What Now? Week 1: Knowing the Gift

It probably won’t shock you to hear that Christmas and Easter are the busiest times of year for church staff. Of course, Christmas is busy for everybody. It feels like Christmas advertising starts in mid-September, Christmas carols are playing in stores around the first of October, the same time when we start hearing ads and see Hallmark movies about “the holidays,” all of it intended to whip us into a frenzy of consumerism and boost the economy at the end of the year. And even though Holy Week and Easter are less of a big deal in our popular culture, in church the Easter holiday is even more important than Christmas. So in our church staff meetings, we start planning for Christmas in June or July, and our first conversation about Easter is often in October. There’s a lot of run up to both holidays. And in the end, after all the buildup, all the planning, all the special worship and devotions and programming, both holidays have this in common: they’re over in one day. December 26 dawns. Easter Monday comes. The world moves on.  

I guess if we want to be faithful to history, it kind of makes sense that we would go back to regular life after Christmas. I mean, the birth of Jesus mostly went unnoticed. The Gospels even kind of say that. Jesus is born in a place where animals are sheltered for the night. A few shepherds hear about it, but nobody else does. And after the Shepherds see the child, they just go back to the fields. Eight days later, when his parents take the baby to the temple for his dedication, two very old, very devout worshipers say wonderful things about him, but nobody else does. In Matthew’s version of the story, some astrologers show up because they’ve correctly interpreted the stars.  But apart from that, nobody really notices. The Gospels of Mark and John don’t even mention the birth. In those versions of the story, Jesus is an adult before we even meet him. So I think we could safely say that his birth was not exactly a big deal. Fox News Jerusalem or CNN-Galilee would have had no reason to cover it. Jesus was just one more peasant child born into poverty, and who would have cared about that? 

Easter, though, is different. Granted, the resurrection didn’t make headlines, at least not right away. But all four Gospels say that his followers saw Jesus multiple times after his death, and that experience changed them. He appeared in locked rooms where they were hiding for fear they’d be next on the cross. He spent an afternoon walking and talking with two of them before they finally recognized him when he sat down with them, lifted bread, and broke it. When they were out fishing, they met him on a beach in the morning, cooking a breakfast of fish and bread for them over a fire. John’s Gospel says that Jesus did so many other things that all the books in the world could not contain them – which is probably an exaggeration, but we get the point: he made an impression. People noticed.  

Of course, it’s true that most people who heard these stories in the first century thought Christians were either revolutionaries or liars or loons or all three. But for those people who met the resurrected Christ, it was certainly not business as usual the next morning. Resurrection changed everything. Resurrection negated the power of the state-sponsored terrorism that had Jesus publicly and horrifically executed as a warning to anyone who would oppose the Empire or the religious leadership of his day. And once his followers saw that, once they chose to believe that the Empire’s power was powerless in the end, they had to answer the question: what now? Once we have seen the presence and power of God in human life, we can’t just go back to the way things used to be. What do we do now? 

For those early Christians there was no obvious answer to that question. They had their memories and stories about Jesus; they had his teachings. But there was no church. There was no Christian doctrine. There was no such thing as Christian life. They had to figure it out as they went.  

This process fascinates me because in a way, those early Christians were asking the question that every Christian has to answer for ourselves: if these stories are meaningful, if we are to pattern our life after them, how do we live? To use Mary Oliver’s famous phrase, what are we going to do with our one wild and precious life?  

For the next few weeks, I’ll be preaching a sermon series called “What Now?,” looking at how the early church answered that question. What did those first Christ-followers decide the resurrection meant for how they were supposed to live, and what do their answers teach us about being Christian? 

Years ago, when I was in college, a friend of mine was involved in a kind of small spiritual study group. They decided to support each other in living as committed a Christian life as they could. They made a commitment to study spiritual life together, to pray or meditate daily. They would get together and discuss their challenges. But in addition to that, they decided they would pool some money, maybe put in 20 of 50 bucks at a time, whatever they could afford, and use it to help people. Nowadays we would call what they were doing a giving circle, where people pool a certain amount of money to give to good causes. But the really challenging part of their giving circle was that the group had to agree on where the money went. So if someone had an idea for what to do with the money, that person had to explain the idea to the group and ask for approval. Only when everybody agreed would money be distributed.  

They did some good things with their small pot of money. They helped one person start a small business, selling handmade items that nowadays you might see on Etsy or Ebay. They paid for a trip home for a young woman who was estranged from her parents, who wanted to try to patch things up. They bought food for people in need. They gave to organizations that did good work. But eventually, they gave up on their giving circle. It was too hard, and too time consuming, to come to agreement on what they would do with the money. They disagreed about the principles of giving away money. Some thought they should only give money to people or organizations who had a good chance of success, while others thought that they should give freely and not try to control the results. Some people thought that a few recipients wasted the money they were given. Others felt like that didn’t matter, because the point was to give money away and trust that something good would happen, even if it wasn’t what they originally wanted or hoped. In the end, they continued their little group, but they stopped pooling money. They figured everybody could just give their own money to whatever they wanted, and they wouldn’t have to spend so much time figuring it out in the group.  

If it was hard for my friend’s group to figure out how to use the little sum of money they pooled, you can imagine how tough it would have been for those first Christians in Jerusalem. What they were doing was much harder. They were creating a kind of early Christian communism, where they had almost no private property. They were putting all their money together and buying life’s basic necessities with it: food, shelter, that kind of stuff.  

Historians are divided about how long that arrangement lasted, or even if it was ever fully practiced at all. It seems to have lasted longer for some people than others. But as the Christian movement grew, within a few decades the practice of common property died out pretty quickly.  

It’s easy to figure out why: common property is hard to do. A few years back, I heard Shane Claiborne speak. Years ago, he and some other people started an intentional community in Philadelphia called The Simple Way. The Simple Way is still around, and they’ve learned a lot about how to create and nurture that kind of group. So Claiborne was speaking about their experience. They didn’t own everything in common, but they try to share as much as they could. Claiborne said, “you know how that works, right? It’s everybody’s lawnmower until it breaks. Then it’s nobody’s lawnmower.”  

Common property is hard to do. And Christianity has a long history of wrestling with ownership and possessions, with what we can own in good conscience and the things of which we should never claim ownership, ever. 

But even if the experiment of common property didn’t last, I do think the attitudes of those first Christians can teach us a lot. See, I don’t think the Jerusalem pooled all their resources because they thought Jesus told them to do it. He never says that. But he does say to love one another. He does say that as he served us, so we should serve each other. He does say that no one should ever Lord it over others. And let’s face it, private property is one way of doing that. Property is one way – not the only way, but one way – of placing ourselves visually in a social hierarchy, showing our status, showing who’s up and who’s down. And it was certainly that in the first century Mediterranean world. 

So I think the practice of common property for the first Christians was simply a radical way of expressing the idea that no matter who we are or where we come from, the followers of Christ are equals in the eyes of God and should be equal in the eyes of everyone else. Common property was a way of saying with their example, with their lives, that conventional ideas of status or hierarchy or human value; notions of honor and one’s proper place in society; the idea that some people are simply born better than others – those divisions of hierarchy and status and honor have no place and no meaning for the followers of Jesus.  

I think there’s one more thing that those first Christians were trying to show as they created a new community and a new way of life. Roman society was built on vast inequalities of wealth and power. Slaves were the lowest of the low. And at the top were the Emperor and his favored few. Most people, especially the people in the Galilean countryside, lived on the ragged edge of starvation all the time. Even in good years people often didn’t have enough to eat. People who owned land and homes could easily lose them going into debt paying taxes to the Emperor. In that environment, the Jerusalem church showed that if we share what we have, there’s enough. No one’s living in luxury; but no one’s starving either. There’s enough food; enough shelter; enough community and acceptance and belonging; enough of what people need to go around. There’s enough.  

2000 years later, it’s easy to roll our eyes and smile at the notion of common property and shared resources. But maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the kind of community where people voluntarily share what they have to support each other. Maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss a new way of life built on the idea that everyone is indescribably beloved and equally valuable to God, and should be to us. Maybe we can see the beauty in the idea that everything we own is a gift from God, and we have the privilege of using it to love and care for each other and for ourselves and for God’s world. If we’re asking what the resurrection means, we could do a lot worse.