30 April 2023: WWJD?
Acts 2:42-47
Much like us, they were Congregationalist and Abolitionist. After the Enslavers Rebellion had ended and Reconstruction had subsequently failed, plunging the South back into the abyss of exploitation and racism, their frontier congregation moved on to other tasks of life together in Christian community.
In 1889, with a growing population, they decided to plant a new church. This is something that happened until fairly recently, until traditional churches started collapsing and megachurches started opening satellite campuses, and by satellite, I mean the pastor beaming in live from the main campus.
Which we were all pretty snarky about right up until the pandemic, when we suddenly wished we had their production skills.
So it was that Central Congregational Church was established in Topeka, Kansas. They called the Rev. Charles Sheldon, a native of Wellsville, New York, just a couple of counties west of here, then still in his early thirties and serving a congregation in Vermont. He was no radical. A graduate of Philips Academy and Brown University, he was comfortable and respectable. That was until he experienced that first winter in Topeka.
Poverty comes in many forms, from the manipulative images of humanitarian appeals on television to American elders who have to choose between food and medicine. Whatever it looked like in Topeka in 1889, it was enough to radically change Charles Sheldon. He spent less time in the pulpit discussing doctrine and personal salvation, and a whole lot more preaching Christianity as a way of living, preaching the practice of the Way of Jesus. He framed this with a simple question: “What would Jesus do?”
Sheldon would be appalled at what has become, his question, his message, reduced to a brand, “WWJD?”, and emblazoned on rubber bracelets and t-shirts and mylar balloons, products manufactured by functional slaves in an overseas authoritarian state, ashamed that “WWJD?” would become a generational mantra for people who focused on personal salvation as if it were a consumer product. Who, if they could fit the poor into their prosperity gospel at all, did so in the toxic form of tourism mission trips that cost thousands of dollars.
Aren’t they just “blessed”?
Sheldon was neither the first nor the last to pursue what would become known as the “social gospel.” Thomas Beecher and the founders of this church focused on practical Christianity. The Eastmans, pastor-parents and activist children at the Park Church, also focused on the practice of Christianity, providing important witness on issues like labor justice and equality for women.
Charles Sheldon turned the stories he used in his practical preaching into a novel, “In His Steps,” first published in 1896. It did fairly well, a best seller at the time and still selling today, more than 50 million copies at last count, though that number is inexact since it is long out of copyright.
Another pastor from upstate New York, Walter Rauschenbusch, would be similarly transformed by his encounter with poverty, while he was serving in “Hell’s Kitchen,” then very appropriately named. As a professor at Rochester Theological in the years after his Manhattan pastorate, he would become one of the first to articulate a theological foundation for church as a community radically engaged in the world, first with “Christianity and the Social Crisis” published in 1907, and then with “A Theology for the Social Gospel” a decade later.
So many Christians spend so much time focused on what we should believe, but there have always been good Christians like these who focused on how we should live, even in those early days when they expected the end times at any moment, even today when the end times may well come at any moment, but if so, it will be our own doing with no help from the divine.
Today’s scripture reading from Luke’s account of the early church describes how they lived, their practical Christianity. Some have even tried to attach modern socio-economic labels to the community, socialist or Marxist, though it is a stretch trying to fit ancient practices into Enlightenment boxes. But I guess that is no different than those who try to claim an absurd church-less Christianity, since Jesus and his successors only ever considered the Way of Jesus as a collective enterprise, a team sport.
Let’s take a moment to situate the text itself. The Acts of the Apostles as we have it today is not a thing. The author wrote what we now call the Gospel According to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles as a single work. Once they became separated, text was added to give the gospel a conclusion and Acts a beginning. Then, as the biblical canon was standardized, they became separated, with John placed between the two parts.
Tradition names the author as Luke, a physician, and associates him with Paul’s mission to the Gentiles. A native of Antioch in what is now the Republic of Türkiye, he is mentioned three times in the Pauline epistles.
For the first part of his text, the portion covering the life and ministry of Jesus, scholars widely agree that Luke uses two sources he shares with the author of the gospel traditionally attributed to Matthew, some early form of the Gospel According to Mark and a lost gospel we call Q. If we accept the witness of the epistles, he actually lived through many of the events he described in the latter half of the text.
By the time Luke wrote his epic, the generation that was eye-witness to the life and ministry of Jesus was gone, and the first successor generation, including the author himself, was aging. Luke is recording story and practice, and is often characterized as an early historian. Still, I’m sure he’d be shocked to know we’re still reading his text almost two thousand years later. See above for end of the world.
Now that we’ve situated Luke historically and reminded ourselves that we are part of a movement of practical Christianity and social gospel, let’s dive back into the passage.
They spend time together. They study their faith. They have glad and generous hearts, are people of goodwill. They pray, they praise God, and their church is growing.
So far, pretty much all Christians can get on board. It’s just that one line: They sold their possessions and shared the proceeds with the community as any had need. Which sounds an awful lot like “from each according to their ability and to each according to their need” and bam, you’re one-step away from the gulag.
Back away from the ledge. This was effectively a doomsday cult, and selling off everything and waiting for the world to end is pretty much what doomsday cults do. It is what they did then and is what they do now.
This is a description of how they lived in their context, not a teaching of Jesus, not even the word of a prophet.
Even for the folks who pretend to take scripture literally, it doesn’t have the same weight as say Matthew 25, the parable of the sheep and the goats, or the workers in the vineyard who all received the same wage, even if they were recruited late in the day, because those workers and their families still had to eat, even if they didn’t get hired as day-laborers until well after lunch.
It doesn’t have the same weight as the Torah command to pay laborers a just wage. These are just folks sharing in community, breaking bread, praying. The real threat to neoliberalism comes from other parts of the Bible.
Our practical Christianity will not look like the practical Christianity of the Acts of the Apostles. It won’t look like the practical Christianity of the founders of this church, of Beecher or the Eastmans.
Still, there are all of those commands. And we have problems.
Most days, we are heading off with the biblical goats, which in the parable isn’t some fashionable yoga class, but is instead condemnation for our failure to act for the least of these. Our systems are cruel and corrupt.
Most of us work more than we need to in order to meet our needs, and that’s okay, because scripture tells us to work hard enough to also meet the needs of those who cannot work, and wisdom teaches up to work hard enough to be prepared for the drought and the locusts that are coming, for they always come, though today we call those locusts “members of Congress” and the drought “government default.” And work is in and of itself a spiritual good, for doing is part of being alive.
But there are people working as hard as they can, every job they can find, and they cannot meet their needs because some in the system take more than they need, more than they produce, and some take without producing anything of value at all. Jezebel is stealing Naboth’s vineyard right here in Elmira. Corporations are making windfall profits due to price gouging and since the wealthy own stock and the poor do not, the transfer of value from those who work to those who scam is simply accelerating.
The poor get called essential workers, but their kids are sick because of black mold in the basement of the slum they rent but cannot afford.
What would Jesus do? He’d feed the hungry. He’d heal the sick. He’d forgive the sinner. He’d storm into the marketplace, denouncing and disrupting corruption, as he did.
The authorities didn’t mind him when he was off in the sticks doing good deeds. Maybe they were even happy with the stories they heard from Galilee. After all, if he could keep bellies full and people dreaming of some divine intervention, maybe the people would just keep quiet as the Roman occupiers and the Jewish elite plundered and exploited.
Luke’s account of the early church community is not a prescription of how we should live. For that matter, some of the teachings of Jesus are not practical prescriptions of how we should live today. Everybody can’t abandon their nets and follow. Someone still has to catch the fish! And if we’d been letting the dead bury the dead for the last two thousand years, we ‘d be up to our eyeballs in corpses.
It is the spirit of the story we are meant to embrace, not the economic model of a doomsday cult but the idea that how we live should be just and loving. For some that may mean pooled resources. For others, that might mean employee-owned business in a free market system, true socialism. For others, that may mean reparations to lift up those who never had a chance. But for the love of all that is holy, it most certainly does not mean our current economic system. No amount of soup kitchens and coat drives can make what we have now just.
We have inherited many things. One of the best is the “Social Gospel” tradition and the emphasis on a lived and practical Christianity. It is challenging, and will always be so. Amen.