I’m not sure what it is, but I seem to make my way into the public sphere a lot.  Even as a kid, my neighbour was one of the journalists for the local paper and I would get my picture in there just for sledding down a hill.  Now days I still end up being in front of people, being written about for random accomplishments and then sometimes pushing my way into the limelight by starting protests or opposing something.  I recognize that a large part of this is my personality, some of it is my own pride and loving to be noticed and some of it is this push that I have to just expose what I see as harmful and oppressive.

I started this blog about 7 years ago and have had my share of drama on it and put myself in the public eye numerous times.  Whether it be writing letters to the editor for my local paper, writing as an opposition to church related blogs or authors, thinking out loud about controversial topics or saying a swear word that offended someone it always seems to upset people a lot or inspire people a lot.  In almost everything that I have done I have gotten a range of responses.  Never have I written something or been involved in something that has had people all agreed as to whether or not what I said was good or bad.

This for me is fun at times.  I like the tension, I like the dialogue.  I like being wrong sometimes because I find being publicly corrected to be a educational experience for me (though I would generally feel embarrassed at first).  I also like being right and people linking to me to prove a point or because they were inspired or because they wish they would have said what I did.  I like sparking unsettling feelings in people and I love motivating people to continue on in their direction.  I’m not sure how I ended up this way, but I’m completely comfortable in the public sphere.

As of late though, I’m wondering if being public is almost working against what I’m trying to do.  I can honestly say that the reason I go public with things isn’t because I want to be known (it obviously is something I like and I struggle with pride like everyone else, but it isn’t my motivation).  I go public because I believe that being in the public’s eye makes you accountable and honest or it at least forces you to be closer to the truth.  I like being told I’m wrong, and I like to tell someone that they are wrong.  They are both important experiences for me.  I think it’s because I value logic and truth.  I just love it.  I love learning, I love dialogue, I love being confronted, I love confronting and I love people.

I’m having a crisis right now though.  It seems that no matter how much I value truth, and exposing it – it doesn’t become more popular.  Through all my moves of going public, calling out people, critiquing in love or in sarcasm or whatever tactic I use, it doesn’t actually seem to serve the purpose of convincing anyone new (it’s easy to inspire people who already agree with you).  It doesn’t seem to encourage me when someone agrees with me or tells me that it’s good to hear someone else that has their thoughts or when I get the same commenters on my blog encouraging me.   So the only voices that really affect me are the ones that that are silent.  Either that or the ones that seem to be overly hurt by the things that I have said or caused seem to haunt me and I can’t get it out of my head.  It’s not that they disagree with me.  It’s not even that I have offended them.  It’s more that I have somehow caused them to be less closer to what I believe to be the truth than when I first came into contact with them because of something I have said.  Can talking and pointing about the truth actually cause people to be further away from it?  I’m afraid it can.

Dialogue, I am learning, is only a helpful process when the other person is involved.  It’s important to see when dialogue happens, because when dialogue happens, change happens.  When I say things like ‘involved’ and ‘dialogue’, I don’t just mean reading my blog and yelling at me because I am hurting someone’s feelings, or scanning your Google Reader.  I mean participating in seeking truth alongside of me.  Which, turns out, doesn’t generally happen through words on websites, at least not for me and protests on street corners.  Since the beginning, the only real change that I have seen is in myself and those that I actually live in and among.  It’s the people that I’m in daily relationship with every day, carrying each other burdens and celebrating joys that I actually seen any change in our lives.  People that comment on my blog?  People that are pissed off about something I wrote in the paper?  People that followed the Tyndale/Bush fiasco?  I don’t even know.  I doubt change came from these situations to them.

So, it forces me to ask myself the question…What do I love more? People discovering truth or myself knowing more truth and proclaiming it more?  My track record has been all about absorbing as much truth as I can and as soon as I know something new or exciting or to expose something I blurt it out because I can’t hold it in.  But I think my answer to that question is that I would much prefer to see myself and my community changed by the truth that we have come to see together rather than going off by myself and coming to whatever random conclusions I have come to and then trying to get everyone else in the entire world to believe me.

Which brings me to my title.  I’m starting to think that any public, loud, in your face truth seeking or exposing is unnecessary and distracting from what I should really be focusing on.  What if the truth is to actually shut up about the truth and just live it in your community and wait patiently to be changed to be more like the truth you believe.  What if the most honest and good thing I can do is to not even participate in the global arguments of sexuality, politics and religion? Really what is the purpose of my twitter feed, my blog posts and my list of friends on Facebook.  I’m at least coming to grips with the fact that whatever my social activity is online isn’t the source of change in people.

If I oppose Bush coming to Tyndale, and it works, he actually doesn’t come, but then leave a thousand people frustrated and disjointed what is the point? Have I actually helped those thousand people come to see truth more clearly, or have I made it worse?  Sure lots of people loved the protest and even signed it, but those were people that already agreed with the fact that we thought it was wrong for him to come.  I can easily fuel my passion to think what I did was right because of all those people who agreed with me.  I’m wondering though, for all the heart ache and work that was involved.  Did anyone actually get closer to the truth (whatever it may be in this situation), or did the whole situation cause most of us to get low and stand more firm in what we already believe so that we could launch attacks in every other direction?  Maybe the approach needs to be different.  Maybe it isn’t just to win where my voice is the loudest and I can get the most people to agree with me because that seems to be the way of politics, and it doesn’t really seem to work to change people’s minds.  We all know politics doesn’t change people’s minds.  No one really has a choice anyway so we just go with whatever media tells us best lines up with our current convictions (which were probably already formed by the media anyway).  So what does?

It’s the slow and steady patience that doesn’t depend on results to feel like you are doing the right thing.  Parker Palmer tells this story of this Quaker named John Woolman who felt that the Lord told him that slavery was wrong and evil and the Quakers needed to free their slaves.  The Quakers took this information and brought it to their group and wrestled with it for a long time and they could not come to a consensus.  Quakers don’t vote, because they don’t think that 51% should be able to control the 49% and they see that as an act of violence.  So they said to Woolman, that while they can’t see this light themselves, they were certain that he could see this very clearly.  So they told him that they would support his family while he would travel around delivering his message for as long as it takes for some kind of outcome to happen.   So he did this, traveled the East Coast for almost twenty years proclaiming this message to his friends and other Quakers.  He became famous for wearing clothing that wasn’t made by slaves, or if he knew a meal was prepared by slaves, he would fast that meal.   He had this slow and patient way of confronting that which was wrong without being so in your face about it that he wasn’t welcome.  Twenty years!

After twenty years, the Quakers eventually reached a consensus and freed their slaves.  The Quakers were the first religious community to free their slaves in the United States, and they did so eighty years before the civil war.  Parker Palmer says that this story helps us see that sometimes slow actually means faster because we are getting to the root system as opposed to just putting wallpaper over what we think.  This wasn’t just taking a vote and then moving on, but this was a patient waiting game allowing people to change and shift while slowly nudging them along.  I find this story encouraging.  Because it tells me that all the individual moments of protest and dialogue I will have probably won’t change people, and if it does, it’s shallow and meaningless over time.  But that’s the game that everyone plays.  Everything has to happen now, you preach a sermon and you expect your community to agree and then shift their entire lives to match that sermon in a week.  The media moves from story to story giving us snipets of reality and truth, and we think that’s the way our lives should be as well.

Long term, slowing down and patience is the only way forward.  It’s the only way that change comes to me or anyone else.  The game is fast and you need answers right away and you need to win.  So just leave the game, stop playing it.  Grow a garden, take your sabbath, be a mentor, read more books, put your feet up more, relax – be truthful in how you live, not just what you say.  The world is in a frenzy all around you and one more person in the chaos screaming about what is right and true doesn’t help anyone.  The people who quietly exit the chaos and live beautiful lives are the ones who are the game changers.

In the past fifty years, we have consumed more goods and services than in all previous generations put together.

September 2007 is when I posted an idea I had to start sharing things.  It was called ATIC and the basic concept was that people could post items that they had for other people in their community to browse to borrow.  I wanted to get my Sarnia church on board.  No one used it.  I’m sure there was a hundred reasons why, but as reality set in I started realizing that this was an up hill battle of helping change people’s habits of how they viewed their possessions.  Different people loved the idea and it was replicated in a few different churches in Canada and the States.  Sarnia is a tough city to experiment with anything new as it is.  It’s a blue collar town and people are generally happy with the money they make, the things they have and their pace of life.  The idea of changing habits isn’t welcomed as much as I hoped.  However, this idea started to spread quite rapidly and now there are hundreds of different sites and companies started around the world to help facilitate this kind of sharing.

The world has been changing quite rapidly.  The way that people view their things is changing as well.  A few months ago I stumbled on this video by Rachel Botsman about the rise of collaborative consumption and started to see that she has made a case for projects like ATIC all over the world.  Sharing is starting to become as natural as buying things and people are using the Internet to do it.

I found her book What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers and have been enthralled by the amount of data they have collected on how the world is changing this way.  From sharing cars to rooms to children’s toys, the shift is exciting.

However, the disappointing part of all this is that this is yet another example of how the church is not really leading culture at all.  We are far behind in learning to appropriately respond to culture and lead an alternative lifestyle that models the kingdom of God.  Where are churches in this shift?  We are probably just moving at the same pace as everyone else as I am starting to see communities pop up around of Christians learning to view their things differently.  We should be leading the way.  Showing the world what it means when the kingdom of God is present.

Nevertheless, it’s exciting.  It’s exciting to see more tools available to share and more ideas spreading so that we can replicate them in our local communities.

And when it comes right down to it, what most of us really want is, as legendary designer Victor Papanek put it, “the hole, not the drill.”

Allright so Joe spoke last week about how John and Peter were taken in and questioned by the high priest and Sadducees. Basically what happened is you have John and Peter and they are running around healing people and telling people that the messiah that they were waiting for is finally found in Jesus Christ who died and was no risen. They were doing fascinating miracles that God was using to prove that what they were saying was actually true. They get questioned by them and put in jail and berated about who’s name they are performing miracles under and John and Peter just keep saying that all they are doing is proclaiming what they have seen and heard with their own eyes. It happened so all they are doing is being honest about what they have seen. On top of that, everyone else was impressed because someone they knew who was very sick and crippled was healed as well. So people started believing because it seemed to them that the God that they have been serving all their lives was up to it again, and they were speaking truth about them.

So we need to ask ourselves why would the Sadducee’s press John and Peter so hard and seem to come again something that was so good? It’s easy to write a song about them and toss them off but it’s important to know who these people were and why they would be so upset that John and Peter were proclaiming the news they were proclaiming. The Sadducees were an important sect of Judaism during the time of Jesus because they were a link between the Jewish religion and the political world around them. They were responsible for the maintenance of the Temple, performing certain sacrifices and were generally considered one of the highest roles within Jewish culture. Since the temple was very much the center of political and religious leadership in Jerusalem, it made sense that Sadducees would eventually move into places of power within politics. And they were. They performed all sorts of tasks for the government as well including collecting taxes, represented the state internationally, regulated relations with the Romans, equipped and led the army and administered the state.

The Sadducees were extremely powerful people. Their livelihoods were caught up in their vocation and they held the keys of power to the people in Jerusalem and the state that they were in. You can see now why they were so involved in putting Jesus to death, he was a revolutionary with a following who his followers called him Lord. There was supposed to be only one Lord and that was Caesar. If Caesar wasn’t Lord, then their entire operation falls apart and they don’t have a job. They no longer hold their powerful positions, they no longer are needed.

So you can also understand why when Peter and John start going around proclaiming that this revolutionary who was put to death by them is not really dead and then start performing miracles in his name why that might freak them out a bit. They are obviously willing to go to great length to prevent power from leaving their hand and a few loud mouths wasn’t going to stop them. But alas, the multitudes win again and they are all astounded at the healings and people started believing what they were saying. So they threatened them a bit more and then they let them go. They couldn’t win this one, so they probably muttered a few things about them not coming back and disturbing the peace and then told them to get lost. This is where Joe left us last week. With John and Peter just getting out of custody from under the Sadducees, and so we will read from there in Acts 4.

23 On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and the elders had said to them. 24 When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. 25 You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:
“‘Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
26 The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the Lord
and against his anointed one.[b]’[c]
27 Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. 28 They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. 29 Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. 30Stretch out your hand to heal and perform signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.”
31 After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

So Peter and John get back from their little battle where they get thrown in jail and argue with the powerful religious leaders and then they come back to their people and tell them everything. It makes it kind of fun doesn’t it? I think that at this point Peter and John are probably starting to get excited/worried as things start to unfold. They know the biggest secret in the world for man kind. Jesus is risen and he is our Saviour and he has saved the world from it’s downward direction. Why wouldn’t everyone get excited about this? The very people who should be excited are throwing them in jail for simply telling people what they know to be true. They start telling everyone what is happening then burst out into some spontaneous praying and rejoicing. They start making the connections with the very beginnings of creation all the way to David and quoting scripture and eventually tell the story again how everything has unfolded. They are acting in wonder and awe. Can’t you see it? They just have this run in with all the powerful types who just put Jesus to death and then they have this grand realization. Oh man, God knew this was coming all along. God had this all planned out since the beginning. He knew it! It’s all working according to plan. All this time we were freaking out, denying Christ and now look how it’s all unfolding. Let it happen God, they say, let the miracles flow and let your story continue forward. It’s like a movie plot unfolding.

I just find this little section to be quite transformative for the church. It’s like the moment when yet another light flips on for them. I feel like this is the moment when they decide to enter into the story at God’s pace and they are finding their place in it. It’s like the moment when they realize things are going to get worse before they get better but they all make the decision to jump into it. Like in Mission Impossible, when they are all sitting around and they get the news that they might die or if they get found out no one is going to vouch for them. It’s like that moment.

They ask for miracles, but really it’s not about that. They just want boldness now to speak what they have seen and not be scared by the powers that are oppressing them. This moment in Acts seems to be that realization, that moment where they make the connection that if they really believe what they are talking about here then the most powerful people (the very people who put Jesus to death) were going to be in their face trying to stop them at every turn.

At this point, at this realization, Luke tells us that the place they were was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and could speak boldly. So their prayer was answered. Like times before, this moment is seen as a signpost of the movement of Christianity and how it moved from twelve people to where we are today. This is how the Christian church started unschooled ordinary men being opposed by religous scholars trying to shut them down. The realization that powerful people will confront you is an important part of being a Christian, it’s an important part of this revolution. Learning how to speak boldly in their midst and prayer and understanding your place in the story seems to be an important part of how Christianity came to be.

Q: Do you see speaking boldly as a central part of your faith? 

If not.

Why? What has happened that having faith in Jesus no longer means the same things it meant to the first Christians?

Then we come up to the end of Acts 4, which I’m pretty sure Joe didn’t read whatsoever because if he read it he would have seen that it is pretty much the same as the end of Acts 2. Let’s read it together.

32 All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. 33 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all 34 that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales 35 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.
36 Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus, whom the apostles called Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”), 37 sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles’ feet.

Luke is pretty persistent on this idea and he always seem to bookend this idea of having things in common and making sure no one is need with a shift in the movement of the church. As the apostles begin to better understand their role as apostles and what their calling is, Luke keeps bringing it back to what they were actually doing with their lives. While they were speaking boldly and moving forward the good news of Jesus, their lives took on a very distinct way of living. They were together. There was no other way the church could have grown and achieved what it did unless this was the case. Unless they were of one heart and mind and taking care of each other and living life by the values of the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of God never could have gone anywhere. So Luke tells us again, in almost an entirely replicated passage two chapters later that this is what the early Christians lives looked like.

Luke seems to talk a lot more about money than any of the other gospels. The gospel of Luke is full of the parables that relate to money, and most of the parables about money are actually unique to Luke, meaning they aren’t in any other gospel. Only Luke tells the story of the rich fool. So it makes sense that he would carry this kind of talk over into Acts. It is important to note though that coupled with all these miracles are miraculous moves by this community and their economic situation. It is a miracle that a community of people would not claim any of their possessions as their own. It is a miracle that Barnabas would sell a field that he owned and give the money to the apostles.

Most of us now are just irritated about the constant bombardment of Sundays and and church that have to do with money. We are tired of the church telling us what to do with our money. Unfortunately though, a majority of the Bible and how it interprets our life under the Kingdom of God has to do with how we spend, use and view our money. You have to look at it this way. The world works in one way. To denote value it gives something a dollar amount and everything is defined by how much it is worth. Our entire world works this way. We all live in this world so we know this. Especially today. Everything is commercialized. If you want sex, buy it. If you want friends, buy them. If you want security, buy it. If you need to pay someone back because you killed their brother, well ask your insurance company because they have a price on their life. The overall price as estimated by economists at Stanford for your life is around 129,000 a year. Money literally makes the world go round and drives most passions, inventions, relationships, entertainment, grief, wars and greed. Very few things that you do in your life cannot be retraced back to money somehow. This is the reality of our life.

However, ever since the beginning of God’s story that we know, God has had a different way of denoting value to people and things and it has nothing to do with money. Read back into the Bible and see that every time there is mention of money or how to use it or how to view it it is almost entirely opposite to how the world around it at the time was using it or viewing it. Luke, picking up on this reversal all throughout God’s story, is consistent with the theme by telling these stories about the way that God’s people view and use money. It seems like there is a very clear distinction between the way the world works and the way that God works. So if you are part of God’s kingdom, then you follow by God’s rules when it has to do with money. God’s rules are that it’s not your money and it doesn’t denote value and it doesn’t give security, only God can do that. So then money gets reduced to something else, it’s a currency of the the other way of doing things. When a community of people who are committed to God’s kingdom, their entire lives change and it usually starts with how economics are dealt with in the community. So Luke shows us this. At the end of Acts 2 and now at the end of Acts 4.

“The church takes care of its own thus creating a vignette, a paradigm of the sort of world God intends for all.” – Willimon

Luke sees parallels to Jesus showing up and commencing the way of God to how God’s people use their money. This is the way that the Kingdom of God moves. This makes sense doesn’t it? God’s kingdom isn’t a kingdom of fighting, war, violence. But it is a kingdom. It does have a king and people in it. With kingdoms there has to be some sort of marker, something that makes you different then everyone else. For the Christian church according to Luke – it seems to be marked by how Christians spend their money and how they view their money.

Q: Does money play a central role in your faith? Do we separate it from our faith? How should we view money today so that we identify with God’s kingdom?

Here is what I think. I think us, here in the room today, have spent our entire lives living with two feet in two different worlds. In one world it’s all about money. We all have jobs so that we can make money to buy the things we want and need and provide for our families. We look at our money as ours that buys us things for our satisfaction. Money is on our minds every day, whether it’s to buy something or sell something or earn something. It consumes us. However, most of us in this room are also Christians. So we’ve been told and have been raised that we should live a certain kind of way. That way usually includes giving 10% of our money to whatever church we belong too, being nice to people, showing up somewhere on a Sunday, and upholding strong morals. Our version of Christianity that we all have grown up with intersects with the world’s value system at different times. Our faith tells us to spend the money on the right things and that 10% of it belongs to God. Then that’s about it.

Living like this is actually pretty complicated because both worlds promote very different messages. The world says invest your money and make your money work for you and be responsible and save your money and reward yourself with your money. That’s how we raise our kids to think, that’s why we go to school, that’s why we get jobs that’s why we are middle class people living the way we are
So we take all those messages and then try to Christianize them. We tell ourselves that we can invest our money by giving to our church because we are investing in the Kingdom. Or we tell ourselves that we only give money to those that are grateful and who will actually use it for a good purpose. Or we tell ourselves that we deserve to be rewarded, that we are somehow entitled to rewards that we give our self from the money that we earned. We Christianize the message of money so that we can live with it making sense. This poses a problem though because we end up starting with a twisted view of what money is and how we are supposed to spend it because we are starting from a worldly perspective.

The Kingdom of God though is completely different. Value is derived from being God’s creation. You trust God to provide for you and when you have something in your possession you see it as no more than a tool to help further the Kingdom that you are part of. When you start from this point of view, from this understanding of who you are and what your purpose is in life and then work money into the equation after this, everything changes. This is what was happening in Acts. This is why these people were living the way that they were living. They derived value and security and identity not through their economic place in the world but through their place in the Kingdom of God. So then if you start from this point of view of the Kingdom of God then money when it intersects with your life has a different role. It’s no longer what drives your life but is simple the thing that drives everyone else’s lives around you. Then you can see money as a tool rather than a lifesource. Which explains this church in Acts. No one saw anything as their own. No one was ever in need. People were selling the things that they did own and then giving the money away to the cause.

Can we be the kind of community that lives like this? Do we want to be? Do we want to be the kind of community that live like everyone else but then make our faith something we tack on and insert it into the lives that we are already living? Or do you think we can be the kind of community that is driven by something else entirely and then we use our money to that end? Will we be a community where our church and our lives are driven and dictated by money or can we be driven by our faith and then money falls in line to that?

Let’s pray.

God forgive us for not truly living in your kingdom.
Whether it be through our money, time and relationships
We always tend to make it about us
We never think twice
Before following blindly what we think is normal

God forgive us for being dictated by our cashflow
For feeling secure when we have money in the bank
For feeling valuable when we buy new things
For feeling powerful when we show off

God forgive us for living by our own rules
For living by our own values
For dictating what we think we deserve
For trying to control outcomes

Free us to live the way you created us to be
Free us to live generously
Remind us of our insurmountable value
Remind us that love doesn’t come through things

Give us dreams that start with you
Give us dreams that aren’t selfish
Give us dreams that help the world
Give us boldness to live backwards to this world
Give us boldness to live without idols
Give us boldness to proclaim with our lives
The kind of life that you made possible

It took forever to get these up but here are some photos from our Turkey Trip.  You can see the whole set here.

No real reason, just a good collision of fortunate events and here I am for two weeks.

Remember where we came from last week.  Peter has just finished the speech of all speeches connecting the dots of how the hope of Israel is realized in the death and Resurrection of Jesus.  You have now three thousand people who have all subscribed to this way of seeing the world.  The movement is now on it’s way.  Luke, trying to give us an idea of what happens next, gives us an idealistic picture of what the earliest Christian community looks like.  Let’s read it together.

And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
Acts 2:42-47

Luke doesn’t just leave us hanging with the story about 3000 people getting saved.  He shows us the very quick realization of what this looks like when 3000 people do get saved.  Now let’s just clear the air right now.  I probably shouldn’t be doing this message.  By now, most of you know that my preferred way of living is in community and we all sell everything we own and live in a box somewhere with fast Internet and make sure the poor are taken care of. So I might be a little biased in approaching this particular part of scripture.  So I’ll do my best to not use this as absolute proof why you should all drink my koolaid and sell all your stuff and give me all your money.  So if I start to go too off the deep end this morning, just stop me, and bring me back on course.

This verse here is one of a few summary passages that Luke writes to kind of give us an overall picture of what is going on all the while making theological statements along the way.  He is basically saying that this is, what the first believers did and looked like when they came to the realization that Jesus was the real deal and the realization of their hope and salvation.  Like any description like this, it is meant to be a summary but not to describe the entirety of an entire movement.  It’s also not meant to be prescriptive.  Luke isn’t telling us that believers have to do these things either.  I can sense the sigh of relief when I say that.  It’s amazing how much of a relief it is when we get off the hook for what we don’t want to do.  It’s also interesting at how we will never let other people off the hook for when we think something is mandatory.

Luke basically outlines four ways that the church started living out her life together.  They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching, they were in fellowship, they engaged in the breaking of bread together, and they prayed.  These things are all pretty basic and don’t need a lot of explanation.  There is some debate around the idea of “breaking bread together.”  Some thing it is referring to the Eucharist and others think it just meant eating together.  However, both of them probably happened together, so it’s probably not that important.  We need to keep in mind that the things that these first believers were partaking in were not all that unusual.  Odds are that many of these people already had some sort of similar ritual or tradition that they were participating in already and it was a continuation of there life already.  Remember these folks were Jews, they had a way of life already very much steeped in prayer, eating together, studying and fellowship.  I don’t tell you this to make light of what they were doing but only to show you that it’s probably not a normal occurrence for someone to become saved and then all of sudden do all these things the next day.  But Luke is showing us this is what the early church looked like.  These were the the marks of the early church that set them apart as a redeemed people of God.

This was the way that these people embodied the good news of Jesus and what the realized about him.  That is the first sentence, telling us about the kind of rituals that the early church participated in.  Then Luke goes on to tell us that because of these rituals, awe came upon every sole and many wonders and signs started being done by the apostles.  This isn’t just the people that were in the community that were in awe.  Everyone was in awe.  This isn’t just because of the miracles but because of the way that this community was living.  It was like nothing else mattered.  I’m convinced one of the miracles that Luke is talking about here is the fact that this community could live the way they lived and actually share what they had, and not be obsessed with the rat race of wealth and pleasure.  Look at how well they took care of each other!  This for many, is actually a miracle, something to be in awe about.

I was speaking with an unchurched friend of mine and we were talking about the inner workings of the church and how it functions.  She asked how a pastor got paid, like where does the money come from?  I told her it came from all of us people that are part of this community, week after week giving of our hard earned money to this community so it can function the way it does.  She was in awe. Why in the world would a bunch of people give their money to an organization that just runs a service once a week?  Obviously she didn’t get it.  But I understand the awe.  I still see it on people’s faces today when I tell them about theStory or about some of the decisions that I make.   This is the kind of awe that the people around the first believers were experiencing.  Who are these people that are selling there stuff just so everyone else is taken care of?  Who are these people who eat together in each other’s homes?  This isn’t the way the world works normally.  Life then, as it is now, was plagued with individualism, greed and a constant chasing after instantaneous results and pleasure.  It is awe inspiring to see a community of people reject that way of living and take the narrow path toward a life of community, learning and downward mobility.

Q: What do you think inspires people about the church today?  Does anything?

The first Christians beliefs lead them to have all things in common and sell their possessions and belongings and distributing the money to anyone that had need.  The commonality of goods is set forth as concrete testimony that something unsettling, specific and substantial has happened to these people.

Q: What would have lead these first Christians to sell their things and give it to the poor?  What caused them to live out there convictions in that way?

I don’t think what Luke was doing here was trying to paint a picture of an ideal society.  Again, this isn’t a list of commands for Christians.  As much as I don’t want to say that.  In fact, by reading Acts and the Epistles we can be quite sure that this ideal society never actually happened.  They certainly had their fair share of struggles and problems and had lots to work through.  Acts, as we will see, is full of problems amongst it’s people.  So we know that Luke isn’t telling us that if we live a certain way everything will be perfect.  Rather he is showing us that when you realize what these people realized, then you respond in a certain way that is full of generosity.

See what these people were doing was was the best response they knew how to give based on what they now knew.  For them, at this time it meant taking care of those who were around them and facing into oppressive systems.  This was bringing to fulfillment that which was promised to them all along.  Like in Deut 15:4-5 that promises a land free of poverty.

“In their eating and drinking the resurrection community is already a partial fulfillment of that promise, enjoying now what shall soon be consummated in the kingdom of God.”
- William Willimon

This is the answer I think to our second question.  The first believers were fulfilling and incarnating what they saw as the promise and fulfillment of the Kingdom of God.  They were living, to the best way they could, what the kingdom of God should have looked like.  Jesus was telling them over and over again that the Kingdom of God was here and now, and they, through there actions were there making that a reality.

We are taught to have things our way and that being able to have our individual needs catered to is how to measure the success of an organization.  In our culture, our individual needs and rights come before any needs of the group.  The biblical picture is not what someone receives from the church, although one does receive a great deal , but of what one gives and how one contributes to it.  The portrait of the early church in acts shows that community and the welfare of the group were a priority.  This attitude reflected spiritual maturity that allowed the church to grow.  In the case of this earliest community, the believers preaching was matched by their community, making a powerful testimony for their mission.  When the early church said that God cared, the care they gave their own demonstrated this. – Darrel Bock

Our culture tends to lean in a very different direction as the Kingdom of God.  The world promotes individualism, privacy and taking care of yourself.  None of these are healthy.  One of the marks of making the Kingdom of God a reality now is to oppose these things in our own life and live out a way that involves community, sharing and caring for those who can’t care for themselves.  Our culture pushes towards greed and collecting as many things as possible for yourself so that you are safe and taken care of.  The Kingdom of God on the other hand promotes sharing and refusing the right to see the world or anything in it as something you can own or are entitled to.  The Kingdom of God sees life as an adventure and not seeing money as something that can threaten you or make you safe.  The two directions are quite different but they both demand different things.

What is happening across and through the church with the first believers is truly remarkable.  We know that there was lots of boundaries setup between people during this time and many of them were enforced at the dinner table.  However, just like Jesus refused to make proper distinctions between person at his table so did the early church.  Eating together is a mark of unity, solidarity, and deep friendship, a visible sign that social barriers which once plagued these people have broken down.  And now here they were, breaking bread together almost every day facing into the cultural expectations of who they should eat with or not.

At the lead team level, we are starting to ask questions about our community.  We are starting to wonder what it means to consider yourself part of theStory.  I think these were the same questions that we are seeing the first believers ask and answer in Acts.  Is it just something that we do once a week?  Is the Sunday morning gathering the end all and be all of what it means to be a follower of Jesus along side of the community of theStory?  Obviously this is the default of our world.  We want to take the easy way out.  Show up somewhere, give some money and then allow it to remove any guilt or obligation that we might feel.  We don’t want to be put on the spot.  We want to be safe.  We want our kids to be taught the right things.  We all have expectations.  But what does it mean?  What does it meant to be part of theStory?

For the first believers it was quite radical.  As the story of Acts starts to unfold we are going to start to see how serious this move really was.  Selling all your stuff, giving it to the poor, taking care of those in need, worshipping together, praying together…this is what it meant to be a Christian.  This was the expectation, but not in a coercive way, but in an obvious way.  For us this might look quite different.  I can assure you though that it doesn’t just mean show up here on Sunday and sing a few songs and listen to me ramble on about whatever I’m thinking about this past week.  Being part of theStory has to mean more than that.  For the first Christians they had to be asked “Will you continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers?” The answer to that question is, “We will, with God’s help.”  Sometimes this was a three year process of answering this questions for the early Christians.  But the lead team is starting to wonder, what is our questions?  What are the marks of theStory going to be?  How long will this take us?

Q: What does it mean to you to be part of theStory? What should it mean?

Again, these aren’t rules.  These are values.  Christians valued certain things and to become a Christian you basically say “I value what Christian’s value” and then you started changing your life to better reflect what you value.  This is the direction that we are going to move into as a church.  As we start to land on certain things that theStory values as a whole you will be able to join in with us and value these things alongside of us.  If theStory says that we value ‘left handed widgets’ because we think that God has given us a heart to manufacture them, then you will be given the same opportunity to say, ‘i value left handed widgets.’  This is what taking ownership over this community will look like.  It will look like this community starting to value the same things and then changing our lives to match what we believe.

Listen, I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to feel the crunch.  The world around us is literally out of control, and it has been since the beginning of time.  Corporations now control and own most of the world’s wealth and by law their only concern is for profit for there shareholders.  Our children are spending increasingly amounts more time in front of screen to keep them quiet so parents don’t have to deal with them.  Our food comes from all over the world with all sorts of chemicals in it.  Pharmaceutical companies continually offer solutions to problems they have created.   Our environment is slowly being destroyed by our obsessive shopping and travel habits.  Our neighbourhoods are being hidden behind fences and attached garages while other neighbourhoods are made out of cardboard and scrap metal.  Our fate is literally being gambled on by the powers that be in the financial district.  Our jobs are fragile.  The ones who say they are out to help us are really just about maintaining the facade of safety while reeping the benefits at the poor’s expense.  Our children are being marketed to a thousand times a day.   It’s not easy.  This is difficult.  I want to resist, but it’s easier not to.  I’m feeling worn out, I’m feeling alone.

But that is what this community is for.  Together we are coming to realize that the direction that the world is taking is not all its cracked up to be.  People are unhappy.  We can see a glimpse of another way to live.  People are starting to wake up and realize what Jesus was talking about.  It’s called the Kingdom of God.  This new way to live has different values.  It values love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, self control and all sorts of other beautiful attributes.  Isn’t this why we are here?  We realize that the world’s fate doesn’t have to be our fate.  We can oppose it. We can choose to live different.  We can choose to be in solidarity with those that are losing and are marginalized because we see helping others as a value and no longer just helping ourselves.  For all of us this will look different.  For some of us it will mean quiting our jobs and taking care of our kids instead.  For others it will mean getting a second job to support someone who can’t work.  For some it will mean saving every last penny that comes in and for others it will mean giving away 90% of your income to those that can’t afford rent this month.  For some it will mean selling your house and moving in with others and for others it will mean keeping your house and being hospitable to your neighbours.  For some it will mean pulling your kid out of extra curricular activities because they are being drowned in activities and for other it will mean homeschooling while for others it will mean leaving your kids in public school.  For all of us it will mean becoming a people who is shaped by the values of the Kingdom of God rather than the longings of this world.  It will mean we will become a generous people.  A selfless people.  A people dedicated to a life of service to each other and the world.

I hope theStory becomes a community that navigates its way through this mess of culture and lands on what our values are and then works together to live them out.  The first Christians sold their property!  This is a big deal.  This is a group of people whose ancestral heritage was tied directly to the land that they were selling.  I think the kind of sacrifice and community involvement will be just as significant but we have yet to figure it out.  It’s coming though.  Our marks will be quite clear and our mission even clearer.  We will be called to be generous with whatever we have now for the sake of the Kingdom of God.  Will we choose to be generous?  Will be be like these first Christians who were willing to give up on it all because what they believed changed there lives so drastically?  I hope so.  I think we can do it.  I want to do it.  Let’s pray together.

O Jesus,

Who chose a life of poverty and obscurity, grant me the grace to keep my heart detached from the transitory things of this world.

Let it be that henceforth, You are my only treasure, for You are infinitely more precious than all others possessions. My heart is too solicitous for the vain and fleeting things of earth.

Make me always mindful of Your warning words: “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but suffer the loss of his own soul?”

Grant me the grace to keep Your holy example always before my eyes, that I may despise the nothingness of this world and make You the object of all my desires and affections.

Amen.