The Church of Acts is marked by immediacy and urgency. They hold everything they own in common. They gather together day after day. They eat together in their homes. Everyone can see them united in this tender time, when the wounds are still fresh and joy still abounds. More and more people join them to be a part of this powerful thing that is happening.
The Church is a ragtag group of misfits and their patrons. They gather together out of intensity and a sense that something new is already happening, and something more is coming soon. The imperial government and the religious leaders are entirely against them. They exist on the margins, the fringes, and most people probably think they’re simply nuts.
I don’t imagine that most of us would be in a hurry to join a group like that. I’ve known a sliver of that kind of intensity a few times, perhaps. I watched people dance in the streets after an election that seemed particularly consequential. I’ve worked at companies that felt like they were about to change the world.
That’s just intensity, though. In the face of excitement, I know that I tend to watch and wait, to be the observer who can see others getting swept up in the moment. The Church of Acts, though, is not just united by excitement, but also by commitment.
You can dip your toe in excitement, you can stand on the sidelines and enjoy a distant taste, but these people gave their lives and their wealth, however grand or paltry, to this new thing that was happening in their midst. If you had a friend who was suddenly moving in with a strange and chaotic new group of people, that includes a lot of the people you would have crossed the street to avoid, I suspect that you would try and stop them. If someone tries to sell all their stocks and bonds and pull out all their money as cash so that they can invest it in the Kingdom of Heaven right here and now, we expect their bank and broker to say “no.”
There are very few people with that kind of commitment. Some of them are easy to deride, and so we dismiss them entirely and view them with pity. Others, we laud for their brave acts in public, and then only in private view them with pity and scorn. We seem to know what life is for, and life is broadly for a measured kind of existence, ideally individualistic and slightly materialistic. All else is madness.
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We should allow, then, that the Church of Acts in all its haste and urgency, the immediacy of its excitement and the totality of its commitment, does sound a bit mad, too. Their madness might seem laudable or kind, or maybe just sort of mostly harmless, but we won’t be signing up any time soon, ourselves.
It makes good sense not to give up everything for one thing, even if that one thing is acceptance or community or God. The trouble with good sense is that sometimes it waits on the sidelines while life is unfolding, and then waits some more as time grows short, and finally misses out entirely on what it was there for in the first place. I do this, personally and professionally. All kinds of opportunities pass right in front of my nose, and they may not amount to much, but I hold myself back even from the not-much they have to offer.
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Christ speaks in our Gospel this morning about himself as the Good Shepherd, set in opposition to the thieves who plot and plan. A thief, a bandit — these strangers among the sheep — is calculating and waits at a safe distance. They work out exactly what it is that they have come to steal, and they take what they need without having to surrender themselves to the commitments that go along with it.
As Christianity has become an orderly part of the empires of the world, it has become a more comfortable place for people like me. A thief like me knows exactly what she wants to take from Christian practice, from the spiritual life, and from community; and having stolen all she desires from God, she retreats to isolation and the illusion of her separateness from others.
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Individualism is a kind of theft from God, but it also steals from the rugged individual the possibility of connection, belonging, and abundance.
A thief, almost by definition, never really has enough. The Good Shepherd, however, has more than enough to deal with in the tending of the sheep, and the sheep themselves are overwhelmed with the number of things they could choose to eat. A sheep sees opportunity and excitement in everything, being willing to eat even that which would kill it. All the more important, then, that the Good Shepherd is reliable and faithful and diligent. Most shepherds mostly are good enough in that way. The good-enough shepherd will not let the sheep die, but will sometimes be surprised to discover the kinds of trouble the sheep have gotten themselves into.
The Church of Acts, in all its madness, is an example to us that togetherness, rather than orderliness, might be good enough for us. We might be able to feast on belonging and community, and not need to store up for ourselves wealth and separation and loneliness. It might be kind of nice to be excited, and to let go of the cheap pleasure of standing on the sidelines and judging those who are actually brave enough to play. Life is here and now, if we will have it, and the Kingdom of Heaven might very well be found in our midst.
May you play and love and give and share, abundantly. May you know that God is with you in the madness and the drudgery of life. May you let yourself know joy.