Easter Economics

Easter Economics--May 1, 2019

"With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold." [Acts 4:33-34]

As a general rule, when you see one sentence sitting right next to another in a paragraph--say, in a newspaper or magazine article, in a novel, or in a daily devotional blog you read online--there is a connection between them.  The ideas in one sentence are supposed to lead to the next sentence, whether reinforcing a single main idea, offering a contrast, or advancing a train of thought in a logical progression toward a conclusion.  Sentences that sit side by side are usually related.

Can we take that as a pretty solid, pretty obvious given?  Does that seem fair? Reasonable? Logical?

The reason I ask is that, even though I know that the original manuscripts of the books we now know as the New Testament didn't have chapters, verses, or paragraphs like our modern Bibles do, they certainly were still written to have a logical flow.  And more to the point, I think it's reasonable to assume that when a given author puts one idea next to another, readers like us are meant to see a relationship between those ideas, rather than treating the Scriptures like random compilations of isolated verses waiting to be embroidered on throw pillows and inscribed on decorative bookmarks at your local religious bookstore.  

All of that seems like just standard, elementary reading comprehension stuff, right?  Good.  Glad that's settled.

So let's try this out.  In this section of the book we call The Acts of the Apostles, the narrator (Luke) notes that the earliest Christian community was centered on the message of the resurrection, and that this same early Christian community was moved to sell their possessions and share them with those who were in need.  Now, you could dismiss these two sentences as merely unrelated random facts that Luke just threw together like a jumble of early Christian trivia... or you could ask if Luke sees a connection between the two of them.

And, just to lay my cards on the table here, I think there is a connection.  The more I think about the way these two sentences sit side by side, the more I can't help but see a logical through-line from the empty tomb to the abundant sharing of the early church.  In a sense, it just seems like the logical conclusion of taking Easter seriously.  After all, if Jesus is alive and risen from the dead, well, then two things follow:  first, he was right about how life is meant to be lived, and second, the point of life (if resurrection is real) has to be more than simply acquiring more stuff.  

Consider the first of those for a moment.  The early church took it as a given that if Jesus was raised from the dead by God, it was a vindication of all that Jesus had said, done, and taught.  And so the resurrection is a sort of divine stamp of endorsement on Jesus' teaching to share our abundance, to announce blessing on the poor, and not to hoard possessions in bigger and bigger barns while others go hungry.  Jesus taught his followers to share with one another and with the wider world, too, and when Jesus rose from the dead, his disciples understood that to mean that he was right about how we use our resources.  

And then second, if the resurrection of Jesus is indeed real, and if that further means that death is not the last word over our lives, then the meaning of life has got to be more than just, "The one who dies with the most toys wins."  The resurrection shouts that other people matter more than holding onto our stuff--yes, even our private property. The resurrection reminds us that people are of such infinite worth to God that God will hold onto our lives even through death, while our stuff will all one day collapse in rust and decay.  If the resurrection is true, then the lives of other people matter more than me clutching onto my trinkets and treasures.

I'm not sure that most Christians I know (myself included) have really thought this bit of Easter economics through and worked it out.  In the American church, we tend to treat our property as our permanent possessions, awarded to us by God for good behavior and hard work, and that others who have less are simply out of luck unless they work harder, do more, or get a better-paying job.  We tend to treat people as disposable and our possessions as permanent.  But it sure seems like Luke is saying the opposite.  It sure seems like Luke is saying that if we take Easter seriously, we will be much less interested in holding onto our money, our piles of stuff, and our pensions than we are in caring for one another--because we know that people will be raised from the dead, while our treasures will only gather (and eventually become) dust.

For the first followers of Jesus, it was so vitally important to get the word of the resurrection of Christ to as many people as possible that the individual members and families of the church took it upon themselves to sell their real estate, cash in their investments, and give it away to make sure that their sisters and brothers had clothes, and food, and a roof over their heads.  Somehow, I think we have gotten it backwards and upside down in our culture, where we use religion (I dare not call it genuine Christianity) as a justification for clutching more tightly onto our stuff and assuming that God's will is for our endless acquisition of more.  

We get so antsy when someone dares to suggest that there is a higher good in the universe than me getting to hold onto piles of money, and we get even more nervous if someone suggests that "my money" should be shared with other people around me.  And I get it, I know that the scene here in Acts 4 is not in any way, shape, or form a coercive government-mandated socialist state.  I'm not talking Bolshevism, here: what the book of Acts describes in the Jerusalem church was neither required in every new town where the Gospel went, nor was it ever mandated with threats of punishment at the end of a sword or the barrel of a gun by the army.  But what I am suggesting is that for Luke and the other voices of the New Testament, Easter did demand a radical revision of values, and the importance of acquiring more and more became trivial, while the importance of caring for other people, even with your own hard earned money, grew more and more.  And that reversal of values is going to put us at odds with the voices of our day and our setting, which seem only to harp about how high the Dow Jones is closing and how fast the GDP is growing, without considering what sort of people we are becoming as we obsess over our wealth.

Maybe today is a day for us to consider just how much the Easter story is going to mess with our old picture of the "good life." Because if we take the resurrection seriously, we can no longer simply be satisfied with getting a bigger house, a newer phone, and a more luxurious car. Those investments are simply too shortsighted--they will only last your own lifetime at best.  But other people? By the resurrecting power of God, they will last forever.  They are worth giving up our piles of stuff for in order that they might have food and clothes and a home.

The bottom line is this: other people's well-being is more important than my ability to have a newer car with more storage room to lug around my ever-increasing piles of stuff.

Today, let us be Easter people; let us become people who recklessly share our abundance.

Lord Jesus, let your risen life reorient our values, so that we can spend our lives investing in what you show us to be important--the lives of others.