April 22, 2012

3rd Sunday of Easter, Year B, April 22, 2012, Greeneville TN

Scripture Reading: Acts 4:31-5:11

"Truth Telling Church"

A few years ago, Christian Smith surveyed about 3,000 teenaged church goers regarding their working theology. Here’s a summary of their beliefs.

· God created and ordered the cosmos, and continues to watch over the world from a respectable distance;

· God wants people to be nice, good and fair to each other, as the Bible and many other world religions teach;

· The goal of life and presumably this God is for us to be happy and to feel good about ourselves;

· God isn’t a micromanager, but God is there when you have a problem, much like a counselor.

· Heaven waits for those who are good.

The tag Christian Smith put on this worldview of churched teenagers was Therapeutic Moral Deism: therapeutic because God is always on call when we need him and wants us to be well-adjusted and happy; moral because of the emphasis on being good and the confidence that we can be; and deism because God isn’t all up in our business, except when we invite him to be. Where did teenagers learn to think of God in this way? Smith concludes from us, their grown up parents, mentors and friends with whom they go to church.

We know for certain teens did not learn Therapeutic Moral Deism from the fourth and fifth chapters of Acts. God was all up in the business of the early church, which was being led in Jerusalem by Peter and the other apostles. God didn’t wait to be invited to this congregation, but barged onto the scene when God was good and ready. And when God came, the results weren’t necessarily nice. Some would even say they were unfair. Ananias and Sapphira, two participants in the church, fell dead on the ground, struck down by the lightning of God’s truth. And great fear, the story goes, seized the whole church.

If you’re like me, the story of Ananias and Sapphira is disturbing. This may be only the second time I’ve dared preach from it because I have a hard time believing God would act with such deadly force. We’ve spent much effort, have we not, in ridding our minds of the angry, vengeful God, who takes delight in punishing the wicked. We’ve gone to school on grace, God’s unmerited forgiveness of sinners. Our God is love, not hate. God walks with us, talks with us, and tells us that we’re God’s own. Where did this God of death come from?

Well, I don’t know. But if we follow the story, we learn we’re not limited to two choices when it comes to God. There’s the God of wrath, so easily offended, so touchy and insecure that the angels have to walk on eggshells to keep the peace. Then, there’s the docile, grandfatherly God, who wants the best for us, but lives far enough away not to be bothered with our need for discipline. Finally, we have option 3, the God of the Bible, the true God, who is both faithful and ferocious, who keeps covenant and expects his people to keep covenant, also. Rather than projecting our ideas of what a loving person ought to be onto this God, we learn by watching this God what love is. And what we learn from this strange and frightening story is this: God loves us enough to confront our lies. God won’t coddle dishonesty in his church. Anything that threatens the life of the new community of the Risen Jesus has an enemy in God.

So what exactly did Ananias and Sapphira do wrong? They sold a field, but withheld some of the proceeds. Everyone else in the fellowship of the Easter Lord was selling what they owned and laying it at the apostles’ feet. The resources were then distributed to any who had need, and nobody was going without the basics. But Ananias and Sapphira weren’t ready for this kind of trust and commitment.

So they whispered to each other over their coffee cups one morning. They loved their church family, but instead of giving all they owned to the new cause, they decided to keep back a portion just in case. Just in case the old car broke down and needed a new transmission. Just in case she lost her job at the Dollar General. Just in case the amount they saved for college wasn’t enough or the market took another plunge. But – and this is the kicker - they didn’t tell anyone. They let the church think they were all in while hedging their bets. They didn’t trust the community to meet their needs. Deception born of insecurity.

Somehow Peter knew the couple’s plan. He immediately took them to court. Within three short hours, the trial was completed and the verdict read: guilty. And the young men carried the bodies of Ananias and Sapphira to the cemetery. The punishment seems way out of proportion to the crime, if you ask me. But nobody’s asking me, especially not God, who doesn’t need my opinion when it comes to maintaining the peace, purity and unity of the church. The couple lied and they died.

I can’t imagine anyone not being disturbed by this story. Did God exact death as the price for deception? Was there really that much at stake? At least we can say this: when the church fails to tell the truth, when it lives on self-deception, it kills us. We may not fall over dead tomorrow. But the life of God is sucked right out of us.

So maybe we let the story get on our nerves. Maybe we let it expose the lies we take for granted. It might even bring us to our knees, confessing our sin and begging forgiveness before the ferocious and faithful God of Jesus Christ. This story is a gift to help the church see its lies and forsake them.

Sometimes we church folk think we’re better than other people. We’re the good people; the bad people are out there, not going to church, not mindful of God, causing problems for the rest of society. We’ll make exceptions, of course, for friends and family members who don’t worship with us, but whom we know to be kind and loving. Still we imagine ourselves different from the party crowd, the tax evaders, those wealthy through shady arrangements, petty thieves and all the rest we read about in “In Happened Here.” Given our record, God would have to be pretty happy with us. We can stand on our own feet before God.

That’s not the truth. Truth is, no one is righteous, no not one. We’re all sinners before God, and were it not for God’s abundant mercy, all of us would be locked up, not just the people at the county jail. Fall down in awe before the merciful God.

Another falsehood: Christian faith is mostly about what we feel, what religious experience we’ve had or what we think about God. It doesn’t have much to do with how we handle day to day life. Where we choose to live is strictly our business, along with how we use our time, how we relate to others, what work we pursue and the manner in which we pursue it, where we shop and what we shop for. God’s not much interested in the details.

That’s not true, either. All of life is a gift, and Christian faith reclaims the whole sweep of our lives for God’s glory. So one of our jobs as a church is to talk to each other about how our mundane choices might honor God and show forth God’s love. This is both a burden and a joy.

And here’s a final one: our current form of church is the only form available to us. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Apparently, God has no expectation that our church will be just like the early church in Jerusalem where everyone sold their possessions for the common purse. The church in Galatia, as far as we know, wasn’t exactly like the church in Jerusalem. Neither were the churches in Corinth, Thessalonica or Ephesus. There is no single form for Christian community. But the church in Jerusalem opens the windows for possibilities. The Spirit can create a multitude of redemptive forms, some of which are stunningly radical to us.

When I hear of that early Jerusalem church, I often think, impossible today. I can imagine a church being of one heart and one soul, but one pocketbook? Impossible. Can’t be done in today’s world. That’s simply not true. The Jerusalem church was scattered when the Romans destroyed the temple in AD 70. But through the centuries its form rises on the edges. The old monastics have been with us since the 3^rd century, brothers who lived with brothers or sisters who lived with sisters, monks and nuns, holding all things in common, wedded to each other with prayer and work. Today we have the new monastics in places like Philadelphia, young Christians who work day jobs, throw their money into one account, worship and pray together, live under the same roof among the poor and use their money and talent to join God in redeeming the neighborhood. I don’t believe we must be like them. But they are there to tell us the truth. The Spirit creates new community in new forms. It’s possible in our life together to be different from the culture at large, different in a way that gives hope, saves lives, and partakes of heaven. The shock of Easter is still making waves of new humanity across the earth.

We’re not the good people. We’re the loved-in-spite-of-ourselves people, called into the forgiveness of Jesus. Now we live for him, seeking to honor him in all aspects of our lives. And together who knows what creative, redemptive form into which God will lead us so that we add some spice to life in Greeneville, Tennessee? This is God’s church built on God’s startling, life-changing grace. This is truth we live by, truth we can’t give up.

I don’t know how anyone who takes the Bible seriously isn’t troubled by this story. But I’m also drawn to it because it proclaims that God believes something is at stake here. And God will guard, even ferociously protect the church from the lies that kill it. May awe seize those who belong to this God.