‘A Dangerous Sense of Holiness’: The Story of Ananias and Sapphira

(The Death of Sapphira - by Amanda Gibson)

Acts 5: 1-11

So, as you may have already noticed, tonight we are going to tackle what many consider the most difficult passage in Acts. In chapter 5 a decidedly inspiring narrative takes what seems like an inexplicably dark turn. Since we are only doing ~22 talks in Acts, we could have easily skipped it. Most do, because, frankly, on the face of it, this is, at best a difficult text and, at worst, an embarrassing text. On the other hand, skeptics love texts like this. Take for example, the guy who runs the ‘Brick Testament’ site a web page clearly dedicated to highlighting the sex, violence, and what he sees as potentially embarrassing texts in the Bible in an attempt to undermine its authority.

You can bet he won’t overlook this text. So Dan and I decided that (a) If we skipped it we’d be total ‘chicken bleep’ and (b) it is in the Bible for a reason and, like the rest of Holy Scripture and the dramatic story of the church, has theological and practical implications for our lives.

Before we deal with this passage, I want to increase the degree of difficulty, and introduce a very similar passage from the Hebrew Scriptures.

1David again brought together out of Israel chosen men, thirty thousand in all. 2 He and all his men set out from Baalah of Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the LORD Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim that are on the ark. 3 They set the ark of God on a new cart and brought it from the house of Abinadab, which was on the hill. Uzzah and Ahio, sons of Abinadab, were guiding the new cart 4 with the ark of God on it, and Ahio was walking in front of it. 5 David and the whole house of Israel were celebrating with all their might before the LORD, with songs and with harps, lyres, tambourines, sistrums and cymbals.

6 When they came to the threshing floor of Nacon, Uzzah reached out and took hold of the ark of God, because the oxen stumbled. 7 The LORD's anger burned against Uzzah because of his irreverent act; therefore God struck him down and he died there beside the ark of God.

8 Then David was angry because the LORD's wrath had broken out against Uzzah, and to this day that place is called Perez Uzzah.

9 David was afraid of the LORD that day and said, "How can the ark of the LORD ever come to me?" 10 He was not willing to take the ark of the LORD to be with him in the City of David. Instead, he took it aside to the house of Obed-Edom the Gittite.
2 Samuel 6

There are a couple of things that these passages (and a couple others like them) have in common. They bother us. They strike us as arbitrary and disproportionate. God’s action seems completely out of proportion to the offense. The Bible is full of people who have done horrible things and seem to get away with it. David nails Bathsheba and then murders her husband when she turns up pregnant but Uzzah gets obliterated for steadying the ark. In the first century people across the Roman Empire are watching slaves kill each other for fun but A&S get snuffed out for telling a white lie during an act of generosity.

We strain to understand what it was that was so bad that Uzzah, Anaias and Sapphira did that deserved this unusually severe punishment. I am going to argue that that is precisely the wrong question. But first, lets look at where we are going.

First I am going to make a few general observations about the text, that I feel are just begging to be made, but then, I am going to try to explain these strange texts by taking a step back and looking at 2 contexts:

1. The Immediate Contexts: Good Times and Momentum for God’s People
2. The Larger Context: Human Brokenness and a Just God

First, let’s just make a few preliminary observations about these texts.

1. The Myth of Testament Specific Deities

People sometimes like to say, in an effort to undermine the plausibility of the Christian worldview, that the god of the OT and the NT are dramatically different deities. The OT god is a god of wrath and the NT god is a god of love. The most creative take I have heard on this is that: ‘The reason that 500 years elapse between the end of the OT and the beginning of the NT is because god went to counseling to learn how to handle his anger issues.

This may sound wise or clever but it is really just evidence that the individual hasn’t spent much time with the text. The God of the Bible is one of dangerous holiness on one hand and ridiculously extravagant grace on the other. The story of A&S demonstrates that the wrath that proceeds from the purity of his justice arises in both testaments. Jesus himself talks about hell more than anyone else in the Bible. Conversely, the OT overflows with declarations of God’s care and love and grace and mercy:

Check out these verses.

16 On that day they will say to Jerusalem,
"Do not fear, O Zion;
do not let your hands hang limp.

17 The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing."

18 "The sorrows for the appointed feasts
I will remove from you;
they are a burden and a reproach to you. Zeph 3:16-18

or

I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?' Ez 10:11

Or even one of the darkest books in the whole OT, Hoseah ends like this:

1 Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God.

Your sins have been your downfall!

2 Take words with you and return to the LORD.

Say to him: "Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously,

that we may offer the fruit of our lips.

3 Assyria cannot save us; we will not mount war-horses.

We will never again say 'Our gods' to what our own hands have made,

for in you the fatherless find compassion."

4 "I will heal their waywardness and love them freely,

for my anger has turned away from them.

5 I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily.

Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down his roots;
6 his young shoots will grow.

His splendor will be like an olive tree,

his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon.

7 Men will dwell again in his shade.

He will flourish like the grain.

He will blossom like a vine, and his fame

will be like the wine from Lebanon. Hosea 14

2. Difficult passage argues for the veracity of the text

The portions of the text that we find potentially embarrassing are some of the best evidence for its historical reliability. It would have been pretty easy for Luke to leave this story out and, essentially say, the early church was such an evidence of the resurrection that everyone loved each other and no one lied as if it were the embodiment of a poorly written Nickleback song). But after he describes the compelling closeness of the early church in chapter 2, a miraculous healing in chapter 3, and the ridiculous generosity in chapter 4, he essentially says in chapter 5, ‘but not everything was great.’ Potentially embarrassing texts demonstrate the historicity of the text and establish Luke’s historical street cred.

3. Lying is a Reality Fail

Second, NT Wright says that this passage “puts down a very clear marker about lying…[2]Lying is, ultimately, a way of declaring that we don’t like the world the way it is and we will pretend that it is somehow more the way we want it to be.” Essentially, lying is a reality fail, and a demonstration that me, and what someone else thinks of me is more important than the fabric of reality.

4. Neither of these acts are as Innocent as they Seem

Before I argue that these acts are not judged because they are particularly wicked, we also have to establish that neither of these events are as innocent as they seem. In the Acts passage, they were not under compulsion to give. So why did they lie. They were using God and his community. They were using God to build their reputation. Their actions made it obvious they didn’t know who they were dealing with.

And in the Samuel passage, the Ark is being carted around carelessly instead of the clear Levitical command that it should be carefully carried wherever it goes. There is a sense in which the same thing is going on. David is going to use the Ark to demonstrate to everyone how God is on his side. He is going to use God to build his reputation. And at the end of the passage David is pissed because he knows that Uzzah was collateral damage of his own triumphalism. Both these stories are acconts of someone wh belongs to God, using God for his or her own ends. This makes God angry. But, on the other hand, it is probobly something I do every day...and I'm still breathing.

Fundamentally, I think it is a mistake to look for something especially bad that the characters in these stories did to deserve a particularly hard treatment from God. It is a mistake to read these passages and say, well I want to avoid those particular actions or God will come down especially hard on me. These events need to be understood in the context of the stories being told and in the context of the greater story of Scripture to make sense.

First - The Immediate Contexts: Good Times and Momentum for God’s People

I think it is really helpful, in trying to understand these passages, to ask what similarities are their in their historical contexts. We find that both of these events happen at the inception of a new beginning for God’s people when things are going particularly well.

In 2 Samuel 5 David is made king after decades of an ineffective leader who, at the end of his life was certifiably insane. It is a time of optimism and hope. Everyone is psyched. David immediately wins two of the most important victories in Israel’s history. First he wins back Jerusalem from the Jebusites and then he wins back the Ark of the covenant from the Philistines. And that is the context of 2 Samuel 6. After years of humiliation and national disgrace, the Hebrews suddenly had a charismatic young leader, they were back in their home city and the most important symbol of their corporate worship had been recovered. It was a very good time. They probably felt indestructible and certainly believed that God was unreservedly on their side. So David ignored the Levitical law that the Ark should only be carried by people and never be touched. He carelessly threw the thing up in a cart and headed to Jerusalem, looking very much forward to the hero’s welcome awaited him.

Similarly, the first weeks of the fledgling church are going very well. You are going to see in the coming months that hard times and broken leaders are going to take their toll on the new community of Jesus’ people in the years that follow, but so far, there are thousands of new believers, they are all caring for each other, miracles seem to be everywhere, people are getting healed, new believers from diverse backgrounds are getting along and caring for each other’s physical needs…things are going very well.

Both of these events occur when things are going particularly well for the people of God.

Both of these events happen at the beginning[3] of a new chapter in the story of the people of God. It seems like you might expect this kind of extreme punitive action from God when things were going particularly poorly…when people were turning away from God and chasing idols (which is most of the time in the Bible and in our lives since each of our hearts is a compulsive little idol maker). But these events happen just as things are starting to go very well. These events happen at the beginning of the rare very good chapters of the story of God’s people.

So why do the authors include these stories?
The story of Ananias and Sapphira laces the triumphal story of the success and expansion of the early church with a dangerous sense of holiness[4]. It reminds them of who they are representing and that he will not be used. It appears that God feels that in the midst of these exciting times, his people need to be reminded, in the words of CS Lewis, that 'he is good, but he is not safe.' Particularly in good times, when God is doing remarkable things in his communities, he will act in extraordinary ways to establish a dangerous sense of his holiness which provides his people with perspective and humility.

So the imidiate context gives us clues to what this passage is trying to teach...but we are still not quite there yet. To really get a hold of it, we need to ask 'how does this story fit in with the bigger themes of Scripture?'

Second - The Larger Context: Human Brokenness and a Just God

On the whole, the picture of God we get in the scriptures is of unnatural and extravagant patience. He says again and again that he is not quick to anger. He pleads with those who are oppressing the poor and worshiping idols to turn from their wickedness.

It can cause us to forget what it means that he is the cosmic source of pure Justice. But from time to time in the Biblical text we are startled to encounter actual, pure, unmitigated, justice face to face and it is horrifying. Lots of people like to talk about justice. We talk about economic justice, environmental justice, justice for the poor, justice for the oppressed. We cry out to God and political leaders for justice…for all to be set right…for evil at last to be obliterated…not realizing that total pure justice would, ultimately obliterate us too.

One of the most common questions skeptics and Christians alike will ask as they probe Christianity’s credibility: How could a just God allow evil?

Calvin and Hobbes: 'It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.'

In other words, why doesn't God just do something about bad people.

I do not mean to minimize this question. It is an important one with difficult complex answers. But what the questioners usually seem to miss, is that if God was to make a total end of evil in the world, he would not only make an end of the evils that offend our moral sensibilities but those we ourselves propagate. MY indifference to the poor. MY addictions. MY dark heart.

God does not put an end to bad people because I am bad people...and so are you.

And so here is my Thesis (which I have counterintuitively put at the end of my talk): The interesting thing about this passage is not that A&S were destroyed for their rebellion, it is that we aren't .

Mark Driscoll tells a story about an exchange he had in his early days pastoring. He said:

“one night the church phone rang at some godforsaken hour when I’m not even a Christian, like 3 am. I answered it in a stupor, and on the other line was some college guy who was crying. I asked him what was wrong, and he said it was an emergency and he really needed to talk to me. Trying to muster up my inner pastor, I sat down and tried to pretend I was concerned. I asked him what was wrong and he rambled for a while about nothing, which usually means that a guy has sinned and is wasting time with dumb chit chat because he’s ashamed to just get to the point and confess. So I interrupted him blurting out, “It’s 3 am, so stop jerking me around. What have you done?”
“I masturbated,” he said.
“That’s it?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “Tonight I watched a porno and masturbated.”
“Is the porno over? I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Was it a good porno?” I asked.
He did not reply.
“Well you’ve already watched the whole porno and tugged your tool, so what am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “You are my pastor, so I thought that maybe you could pray for me.”
To be honest, I did not want to pray, so I just said the first thing that came to mind. “Jesus, thank you for not killing him for being a pervert. Amen.” I prayed.
“Alright, well you should sleep good now, so go to bed and don’t call me again tonight because I’m sleeping and you are making me angry,” I said.
“Well what am I supposed to do now?” he asked.
“You need to stop watching porno and crying like a baby afterward and grow up man…A naked lady is good to look at, so get a job, and get a wife, and ask her to get naked, and look at her instead. Alright?” I said.
“Alright. Thanks Pastor Mark,” he said as I hung up.

What reminded me of this story was Mark’s prayer, which, may have been pastorally crass but was theologically perfect. We grow so accustomed to God’s longsuffering that we began to presume upon it. And so at the beginning of these two movements, when things were going well and people were tempted to use God for their own purposes, he opened a small, temporary window to his holy justice to demonstrate what the unmitigated force of that pure justice will do to our sick hearts that are, at best, filled with mixed intentions. For the long term good of the community he let loose what he generally restrains.

I have one more illustration before I wrap up. This is from Razor, which is part of the recent Batlestar Galactica series on Syfy (which, incidentally, was way better than anyone could have predicted). Razor was a side project, a film made between seasons 2 and 3, mostly with auxiliary characters. It told the story of a young military woman who had been involved in shooting civilians and carried that guilt through the entire film. In the end she sacrifices herself for the fleet leading to these exchanges:

Battlestar Galactica clip –


Starbuck: 'Maybe she had it coming.'

Apolo: 'We've all got it coming.’

One of the great empirical realities of our world is that injustice is rampant out there. And whether or not you are a Christian, that should break your heart and we need to be mustering as much strength and as many resources as we can to fight injustice in as many forms as we encounter it. But what this passage, and others like it illustrate, is one of the primary things that the Bible teaches. Injustice isn’t just out there, it is also in here. The first thing you have to understand about the gospel is this. There is a dark shadow over each of our hearts. ‘We've all got it coming.’

In the end God WILL eradicate evil and bring justice and restore the world to full beauty and wholeness. He will do the very thing that we have always wanted him to do. The irony is that we were part of the problem all along. In order to set the world right he will have to come against each one of us and our dark hearts.

The gist of the gospel is that because of the life death and resurrection of Jesus, God has made a way that a way that he can come against the darkness in our hearts, while we ourselves are spared.

The gospel tells the story that because of the events of good Friday and Easter, God has transferred our penalty onto himself. We can be welcomed into his presence and his eternal realm, because through the life, death and resurrection of Christ he has made a way to obliterate the dark injustice that plagues our hearts as it plagues every other nook and crany of our world, without obliterating us. This is the gospel. ‘We all have it coming.’ But as Peter said just days before the events of this passage, we can escape our eventual confrontation with God’s unmitigated and consuming justice through faith in God’s solution…by accepting the work of Christ and submitting to him as our new leader. In the words of Acts: “With many other words he warned them and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation’…Repent and be baptized every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins.”

Over the course of this year we are going to get a lot of important things out of the book of acts. We are going to see that God cares about the city and that he cares about the poor and that he pushes his people to challenge ethnic and social barriers, and that the work of his Spirit gives us unexpected spiritual resources…but at the heart of his community then and now is a people who recognize we are no better than anyone else because God is against the persistent stain of injustice in our hearts but has accepted us through his grace.
__________________________
[1] A quote from NT Wright – for a while, the working title for this talk was: ‘we all have it coming’
[2] Wright also says that lying is ‘the opposite of the gift of tongues. Instead of allowing God’s spirit to have free reign through our faculties, so that we praise God’s spirit to have free reign through our faculties…we not only hold heaven and earth apart; we twist each itself, so that it serves our own interests.”
[3] Most commentators (Boyce, Stott, ) see this as the key interpretive context of the story, but I most quote Bruce.
[4] NT Wright Acts for Everyone Volume 1

You are not Yourself by Yourself: Community in the Early Church

Acts 2: 38-47

Acts 4: 32-35

This has been a fun quarter. As some of you know I am on campus more. I turned in my dissertation to my committee for evaluation, and so I am taking the opportunity to bang out some pre-recs for another degree I have my eye on…so I am in freshman bio 2 and 3. Dan has enjoyed my transition from PhD candidate to intro bio student and taken the opportunity to nick name me Benjamin button.

But one of the cool things is that there are no fewer than 7 college lifers in my Bio 2B class. We have Professor Strong for this class who is off the hook. He is passionate and hilarious…often of the unintentional variety. We giggle all the way through that class. In our third class, he put up this slide to talk about latitudinal biodiversity gradients and then told us an anecdote. He said he had a girlfriend in college who had one of these…called a bush baby. The first time he went over to her house, it cautiously greeted him and when he sat on the couch, the bush baby came over, climbed up on his head and proceeded to urinate into its hand – rubbing the collected pea behind professor strong’s ears…thus initiating him into the social group. Kiho flashed that warm but devious grin of his and said, without missing a beat, ‘Cool, a new College Life ice breaker.’

I thought the anecdote marginally related, because today we are going to be talking about community. Jesus and the early church simply assumed that the life of faith would be something done in community…but this turns out to be a radically counter cultural assertion in our particular cultural moment. Let me try to illustrate this with a couple of quotes:

“I have my own spiritual thing, but am not part of an organized religion. I think religion is very special and individual to each person.” - Jessica Alba

“I think I find more strength in faith than I do in organized religion.” - Jon Bon Jovi

“I'm not into organized religion. I'm into believing in a higher source of creation, realizing we're all just part of nature.” -Neil Young

"Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business. I live by the golden rule: Treat others as you'd want them to treat you." - Jesse Ventura

“I believe in a higher being. You can call it what you want. But…I don’t believe in organized religion.” - John Mellencamp

"I don't belong to any organized religion of such, but I'd like to believe in a higher power." James Iha -guitarist for Smashing Pumpkins

“I have always been a spiritual person, but I’ve never really subscribed to an organized religion…”
- Nick Harmer bassist for Death Cab for Cutie

“I don't want to be restricted how I can go about my religion and my life. And I just, again, want to know what's going to make me happy. So I think that (religion is) still part of me, it always will be, but I might not be as public about it.” - NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the teachings of Jesus, but I am suspicious of organized religion.”
- Madonna,

Um, anytime you can get NASCAR dude and Madonna to agree about something, you know that that think is pretty deeply ingrained in our cultural moment. And it is not just platitude spouting celebrities.

Three weeks ago The Economist (a decidedly high brow[1] periodical) made the case that “something people badly want (is) a way to acknowledge faith can be taken seriously as a response to deep human yearnings without needing to subscribe to the formality of organized belief.”[2]

Honestly, this is one of my little pet peeves…when someone says something like this, usually taking the form of “I’m not into organized religion but I am a very spiritual person” they usually think they are being profound or original or at least clever. I’d just like to deconstruct that for a minute. This is about the most clichéd, tired, derivative view of spirituality you can have in our culture. It isn’t rebellious or clever, it is tired and trite. I mean, if you are going to make a comment as inane as this, at least do something unique with it, like…this one I enjoyed:

“I usually lump organized religion, organized labor, and organized crime together. The Mafia gets points for having the best restaurants.” ~Dave Beard

But this obviously antipathy against ‘organized religion’ is a deeply and widely held sentiment in our culture, and it is not without an element of truth or at least of resonance. Anything this widely believed probably has an element of truth to it. Clichés are usually clichés for a reason. And I agree that the human religious impulse is mostly a dark and broken impulse and that religion is, in many cases, is as far away from the message of Jesus as hedonism is. I also think the church has a relatively poor record or representing Jesus.

Tim Keller says that ‘all of the arguments against the existence of God are pop guns of doubt compared to…‘If Christ is so great why is the church the way it is?’…There is nothing that can create doubt like that.’ I am going to touch on this just a little bit today, but it is not my topic. I have given whole talks on this question before, as has Keller and Os Guiness, so if this is a significant problem for you, I have thrown the mp3s of all three talks onto a few CD’s and you can get them after the talk.

But something else strikes me about these quotes. Let me go with one more that particularly brings this out.

“I don’t necessarily believe in organized religion. I love my God, my higher power, but it is mine and mine alone, and I create my connection, and I decide how my connection is going to be.” –Will Smith

Now, to be fair, I love Will Smith. He is the biggest movie star in the English speaking world, 7 pounds was probably the best studio film to come out last year, by all accounts a he is descent family man, and dude is disconcertingly handsome…I mean, that is a beautiful specimen of humanity…and I’ve literally grown up with him. Seriously, the first album I ever owned was ‘I’m the DJ, He’s the rapper’ back when no one knew his real name.

But look at that quote again. Of the 36 words in it the words I, my or mine make up 9 of them. That is 25%. And that, I think, gets at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The foundational tenet of contemporary god talk - the litmus of contemporary spiritual ‘orthodoxy’ if you will - is ‘individuality’.

But tonight we are going to look at two of my favorite passages in the whole Bible. The reason I love these passage is that they describes a shocking vision of Christian community. On the one hand, it pitches Jesus-following as irreducibly corporate, something that can only done in tight connection with others. But on the other hand, it paints a picture of ‘organized religion,’ if you will that is so startlingly foreign from the one-dimensional caricature posited and reiterated by these quotes. Let me suggest, as my thesis, that the appropriate response to the evils and ills of ‘organized religion’ is not individualized spirituality but Biblical community.

The talk will divide into 2 parts:

I. The Importance of Community

-I am going to try to deconstruct the idea that following Jesus is something you can do mostly on your own, particularly in college. I will make the case that Christianity is irreducibly corporate and that, far from being a liability, this is one of its most beautiful and helpful features of this world view…despite being entirely counter-cultural.

II. The Elements of Community

-Then we will look at 4 elements of community lifted directly from the account of the earliest church and try to think a little bit about how these could play out in our little community

Essentially I am going to try to answer these two questions

Why is the Church? What is the Church? So let’s dig into it.

I. The Importance of Community

Here is the thing. It is definitionally impossible to follow Jesus by yourself. You can try it. You can pray and read the Bible and try to ‘love your neighbor’ by yourself…and you can have some measure of ‘success’ in achieving these objectives…but as soon as you try to do it alone it is, by definition, not following Jesus. It is something else. Authentic Jesus following can only be done with other people trying to do the same. It is irreducibly corporate.

Look at the text. Verse 2:44 ‘All the believers were together’ and then again in 2:46 ‘they continued to meet together.’ Tim Keller said that these passages and others give the impression that they ‘met together relentlessly’ that ‘they couldn’t seem to get enough of each other.’ The early Christians appear to have an insatiable appetite for being with each other. From the very beginning, normative Jesus following was done together – Christianity can only be done in community.

My sophomore year in HS I took a sculpture class. Art classes weren’t like other classes in High School because you got to talk, the radio was on, it was all very informal. And every art class I ever took worked the same way. The three or four popular seniors in the class would talk about their sexual exploits, either real or imagined, and the rest of us hung on their every word. I wasn’t a Christian yet, and not having experiences to add, I listened attentively. Our teacher Mr. Geller mostly stayed out of it. But I remember one day one of the guys admitted that over the weekend he fell asleep while having sex. This was more than Mr. Geller could bear and he finally jumped in. He said, ‘I’m sorry, if you are falling asleep during sex, you are just not doing it right.’[3]

This story came to mind when I read this passage. It seems to me that if you have the impulse to make your devotion to Jesus a private matter…if you find a personal, individual experience of God more compelling or fulfilling than a corporate, community experience of God…then you just aren’t doing it right. Normative Christianity is typified by people who can’t get enough of each other. If that doesn’t describe your experience, I suspect you are not doing it right.

I really like what Eugene Peterson has to say about this “I often found myself preferring the company of people outside my congregation, men and women who did not follow Jesus. Or worse, preferring the company of my sovereign self. But I soon found that my preferences were honored by neither Scripture nor Jesus. I did not come by the conviction easily, but finally there is not getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart form an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself.” ­–Eugene Peterson – Christ Plays in 10,000 Places[4]

Peterson asserts that to be human is to need other people…that at some level we do not fundamentally experience our fullest personhood when we are alone – but when we are in community. But Christianity in particular is irreducibly for a couple of reasons. Let me briefly pitch 3 theological reasons why Christianity is fundamentally a community experience:

1. At the center of Christianity is an admission of need and incompleteness, we require connection to other Christians.

2. Christianity is irreducibly corporate because God is. At the heart of the Christian faith is one God, who is himself, a community. The Trinity is not just some sort of abstract theological concept, it, among other things, demonstrates that if a God who is fundamentally corporate, creates us in his image. It would be really striking if a God like this created us for a private, individual experience of him. (Pinnoch – the dance)[5]

3. The Beauty is in the mess. This passage seems to assert that while Christian conversion is individual it is only authentic if it leads you into community – which is sure to get messy. Think about the scene here. There were 3,000 brand new Christians joined the community that day. How many crass hypocrites did that include? How many annoying or difficult people? How many with did that include who had serious coolness deficits? Running into difficult people in the church is not evidence that it is broken…it is evidence that it is fulfilling its purpose. The only prerequisite to join the Church is to look to Jesus and say, ‘I am a total mess and can’t fix this myself.’ You put a bunch of people like that together and it WILL get messy. But the mess of Christian community (in addition to its joys) is one of the tools God uses to form us.

This is one of the reasons why repentance and forgiveness are so central to Jesus’ teaching? Because we are broken people slowly healing – it just so happens that the church disproportionately attracts those that are more broken, so it tends to be a messy place that can only be navigated with repentance and forgiveness. After I had been a Christian a couple years, I had a pastor tell me ‘Stan, I don’t think you love the church. I think you love the idea of the Church.’ (as an aside – same for marriage – Derik Webb – every love song ‘you are great and I am great and when we get together it is great’ – every time I write a love song ‘I am a broken mess of a person and you are a broken mess of a person but I’m committed to this thing and by God’s grace we are getting by’)[6]

Honestly, I think people like individualized spirituality because not getting into the lives of other people and not letting them into our most intimate space and ideas means that we don’t really need to get into the difficult business of repentance and forgiveness.

But repentance and forgiveness are not optional add ons to the Christian life. They are central. Biblical community not only provides us with opportunities to experience encouragement but also serves as the ‘lab’ for our ‘book learning’ on repentance and forgiveness. Christianity is a lab class. It is irreducibly corporate. If you are doing it alone, you are just not doing it right. It is actually, probably, something else entirely.

II. The Elements of Community

So in addition to the basic principal that they ‘were together’, there are at least a dozen things we could draw from these passages to help us think about what normative Christian community should look like. We could teach for a whole quarter just on the elements of community from these passages and I’m convinced that it would be a pretty good series. For, example, James Boyce points out that, according to this passage, the early church was an urban, multi-ethnic mega church. Remember who responded to the message in chapter 2:

9Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome 11 Cretans and Arabs

The urban and multi-ethnic nature of the church become major themes in the Book of Acts and I am going to focus on them in future messages – particularly when I talk about Cornelius and the Church in Antioch at the end of this quarter and the beginning of winter quarter - but for now, lets select 4 “elements” of the early Church that could help inform our experience of Christian community.

1. A Learning, Studying Community

It was a learning, studying community. The first thing Luke mentions to describe this new group of Jesus followers is that they were intellectually engaged. Acts 2:42 “They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.”

Now, last week Dan made the case that the early church was typified by a connection and dependence on the Spirit…and I 100% agree. If the work of the Spirit isn’t the main theme of the book of Acts, it is in the top 3. So it seems counter-intuitive that study would be the first mark of such a spirit filled community. But the life of the Spirit and the life of the mind are not competitive but symbiotic. Truth, particularly God’s self disclosure as reveled through the Scriptures, is the catalyst of the Spirit’s activities. Their experiences were grounded in understanding. They took seriously the words of Jesus that the first commandment was to love Jesus with all your ‘Mind, heart, soul and strength.’

My wife spent a semester of undergrad in Texas. She visited churches there where, I kid you not, parishioners checked their concealed fire arms in at the door. The church has been accused of doing the same thing with our brains…and the accusation is not without basis. But we will not ask you to do that here because clearly normative Christian community was intellectually engaged. Deciding how you are going to respond to Jesus is too important a decision to base on a vague feeling, intuition or emotion. You need information. The earliest Christian community was a learning, studying community.

2. A Multi-Scale Community

Second, the earliest Church was a multi-scale community. Look with me at 2:46

46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,

Their organizational structure included large group meetings where they all met together, formal[7] small group gatherings for prayer and worship and informal meals together. We would really encourage you to do the same during your time here at UCD. The structure of CL or any other of the major college ministries where we have a large group meetings, formal small groups and impromptu times or meals together[8] is not an arbitrary organizational structure but actually has Biblical precedent. We would really encourage you to take advantage of each of these opportunities.

3. A Ridiculously Generous Community

Third, a mark of vibrant Christian community is ridiculously counter-culturally generosity. This is the most obvious theme of the passages[9]…and in many ways, the most shocking theme.

2:44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.

4:32No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.

4:34There were no needy persons among them[10]. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone as he had need.

First, I’d just like to point out that this is exceptionally ‘organized religion’ and in Chapter 6 it gets even more organized as the apostles delegate tasks like caring for the socially and economically helpless to what essentially amounts to a sub-committee. But I suspect that many of those who object to ‘organized religion’ would be intrigued by a community like this. On the whole, I don’t think the objection is really to ‘organized[11]’ religion at all, but to irrelevant religion.

So we see in the passage that there is a fundamental difference between ‘hanging out’ and ‘community.’ NT Wright says in his commentary on these verses that Christian ‘fellowship is more than friendship but not less.’ It involves a component of taking material responsibility for each other. Biblical community is ridiculously, counter-culturally generous.[12]

4. An Externally Focused Community

Finally, despite their obvious affection for each other and their discipline of gathering together they remained externally focused. Their primary purpose for existing was not for themselves.

The passage says in 2:46 – ‘they the enjoyed ‘the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.’

It would have been easy for them to say, ‘Whoa now. We just experienced a one day growth rate of 2500%, let’s pack it in a little bit and focus on our personal growth. But while the first church couldn’t seem to get enough of each other, they still managed to stay engaged in the larger community and did life together in such a way that others were not only welcome but coming. They interacted with their city in positive ways for the good of all its inhabitants and maintained enough significant relationships outside of the Christian community that

This is the idea behind the growth group kingdom projects. Christian community does not exist only for the good of its members but to be a genuine help and joy to their community.

Let me wrap up with a final story. My first day of undergrad, before my Mom and Dad packed up the Windstar and drove the 200 miles to the school we had chosen, I woke up at 4:30 in the morning and could not go back to sleep. So I got up. It was a foggy, cool, September morning in Northern NY. I was a brand new Christian. Seriously, like 18 months earlier I had been an atheist…though not a particularly good one, since I couldn’t seem to keep myself from praying. Anyway, I had wanted to go to a Christian college but couldn’t afford it. I was, honestly, nervous about what college would do to my new faith. I had recently purchased the NT on tape and so I popped Acts into my walkman. A walkman, for those of you who don’t know is this strange device that we used to put these things called cassettes into and which stored audio information on, I kid you not, strips of magnetic tape…and sound would come out through these ear pieces that were held to your head with a metal band.

Anyway, I went for a long walk in that early morning fog listening to the story of the first days of Christianity. As I listened to the story of the early church unfold in a world hostile to their worldview and in the face of huge uncertainty, I began to get a sense that God was going to see me through it. But he wasn’t going to just see ME through it. He was going to see US through it. I didn’t know who ‘us’ was yet…but God’s plan for me at college was to be part of an us…and let me tell you, almost fifteen years later, I am still extremely close with them. You need to find yourself an ‘us’ to follow Jesus with during your years at UCD. You may not know them yet, but I guarantee you that if you find them, they will be among the closest friends of your life and will be directly responsible for how much ground you gain or loose spiritually during your years here.

I have said it before and will say it again – If you spend these 4 years on the margins of Christian community you are RIPPING YOURSELF OFF. Join a Christian fellowship and stick with it. I don’t care which one it is. IV, Crew, or, College Life. More important than which one you choose is that you dive into it and make it a home. You are only in college for a few years, so don’t waste time bouncing between them.

Connect yourself to a community of Christians that is a vibrant studying and learning community, that experiences Christianity as a multi-scale phenomena (go to a large group meeting, join a small group, hang out regularly with a few close Christian friends), that is counter-culturally generous, but always keeps in mind that Christian community exists for those outside of it. If you have had trouble making connections, come on the retreat coming up. Because Christianity is irreducibly corporate and the solution to organized religion is not individual spirituality but vibrant, dynamic, Biblical community.

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[1] Though far too self important and self assured.
[2] History of Christianity: The Greatest Story or the Trickiest? September 19th, 2009 p95
[3] Now, before I tell you what I think this little anecdote has to do with Acts 2 and 4, I have to take a brief aside. One of the things I love about this story is that it deconstructs the myth that unmarried sex is exciting and fun and married sex is dull and passionless. What you have is a man who has been married for decades, for whom sex has been an effective tool to build lasting intimacy and closeness with a life long partner telling another guy who is essentially just using it for cheap thrills and bragging rights that his experience of the thing is diminished. And let me just say, that we are going to talk more about this. Dan and I have set aside the first 3 weeks of next quarter for a series on sexuality and relationships.
[4] I also loved this quote in that chapter: “People can think correctly and behave rightly and worship politely and still live badly – live anemically, live individualistically self enclosed lives, live bored and insipid and trivial lives.” Christ Plays in 10,000 Places
[5] As Keller has quoted in his talk on Contextualization- we were deformed through community, it only makes sense that restoration would come partly through the context of a community.”
[6] Let me give you one more quote to round out the point. “The Church offers a way forward beyond mere individualism, beyond mere organization. It is a voluntary community of those who have caught some glimmering of what God means in Christ and how Christ unites all who accept the Accepter. Thus in the Church, at its best, there is both the flowering of individuality and also the sense of belonging, of being accepted, of forgiving, of being forgiven, of loving and being loved.” – Chad Walsh
[7] ‘the breaking of bread and the prayers’ – as contemporary evangelicals we read this and we think of eating together and praying for each other’s needs – but that is an anachronism – it probably is an early form of the Lord’s supper and a liturgy of sorts – there are formal and informal aspects to the community life of the early church – but the breaking bread in v 46
[8] Keller - “You are who you eat with.”
[9] Luke gives more attention than any of the other gospel authors to Jesus’ teachings on money and the poor – it is not surprising, therefore, that he would be intrigued by the economic dimension of the early Christian community
[10] No one in need – ref to Deut 15:4 & 11 (direct quote from the LXX)
[11] The alternative to ‘organized religion’ doesn’t have to be disorganized religion. Biblical community is and was ‘organized’ but was still alive and dynamic. Notice that even in the earliest moments, even in its most organic form, the church is a centralized enterprise – not individual to individual but individualàchurchàindividual. There is a centralized administration of the funds – presumably to protect the community from scams – but also so that assistance came not from the individual but from the community. It is in this context that the verse in 1Timothy makes sense about getting the unemployed jobs so they have money to care for the needs of other. It appears that one of the roles of the early church leadership was to move people from recipient status to giving status.
[12] While the issue of generosity makes us think first (and rightly so) about money – I think it is a fair question to ask ‘What is the scarcest resource for UCD students?’ I suspect it would either be time or GPA. I think it is an important question for Christian students to ask, would God call me to sacrifice some time or GPA on someone else’s behalf.