7 April 2024

Acts 4:32-35

During the second year of my professional degree program, I completed a major paper on prayer. I particularly wanted to explore what prayer could mean once you moved beyond human constructions of a puppet-master God who was arbitrary and capricious, who granted some miracles and denied others. 

As part of that process, I spent some time on the Lord’s Prayer, which is problematic despite the fact that it is still central to our collective and individual lives. Does God really expect us to wait passively to receive daily bread, or has God already given us the gifts we need to produce our own bread, and to provide bread to those who cannot? 

What sort of God would lead us into temptation? This is something members of the Catholic clergy have been wrestling with in European language versions in recent years.

None of this is helped by the fact that Jesus would have likely spoken the prayer that went from oral tradition to gospel in Aramaic, but the gospels were written in Koine Greek, and for the Roman church, the authoritative text comes from a third layer of translation, in Latin.

One of the most difficult passages to translate is the reason we have multiple versions of the prayer in the English language tradition. The Greek word “opheil?” refers to a legal and financial obligation in ancient Greek literature as well as in the Greek translation of the Hebrew language scriptures, and this is the only word used in Matthew’s version, the one we recite. But Luke, using the same Q source as the authors of Matthew, asks God to forgive sins, “amartias,” while commanding us to forgive those indebted to us, “opheilontí.” Luke can do this because by the time the gospels were written, “opheil?” was most frequently used to mean a moral obligation, something also reflected in the changing use of the Aramaic root in Rabbinic Literature. 

In the end, neither “trespasses” nor “debts” alone will suffice. We should be asking forgiveness for our sins, and forgiving both the financial obligations and moral wrongs of others.

Now multiply this debate by a million doctoral dissertations, and you have a sense of the challenge of translation, and that only of the text itself, never mind the need to translate practice and theology across wildly different intellectual, conceptual, and cultural frameworks. 

We now know that epilepsy causes seizures, not demons. Even at the time of Jesus, social structures were evolving in many places from clan-based small-hold farming to created community in an urban context. For all of the evils in the Roman imperial system, including mandated sacrifice to Roman deities and semi-deities, the reality was that religion was largely a personal choice in most of the empire, the only reason Christianity survived those first centuries. Rome enslaved millions, including countless Jews in the wake of the Jewish revolt around the time the gospels were written. You might live in the same place you were born, but many did not, and even if they did, the entire empire was cosmopolitan, a melting pot or stew pot long before the colonization of the Americas created the historically false narrative of equality in America.

Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, the second half of Luke’s single epic account of Jesus and his first followers, gives us a snapshot of the earliest Christian communities. Luke’s experience is intentional community that today would be called “socialist” or “communist” and rejected by America’s heretical perversions of Christianity, from the prosperity gospel that throws out Jesus to white Christian ethno-nationalism that gives him a dye job and plastic surgery. Luke gives us a community that shares resources.

Not that early Christian community did not have problems, however egalitarian. Paul is pretty direct when he condemns wealthy members of the church in Corinth, who gather to enjoy the good wine before welcoming the less well-off to the “love feast.” 

Christianity would be co-opted by empire, and we can lift up all sorts of ugly moments in Christian history. But there are also many things to celebrate, in Christian history and American history. 

We did Rome one better as a nation when we leaned into William Penn’s notion of religious freedom, when many embraced the right of conscience in the Christian movement that became part of our own United Church of Christ tradition. Christian community became a matter of choice, something we know because the founders of the Park Church made a choice to breakaway, following their own consciences when it came to the abhorrent evil of slavery. While religiosity was never as universal as the mythic retelling, many Americans gathered in religious communities of choice.

Sadly, however, we lost some of that egalitarian spirit, and American Christianity divided along racial, ethic, and socio-economic lines. Consumerist mega-churches have softened those divisions only slightly.

Even today, we still have upper middle-class white Christians who fly off to places like Honduras on expensive mission trips, who adopt children from Africa and the African-diaspora, ripping children from their culture, acting somewhere between the great white savior complex and the poverty zoo where you can feel good then go back to your position of privilege in an exploitative economy.

The Christianity of Jesus was a Jewish reformation, and we don’t have enough information to know with certainty how Jesus felt about non-Jews. There are passages that go both ways. But we can say with certainty that the Christianity we received, the Christianity between Paul of Tarsus and the maybe-conversion of Constantine, was about intentionally-formed community, not built on clan or tribe or the happenstance of birth, but on choice. The Kingdom of God as preached by Jesus and spread by Paul was opt-in.

Our job is to translate that good, the opt-in community of care and grace, into our current cultural context. And that isn’t always easy, for the preponderance of social forces act to divide us and to pit us against one another. Our economic system is supposed to be a biological “battle royale,” social Darwinism with the winners at the top of the body pile, and though it doesn’t actually work that way, is actually more oligarchy than meritocracy, that idea still rests at the heart of our common conversations, only interrupted briefly by unspeakable tragedies, collective vengeance, and the last album drop by Beyonce or Taylor Swift.

Twenty-four years ago, Robert Putnam wrote “Bowling Alone” about the collapse of social spaces in America. Peter Block’s 2008 work “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” furthered the conversation about intention and community space. Both were secular, but both spoke to the concerns of church.

Having read more than my share of church profiles over the course of my career, one thing I have discovered is that many churches describe themselves as family. Of course, most church folks have family, which may or may not be a good thing. Many folks, especially in the LGBTQI+ community, create new families for themselves because they have been rejected by their family of origin. But plenty of other people are not looking for that level of intimacy, and may find the framing of church as family off-putting. The Passing of the Peace, common in so many churches including those I have served, is meant as a welcoming, but often has the opposite effect, signaling an impenetrable intimacy.

The other drawback to church as family is that family-sized churches do not have the critical mass to do effective mission in today’s world. Instead of thinking of church as family, observers of successful churches have come to see them as a community of spiritual communities. And we do a remarkably good job of that here, helping people find their fit, though we could certainly be more intentional and invitational.

We have shaken off some of the socio-economic descriptors of the past, labels that may or may not have been true at the time. I could not be more proud of the ways we have embraced diversity. Still, I will continue to push us around racial, cultural, and generational diversity, where we have a ways to go before we truly reflect the surrounding community.

One of our greatest challenges is this amazing building, a focus of last week’s sermon as well. It is not easy to repurpose space and adjust flow in a historic property, and our desire to provide faith formation programming can impact our ability to form community. Especially during formal presentations, we can inadvertently leave people feeling trapped, and so need to be explicit in giving permission for folks to leave.

We have the very good problem of being close to outgrowing our current room configuration for coffee hour, even without the demanding Golden Retriever in the mix.

We hope that our smaller community circles are diverse and porous, that there is room for new folks, and hope to be intentional in our desire to be a church that welcomes people no matter where they are on life’s journey, the extravagant welcome that is one of the marks of the United Church of Christ, a mark we claim at the start of our worship.

You may think it odd, maybe even a little insider-ish and “meta,” for me to be speaking about the structure of community, inside the church or out, to be glossing over the economic mutuality of the passage from the Acts of the Apostles, but the Torah is full of guidance on how to be community, how to welcome the immigrant, how to keep vulnerable people from falling between the cracks. The prophets call the Israelite people to caring community with mutuality and accountability. Jesus creates a community that survives his execution at the hands of church and state. Paul writes extensively on how to stay faithful in our relationships in community.

In fact, it might be fair to say that there was no such thing as religion in the ancient world, for even as people chose the God they would worship and the spiritual community they would join, they had no conception of religious space as opposed to economic space or social space. It was all the same thing.

Would that the same thing were true today! Imagine if people were held accountable for their behavior in the social space of social media, if we admitted that the ranting of a deranged sociopath tell us everything we need to know about his so-called religion.

Our community may not be as intense as the one Luke writes about in Acts, not quite as sacrificial, but it is every bit as holy. May it always be so. Amen.