Devoted to community

Acts 2:42-47  (CEB)

42 The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers. 43 A sense of awe came over everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. 44 All the believers were united and shared everything. 45 They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. 46 Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. 47 They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved.

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This is without a doubt one of my very favorite stories in the New Testament.  I mean, I love the Pentecost reading, but this one . . . If one is to consider the Acts of the Apostles as the closest thing we have to a history of the early church, that means that somewhere back in our church DNA we have a gene for perfect church unity.  I love this so much.  “All the believers were united and shared everything - with gladness and simplicity.”  I get all fan girl when I read this. I tear up a little bit, and sigh.

But then the cynic in me says, “Yeah, but how long did that last?  It was only like a minute later (Acts 5)  that Ananais and Sapphira kept back part of the proceeds from the sale of a piece of property.  And right after that, (Acts 6) “the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.”   It didn’t take long for before the perfection of the earliest days was tarnished by humans behaving humanly.  And that goes all the way back to the Garden.   Regardless, we do have a history of perfect unity in the church even if it was only for a very short time.  We can see how community, especially Christian community, can look.  For a minute, followers of Jesus put God and each other ahead of personal issues, and it was good.  

Right now, in our current situation of being separated in this time of quarantine, our focus is on community.   Especially for those of us trying to find ways to make sure everyone is kept informed of everything - which is really pretty complicated, because some people don’t have internet, and some have internet but don’t have Facebook, and some have Facebook but not enough bandwidth to get Live to work right, and some who are looking for us can’t find their way around YouTube, and the website went insane the other week. . .  It’s ok - Jason fixed it.  Thank you, Jason.  Print versions of the Pastoral Prayer, the Message and the Lord’s Supper are snail mailed to our less technically inclined members on Mondays.    Jordan and the Quarantine Qrew - Kenneshae, Jessica, Jorge and Joe on vocals with Isidro and Abel on tech keep working to make the livestream experience better.  Different people contribute to the parts of the service that are pre-recorded in a variety of locations - including the little recording studio located in my living room.  Beginning today an Elder will preside at the Lord’s Table.  We will be adding new things, like a time for members to share what they are doing during quarantine and even a Children’s Time when we can. We are trying to include as many people in our online worship experience as possible while still working to keep each other safe and healthy.

You see, we talk about All means ALL as something that is really important to our congregation, and we do mean that, but trying to make that work, trying to really include our entire community, can be crazy making.   One positive outcome of online worship is that we are much more aware of who in our congregation has been left out in the past.  Another is that our community is growing, as we have a number of folks who for one reason or another didn’t come to the church building for worship services but who are now attending virtual worship. Previously they may have watched the sermon on YouTube later that evening, but that was just the sermon.  Now they are able to not just watch the sermon, but participate in the entire worship Live, and take communion with all the rest of us, and pray the prayers with all the rest of us.  When the time comes that we can worship together in the building in groups of more than 10 and without face masks - and that could be a long time coming - we need to keep making these folks welcome.  We need to keep doing and improving our online worship even when we can be face to face in the sanctuary. 

Peter W. Marty editor/publisher of the Century and senior pastor of St. Paul Lutheran Church in Davenport, Iowa.,  recently wrote an article titled “The coronavirus pandemic is nurturing neighborliness”  He says that, in a time when it is fairly common to not even know the names of our actual neighbors, we seem to be relearning the social benefits of building community with our not-so-close neighbors.  In his article are stories of children playing tic tac toe with dry erase markers with residents of a nearby nursing home.  Neighbors on a cul-de-sac who didn’t know each other very well before are now sitting at the end of their driveways in the evening for “happy hour” conversation.  I have seen quite a few stories online about folks dropping off food (and toilet paper) unasked at the homes of neighbors who can’t go out.  Friday I saw stories about people receiving May baskets for the first time in years.  It used to be a thing, when I was growing up anyway, that on May 1st you would pick flowers from your yard and leave small bouquets or baskets of them at your neighbor’s front doors.  I have not seen that done in a very long time, but this year, when we aren’t preoccupied with all the millions of things that we would normally be doing, some of those old neighborly practices are coming back.  We have seen teacher parades, and drive by baby showers, and birthdays.  Today someone I know is attending a drive by memorial for a recently departed friend.  These events have brought people out of their houses to at least wave at each other.   Now that we cannot go out and about, we are finding new ways of being community. 

Those earliest Christians, who weren’t even calling themselves Christians yet, were doing something new.  We can be pretty sure of that because Luke made a point of writing about how they were all getting along and sharing everything “with gladness and simplicity”.   Even the Gospel writers didn’t write about everything that was done by and around Jesus.  We don’t know what common practices were other than by way of the exceptions the Evangelists wrote about.  Jesus eating with “unclean” members of the community and talking to the Samaritan woman and stopping the stoning of an adulteress, taught us a little bit about common practices of his time.  Reporters, and this is really the role Luke took in writing down the Acts of the Apostles, don’t tell stories of every day, ordinary behavior.  They write about things that are different, unexpected, exciting.  So, for this diverse community of people whose only common connection is their belief that Jesus is the Christ to be praying together daily in the Temple, eating together in each other’s homes, sharing everything in common, even selling pieces of property and possessions and distributing the proceeds to everyone who needed them - this was different.  This was not the way most people lived.  Then as now, people were focused on surviving, paying their bills, getting enough for their own family to eat, acquiring possessions, acquiring or keeping wealth and power.  In short, people behaved in the ways that we expect people to behave.  This perfect community of believers stood out from society.  And for as long as that lasted, it was very good.  

We don’t know for sure how many people made up this community of believers.  This was after Pentecost and the baptism of thousands, but many of those would have headed back home after the festival.  In order for them all to be together in one place they met at the Temple, probably in one of the large courtyards, where men and women could be together.  It is very likely that this is where one or another of the apostles would preach and tell the stories of Jesus.  This part would have been fairly normal for the time, for teachers to instruct their followers in the Temple Courtyard.  We know that they met in homes for meals, and we know that most homes were pretty small, so the groups who met together for meals and prayer and discussion of what they had heard from the apostles would have been fairly small as well.  I like to think of those as pot lucks, where everyone brought what they had to share with everyone else.  That’s the way I read the story, anyway.  At some point, either while they were all together at the Temple or over supper, they would share what they knew of the needs of their community - the community of believers and their physical neighbors.  Like we do prayer concerns.  And just as we look for ways to help our friends and neighbors meet their needs, so too did the early church - thereby demonstrating God’s goodness to everyone.  As a result of their continually praising God and helping their neighbors, “the Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved”.

Those early believers were doing something very new and very different from things they did before . . . before the Resurrection and before Pentecost.  Likewise, we are doing things that are very new and different from the way things were before - before the shelter in place orders, before Covid19 entered our lives.  We are worshipping differently.  We are gathering differently.  We are making connections with other people differently.   But the thing that has not changed, and that was the same for the early church, is that we are devoted to the teachings of the apostles - to the Gospel stories they wrote where we learn what Jesus said.  We are devoted to praying for each other, and to caring for those who need our help.  We may not share everything or sell our possessions to give to those in need, but we are devoted to giving of what we have to those who have less.  That might be food or toilet paper but it might also be connecting with those who are alone by writing a card or calling or dropping by and talking through the screen door from a safe physical distance or leaving a May basket at their front door.   I see you all on Facebook praising God and demonstrating God’s goodness to everyone, sharing your faith freely and openly, as did that perfect community of believers Luke describes.   In our current reality we are acting more like that community all the time.  

My dear siblings, we may not be meeting face to face, sitting in our favorite pews, nevertheless we are gathered as one community in all our separate places.  In a moment we will share a meal in our homes, as did the early believers.   May we leave our time of worship today united in our devotion to our community, to caring for one another, and to the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.