Sermon 5/3/2020 “A prophecy”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Resurrection with Meade Memorial Church “at home” in Alexandria, VA
Text: Acts 2:42-47
Day: 4Easter, Year A, during a pandemic
I bring a prophecy today. This is a dangerous thing to do—prophesy to people who don’t know you. The only thing more dangerous is to prophesy to people who DO know you.
If I were an old-time prophet, my prophecy might begin with today’s gospel. An old-time prophet would use Jesus’ comparison between “thieves and bandits” and the “Good Shepherd” to note how we “slip over the sheepfold fence” to follow false shepherds, the shepherds of money and power, the shepherd of prosperity gospel.
If I were an old-time prophet, my message would be, “repent and return to the Lord.” Isn’t that always the prophetic message, to warn of doom, to identify the cause, and to foretell the path of hope and salvation?
If I were an old-time prophet, the message would be clear and unequivocal: wake up, pay attention, and change your ways, or else! The prophet Jonah’s message was clear: repent of idolizing cruelty or be destroyed. The prophet Joel’s message was clear: repent and return to the Lord or the plague will erase your kingdom. The prophet Amos’ message was clear: natural disasters are a sign of your coming annihilation unless you repent of corruption and injustice. The prophet Hosea’ message was clear: stop worshiping false gods and return to the Lord. All of these prophets’ warnings went unheeded, and the Northern Kingdom of Israel is lost. So, too, were the messages all the other old-time prophets, summed up this way: give up whatever you have replaced God with and make God central in your life.
I’m not an old-time prophet, but I am a prophet. I see God at work in and through our pandemic. God DIDN’T SENT the plague, but God has ALLOWED the virus and is at work in what’s happening to us.
God apparently included certain “fail safe” processes within creation that trigger whenever threshold conditions are reached. The terrible Ebola virus, for instance, lives in rodents that inhabit the remote corners of our planet. And when our population gets so large people begin to inhabit those remote places, Ebola flares up. If we curb Ebola without considering the underlying condition that triggered that virus, we fail to heed the warning God intended.
Apparently, God embedded other fail-safe measures in creation. For instance, perhaps you have heard it said … <twinkle> … that the entire arc of scripture, the arc of the moral universe—bends toward justice. We see this arc, this push, first in Exodus when God heard the cries of his enslaved people and set them free. We understand scripture as God nurturing us to love all people unconditionally (as God loves), winding through and beyond the defeat of apartheid toward release of the captive and salvation for all the oppressed. Therefore, when injustice becomes so rampant today the cries of the poor, the marginalized, and the aliens rise to the high heavens, we people of faith should view any global crisis as a fail-safe mechanism to get our attention. I mean, could the ten disasters that plagued the Egyptians have been worse than our situation today?
We people of faith must examine our current reality and then honestly and prayerfully discern together what we need to do to “repent and return to the Lord.” This isn’t about getting others to act; the answer lies within each of us. Who will WE BE in our broken world?
There is no doubt something is seriously wrong. God has put us in “time out.” We need to discern what is wrong with the way we have been living and the way we have been interacting with each other. And to begin this discernment, God has given us the first reading today from Acts to show us what our world should be like.
“All who believed,” the passage says, “were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day,” the reading continues, “as they—[Christ-followers]—spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
Can you feel the excitement of these new converts to Jesus’ way of life? The serenity, the purpose? They were together. They functioned as a unit, not because they thought alike but because they committed to be one. They were generous. They worshiped in the temple EVERY SINGLE DAY. Then they ate together, sharing Jesus’ Last Supper. They were not simply happy, but joyous. And they praised God no matter how hard they were persecuted, praised God for their suffering, so that even the people who persecuted them were impressed and won over.
This all sounds too good to be true. But there is something at its core that is Truth—the way we are meant to live, in harmony with God, in harmony with our world and with each other. And we are to model for our world how to live for Christ against our culture of greed, just as Jesus modeled for HIS world how to counter the culture of the Roman occupation in his day. Required to carry a soldier’s pack a mile? Carry it two miles. Struck on the face? Turn the other cheek.
Acts’ account of the early Christian Church was from its toddler stage. Soon, when Christ hadn’t returned immediately, Christians settled in for the long haul and matured as a community. That the Church has thrived for 2,000 years is a testament to the Truth at the core of our existence: WE ARE this church. While we no longer find it practical to worship together every day, we worship together as a congregation each week and have personal devotions on the other days… don’t we?
Christians found it impractical over the long term to give away EVERYTHING they owned to the poor. But the spirit of this kind of giving is evident, even today in the outpouring of resources, for example, to feed hungry people during this pandemic. Along with this way of thinking comes the realization that we actually own NOTHING we possess—everything we have and everything we are comes from God and is on loan from God. And our life as Christians involves figuring out how much to give back to God, joyfully and thankfully, no strings attached, to do what God would have us do.
This is my prophecy today: The Christian Church will continue to thrive to the extent we live in joyous harmony with all people and spend time in fellowship with God. If we don’t do this, don’t repent and return to the Lord, we too will die.
So, what will you do this week to live an Acts 2 kind of life?
