Strange Blessings

Acts 5:1-11

June 17, 2012

I made a classic channel-surfer’s blunder the other week and wound up tuning in to the broadcast of the Grace Community Church. I don’t know if you’re familiar with them, but it’s a local outfit that is presently raising money for a worship facility that will accommodate their need for 2,500 seats for four services on Sunday.

That’s 10,000 people a week! They are surely selling something that people want to buy.

You don’t have to watch for long – and, Lord knows, I didn’t – to see what it is: the gospel of prosperity. “If you bless God, then God will bless you; if you bless God by giving generously to God’s church, then God will bless you even more!”

That really is the sum total of the prosperity gospel that is preached from the pulpits of the megachurches led by folks like Joel Osteen.

And tens upon tens of thousands of folks show up, and clearly they are fed by that message in some significant manner, and, just as clearly, some of these huge congregations do some real good in their communities through large food pantries and after-school programs and so on. Truly, that is all good.

On the other hand, there are at least two huge holes in the prosperity gospel that gets preached from these pulpits. Well, three huge holes if you count the complete absence of the gospel that Jesus preached as a hole. You know, all that stuff in the book about where your money is your heart and soul will be also, and that part about taking up your cross to follow Jesus.

But, never mind that.

The prosperity gospel works just fine when life is working fine. It seems true enough that you are blessed when life is good: when you’ve got a job, when your family is well, when you’re walking on sunshine. But when the bottom falls out – when a loved one gets horribly sick, when violence strikes close to home, when your own demons drag you deep into the dark night of the soul – when the bottom falls out, when you cannot imagine uttering any more than “my God, my God, why have you abandoned me,” a gospel that says no more than “bless God and God will bless you” has nothing much to offer.

The second big hole – and it’s certainly related to the first – comes in how the prosperity gospel understands blessing in the first place.

From my admittedly small sampling – I really try to avoid this stuff – it always strikes me that “blessing” is defined consistently in terms of the dominant values of American consumer culture. To be blessed, according to this “gospel” means to have a good job, a nice house, or several, a fat wallet and an even fatter portfolio, trips to Disney or beyond. To bless God means to join the church, to give generously from that fat wallet to the church, and to live a conventionally moral and pious life.

But in scripture the blessings of God tend most often to come in most unusual ways, and those most intimately involved in what we might call the “economy of blessing” tend to be the least conventionally moral and pious characters imaginable. Recall the stories of the patriarchs and the prophets – most of these folks are not the ones you want moving into the house that is for sale down the street on your pleasant block! Scoundrels, failures, oddballs, thieves and even murderers are among those God has blessed to bring blessings to God’s people.

And what of those blessings? In scripture not only are the blessed an odd lot, but also the blessings. Blessing comes in most unusual ways: getting sold into slavery by your brothers; getting abandoned in infancy by your mother; getting chased into exile by your mentor.

“Blessing,” according to the Bible, never fits neatly into a box, much less into a wallet.

So many of the problems and challenges in scripture arise, in fact, precisely around what fits into a wallet – that is to say: money. The problem is not necessarily in having money per se; the problem comes in pinning your own value, your own understanding of what it means to be blessed, to the accumulation of that money. That is to say, the problem comes in embracing the society’s value system that equates wealth and power with righteousness and with being blessed.

That’s what’s behind the strange and disturbing story from Acts that we just read. I bring that passage into our conversation this morning because it’s precisely the text that the Grace Community Church preacher was using when I accidently happened upon him. It will come as no surprise to you to hear that his interpretation differs from mine. He told his flock that God had richly blessed Ananias and Sapphira with multiple properties because they believed and worshipped, and that God cursed them because they refused to give their money to the church.

I promise you, that was the full extent of his exegetical work, though his words sure were pretty as he said it. He even went on to suggest that had this couple given to the church they would have likely been blessed with more houses. By that reckoning, faith is an investment scheme that would surely appeal to the one percent!

Needless to say, I don’t think that’s at all what’s going on in this story. Or, better, if that’s all that’s going on in this story it really doesn’t have anything to teach us. We know we’re not supposed to lie. We trust that God does, in fact, love us and bless us, and, being people of Reformed faith, we know that God’s blessing, love and grace come utterly independently of anything we do or say or believe. God doesn’t bless us because we bless God; God just blesses us. Period. God blesses us because of who God is not because of who we are.

The one-way street of blessing, if we take it seriously, thoroughly disrupts the kind of market economy that Ananias and Sapphira want to profit from. Grace disrupts the market because grace turns the market’s values upside down.

To be blunt, as Will Willimon is in his commentary on Acts, “Wealth is not, for Luke [the author of Acts], a sign of divine approval. It is a danger.”[1]

It is a danger because it threatens death to the church. This strange story in Acts is the first time the word, “church,” – ecclesia – is used in Acts, perhaps, Willimon suggests, because in the struggle over money “the community first experienced itself as the disciplined community of truthfulness.”[2]

Truth matters when you’re dealing with money because it is so overwhelmingly easy to lie – first and foremost, to ourselves – when it comes to matters of money. Here, again, Willimon is insightful:

There is, he writes, “something quite natural about the lies of Ananias and Sapphira, for we all know the way we rationalize and excuse our own covetousness, acquisitiveness, and greed. ‘I’m not really all that well off,’ we say. ‘I have all I can do just to make ends meet.’ ‘I worked hard for this and deserve it.’ Our lies are a correlate of our materialism, for both our materialism and our self-deceit are our attempts to deal with our human insecurity, our human finitude, by taking matters into our own hands. Luther once called security the ultimate idol. And we have shown time and again that we are willing to exchange anything – our family, our health, our church, the truth – for a taste of security.”[3]

We’re a long way from the prosperity gospel when we come face to face with our deepest fears and our overwhelming need for security. Indeed, when we come face to face with that – when we confront ourselves in utter honesty – we’re a long way from the gospel of prosperity, but we’re drawing close to the gospel of Jesus. We’re drawing close to the kingdom of God.

The journey to the kingdom is not a way marked by streets paved with gold, but it is a way concerned with our gold. In other words, the way of Jesus does ask us to think with honesty, with faithfulness, about our money. The way of Jesus asks us to be honest in asking and answering the basic question of finance: where does our money go? Is it guided on its journey by the deepest values of our faith?

That is the real question raised in the story from Acts.

Toward answering it as a community I want to make a suggestion. Let’s do a community accounting project, and ask ourselves what our money goes to support? I really do want to do this, but in a simple and entirely positive way, by inviting each of us to think about and name some of the causes or organizations, beyond this congregation, that we support with our money because those causes or institutions are engaged in work that supports the deepest values of our faith.

Here are a few that our household budget supports: Whitman Walker, More Light Presbyterians, Camp Hanover, the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship, Bread for the World, AFAC, People of Faith for Equality in Virginia. We managed last year to give away 10 percent of our income. That’s a good starting point, and we hope to get better.

I want us, as a congregation, to keep track of the places that we support – not just through the church – because the exact wrong lesson to take from the story of Ananias and Sapphira is that you should give your money to the church so that we can distribute it to places like AFAC, and so on. I want us to keep track because where our money goes there our hearts will be also, and it’s good for us to know where our hearts are.

We’ll begin this work of offering today by using the slips of paper you were given this morning. Just jot down the names of the charities you give money to because the work they do reflects the deepest values of your faith. As we sing our closing hymn together, I invite you to bring the slips of paper up and drop them in the basket. Don’t put your name on it – that’s not important. We’ll create a sign that names these groups, and thus claim them as truly part of the mission of this congregation.

Let us pray.

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[1] William H. Willimon, Interpretation: Acts (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988) 52.

[2] Ibid. 55.

[3] Ibid. 54.

A Community of Bread

Acts 2

June 3, 2012

“All who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved!”

So echoes the proclamation of Pentecost that we recall this morning. Everyone, everyone, everyone shall experience salvation: healing, wholeness, the deep peace of shalom, communion with the Creator and with all of creation, in this time and for all time.

As the words of the prophet Joel put it, we’re going to see visions and dream dreams. That is the gift of the Spirit and the promise of Pentecost.

So I want to share a dream with you this morning. This is not one of those grand, extended metaphors; it’s a real dream, the kind you have when you’re asleep, and I had it a couple of weeks ago.

To understand it fully it helps to have been in worship last Sunday, but since that was a holiday weekend many of you were not in worship – which is why, as it turns out, we’re celebrating Pentecost today and not last week when it actually fell on the liturgical calendar. That’s just how we roll at Clarendon.

Be that as it may, the dream concerned the pile of rocks that we had on the communion table for the Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend. We shared an act of worship during which we recalled people who have played significant roles in our faith journeys. It was a powerful piece of community life, and a reminder that as we grow and change and live into the next season of our life together we are grounded in powerful stories and memories, and we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses.

All of that is good, but the prospect of change comes, nevertheless, always with some anxiety. So, as I was in the midst of thinking about all that is going on I had this dream.

In the dream I had set up the communion table for worship with a pile of stones, but when I walked into the sanctuary to begin the service y’all had already begun and you weren’t doing what I had in mind. You’d turned the table – literally. It was askew in the space and you had taken the stones and were sharing them with each other and talking amongst yourselves.

I woke up thinking, “well, that’s an anxiety dream.”

But as I reflected on it a bit over the next several days I realized that it was not, in fact, merely an anxiety dream. While I’m sure there was some of that, what I actually received was both a calling and a vision. It was a calling, a message about my own vocation, that was trying to teach me a little bit about letting go, of holding loosely to the things I do in order to let go of what is not properly mine to hold.

And, it was a vision of precisely the vibrant congregation that God is calling forth in this place. It was, literally, a vision of liturgy. Liturgy, that wonderful combination of Greek words that means, literally “the work of the people,” and, in my dream, the people were doing the work of worshipping God, of sharing their lives with one another.

Moreover – and here’s where the anxiety comes in – you were doing it without the sanction of the institution of the church, insofar as the formal holder of the office of teaching elder represents the sanction of the institution, the authority of the formal church.

That’s what was happening on the day of Pentecost. The spirit was saying to the huddled, fearful disciples, “get up, go out, and be the people of the way that Jesus called forth.” The spirit was saying to the disciples, “you don’t need to wait for the formal blessing of the religious institution and the powers that be; you are the ones that you’ve been waiting for!” And, the spirit was saying to the people – to all of the people, from all places, from every background – “the amazing grace of God is for you, too! No limits! No barriers! No fences around it!”

“Now, get up and go out and be the church!”

There are, of course, a million and one details to that journey, and this is a brief homily not an org chart nor a road map. I suppose it’s reasonably accurate to say that you’ll vote on the organizational chart later this morning.

But, as Peter told the crowd in his great Pentecost sermon, we have a model for the journey. We don’t have to invent it out of whole cloth. The way of Jesus is before us: a way of loving neighbors, a way of breaking barriers, a way of being the people of God for one another and for the world.

We have discerned well here how we live into this way. We have, as Joel promised, received dreams and visions, and the Spirit of the Lord has been poured out upon us as God calls us to a particular way of life centered on the fellowship that we share around this table.

I’ve been reading Wendell Berry this spring, and in his wonderful novel, Jayber Crow, the title character, in whose voice the entire story is told, offers an extended reflection on the life of the church as seen from his multiple perspectives as the town’s barber, the church’s sexton, and the community’s grave digger. I think Jayber captures something essential about church that we’re aiming at, and that, too often, the institutional expectations stand in the way of. Jayber observes,

“What gave me the most pleasure of all was just going up there, whatever the occasion, and sitting down with the people. I always wished a little that the church was not a church, set off as it was behind its barriers of doctrine and creed, so that all the people of the town and neighborhood might two or three times a week freely have come there and sat down together.”[1]

Something along those lines is the way of life we’ve described in the mission statement we adopted this spring. The statement points beyond the ways of being institutional church toward a way of simply being – being the people of God following the way of Jesus. We’ve described this way of life together in the mission statement that is printed on the back of the bulletin. I invite you to join me in reading it together:

We welcome all* to gather at table at Clarendon Presbyterian, to be richly nourished in breaking bread and sharing cup, and to be sent into the world following the way of Jesus to nourish all* our neighbors in body, mind and spirit.

*All means all: all races, ages, genders, gender-identities, orientations, classes, convictions and questions.

That’s who is welcome to this congregation, to this way of living in the world, to this table, because, to begin with, we are a community of bread: taken, blessed and broken for the sake of the world. Amen.

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[1] Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2000) 164.