“One in heart and mind” (4:32) is how we speak of people close as can be.  We tend to reserve that sort of talk for those very much in love.  Luke uses it for the church.  He is telling us that Christ’s love for us, and our love for Christ, does something quite remarkable.  For at least the last century, there has been that part of our culture that insists nothing really matters—Freddie Mercury sang all about it almost fifty years ago, though he sounded kind of sad.  Nothing really matters; our words and works have no real, lasting significance.  Vanity of vanities.  I suspect much of that way of seeing things comes from an existential disappointment: disappointment in all the lies.  When lies are all you find, the truth can be hard to see.  Love is supposed to be the antidote to all the lies, but in these times, the story we get told is that, of all the big lies, the biggest of all is love—committed, persevering, lasting love: like God’s love.  Yet people keep seeking that kind of love, hoping for it, even, every so often, praying for it.  Love stops for the one; love looks like something.

In Christ, meaning comes to us.  Truth, reality, from God, is given to us and remains: durable, resilient, truthful, transforming.  Christ’s love is the meaningfulness that leads us into common purpose, koinonia purpose.  It’s Christ’s love that causes us, each with our own blessed gifts from the Spirit, to begin to see, think, and want with the mind of Christ.  We begin to take on his character: one in heart and mind—the wholeness of his character for the brokenness of our lives.

Individually and together, Christ is being formed in us.  We are God’s people, God’s statement to the world.  Paul speaks of Christ coming to live in us, becoming alive in us.  He talks of how it is no longer Paul who lives but Christ in Paul (Gal 2:20): he remains himself; he is changed in a way he can’t quite describe.  The best he can do is experience and share the change.  That’s the power of Christ in the Spirit.  We cannot account for it: it is not of us, not from us.

Those early believers were experiencing unity in Christ: the gift of the Spirit.  The people gather together, worship together, pray together, experiencing this unity, this koinonia: the fellowship of Christ—decisive devotion.  They serve.  First of all one another, thereafter the neighbors they have from God.  Not all their neighbors are wonderful human beings.  Neither were some of us; then grace enabled us, also, to answer Christ’s call.

Luke tells us, “No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had” (4:32).  In the world, what’s mine is precisely what is not yours.  Some of us saw that principle in action during our egg hunt on Palm Sunday.  I’m convinced the first words children use most often are “No” and “Mine.”  In the world, what’s mine is what I make decisions about: what is mine is under my authority, my power, my control.

In the fellowship of Christ, the Spirit brings about a changed attitude toward these categories of “mine” and “yours.”  “My” things are no longer mine.  The Spirit causes me to understand that what I have has been given by God.  It properly belongs to God.  It’s all just on loan, even if it’s only one talent, or half, or half of a half.  God gets to make decisions about what to do with what I had been calling mine before Christ lived in me.  Growing into Christ’s likeness, we carry out God’s decisions regarding what He has given us.  As He teaches and tells us, we do: faithfully, humbly, gratefully, joyfully, and, every so often, sacrificially.  People notice.  We are God’s statement to the world.

What are we saying?  Are those outside these doors, the ones among whom we spend the majority of our lives, are they getting any message from us?  Oh, the snide ones out there will say, “Sure, what I’m getting from you is judgment, you Cristo-fascist hater!”  We are offering life lived by another standard, the biblical standard.  Is there another way to life?  Is there another way of life for one whom Christ has claimed?  Sure I love Jesus, and as far as the Bible goes, I believe what I like and I’m not going to believe what I don’t like!

The church leadership—the apostles—had been ordered with very stern warnings—we could also call them open threats—to be silent.  You know that churches are tax exempt, right?  That’s been custom from the earliest colonial days; it’s been law since the end of the nineteenth century.  Native son Lyndon B. Johnson, back in 1954, in his senate days, made sure that exemption became contingent upon churches keeping silent during elections—no endorsements, no swaying votes.  Neutrality or silence.  That always seems to apply to one side but not the other.  Beloved, silence in church can be a blessing but silence from the church is not.  Who else is there to speak God’s Word into this torn-up world?

The apostles were not going to be silent out in the world into which Jesus sent them.  Because it was Jesus who sent them, he did not send them without resources, without hope or help: “With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus” (4:33).  The power here isn’t some continual series of eye-popping miracles as we commonly think of such things.  Luke doesn’t say that, with great power, the apostles continued to heal the lame and raise the dead—though he details such moments, too.  Luke says that, with great power, the apostles continued to testify: they continue to speak about Jesus, knowing this would put them in the hands of the authorities but never at their mercy, because God’s mercy comes first and is at work through all things, including the things that seem hard and feel daunting, even the things that hurt.  Has Christ shown us nothing?  Our sacrifices also become streams of mercy.

The apostles continue to proclaim the resurrection.  That’s the key, the sticking point.  Oh, if they had just sort of confined themselves to proclaiming the ethical teachings of Jesus, the church would have gotten along alright, without much disapproval from the authorities.  You know, we can make Christianity pretty bland—neutral: and from the best intentions!  Decades back, preacher A. W. Tozer wrote of the problem that comes when a congregation becomes “a religious merry-go-round [where people] simply hold [. . .] on to the painted mane of the painted horse, repeating a trip of very insignificant circles to a pleasing musical accompaniment.”[1]  We don’t want people to reject the message—it’s such an important message: life-saving!  Since we are so eager for people to accept the message, we start to turn the message this way and that, put it in the best light (as it were), so people won’t reject it.  What we end up with, and Presbyterians know all about it, is the “religious merry-go-round,” one version of which is the message to do good and be nice.  What’s the Gospel?  Do good and be nice.  The shattering power of the shattering God shattered upon the shattering cross.  Do good.  Be nice.

Beloved, if that’s really the heart of the Gospel, do we even need to be here?  Do good and be nice.  You don’t say!  The banners all around school tell my children that.  We need no church to tell us that.  And we wonder where everybody is, these days, and why they aren’t in church.  Who wants to have their feelings hurt by what some guy on a rant says the Bible says?  Who wants their personal values challenged?  No!  Hold onto the painted mane of the painted horse.  It’s like the novelist said: Entertainment provides relief.  The only relief I can offer you here is Christ, who did not come to entertain.

The message here, the message of the Church, the apostolic teaching, is not do good and be nice.  It never has been.  The message is always love the Lord your God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.  That’s not all the message.  Beloved, if that was the message of Christ, he needn’t have bothered, because that teaching was already in the ears of Israel, had been for untold centuries of generations.  They had Moses and the prophets!

We’re told that the apostles were preaching, and with Spirit power, the resurrection of Jesus.  That couldn’t have happened without a tomb, and that didn’t happen without a cross.  And none of that would have been required if it weren’t for one little word: sin.  The message of Jesus, then, is all about cross, tomb, and resurrection.  That’s the message, the meaningful message that changes life, saves life, gives life.  It isn’t do good and be nice.  It isn’t even love one another.  Beloved, my non-religious relatives and atheist friends love their friends, spouses, and children; they have sympathetic compassion for those who have been hurt or suffered injustice.  No.  If we’re not getting the message right, we’re not going to get much of anything right, and the world will notice and not care, going about its old business in its new old-fashioned ways.

One of the tried-and-true attacks upon Christians is the charge of hypocrisy: we don’t practice what we preach . . . unlike who?  Still, if we’re no better than anyone else . . . except we’re also always telling one another to keep away from any holier-than-thou-ism—don’t judge, right!?  No, we’re not better than anyone else; and that’s why nobody bothers to join us!  That leaves us with the sneaking suspicion that people out there, despite all the egalitarian talk, secretly want to feel superior to somebody.  Jesus tells us about that, too.

Yes, we are hypocrites and always will be in this life, which could be depressing if we didn’t also have a Savior and Lord named Jesus.  Christ practiced what he preached; our life in the church is life in him, from him, and through him, as this table before us always reminds us.  Ashamed of our hypocrisy, we are justifiably proud of his integrity, faith, and obedience.  He tells us that he sends his own Spirit to help us live his way: life on God’s terms, resurrection life.  Over these weeks since Easter, we’ve been hearing about what that sort of living looks like.

It’s living by grace, and yes, it does look like something.  It does look like love one another; it looks like God’s love embodied, emboldened, enacted.  Luke says that “God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all 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 and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need” (4:33-35).  Now, to my cynical ears—that is, my Calvinist ears—distributing “to anyone who had need” sounds like a system ripe for abuse and fraud; except the Spirit is in it.  “No needy persons”: O, for such a world, such a society!  O, for such a church!  A church had a member who had done rather well in life; people in the church knew it.  A couple in that same church, through the usual, incremental ways, had fallen into the habit of living beyond their means—way beyond their means.  It’s not hard to do!  From time to time, one or both would quietly go to the member who had done well and make their case, with tears and assurances.  This saint had helped them out before; they hoped it might happen again.  So, I hear what Luke says about this distributing to any who had need and it causes my stubborn heart some concern.

But Luke isn’t talking about a system of abuse.  He is talking about a church of integrity, a koinonia people of grace, compassion and truthfulness, confession, repentance, and active, Spirit-guided amendment of old unhelpful habits.  Paul talks about this in the eighth and ninth chapters of 2 Corinthians.  Life happens—reversals, setbacks, loss of job, sudden illness, a burden far beyond the little savings many of us find ourselves barely able to put aside, anymore.  And the church could help.  I’m not sure that Luke is even primarily talking about cash payouts, like that free government money on those convenient plastic cards like everybody else has, or the free money that magically shows up in our checking accounts one glorious day, or several—is it always in an election year?

The church becomes aware of particular needs, and as a body we help: with food, with childcare, with visiting the sick and injured, with doing cleaning, shopping, or emptying the litter box: small things done with great love.  Grace is knowing the need and doing what is within our power to help.  Love looks like something.  Jesus stopped for the one: gave his time, attention, and concern, even to the one.  This is our fellowship, our koinonia in Christ.  William Barclay, as so often, gets it right: “However much these early Christians had their moments on the heights, they never forgot that someone had not enough and that all must help.  Prayer was supremely important, the witness of words was supremely important, but the culmination was love of the brotherhood.”[2]

To the God of all grace, who calls us all to share God’s eternal glory in union with Christ, be the power forever!

               [1] A. W. Tozer.  Tragedy in the Church: The Missing Gifts (1978).  Qtd in Tozer on Leadership, a Daily Devotional via BibleGateway.com

               [2] William Barclay.  Acts of the Apostles.  1953.  Daily Study Bible.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1976.  43.