No Divine Lunch-Debt--May 4, 2023

No Divine Lunch-Debt--May 4, 2023

"All who believed 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, as they 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. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved." [Acts 2:44-47]

I am convinced that in the Reign of God, everybody gets to eat.  And at least part of what convinces me of that, the more and more I read the Scriptures, is that the God we meet in the Scriptures loves without keeping score or tallying up debts, wrongs, and obligations.  The God we meet throughout the Scriptures, and in particular through Jesus, says, "You are welcome at the table simply because you are here," rather than, "You are not eligible to eat today because you have too much red ink on your account." And honestly, in a time and culture where some kids go hungry at noon because of their outstanding "lunch debt," it is a radical but necessary thing for us to say that in God's Reign, everybody gets to eat.

I find myself thinking along these lines reading the words of this little snippet from Acts 2, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  The earliest community of Christians, still in the very city of Jerusalem where Jesus had been killed and raised mere months [at most?] before, dared to practice that kind of love--the kind that doesn't keep track of debts incurred, but rather shares according to need. Without making it a new rule or commandment that every Christian community had to pool their resources the exact same way [and to be honest, we do not have a witness in the book of Acts that other Christian communities practiced the same sort of communitarian living as here in this scene], this group of Christ-followers practiced love without score-keeping or bean-counting.  When someone came into their community in need, they provided from their abundance so that nobody would go hungry, rather than saying, "You're gonna have pay me back," or "Sorry, you were hungry yesterday and I helped you, so you still owe me for that."  These followers of Jesus were convinced that God's kind of love doesn't see everything as a transaction, where I have to get back in return what I lend out [and with a tidy profit in interest, of course], but rather sees everything as happening within the household of God.  And in a family or household, everybody gets to eat, regardless of whether you paid off the costs of what you ate yesterday.

In a sense, that seems obvious--after all, in your family, I'll bet that everyone in the household gets to eat even if you didn't pay for it, work to earn it, or sign a contract that you'll work off the cost with future labor.  Kids get to eat without bringing money to the table, just like they did yesterday and the day before.  There is no meal-debt in the household.  And yet, as everyone grows up in the household, you come to learn that in the big picture, we all make contributions to the household so that everyone can eat.  Sometimes I'm the one to set the table, and sometimes I'm the cook.  Sometimes I'm the one washing dishes, and sometimes I've got to run out the dinner to an early meeting or come home from a late one and can't be much help around the kitchen that night.  Sometimes I do the prep and the washing of dishes if others need to be somewhere else.  Kids sometimes help set the table, and sometimes they have to do homework or get off to soccer practice or basketball.  But the one thing we DON'T do is keep a tally of who has earned the "right" to eat dinner based on making sufficient contributions.  And that is, quite simply, because a family operates on an economy of love rather than on an economy of profit.  I'm willing to bet that's how your family works, too.

The revolutionary thing is to realize that's how God runs the whole household we call the Christian community, and indeed, the whole universe.  But that is precisely what made the early church so compelling: they took seriously what Jesus had taught them--namely, that all of creation is God's household, and therefore that all of creation is meant to be ordered in light of God's love rather than some need to settle scores and get even.  The early Christian community of sharing created a little bastion of clarity where you could glimpse what God's Reign looked like in real relationships, like an embassy of heaven itself.  And there was no such thing as lunch debt there--for anybody.  When those with abundance shared what they had so that others could eat, it wasn't with the salivating anticipation of future profits when a loan came due. They didn't think to themselves, "I'll sell my possessions to share with others, and then they'll have to pay me back with interest and I'll make a profit back on the risk." The early Christian community just said, "In the household of God, everybody gets to eat--and here are fellow siblings in the family of God."  No bookkeeping, no IOUS. No lunch debt.  And because of that they were radically free to love whoever crossed their path.

And, as you'll note, the narrator of Acts tells us that such love sent shockwaves through the city, and people were drawn to this fledgling movement of fishermen and tax collectors in huge numbers.  People were aching for an alternative to the stingy transactional thinking of the world around them, where everything came with strings, and where score was kept forever.  They were amazed that there could be another way of sharing life together, and they were equally astonished that they could belong to such a community of graciousness.  The idea that this new kind of shared household of God was an open community, to which new people could be drawn and welcomed in, rather than a closed circle that had to keep the "riff-raff" out, was incredible.  And yet that was exactly the truth--becoming a follower of Jesus was like a welcome into a household where everyone would be able to eat, where those with abundance would share for the good of all, and where debts were cancelled.

We still occasionally get glimpses of that kind of love in action, but I'll be honest: they are rarer than they appeared to be in these early days of the Jerusalem church.  In our best and most faithful moments, we still defy the transactional, bean-counting logic of a culture driven by profits, when we do good for others who will never be able to pay us back.  When people give their time to help distribute food at the local food bank, or grow it in their gardens and bring it over, or give energy and resources to raise money when a family in the neighborhood is going through crisis or a life-changing diagnosis, you get a taste of what the church did here in Acts 2.  We still find ourselves worrying about balancing income with expenditures, and we still get swept up sometimes in how to make the most money, or how to ensure the financial stability of our congregations and ministries. And I get that--these matters are not inconsequential.  But it's in those moments of audacious generosity that you really get a glimpse of how God rules the universe... and somehow you want to be more fully involved and immersed in that kind of love.

So... what's stopping us?

Lord God, let us live this day recognizing all the world as your household, and all the people we meet as people whom you love and for whom you have provided enough.