enough – Presbydestrian

“Of One Heart and Soul”
Acts 4:32-35
April 12, 2015, First Presbyterian Church of Holt

Listen to audio here.

Do you ever read scripture and think: “Really?!” “Really?!” was my first reaction when I read this text. I thought, whoever wrote this first line of this passage must be the type of guy who writes greeting cards and inspirational posters filled with empty platitudes. No way could any group unequivocally say that they are of “one heart and soul.” Even one of the commentaries I read this week said, “there is little doubt that our author paints a rather idyllic scene.”[1] Indeed!

But then my second thought was jealousy. I’d love to live in a society that was that incredibly united and without any needs. A culture where “great grace [is] upon [us] all.” Could it be, might it be possible?

This reminds me of a sermon on the feeding of the 5,000 that I heard by Nadia Bolz-Weber, Pastor of “House for All Sinners and Saints,” a Lutheran church in Denver, CO. She speaks about the possibilities of what happened at that tremendous miracle, and the disciples’ perceived inadequacies.

She writes, “I started to wonder what was going on with [the disciples] that they would see the scene in front of them as they did. I wondered why they wanted the crowds to go away and fend for themselves and why, when Jesus asked what they had, they said “nothing. Nothing but 5 loaves and a couple fish.”

And with that offering, that meager offering, which they thought was “nothing,” a whole crowd was fed.

She continues saying, “the disciples must have learned… that there was more available to them than what they themselves were bringing to the table…Maybe [Jesus] didn’t want the disciples to send the people away because Jesus knew that those people had what the disciples lacked. Maybe the disciples, like us, need to be reminded that even when we do not have what is needed, what is needed is still at hand…it’s just [going to] come from God or others, because in God’s economy, that’s how it works.”

And then she preached this line that buzzes around in my head, and I plan to cross-stitch for my office wall one of these days:

“What you have is enough because it’s never all that there is.”[2]

For me that has been a tremendously profound thought.

It also takes a lot of pressure off, refocusing what my life and ministry are about, not about being all things for all people, but pointing to our God who is, and our community, which can manifest God’s goodness for each of us.

By recognizing that we on our own are not enough, and allowing God to work through the places where we are lacking, we open ourselves to receiving grace. When we try to do it all on our own, we are operating as functional atheists, ones who see no need for God’s presence and providence in our lives. When we acknowledge that we are not self-sufficient, but still are willing to bring who we are and what we have, offering our lives as contributions to the work of God’s kingdom, all together we have more than enough.

It is important to notice that our scripture says that the believers were all of one heart and soul… not that they were all of one mind or body. The believers in Acts experienced abundance not because they were all the same in their thoughts, physical appearance, and background, but because they were different. Through their individual experiences and gifts, they were able to contribute to a more complete community. Each bringing who they are and what they have, none of them experienced need.

I would argue that one of the joys I’ve found in Christian community is that the less we have in common in body and mind, the more closely we rely on our common faith in Christ to be what unites us. Some of my most profound moments in ministry have been leading worship among a room of people with dementia, exploring what it is to be God’s beloved child with our X-team kids, or joining together with strangers from around the country to serve God in mission at workcamps during my high school summers. Those experiences are impactful because of our commonality found in Christ.

If we decide to spend all of our time together because we’re all the same age, ethnicity, or gender, or because we like that same movies, music, and sports teams, our unification is not one of any depth or substance. But if we come together for worship and service to our God, because of our love of God and our belief in our resurrected Christ, we are indeed of one heart and soul, and privy to God’s abundance in our community and lives.

“What you have is enough because it is never all there is.”

The uniqueness of that community in Acts, is that they understood that. They understood that on their own there was still need; by their own merits there was still sin. The reason they were united wasn’t some common pact to live in harmony or because they liked all the same things. It was because they knew and believed utterly that Jesus was lived and died so that they may have new life, and that they might know a way forward into God’s grace.

In our passage today we read, “with great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.” That great grace was not upon them because of their own merits, but because of the deference that showed to God, the way that they used their lives to point to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is what united them and gave them purpose as they were forming the new church follow Christ’s death and resurrection.

Twentieth century theologian, Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote, “Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, for eternity.”[3]

Might our community be “of one heart and soul”? As idyllic as it sounds, and as incredible as it may be to believe, this unity is possibly through our common belief in our resurrected Christ. May it be so. Amen.

[1] David L. and Taylor, Barbara Brown Bartlett, Feasting On the Word: Year B, Volume 2, Lent through Eastertide: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary (Feasting On the Word: Year b Volume) Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 382.

[2] Nadia Bolz-Weber “Sermon On Lembas Bread, the Feeding of the 5,000 and Why I Hated Pastoral Care Classes,” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/, August 6, 2014, accessed April 9, 2015, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/nadiabolzweber/2014/08/sermon-on-lembas-bread-the-feeding-of-the-5000-and-why-i-hated-pastoral-care-classes/.

“Abundance”
Luke 12:13-34
August 4, 2013, First Presbyterian Church of Jesup

Where in your life do you feel inadequate? For many of us, when asked this question we can probably give a whole list of things: financial instability, health concerns, strained relationships, job insecurity, pain in the lives of those we love, heartache for the pain of the world. It seems like worry is somewhat of a default setting when we are thinking about our world.

My mind even brings up a scene from “Mean Girls,” in which a group of high school girls are looking at themselves in the mirror and each pointing out their own perceived physical deficiencies. When one of the girls doesn’t say anything negative about herself the other girls stare at her until she comes up with something, insisting through their peer pressure that there has to be something about who you are that is simply not good enough.

We seem trained to look for inadequacy, to point out our faults, to see where we are lacking. Worrying is such an easy thing to fall into, and when we’re doing it, it seems helpful, productive, supportive even. If we let it, this world will always make us feel that like the man in Jesus’ parable, that we need bigger barns; that what we have or who we are is not enough. The man in this story was not working from a place of true deficiency; in fact scripture tells us that the rich man had accumulated much wealth. But that wealth did not bring contentment, it simply brought about his perceived need for more barns for all of the crops he took in.

How about we ask another question: where in your life do you experience abundance? I hope we can also write a list for this one: plenty of food to eat, comfort of a roof over our heads, warmth of the company of loved ones, the joy of God’s creation, the love of our great God, and the companionship of a loving church family. I hope we can look into the mirror and share in God’s affirmation that God’s creation is indeed “good.”

Acknowledging the abundance in our lives isn’t as popular of a thing to think about. Counting our blessings can seem haughty. Acknowledging the depth of our inherent worth as children of God can seem unfounded since it is something we are unable to quantify. We are taught by this world that contentment is complacency. That being comfortable in our own skin, in our own pay scale, in our relationships, means that we don’t have enough ambition. Contentment, to some, seems like we are giving up on growth. God calls us to live deeply and fully into our lives, into our relationships, into the eternal.

1 Timothy 6:6-10, “Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains.” Accumulation of things that tie us to our earthly existence is an investment in that which simply will not last. Contentment is the acknowledgement of the blessings that are in our lives and finding joy in what already is.

There’s a British pop group named, “The Streets,” who have a song called “Everything is Borrowed” which echoes these verses. The music video for this song shows a family waking up in the morning to a knock on their door and the news that their house has been foreclosed. Everything in their home is now the possession of the bank. The video ends out with the couple and young son standing on the sidewalk in front of their house as everything they own is loaded into a moving truck to be taken by the bank’s collectors. As the camera pans out it’s hard to feel hopeful for this family who has just lost all that they own, but then the chorus to the song comes on. It goes like this: “I came to this world with nothing, and I leave with nothing but love. Everything else is just borrowed.”

While this telling of the family’s foreclosure is all too real of a reality in this economic time, our scripture speaks of a security beyond what we can carry around with us in this world, beyond what can be loaded into a moving truck or stored in barns.

Luke 12:33-34 says, “Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

If we find our abundance in earthly things, we will be disappointed. If we invest in the stuff of this world, we will find that perhaps our barns are overflowing, but our lives are empty. Emphasis on the quantity in our lives life rather than on the quality will always be evasive.

This toxic desire for accumulation can even infect our church life. Even as we seek to welcome all who enter into this building with open arms, growing a church just to have more numbers on the rolls is not what we are called to be about. We are called first to grow in the depth of our love for one another, to show more richness towards God, and to fall more in love with the life to which God has called us. Abundance of love towards God and another opens the doors to the kingdom of God here on earth.

One deficiency that this passage points out as being very, very real, is the fleeting nature of time. While the man in the parable had accumulated wealth so he could live comfortably, in verse 20 we are told that he will lose his life that very night. And in Luke 12:25 we read, “And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”

While all in this congregation will find themselves with different timelines trailing behind them, none of us can know what time lies before us. When we are working with such unknowably finite time, busyness becomes an idol. We want to have some thing to show for our time, some quantifiable measure of our worth.

Author, Carrie Anne Hudson writes, “Busyness is an interesting god. It tells us that we are important and needed. It reminds us that if we keep moving, eventually our existence will be validated. This idol tells us that if we stop to chat with our elderly neighbor or write a letter to a friend, that someone else will be gaining ground on us. Busyness becomes such powerful force demanding our worship, that we minimize things like relationships because relating doesn’t get us anywhere.”

Belief that self-worth is based on time devoted to productivity or solely reflected by paychecks is a lie. I’ve seen friends that struggle with this when making decisions on whether or not to be a stay at home parent. When so much of our life path is structured towards being “productive members of society,” we are not conditioned to see the worth of relationship and the blessing of time invested in the well being of others.

When reading the parable of the foolish man, it’s important to realize why this man is foolish and how this man is making his decisions. In verse 17 it says, “he thought to himself,” and in verse 19, “and I will say to my soul.” This man was talking to himself!

In his abundance of crops, he wasn’t taking any time to think about how his abundance could contribute to the lives of those around him. Nor was he taking time to be thankful for the others who had allowed this abundance to be possible. Surely he had help working the fields and surely he could be thankful for appropriate weather conditions that allowed for such a harvest. Wealth in and of itself is not the sin presented in this story or what makes him foolish; it’s the man’s inability to consider others when managing his wealth. It is his investment in his own material happiness, at the expense of others. There are people around him who could benefit from his material abundance, and also from his eternal investment of relationship.

In verse 19 and following we read that the rich man says to his soul, “’Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

What does it mean to be “rich towards God?” Richness in God is acting in ways that enlarge God’s kingdom, welcoming others into the abundant life to which God is calling them. Matthew 25:31-46 tells us how we may to be rich towards God, how we may invest in our eternal inheritance:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

We become rich towards God when we are rich towards one another. The prepositions are important here. Being rich towards God is very different from being rich from God. Richness towards God is applying the abundances of our lives in ways that work to bringing about God’s kingdom. It is not simply sitting back storing up the blessings we have received, placing them in our barns and closing the doors. Richness towards God is investing the material wealth, and particularly the meager wealth of time we have, in relationships that bring God glory.

In Luke 12:29-31 we read, “And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.”

Striving for the kingdom, rather than the world, is a radical proposition. This means giving up the twin vices of worry and busyness. It means counting our blessings. It means seeing our abundance as not something to be squandered, but something to be shared.

As “The Streets” remind us, “We came to this world with nothing, and we leave with nothing but love. Everything else is just borrowed.” May we invest our love richly in ways that last. Amen.