Trinity Parish Church - Easter 4A - April 13, 2008

Acts 2:42-47

The Rev. Rachel Endicott

"Those who had been baptized devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." (Acts 2:42)  So started our reading from the Acts of the Apostles today...  As apostles, what do we think of the reading?  As baptized followers of Christ, what do we think of the reading?  If you're like me, the following paragraph which includes selling our possessions and distributing it to a common community life sounds really scary.  Does scriptural authority (and yes, as an Episcopalian, I do believe that scripture talks to us today) say anything to us in the present?

Luke, as writer of Acts, is busy here defining how the Spirit is at work in the early Christian communities.  He talks about the ways in which the new converts, changed by their baptisms, acted in new and different ways, walked a different walk, and lived a different life.  And he goes on to define how this devotion of the early followers of Jesus, was made known through fellowship and meals together, and prayers.

In Jerusalem, for a time, it appears that - like the Essene community - the fledgling Christian community there held all their goods and money in common.  If we read elsewhere in Acts and elsewhere in the Bible, we find this isn't the only model for how Christians used their possessions and money.  But where we do find common ground is in the call to take care of the needy, the widows and orphans, those who had nothing among them.  The other commonality in many of the stories about money and community, particularly in the parables Jesus tells, is the way in which money can be a stumbling block when we hoard it.  It comes between God and us.

Think of the many examples in the Bible of the way Jesus addresses money, including the stories of the rich young ruler and of the man who had so much money that he needed to build greater and larger barns.  We get that powerful story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke, Lazarus meaning "God has helped" in Aramaic.

And if you're feeling uncomfortable at the mention of these stories, my guess is that that is the intention of Jesus and the writers of the Scriptures.  One third of Jesus' sermons are about money of the sin of greed, so if I were to preach proportionally, every third sermon would be about money.  While I don't intend to do that, I do think it's important to consider how our behavior concerning money might be formed by this passage in Acts and by Jesus' insistence in speaking a great deal about money.

At the core, scripture seems to state that giving money is a spiritual discipline.  The members of the early church in Jerusalem lived into their discipline in a whole-hearted, go for broke manner.  They became an integral part of the community in all sorts of prayerful, vocational, and financial ways.  Their giving defined who they were.  Likewise, for us giving also should be a spiritual discipline.

First, through our giving, we live into a theology of liberation.  We obtain freedom from the power of mammon, a word that means more than money, it means riches or gain, and the implications is that these things - or other things - can become all-powerful in our lives to the negative.  And this liberation can be true at all income levels, not only for those who have little, but for those who we would define as the middle class in the U.S. - which by world standards is exceedingly wealthy - as well as for those for whom even in our society approach the top of the wealth spectrum.  It is a way to consciously choose to be free.

One saying I've heard is, "Do you own your possessions or do your possessions possess you?"  and possessions we have...  In fact, I won't ask for a show of hands, but I wonder how many of us sitting here rent a storage space for all those possessions we can't even fit in our house of our garage...

However, there are challenges to giving.  It is easy to shy away from this spiritual discipline.  Bp. Margaret Payne, ELCA bishop of the New England states, shares a story about her preaching about money.  In a congregation she served, she preached about the usefulness of the tithe as a goal.  Coming from the lectionary reading for the day, she argued that we are called to give.  At the end of the service, she stood by the door to greet folks and sure enough an angry parishioner came up to her.  He was obviously furious and said that the only reason she was preaching about tithing was because she wanted a higher salary.  So, in response, Bp. Payne said that while a salary increase would be nice, that wasn't her intent.  She went on to challenge him if he truly believed that her desire for a raise was behind her preaching on tithing, that he might consider still tithing, but not to the church.  She suggested that he tithe to another organization of his choice that he felt was doing God's work in the world.  And you know what, rather than being comforted by this, the man was even more angry!¹  Hmmm....

Secondly, we give money as a spiritual discipline because we need to give.  Why would I say that?  In order to be in the image of God, we need to give.  We need to give of ourselves, we need to create and we need to nurture.  And we do this by giving of ourselves: our time, our skills and talents, and of our money.  If we are indeed created by the Holy One as God's people in God's image, we need to be involved in the giving of ourselves to the furthering of God's work in the world.

Parallel to this, some people would even say that giving helps us in acting our way into believing.  By giving to those organizations and individuals who work for the poor and dispossessed, we actually come to know and participate in the reality that God cares for the poor and hungry.  Through this spiritual discipline of giving, we also see how the Good News of God and his son Jesus can make a difference in the lives of God's children.

Thirdly, we engage in the spiritual discipline of giving so as to keep PIA at bay, PIA being Bishop Payne's acronym for prosperity-induced amnesia.  Our relative prosperity of us here compared to the rest of the world allows us to forget that we are to give and that - in fact - all of our money is God's, not just the portion we give back.

Prosperity can also be a danger in that we seem to be born with a desire to acquire and accumulate.  But does it bring us fulfillment, happiness, and contentment?  My guess is for most people, no.  What it often brings is a feeling that we can never have enough, never keep up with the Joneses, never keep up with the unrealistic portrayal of the "average" person or family we see portrayed on television or in the movies.  And, in fact, this frenzy of acquisition if anything tends to insulate us from others and from God's will.

I want to leave you with another story which illustrates how our frenzy of acquisition is a spiritual problem.  There was a wealthy family of father, mother and daughter.  As the baby grew, she wanted for nothing.  When she was two, the mother went out shopping.  She spent $10,000 on clothes for the two year old daughter.  When the woman was asked why she had spent what most people would consider an obscene amount of money for a two-year-old's clothing, the woman responded by saying, "I had it; why not?"  As Walter Brueggemann writes, "unbridled consumerism ... is a narcotic that numbs to the cry from below." ²  And the cry is there each and every day.  Even before our economic downturn or recession or whatever the current financial climate is being called, there are those in our own neighborhoods and around the world for whom the very ability to procure food and water which support life is slipping away.

While each of us has to make daily and long-term decisions about how to use, spend, save, give our money, I would challenge you in the spiritual discipline of giving.  I would encourage you to use this giving as a path to freedom.  I would encourage you to use it to live into your being created in the image of God.  Finally, I would encourage you to give as a way to keep prosperity-induced amnesia at bay.  All that you have is on loan from God.  Be baptized people who rejoice that you have been given an opportunity to give!

¹ Presentation at Spirituality & Stewardship Conference, April 5, 2008, Worcester, Massachusetts.

²Walter Brueggemann (editor: Patrick D. Miller), The Word that Redescribes the World: Bible and Discipleship.  Minneapolis; Fortress Press, 2006, p. 131.