All Things in Common? – Gary Harder – Nov. 6/05

ALL THINGS IN COMMON?

November 6th, 2005
Gary Harder

Text:     Acts 2:42-47
“Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. 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.”
Introduction
There are many Hutterite colonies in Alberta. Many of them are doing very well economically. When a community doesn’t own personal property, but “holds everything in common”, you can be very efficient and self-sufficient, especially in farming. So much so that often there are rumblings of discontent from nearby farmers and communities that can’t compete.

Occasionally I visited one or other of the colonies. Always I was impressed with their efficiency, with their cleanliness, and with their zeal for the religious life. They would point to our text from Acts 2 as their basis for shunning personal property and ambitions and for holding everything in common in community.

One time my visit came just before they were going to establish a new colony. They had outgrown their old one and needed to start a daughter colony on a new tract of good farm land. I asked them how they decided who was going to stay in the old colony and who was going to move to the new one.

Very simple and straight forward, they said. We divide everyone up by their gifts. Each group has to have all the gifts needed for a successful colony. Each had to have geese specialists for example, each had to have carpenters, and dairymen, and mechanics, and so on. So before the move everyone was assigned one of the two groups. But you went to bed the night before moving day not knowing if your group was staying or moving to the new colony. In the morning there was some kind of pulling of straws, and within the hour you were either on your way or ready to stay put. Very simple. Very efficient. Very effective. Is that what Acts 2 is pointing to? Jacob Hutter, founder of the Hutterites, said it was.

Also over the years an occasional stray, rebellious Hutterite young adult has found his or her way into my office to complain about a restrictive and enforced way of community life that they were fleeing. But mostly they had very few skills to cope with the freedom of life outside. The mold they were forced into felt very oppressive for them. A number of these, but not all, eventually went back. The tight, rigid mold was in the long run easier to live in than was the nebulous sense of community and the extreme individualism they found elsewhere. And so they eventually went back.

Our text
Our text from Acts 2 is a huge challenge for me/us. Church as community is central to how we Anabaptist Mennonites understand the nature of the church. But what does community mean for us living in an urban, post-modern context? It seemed easier to create community when you all lived together in the same village in Western Canada or in the same colony in Russia, or in Paraguay, when everyone shared the same ethnic heritage, spoke the same language, met each other almost every day, looked the same and thought the same. Of course, even then not everyone fit in, and some folk settled in on the very edges of community life. And there was pressure, a great deal of pressure to conform to community standards and thought. Want to get married? Not until you are baptized. Want to own land? You need to be baptized first.

What does church as community mean here in multi-cultural Toronto where we live scattered across the whole metro area and see each other at most weekly or bi-weekly?

The first part of our text talks about “having all things in common”. Is it the Hutterites who are most faithful to this vision? Most of us would not be inclined to live that way. Some folks try to find an “intentional community” way of living together with a small number of like minded friends, sharing at least some things in common; occasional meals, baby sitting, car, etc. Most of us probably long for a deeper experience of community.

Was it easier for those first Christian Jews brought together by the Pentecost experience? If we read just a few chapters further in Acts, and if we read the letters to the first churches which Paul established, we soon realize that their experience of community was not as ideal as described here in Acts two either. All the early churches had huge problems, community fractured by many issues, not least of all by the question of whether you invited newcomers into your inner circle or whether you try to stay pure by excluding people not like you. The Jew/Gentile barrier was huge then, far bigger, I think, then our own barriers around sexual orientation today.

But at least here, for now, right after the powerful experience of Pentecost, genuine community seems to happen in big ways. Several observations on the text.

The Holy spirit was doing extraordinary things among them. “Many signs and wonders were being done by the apostles”, the text says. This is the dramatic beginning of the church. There will continue to be dramatic things happening, of course, but it seems that as the ongoing life of the church unfolds, these will not any longer have the same central, dramatic place in the life of the church as they did in the awe inspiring creation of the church. Just as God acted in a never to be repeated way in birthing the Son Jesus, so the Holy Spirit acted in a never to be repeated way in birthing the church. It was a time of high voltage birthing and power display which would not be expected to be reproduced in the everyday life of the ongoing church.

And yet the Holy spirit does continue to act, and surely one of the pillars of genuine community is to be aware of how God is working in the life of the church. Where do we see God at work? Where is the holy Spirit touching our lives – our personal lives, our family lives our church life, our community?

A second observation is that the Pentecost crowds spent a lot of time at the temple. “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…”

They were of course Jews, and so it would seem natural that the temple would be the center of their spiritual lives. Except that they had now met Jesus and had their lives reoriented. And yet they continued to be Jews faithful to their traditions and heritage and their worship.

In the end it is still worship which is the center of Christian community life. In the end it is worship of the living God which holds everything else together. Without that, community will only be a shallow form of surface fellowship not nearly deep enough to meet our primary needs of connections and support and caring for each other and loving each other and discipling each other and praying for each other.

From the temple, from worship, they then spent time in each other’s homes. And in responding to each other’s needs to make sure that everyone’s basic needs were met. Who were these people finding hospitality in each other’s homes and taking care of each other’s needs? Were they long time friends, people of the same tribe, people of the same inner circle who would naturally and easily respond to each other?

It was at this point that I read the first part of chapter two again. Who were they? Why, people from every nation and culture and language and race. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians. People from Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, Cyrene, Rome, Crete, Arabia. Sounds like Toronto. Looks a little bit like TUMC.

One of the things that really thrills me about TUMC is the ever greater diversity I see here. Diversity of skin color. African, Caribbean, Hispanics, Korean, Caucasian, Asian. Diversity of faith heritage. Various Christian denominations. Some who did not come from a Christian tradition at all. Diversity of experience, of
gifts, of traditions, of insights, …..of sexual orientation. All coming together to worship God through Jesus, and looking at faith and at community through the lens of Anabaptist-Mennonites eyes. An enormous gift. An amazing richness. I am thrilled by the diversity when I look over our congregation now. I think it is evidence of the Holy Spirit at work among us.

But it makes building community more complex. We have language barriers to overcome. We have cultural barriers to overcome. We have experience and theological barriers to overcome. We have prejudices and dislikes to overcome. Distance barriers, experience barriers, education barriers, family make-up barriers. Just like I’m sure the Pentecost church had to do. But they were captured by a bigger vision, a bigger Spirit, a bigger worship. And then barriers can be broken down and crossed.

What can we do to live out the Acts story here at TUMC? What can we do to “worship together in the temple, share things in common, respond to each other’s needs, eat together in each other’s homes”? What can we do, in the words of Paul, to “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep” (Romans 12).

I have one more observation about our Acts text. The chapter ends this way: “And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”

It was clear that it was the Lord who was adding to their numbers. It was not the disciples strategies and hard work. They simply opened their lives to what God was doing and became agents of the Holy Spirit.

The other thing that really strikes me is the present participle form of the word salvation. “And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved”. Those who were being saved. Ongoing salvation. Not finished yet, no matter how many conversion moments, how many times saying yes to Jesus. Salvation is never finished. It is ongoing. Most of the time when salvation is talked about in the New Testament it is in this present participle tense. Those who were being saved.

God isn’t finished with me yet. God isn’t finished with TUMC yet. Salvation is continuing. Thanks be to God.

Stories
There would be many things to reflect on concerning what community means in a church; what are the signs of healthy community, what are the marks of dysfunctional community, when is community freeing and healing, and when is it binding and restrictive.

But I would rather, today share with you several stories that impressed me during this last week.
Last week we were at our seminary in Elkhart, Indiana to visit our son and daughter-in-law. And that gave us an opportunity to also visit dear friends of ours from college days. By now he is almost totally physically incapacitated by “Multiple systems atrophy”. His mind is still sharp, but he is confined to a wheelchair, his speech is almost impossible to understand, he has great difficulty just eating, and needs quite constant care. But his wife has to continue to work, not least of all because of the financial costs of his care. They do have some home care available, but not nearly enough. And so their church has stepped into the breach, especially their small group. Someone from the church comes there every day to be with him while she is at work. A friend we have in common spends one afternoon a week with him watching movies together.

A visible demonstration of community at its best.

The second story comes from a totally chance encounter over the weekend as we were playing tourist. In Ontario. We happened to meet a woman whom I had given some pastoral care to some years earlier before she had moved to another city. So many things have gone wrong for her. She has carried so much pain, not least of all from a broken marriage when her husband left her for another woman. But now, when we met her, her eyes sparkled as she shared with us how healing has taken place – for her and for her children – and how life is so good again now. She described it this way. “It’s as if there was a huge light that I wasn’t able to see because of my darkness. But God was pulling me to that light, and now I am living in it.” And when we asked how that had happened, she talked about the various people from her several church communities who had walked with her over these dark years; people who had supported her, loved her, encouraged her. And challenged her to not to give up and to take some risks in embracing her future.

And then she told us about her daughter who had become an agnostic, perhaps because of the pain in their family life. She had gone off to Africa that way, and reported back. “Guess what, God was waiting for me here in Africa. Everything is different now.”
At TUMC
But I want also to remind us of the many signs of genuine community that are expressed regularly within our own congregation. I want to share a few things that came very quickly to my mind this morning. You will think of many more examples.
The many small groups in our congregation. Several of them have been sharing life stories with each other. Many of them offer a great deal of support to each other, helping people move, bringing meals when there is illness, ect.
The heritage club has been an incredibly meaningful experience of community for many of our seniors.
Our caring team continues to work at responding to the complexities life for many members. They have been focusing on small groups lately, and have now put in place a “small group co-ordinator” to give more focus to this ministry.
When we built this building 9 years ago it was an amazing experience of community. First of all we are now three partners that co-own the building. And then we had volunteers from about 20 different countries helping in the construction, working together some thousands of hours. Of special note were many of our seniors who spent day after day working together.
Our mentoring program and our faith partnering bring together mature Christians and younger Christians in a one on one relationship.
We offer a “discernment process” for persons facing important decisions. This brings a small group together in a very focused and intentional way to walk with someone.
Our sharing and prayer time during worship has become a very important part of our community life. People do feel safe to share very intimate moments of grief or joy or concern, knowing that these will be surrounded by caring and praying.
There are many, many moments of hospitality that are shared with each other.
This is but a small sampling of the kind of things happening among us which express and build community.

But along with these we also have to make a confession. We are a very human community, as are all churches, and that means that a sense of real community is always somewhat fragile, and there are always some folk who do not experience it. They feel excluded from it. We continue to be a sinful people who still have barriers in place. There are always people on the margins of community. We continue to lack sensitivity and understanding and willingness to be more inclusive. We simply have to confess that.

None-the-less, I am convinced that the Holy Spirit continues to work, and that community continues to happen. Why not give ourselves completely to worshiping the God who continues to create community. The Pentecost Spirit is still moving. Thanks be to God.