Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year A, 2008

All Of Me

04 Easter A 08
April 13, 2008

Acts 2:42-47
I’ve heard it said that if you don’t believe every word of the bible you really don’t believe one. If it isn’t all true, then none of it is. On that basis I’d like to announce this morning that we’re all now going to be selling our possessions and putting them all into a common fund to be administered by the leaders of the church. When you get a paycheck, just hand it over to us and we’ll decide how much of it you can keep for yourself and your family. Each year, we’ll review your salary based on your faithfulness to Christ and your willingness to serve the church.

The idea here is that everyone should have what they need, you see. Jesus Christ is risen and he rules this church. Everything you have comes to this table and is put in the offering plate, and Christ through the Holy Spirit will bless you. Unless, of course, like Ananias and Sapphira, you hold back. This will unfortunately be fatal.

Of course, we’ll be selling off some of you homes and combining households. We’ll decide who needs TV’s or computers. We’ll decide together how much each person needs for groceries.
Yes, the old way was to give a tithe, but now we follow Christ, who gave everything. The new norm from now on is to give everything we have.

Well, before you all start heading for the doors, let’s think together about what is happening here.

I said in this month’s newsletter notes that, to misquote Forrest Gump, “the church is as the church does.” The church does three basic things: baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and ministry.
The first Sunday after Easter, Pastor McPherren spoke with you about the sermon of Peter on that first Pentecost morning, the word of God at its most basic, Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

In that early time immediately following the resurrection, the Holy Spirit was poured out abundantly in Jerusalem, particularly on that morning of Pentecost. The tremendous tension under which Israel was living exploded in joyful response to the news of Jesus’ resurrection. The good news was that God had defeated the Romans in a way no one could have expected. God simply dismissed them and all their power with the flick of his finger. He showed his people that the only power that evil has is the power to take life, but that he had the power to give it back.

Last week, I spoke at Ashland on the lesson from Acts, in which three thousand people were baptized following that amazing first sermon of Peter. I spoke about baptism as one of the three basic things the church does. And you heard from Pastor Reinger about the walk to Emmaus and the two disciples who encountered the risen Lord without even knowing it, until the breaking of the bread when he was revealed to them.

Today, we’re speaking more about the breaking of the bread. It’s mentioned twice in the lesson this morning. Once it was discovered that Jesus was revealed in meal, it seems it became central to the lives of those who believed.

There was a little teenaged Christian who lived in the fourth century, and her name was Egeria. She made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and wrote a diary as she went. In it she participated in quite a few holy communion services. But she didn’t call them communion, or Lord’s Supper, or eucharist or anything like that. She called the meal “the offering.”

It seems that whenever she came across a community of Christians, she would offer them everything she had. And they would do the same for her.

The Offering. We now think of the communion as something we receive and the offering as something entirely separate. But in the early church, the main thing most poor folks had was food. They brought their food to church on Sunday morning, it was gathered at the table, the apostles and elders blessed it, and the food was shared with the gathered assembly. Very little was eaten; the idea was to have a lot left over. Some went to support the apostles and elders, but the rest was given to the poor members of the community. So that a poor woman who brought a crust of bread would go home with a week’s groceries to feed her children.

The offering and what we do with it, this is the communion. It is the offering of our lives, our time and talent and money, to each other and to the world. And this offering of ourselves makes Christ’s offering of himself, which many might see as a thing of the past, into a thing happening now. It makes Christ’s ministry something that has not ended, even though he has been executed. It makes his resurrection a real thing. As you and I, living breathing people, offer ourselves to one another now, Christ appears among us.

When Jesus described himself as the good shepherd he was comparing himself to all human kings and governments. The false shepherds want our allegiance to take from us. The good shepherd wants to offer us his life.

Remember he taught that whoever would be great among his followers would have to be least among them, a slave to them all. The ethos of the kingdom of God is offering all of oneself all the time to all the people.

It is this power that is eternal and it is this life that is indestructible. The power of the resurrection comes from the free and complete offering of all of oneself to God and to others, all of one’s time, all of one’s money, all of one’s talent, by all the people under Christ, who was the first one to go down this path. As each one does this, the risen Christ appears in the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton once said, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.”

Psalm 23 is perhaps the most oft-requested scripture for funerals. It may be so because it is one of the few passages people know by heart, like John 3:16.

Have you ever noticed the line in there, “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies”?

That one has always clunked a bit for me. Here’s all this pastoral splendor and peacefulness, leading beside still waters, lying down, dwelling in the house of the Lord and so on. Then all of a sudden there are enemies present.

So here’s the spectacle presented to your enemies: you are seated comfortably at the table. God, the creator of the universe, is bustling around bringing you your supper. Maybe he’s got a little apron on.

What do you think your enemies are going to make of this?

If this sounds irreverent, it is. It is not meant to suggest, as many are preaching with great success, that you should actually take such an attitude toward God. Nor is it suggesting that God has got your back against those people you don’t like.

No, the idea here is to fill you with wonder and joy. God has freely chosen to make himself your servant in the presence of those arrayed against you. And the ones that are arrayed against you are those powers and forces that are far more powerful than you. Powers like greed, hatred, fear, sin and death, the powers that victimize just about everyone in the world, rich, poor and in between.

And so finally, this word from God is a word about how you understand everything you do and everything you have. It’s not so much that you change the way you give, it’s how you see what you have. What if your work was all for God? What if your money was all for God? What if you property was all for God? Certainly God expects you to keep what you need. But what about the rest?

The community we are creating all over the globe is meant to be a vision of hope and yes, judgment, for all the human governments of the world. We are not fomenting revolution. We are more like a separate nation woven into and among the nations of the world. We don’t need guns or prisons or jails. We are ruled by God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. We share because we freely choose to from the bottom of our hearts.

This is not about guilt or duty or obligation. This is about joy and generosity. And haven’t we seen it here at Philippi?

Christ is risen. And we see him now in our sharing with each other, in the breaking of the bread.

Amen.