Scripture: Acts 2:43-47; Isaiah 6:1-8
I’ve been taking my preaching cues recently from the liturgical year, and I decided that I would do it one more time today. Two weeks ago the occasion was the ascension of Christ, last week it was Pentecost, this week—well I had a couple of choices. Today is Trinity Sunday, and some folks take that line, preaching a sermon that expounds on or reflects on the doctrine of the Trinity. For whatever reason, I wasn’t moved to go in that direction. Since today is also the first Sunday after Pentecost, it is the beginning of something that in the church calendar is referred to as “ordinary time”, and for whatever reason, that resonated with me a little more, so my comments this morning are in response to the concept of ordinary time.
Ordinary time in church-speak is any time other than the seasons of Advent/Christmas/ Epiphany (the time before and after Christmas) and Lent/Easter/Pentecost (the time before and after Easter). There is typically a short period of ordinary time between the ending of Epiphany and the beginning of Lent. There is a long period of ordinary time after Pentecost that begins today, the first Sunday after Pentecost, and that lasts for roughly six months. During that time the Sundays are referred to as just the “first Sunday after Pentecost” or the “14th Sunday after Pentecost”, and since first, second, third, and so forth are ordinal numbers, the time that was measured that way was designated ordinary (ordinal—ordinary) time. (Sorry for this little technical lesson on the church year.) But it’s ordinary time too, of course, in the sense that there are no high holy days during this stretch of time, no occasions of standout significance on the Christian calendar. I often think of Christmas and Easter as the seasons and occasions that are rooted in the life of Christ. The rest of the year is not so much about Christ as it is about the Christian, what it means to be Christian. And being Christian, for most of us, I think you might agree, is mostly pretty ordinary. Another good reason to call it ordinary time.
I meant to talk some about this last week, when I was talking about the Holy Spirit, but I ran out of time. Something I was reading in connection with Pentecost made what I thought was a good point. The author said that most everyone cuts the story of Pentecost off before it’s really done. Chapter two in the book of Acts talks about how the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples while they were together in the upper room, talks about the rush of a mighty wind and an appearance of something like tongues of fire. It goes on to talk about people speaking different languages, miraculously speaking languages they didn’t know, so that there was this outbreak of understanding among people who normally wouldn’t have understood a word of what each other was saying. And then it goes on to talk about the sermon Peter was inspired to give under the influence of the spirit, “your young shall have visions and your old shall dream dreams”, and how at the end of the sermon about 3,000 people were baptized as a result.
All of this is a little too long to read out loud, so most people cut Peter off in the middle of his sermon so far as the church reading goes, but chapter two gives the whole sermon, indeed it gives the whole story of Pentecost. But what the person I was reading was suggesting was that we really ought to read all the way to the end of the chapter, because it’s not all about the spirit filling people with a passion for the gospel, bringing new life and vitality to the grieving disciples, not all about excitement and miracles and so on. It’s also about economics, this person said. The Holy Spirit is also about economics. You heard the last paragraph of the chapter. It says: “Awe came upon everyone because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. (And then all of a sudden…) 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, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” I like that way of saying it—being saved—but that’s another sermon.
The writer I’m telling you about said that this really ought to be part of the story of Pentecost, and I had intended to second the motion and talk some about that, but, as I say, ran out of time and decided to carry it over to this week. Of course, you can understand why not too many people include this little paragraph as part of the nice Pentecost scripture, or for that matter come back to it any other time. It’s not just that it’s about economics. It’s socialism. Christian socialism, to be sure, not socialism of the godless variety, but Socialism nonetheless. The earliest Christian church, it seems, was a socialist cell. And when they recalled the words of Jesus, or when someone read the recollections to them, about when Jesus told a rich young man that he should sell everything he had and give to the poor, that apparently would not have seemed so outrageous to them at all. We have to struggle with such a saying; them, not so much.
If I were in a different mood, I would make something of this. I would probably make some wry or sarcastic comment about how people who want to treat the scriptures as authoritative over their lives never seem to pull this scripture out as an example of the kind of thing we should take to heart ourselves. OK for them back then, maybe, but not necessary for us to take that model seriously. The Bible may be authoritative in some ways, but not in that way. But then I would go on to point out that it is not just Biblical conservatives who shy away from this passage. If we take it seriously, not literally, and not absolutely authoritative for us, even if we take it somewhat seriously, it would challenge just about the whole of our church life, not just those of a conservative bent who might be resistant to the very thought of there being some connection between Christianity and socialism, but the rest of us as well, who maybe aren’t freaked out by the idea but still don’t conduct our actual church life, or any other part of our life, in any way remotely resembling what is described here in Acts.
Individualism is too deeply ingrained in our way of life, our secular way of life, and our church way of life, for us to give even a second thought, even a first thought, to being church in the way Acts describes the earliest Christians as being church. In fact what they were doing was probably not thought of as church. They were in the temple every day, the scripture says, being faithful Jews. That would have been sort of like being church. When they gathered in homes for the breaking of bread with glad and generous hearts, they did not stop being Jews, but it was more like just being a community of Christ’s followers, not really church. It was in that context that they shared their lives, including their worldly possessions.
In our day, true, there are a few small Christian groups here and there, probably not thinking of themselves as churches, who live in community, including some significant sharing of resources. I am aware of a few such groups and they typically attend church somewhere else but also break bread together in homes, trying to develop a Christian life-style that includes living communally. For most of us that’s pretty far out. For most of us it is not on the radar screen as a remote possibility. We’re not about to turn our church life into a commune, or look for one to join, so we settle for coming to church, which doesn’t threaten or question our individualistic ways or lifestyles.
If I were in a different mood, I would explore more whether the vision of Christian socialism, or socialist Christianity, presented in the scripture has anything to say to us as a church or as individual Christians. Knowing that we aren’t going to radically change our way of life and become Christian communitarian socialists, still does that vision suggest any new ideas to us that we might want to consider? Does it in any way ask us to question ourselves as individuals, as a church, as a total society? Or do we just dismiss the vision of those early Christians, and the vision of any modern day Christians who are trying to do something similar, as just too weird for us to take seriously?
If I were in a different mood I would pursue all that further than I have so far. As it is, I will content myself with the trick of gently sliding the topic of Christian Socialism and communal living on the table by telling you I’m not going to talk about it and going on to describe at least a little what it is I’m not going to talk about, and take up a good portion of the sermon doing it. This, as many of you are aware, is a trick I have resorted to on more than one occasion, so I know I wasn’t fooling anyone. But I will now move on to mention another thought or two, talking more briefly than I did about what I wasn’t going to talk about.
One train of thought grew out of what I have just been talking about. Holy Spirit—economics—Christian socialism. The Holy Spirit is not all about enthusiasm, energy, vitality, passion. It is also about how faith gets embedded in everyday life. That’s why we need to read to the end of chapter two. The Holy Spirit is not all about remarkable things happening, miracles, tongues like fire, thousands of people getting baptized. The spirit needs to come to dwell in much more ordinary things, such as breaking bread together and a way of life that becomes a day by day routine affair. In the case of the early Christians the way they chose to make their faith routine, the way it became embodied in an everyday sort of way, was probably seen as remarkable in their own time, and certainly is outside the mainstream in our time—the Christian socialism I’ve been talking about. But the point, I thought, is not how remarkable their life style was, but the fact that the Holy Spirit was about an abiding spirit presence in their lives day in and day out, in what must have seemed to them the very ordinary comings and goings of their lives, nothing fancy, nothing dramatic, very few rushes of mighty winds, just an abiding spirit keeping them on track, keeping them nourished and hopeful and sometimes even glad and generous as they went about doing what they had set out to do: sharing their worldly goods and distributing what they had to those who had need.
And so for us, too, the Holy Spirit is not so much about anything very remarkable and is about our day to day life as we go about, in our own way, with our own integrity, trying to be a Christians individually and trying to be a Christian community together. It’s not about the spectacular workings of the holy spirit but the abiding work of the holy spirit, keeping us nourished and hopeful and sometimes even glad and generous, keeping us on track as we try to let our values be embedded in congregational meetings and committee meetings and capital campaigns and other such things not usually seen as having much to do with the holy spirit at all. If our values are not at stake in what we do, then we do need to pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon us. If our values are at stake in what we do, no matter how ordinary, routine, or mundane it may seem, then the Holy Spirit is at work, just not in quite the way we sometimes think of it. We do need to read through to the end of chapter two in Acts, past the spectacular stuff to the point where the sign of the presence of the holy spirit is in the way values get embedded, expressed and lived out in the everyday, sometimes very ordinary, life of the Christian community.
It is one of the symbolic meanings of communion for me. There is nothing magic about communion. The bread and the juice are just bread and juice, ordinary gifts from everyday life. But it is our faith that the ordinary stuff of our lives bears within it, if we have eyes to see and hearts to understand, the ordinary stuff of our lives carries within it the very spirit of God. May we live by that faith and may we seek the spirit’s presence in even the most ordinary times of our lives. Amen.
Jim Bundy
June 7, 2009