SermonStudio

Now here is what I often think of as a passage of scripture with high potential for use as a brick--bat. At least it is often employed that way by folks who think the way the church moves ahead is by making people feel guilty and bad about things that are not their fault. Sometimes preachers read this and find it almost too tempting to stand before their congregations and extol the glories of the church in the New Testament version of the "good old days," so that everyone pretty much feels extra lousy that the good old days appear to be long--gone enough as to be well nigh unrecoverable. Yes, in the good old days - if only we could have lived then - why, folks in the church were just together, like a family, had all things in common, for crying out loud. Try suggesting that to a modern congregation, even one that claims to "preach the Bible." They had all things in common? What church practices that today, other than a few monastic orders, or loony cults? I'm already feeling like a faithless, no good so--and--so. This must be a really good sermon by that inappropriate--guilt measuring stick.

Before we descend into excessive guilt, though, we should probably read this and other scripture about the early church, remembering that whatever else we might feel justifiably guilty about in our lives, we ought not feel guilty for having been born into a century other than the first one. Not our fault. We should also probably recall the old tongue--in--cheek remark that nostalgia just isn't what it used to be. It never is.

This passage reminisces about those first days of the church's existence, when the fellowship shared everything, when wonders and signs were popping off the apostles' fingertips like firecrackers, when they spent time together in the Jerusalem Temple every day, when even their eating together was marked by words such as "glad," and "generous." There was goodwill even from those outside the church, and new members were flowing into the fellowship day by day. Yes, those were the days, weren't they? If only the church could simply have remained in those halcyon days.

But why didn't it? Why couldn't it? Why won't it? There are lots of reasons. If we were to read on in Acts beyond this idealized snapshot of the church's life in its first days, we would find that soon apostles will be winding up in jail for their preaching. Where at first those outside the fellowship had what Luke records as "the goodwill of all the people," that sentiment was not to last, not universally. Within a few years there would be persecution, imprisonment, even execution at the hands of those outside the fellowship. Even within the church, Ananias and Saphira would be found withholding funds from the fellowship, and lying about it to boot. Soon, Greek Christians and Hebrew Christians would be at odds over whether or not the church should continue all or even some of the Jewish synagogue and Temple practices. Even the apostles would disagree about this. Stephen would be murdered for his faith. Things looked really really golden in this passage, but the very faithfulness of the church would soon thrust it into a world that does not yet know nor yet value the witness of those whose lives have been given to Christ as Lord and Savior.

What we do have in this snapshot of the earliest life of the church is a memory picture, like our favorite memory of the way folks were customarily seated around the dinner table at the family Christmas dinner. Brother here, sister there, grandmother across the way, dad there, mom here. Now that mental picture is the stuff of Currier and Ives or of Norman Rockwell. But you and I know that underneath the idealized Ozzie and Harriet picture of such occasions, there has always lived the nitty--gritty day--to--day reality that just insists itself into the picture even on special days. The already--broken toy that lay in the living room and the tears that were still brimming on young eyelids about it; the fight you just had with your brother or sister over a chocolate bar; the angry glance that your mother shot at your father after some callous remark about the vegetables.

The purpose of golden memories is not to throw our ordinary lives into shadow, but to give us something to shoot for, an ideal about the way things can be in the kingdom. Just because we have things in common does not mean that all experience is common. Some of it is holy; sometimes we do not see how holy it is until we look back later, sometimes much later. Sometimes the ordinary stays ordinary in our memory for years, decades, until some present circumstance throws new light on it and it provides a vision of what could be from a totally unexpected place.

I have a friend who never thought what a good driving teacher his father was, for instance, until another two decades passed and he was the driving teacher whose didactic methods paled in comparison to his father's to the degree that both his daughters much preferred learning to drive with their mother in the passenger seat. That memory, now filled with nostalgia, of course, provided him with a tiny view of the way the world could be, perhaps even ought to be.

It is the golden moments of the church we need to recall when we hit the tough patches. They keep us going, keep us effective. A friend of mine serves a church in a community where a homeless woman froze to death one winter. His church remembered a time in their community when such a thing would have caused a paroxysm of self--examination in the community, and they set about with other churches to do something about it. The social service agencies said they could help but would need time - months - to get the paperwork and funding rolling. The churches said, that is fine, you keep talking about this and working out your procedures, but we are committed to an old vision where the church had all things in common, and we are going to go on without you. Join us when you can. And they did go on. They gave themselves to what they had in common, not to what distinguished them from one another.

We recall communities with schools where children could go and learn their lessons, and make faces at each other, and make eyes at one another, and cry and laugh, and no one ever worried about being shot to death in the school library. In a statistical summary for calendar year 1995, democratic nations were compared in regard to gun deaths of young people under 19. The results are astounding: in Japan there were none; in Great Britain, nineteen; in Germany, 59; in Canada, 153 - 231 total. In the United States, there were 5,285 - 260 in Texas alone!

In 1996 in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Great Britain, Canada, and Germany - all countries with vigorously democratic governments and people who are as free as we are to go about their daily lives - the total number of gun murders for all those nations in 1996 was 377. This compares with 9,390 in the United States for the same year. The main difference between those countries and ours is that ownership of weapons is not considered a birthright of all citizens elsewhere as it is here. That, and the fact that perhaps the time has come for us to admit to ourselves that we have forgotten our more innocent times and become a nation perilously addicted to violence over a broad spectrum of human activity, from art, to cinema, to recreation, to domestic relations.

I don't know about you, but even though the reality is different today following the gruesome and senseless violence of recent years in our public schools, I do not want to let go of that golden memory of violence--free schools and violence--free homes as a source of thinking about how things should be in our culture. We all can remember a day when no one would ever have thought to suggest laws permitting ordinary citizens to carry concealed weapons around in public, when a person who enjoyed hunting would never have thought to go out looking for semi--automatic weapons or stockpiling the makings of bombs in the basement. I have a friend whose Scottish cousin, living in Great Britain, a country with some of the tightest gun control laws and enforcement in the world, expresses utter amazement at the gun culture of the United States. While people in Britain, on the whole, do not own guns, they are not enslaved, they do not find themselves living under a dictator. They also do not shoot their family members with anything approaching the regularity we do here. A magazine ad ran recently, picturing the barrel of a handgun pointed directly at the reader, saying ominously, "The person most likely to kill you with a gun already has a key to your house." Other vigorously democratic and free countries do not witness school children blasting away at each other with weapons that would be the envy of many third world militias, and yet they remain free. What can we learn from their golden dream?

The annual General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) two years ago passed a resolution calling upon all Presbyterians to work toward removing handguns and assault weapons from our homes and communities, adding that church members should develop community strategies and create sanctuaries of safety for our children. If our commitment to the commonweal, our commitment to the common good, can recall a time in our lives together when we first took into account what was best for the most, and only secondarily what is most profitable for the individual, we might find in that a vision for a kind of world we would like to see again. We might even get motivated to say to those who make the laws and enforce them that the time for tolerance of the American gun culture as well as the culture of violence has come to an end, that we have an older and better vision, one which values the good of the whole over the presumed individual rights of those who cling to means of violence.

To be the church sometimes means simply to be the fellowship, that, holding our vision in common, cries out "Enough!" as did Rosa Parks one day on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama; as did John Witherspoon when he became the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence; as did Francis of Assisi when he left behind the war--loving feudal life he had known to work with the poor; as did Abraham Lincoln when he put pen to paper to set the slaves free at last; as did Lyndon Johnson when he introduced legislation to put an end to racial discrimination at the polls; as did Martin Luther, when he helped put an end to the selling of the church's birthright of the grace of Christ.

When in the church we have all things in common, it turns out that they are anything but all common things. They become holy things, a holy calling. We need to pray about our calling whenever we experience dramatic events in our nation; we need to pray earnestly about the calling of our church community as we confront the issues of the day.