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All Things in Common Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 27, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 15:1-6 Acts 2:43-47; 4:32-35; 5:12-16
To be perfectly honest, the words of our text from the Book of Acts never fail to bring out my inner two-year-old. No one claimed private ownership of any possession, but everything they owned was in common? Are you kidding me? I am more than willing to tithe my salary (after taxes, of course) to the church, but turn my closet and cupboards and CDs and car over to the session for distribution to all who have need? This stuff is mine. I worked hard for it. I deserve to keep what belongs to me! According to Allan Greene, Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine, “Children come with a powerful, built-in ‘wanter’. Walking down the aisles of a store with a child, one hears the pleas of, ‘I want that one, the red one,’ and ‘I need this one, the big one’ punctuating the air. Children don’t want what they already have nearly as much as they want what is out of reach, unless another child happens to pick up one of their nearly forgotten possessions. Then the ‘wanter’ goes into overdrive. Kids want what others have.” They also, says Greene, “come with a powerful, built-in sense of ‘mine’. Early on everything they see is ‘mine.’ For the next several years, learning what belongs to whom and what ‘belongs’ means is an urgent topic on their agendas.” Greene goes on to observe that this human instinct for ‘wanting’ and ownership can be a powerful and positive force within society. “It has fueled most of the human and personal achievement in children and adults throughout history.” That said on one hand, Greene warns on the other that “When this desire causes disregard for others, the power turns toward destruction. In this form, it is responsible for most of the oppression, violence, and crime that defaces humanity.” What to do, not only with two-year-olds but with this powerful instinct of wanting what is mine that remains with us until the day we die: until with our last breath we “get” that we cannot take what we want or possess with us into the room that awaits us in God. Some in church and society throughout the ages have determined that the instinct of wanting so corrupts the social order and the human spirit that a communitarian model—a community that holds all things in common--is both prudent and prescribed by Scripture. Others have concluded that a community of shared goods misunderstands human nature, squelching individual achievement and creativity as well as breading corruption and greed in those who presume to administer the common treasury. In the middle are a few who think a combination of legal curbs on our acquisitive enthusiasm and a few tax incentives to encourage charity toward all is as close as we will get to the kingdom this side of the grave. Presently the middle ground between the poles of holding all things in common and holding on to all that is mine is the ground where we live and move and demonize one another—one side fiercely defending the rights of individuals while the other side demands social justice for all. Civility has vanished. Health care, gun violence, sustainability, public education, economic disparity--the very subjects the Social Witness Committee will put before us in the next hour—breed contempt. Therefore on the first Sunday of their series, we would do well to ask if there is a word from the Lord as we set out to seek the common good. To start with, what about holding all things in common do we not understand? In a fascinating study of “Cultural Attitudes in Western Christianity toward the Community of Goods in Acts 2 and 4,” Professor Reta Halteman Finger of Messiah College traces the interpretation of Luke’s picture of the early [or ideal] church from the Reformation to the present. Beginning with Luther and Calvin all the way to Barth and Bonhoeffer, our team’s response has been overwhelmingly hostile. Certainly, they say, the practice of holding all things in common is not to be imitated. For where a community of goods has been taken as a divine mandate—in monasticism and certain cults—the authority necessary to enforce behavior so contrary to human nature has resulted in corruption and exploitation. Guyana and Jim Jones come to mind as does David Koresh and the Branch Davidians. That being said, the unchecked impulse of individuals to acquire property and wealth with no regard for the common good suggests a multitude of characters currently in the news whose actions have defaced humanity. The Anabaptists alone have tried to take our text to heart in their life together. As for you and me, whether we are liberal or conservative in our politics, reformed or Anabaptist in our theology, as a people with acquisition bred into our bones we would do well to revisit the lessons we apparently did not learn when we were two concerning our relationship with the stuff that is ours! The first lesson has to do with what it means to keep an ancient rule about not taking someone else’s stuff. From the beginning it has been clear that ownership is not only hard-wired into our brain but built into the fabric of our common life. One steals that which belongs to another. Yet in the light of God’s providence (God’s providing for all of God’s creatures), we must ask what “belongs” means. How are we to discern God’s purpose in our having when others have not or in our taking for ourselves what others need to live? Luther was astoundingly current in his response: “If all who are thieves, though they are unwilling to admit it, were hanged on the gallows, the world would soon be empty and there would be a shortage of both hangmen and gallows.” Even at the close of the Middle Ages, Brother Martin was on to white collar crime! “At the market and in everyday business,” he wrote, “fraud prevails in full force. One person openly cheats another with defective merchandise, false measures, dishonest weights, bad coins, and takes advantage of him by underhanded tricks….These are called gentleman swindlers….[T]hey sit in office chairs and are called…good citizens, and yet with great show of legality they rob and steal.” There must have been a Wall Street in Erfurt! “Daily the poor are being defrauded,” Luther continues. “New burdens and high prices are imposed. Everyone misuses the market in his own willful, conceited, arrogant way as if it were his right and privilege to sell his goods as dearly as he pleases without a word of criticism.” The first lesson is pretty straightforward: stuff belongs to us within limits. These limits are given to us not from the government but by God. The second lesson is this: when it comes to wanting what is mine verses stealing from the perspective of the God who has made us stewards of this good creation, “goods may be owned soli Deo Gloria.” We are stewards to whom things belong in trust for the God who would have none go hungry or homeless or live in a need that another had the means to meet. Suddenly the noose swinging on the gallows hangs dangerously low and close to our necks, for in God’s eye we are thieves one and all. Perhaps that is why Jesus was crucified not between two adulterers or two murderers but two thieves! The second lesson: what we have is held in trust to the glory of God to be used for the good of all. The third lesson connects the dots between our built-in ‘wanter’ and our built-in sense of mine with the congenital flaw the Scriptures call sin. “Sin,” writes Christian ethicist Paul Lehmann, “is the transgression of the limit set for us in the world by God the Creator, the consequence of which is a struggle over sovereignty that effectively prevents us from discerning what really belongs to whom and from living accordingly.” This is “not a matter of general property rights,” says Old Testament scholar Patrick Miller, “but of what human beings, a family, need for support, need in order to provide food and clothing.” Suddenly we are not talking about the man who drove off with my new Volvo station wagon the day I first moved to Philadelphia or the person who broke into your home and lifted your grandmother’s pearls. We are talking about the just ordering of a society where all may thrive. We are talking about minimum wages, public education, adequate and available health care, clean air and water, safe city streets. In sum if not in fact, we are talking about a modicum of social security such that none are in need in the land the Lord has given us. The third lesson is that our sin, our transgression of the limits set by God tears asunder the common life of all. I suspect I know what you are thinking right now because I am presently channeling my father: to help people in this way is to foster a society of dependence, to curb creativity, to promote corruption among those who hold the purse strings, to ignore the fact that the unlimited production of capital is what makes charity possible. I cannot dispute these claims. Nor can I claim any wisdom concerning the details of public policy on any given matter before the commonwealth (the commonwealth: what a word!). All I know is that the church must struggle with the penultimate ordering of the common life as those who ask one question: What God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human? The only clue we have is Jesus Christ. It is very hard for me to read the Bible and to pay attention to what Jesus did without concluding that as his disciple I bear a particular responsibility for those in need among us. They may be in need because of their own irresponsibility; they may be in need because some great tragedy has befallen them; their needs may be laid at the feet of a broken educational system or inadequate health care or a culture of poverty. Still, I do not remember Jesus looking into such details: I only remember him doing what was needed to make human life human. This requires more than charity, more than a little off the top to salve our conscience. For our part, Lehmann says, following Jesus in the world translates into “behavior expressive of confidence and hope as against anxiety and despair, of behaving with abandon rather than with calculation, of being all things to all [people] rather than…‘pursuing selfish advantage.’” We, of course, do not do this. We cannot do this, we confess. On the more discouraging days when anxiety and despair threaten to overtake me in the face of human suffering, I wonder why God did not continue to give the church the power of healing that was in Peter. Imagine if to the health care crisis we could simply say, “Bring us your sick and those tormented by unclean spirits and, as the shadow of the faithful falls upon them, they will be cured.” But because we were not given such power, I think God means for us to wrestle from the time we are two-years-old with the meaning of the word “belong.” I think our humanity is to be found not in what belongs to us but in the One to whom we belong. Luke did have it wrong, I am sorry to say, when he held up a community that had in common its stuff as if that were the true church. One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all: these are the things we hold in common, the gifts given to help us grow up in every way into him who alone can redeem the two-year-old in us all. Thanks be to God. |