuff when you are part of an extended family.

Now I don’t want to oversimplify this model of church; this communal way of living can feel burdensome in our time and culture, where we feel forced to accumulate and save and be cautious with our giving, and we can blame this on a myriad of things, like the cost of living where we are, or the needs of our children or grandchildren, or a lack of trust in where our offerings go. But the truth is that if we all behave like this, if we treat our belonging to a church as we would belonging to a family, and live out that relationship in what we do with our money, resources and time, we will actually have more energy and vitality within us. There really is an attractiveness about a life in which we stop clinging on to everything we can get, and instead start sharing, giving away, celebrating God’s wonderful generosity by being generous ourselves. And friends, this attractiveness will literally attract others in.

Because the point of Christian community is to be counter-cultural, to be radically generous in a society that says we should not – but to do so, not just for the sake of it, but because we love and serve the Lord.

Christian community should also not be a wholly comfortable experience; yes, there is love and compassion and generosity within this community, but there is also challenge, prophetic words and a constant push for each of us to do and be better Christians. If we really are to be a community, a family, one that God promises will live forever – then there really is no point in us not forgiving the debts and sins of the past. A healthy family holds no resentment for past mistakes and hurts, does it? So why should we?

This passage seems to tell us to take Jesus’ words seriously when he said “anyone who wants to come with me, deny yourselves, take up your cross, and follow me.” Deny yourselves. Deny the worldly idea that you exist for yourself, that you are the centre of the universe, and your aim in life is to accumulate more for you. Embrace this loss of self-identity for the sake of a shared identity. You are a Christian, so you can no longer exist in a vacuum. You are a Christian, so you belong to a family – the family of West Epping Uniting Church, the family of the Uniting Church, and the whole family of God that has existed in so much of the world, for thousands of years. You are a Christian, so love one another. Amen.