Defined By Devotion
THE FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER
Acts 2:42-47 • 1 Peter 2:19-25 • John 10:1-10
Tucker Carlson is an Episcopalian. Did you know that? He’s been an Episcopalian all his life. Born and baptized into an Episcopal parish in California, educated at an Episcopal school in Rhode Island, married to the daughter of an Episcopal priest, Carlson is as intimately familiar with the ins and outs of this denomination as almost anyone.[1] I bring him up not to discuss his politics or the implications of his dismissal from Fox News but to note how different today’s church, in which such divisive forces are present, is from the one we hear about in Acts 2.
Back then, “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.” That’s not exactly the unity of spirit that comes to mind when you hear that Tucker Carlson is a member of our church. How did we get from “all things in common” to “I refuse to believe that he’s an Episcopalian?”
Today’s reading from Acts is yet another story from the afterglow of Pentecost. For the third week in a row, we hear a passage from those first few moments after the Holy Spirit descended from heaven and alighted on the apostles. We’ll go back and hear how the Spirit arrived and how the apostles began to speak in other languages four weeks from today, but today’s lesson is what happened after Peter finished his sermon—after those who had received his words had repented and been baptized. Given the rather blunt and accusatory tone of that sermon, we might think that the real miracle of the story is that 3,000 persons were added to the faith that day. But, when we pick up with today’s reading and hear how those Christians lived together in unity, there’s no doubt where the real miracle is.
This is the power of the Holy Spirit—that a community of diverse people—rich and poor, old and young, male and female, literate and uneducated, Hebrew-speaking and Hellenized, powerful and powerless—Jews from all over the known world—were able to put aside all of their differences and all of their individual desires, needs, and concerns and live in such unity that they could sell all of their possessions, pool together all of their resources, and not fight about it. Now, that’s a miracle. But don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that this description of material and spiritual unity is some utopian metaphor that modern Christians are supposed to mythologize. I believe that it is an actual, literal description of what the community looks like when we are devoted to Jesus Christ just as they were.
Devotion is what defined them. “Those who had been baptized,” the Book of Acts tells us, “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Their lives revolved around formation and community. They learned together. They ate together. They prayed together. And the Bible makes it clear that they didn’t do that once a week. Listen to the story’s description of how those early Christians lived: “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.” This was not a Sunday-morning encounter but a daily endeavor.
Each day, they continued to go into the temple as they always had, honoring their commitment to corporate worship and prayer, but their fellowship didn’t stop at the temple gate. At night, they went into each other’s homes, where, the passage tells us, they “broke bread…and ate their food”—a double-description that conveys both the symbolic and literal nourishment they received at the table. Their hearts were glad and overflowed with generosity. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to all people, not only to those in their company.
This was more than a church. This was more than a collection of believers. This was a community of faith—people bound together in joyous celebration of God’s unlimited goodness. There was no part of their lives that was untouched by this Spirit-filled movement. Everything they were and everything they had belonged to God, and the community grew and grew.
Don’t we want to be a part of something like that? Don’t we want to immerse ourselves in God’s goodness until the blessings become so thick and full that we can no longer tell where one person’s bounty ends and another person’s begins? Don’t we believe that what God wants for us is the kind of unity that runs deep into our souls and that has the power to shape the whole world until we are all reconciled to God and to each other? That is the peace of God that passes all understanding.
What will we do to make that peace come to the earth? What can we do to make that vision for the world our reality? What decisions can we make, what structures can we put into place, what boundaries can we set, what rules can we establish, what leaders can we elect to be sure that God’s dream for the world comes to pass? The answer is none of them.
Our job isn’t to make the reign of God a reality on the earth. That’s God’s job. And the good news of the Christian faith is that God has already brought that reality to the world in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our job is to devote ourselves to that truth. Our job is to commit ourselves—body, soul, and mind—time, talent, and treasure—to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers because that is how God’s reign comes into our lives, and it is our lives, lived together in unity, through which God’s reign takes hold in the world.
Given the state of our church, our country, and the world, it should come as no surprise that that sort of unity will not come about through expressions of power and might. The Holy Spirit doesn’t work by empowering us to make our vision for the world a reality. She works by taking hold of us and shaping us until our lives look like God’s life and our wills look like God’s will. Thus, the Spirit does not harden us with invincibility. She softens us to become vulnerable just as Christ was vulnerable. We do not have the power to bring the kind of unity described in Acts 2 into this or any other Christian community. But, by allowing the Holy Spirit to take control of our lives, God can and will make that same sort of unity the defining characteristic of our lives and of this congregation.
The vision for the church laid out in the Book of Acts is not an economic model or a recipe for communal life. It is simply a description of what the Body of Christ looks like when it is animated by the Holy Spirit and filled with God’s love. As Willie James Jennings wrote, “What is far more dangerous than any plan of shared wealth or fair distribution of goods and services is a God who dares impose on us divine love. Such love will not play fair. In the moment we think something is ours, or our people’s, that same God will demand we sell it, give it away, or offer more of it in order to feed the hungry, [clothe] the naked, or shelter the homeless, using it to create the bonds of shared life.”[2]
If we are going to get to a spiritual place where the total and complete demands of the Holy Spirit upon our lives fill us with joy instead of heartache and bring about unity instead of discord and inspire enthusiasm instead of reluctance, we must devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. That must be the life we live every day. That is how we learn how much God loves us. That is how we come to trust that God’s love for us and for the whole world is full and overflowing. That is how we learn to believe that what God has given us is infinitely more valuable than what the world can provide. Then our unity will no longer be our goal but the life we live together in God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.
1. Petiprin, Andrew, “Tucker Carlson, Episcopalian,” The Living Church; 26 June 2017: https://covenant.livingchurch.org/2017/06/26/tucker-carlson-episcopalian/.
2. Jennings, Willie James. Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Westminster John Knox Press: 2017, p. 40.
© 2023 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas