Once Upon a Time…
April 10, 2005 (Third Sunday of Easter)
By
The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland
(From The Lectionary Page)
In the scripture readings appointed for today we have three different pictures of life in post-Easter Christianity. OK, Isaiah isn't really talking about post-Easter Christianity, but we've been putting words in Isaiah's mouth since Christmas, so why stop now? The poet's vision is sweet and loving, describing the relationship between God and God's people in a way that you might describe the love of parents for their newborn child. Isaiah may not have been speaking directly to the early Christian community, but how could that community not have heard their own new relationship with God when they heard Isaiah's words read aloud at the Temple?
Thus says the Lord, who created you, who formed you, who redeemed you and called you by name. The first friends and followers of Jesus surely felt created and called anew, just as the first hearers of Isaiah's poetry would have felt. And having just experienced first the cruel execution and then the amazing resurrection of their beloved Jesus, it must have seemed completely reasonable that they might walk through raging waters and not drown; that they might pass through fire and not be burnt. And why this special treatment for them and not the rest of God's people? This amazing love of God is, in fact, for all people, if only they could see it. So those first followers take their charge from Isaiah's words, bring forth the people who are blind, yet have eyes; who are deaf, yet have ears!
If we have to stretch a bit to bring Isaiah to the first followers of Jesus, there is no such stretching involved in reading Acts, part II of the Gospel of Luke, a story of the deeds of that early group. Acts is the rest of the story, the what-happened-next sequel to the Passion narratives we read a couple of weeks ago. In order to find today's piece of the story we have to fast forward past the Gospel reading like some religious couch potato operating our divine Tivo remote.
In the episode from Acts, Peter has already met Jesus and apologized for that whole denial thing. Now he appears as head of the twelve, fearlessly telling the story of Jesus in the Temple precinct, and even healing as Jesus had healed. Here are the disciples triumphant, after all the bafooning and cluelessness they displayed before the crucifixion. They have witnessed the whole thing, made their peace with it, and are determined to share with the world the revelation they have lived for the past several years.
The part of this episode that I love is towards the end, where we get that idyllic description of the early Christian community:
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. Day by day they spent much time together in the Temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts…
Of course, anyone who has earned their own living, seen people take advantage of each other, or been alive during the 60's will recognize this vision of utopia as the free-love hippie, Marxist communism that it is. If the disciples ever had such perfect community, then they certainly didn't pass it down through the years or we wouldn't need stewardship campaigns.
And yet, while the community described in Acts is probably a bit too perfect (surely the narrative leaves out the times when John came home all dreamy eyed after sitting on the temple steps all day and Thomas complained that he'd been working his butt off and why should John get a free lunch off his sweat?!), they must have had something, right? How else do you explain the unlikely spread of what was, at best, an obscure splinter group of the Jewish faith? Three thousand saved is probably a detail included to impress readers, not a piece of census data, but the Christian community grew greatly over a relatively short span of years. They must have had something going for them. They must have found some way to live together that was better than what the rest of the Roman world had going for it.
Now click reverse on the remote control if you would, back to afternoon on Easter Sunday. A couple of Jesus' followers are trudging along the road to Emmaus, headed back to whatever is left of the lives they lived before Jesus came along. You probably know this story already. Jesus, disguised as a stranger, joins the disciples on the road. They chat as they walk, the disciples being impressed with the stranger's knowledge of scripture as it applies to their former Messiah. They reach Emmaus, invite the stranger in to dinner, and in a moment forever immortalized in our liturgy, the bread is broken and Jesus is there. Jesus vanishes and the Disciples run home to tell their friends what happened.
In the days, weeks, months, and even years following the great events of Holy Week, the Christian church was gradually formed. Many of us think of that early church with a kind of powerful religious nostalgia, imagining that life in the early church must have been so much more dynamic, and exciting, and vital than our own church life. I mean, it's not like the apostles went to vestry meetings, right? Back then it was all about the witnessing and the worshipping.
I don't know. Maybe life in the early church was better. But I bet they had their problems too. People are people, even when they're doing their best to follow the teachings of Jesus. Judging by the three stories we have today, it seems that one thing the early church had was a real sense of being God's people and living in community based only on that. Maybe that early group wasn't a communist utopia with visions of Jesus at every meal, but they had to have had a real sense of love for each other, a real sense of belonging to something amazing, and special, and life changingly blessed by God.
That kind of feeling-that kind of community-is not something you can automatically pass down through two thousand years of church politics. Yet neither is it something that can only be had in the first years of a new and powerful faith. That kind of community is available to us, here and now, just as it was to the first followers of Jesus. They shared their meals, we can share ours. They shared their wealth, we can share ours. They spent their time together trying to show the world why living the life Jesus set out for us can make us better, more loving people. We can show the world that too. AMEN.