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Acts 5:1ff; 8:9ff
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2:Making connections here at church makes church church. So thank you so much for being the church to each other just even in the last five or six minutes of our coffee break. My name is Bobby, and I serve the community as one of the pastors on the team here. As you may or may not, but likely remember, if you've been kicking around comments for a while, Joel Braun left our staff team to take a role at Entheos Retreat Center with his family just a few months ago. And one of the things that I miss about working with Joel is our talks about television.
Speaker 2:You thought I was gonna be really theological. Right? Well, I know it's summer, and many of you would rather climb an entire mountain than stay inside and watch a little TV, but I still love a good drama. Even in the summertime, you guys, my feet, they get puffy in the heat, and I gotta put these suckers up. So I like a little TV in the summer.
Speaker 2:Okay? Just before Joel left, he told me about the HBO series, The Leftovers. Are there any fans in the room? Oh, wow. Not one.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, I'm gonna tell you about it. I just started watching The Leftovers, and you guys, it's very intense. Before I get too far in the series, I want to see what a real television critic has to say about The Leftovers. No offense to Joel Braun, but he has led me astray before.
Speaker 2:So I found a piece online by Todd Vanderwerf at Vox titled The Leftovers is one of the best TV shows ever made. So this time you guys, Joel Braun may be onto something. The Leftovers is about people who remain on earth after a global cataclysm takes one hundred and forty million humans in the blink of an eye. People who were there one moment are forever gone the next, and nobody knows where they are or what took them or why. So after four intense episodes, I need to know, am I going to find out what happened to all the people who disappeared?
Speaker 2:The wives, the daughters, the sons, the righteous, and the rotten. Where did they all go? Well, our buddy Todd at Vox tells me that I am not going to find out what happened to all the people who disappeared, but he gives me hope in the story when he writes this. The series doesn't focus on bringing its plot to a conclusion. Instead, it concentrates on guiding its characters toward wholeness if not happiness.
Speaker 2:Wholeness if not happiness. I mean, that's pretty good drama, isn't it? Even in the summertime. This summer, we're in a series on the dramatic acts of the apostles. And acts is this work of a skilled writer, possibly Luke, a companion to the apostle Paul.
Speaker 2:And the author draws out the intense drama of Jesus' followers who are left over after Jesus is gone but the holy spirit has come. Jesus was there one moment and gone the next. And this messianic Jewish group, they fumble their way forward to make sense of life without Jesus right there in their midst. And don't skip over the context here. The Jewishness of this movement in its inception is to be underlined and highlighted and starred.
Speaker 2:It's a very big deal. All over the book of Acts, we'll find Old Testament stories and references pointing out how Jesus remade Israel's story, and that will absolutely help us today. Today, we're in two dramatic Acts stories near the beginning of the book. These two stories, they're not tidy and they don't wrap up in pretty bows. In fact, Acts isn't in your bible to wrap up the Jesus movement with a happy ending.
Speaker 2:Acts is there to tell the story of a new beginning, but it's not about happiness either. It has way more to do with wholeness. But what does that even mean? It means that no matter what's ahead in your story, great big highs and all kinds of horrible lows, situations you understand perfectly and others that leave you baffled. No matter what is ahead for you, faith is found in the smooth and the rough parts of the human experience.
Speaker 2:All of life is fodder for faith. Now can we just have an honest moment here? I spent a lot of time in the last few weeks thinking about the story that we're starting with today, And I had a pretty constant refrain in my head that sounded like this. I don't like it. I don't really like it.
Speaker 2:I don't really I don't really like this story. I mean, I would absolutely watch it on television, but I'm not so sure I want it in my bible. Well, too bad, Bobby and the rest of you. These stories are on the sacred page, and they remain there after centuries. And so we're going to face them, The stories of very imperfect people practicing far from perfect faith.
Speaker 2:So we affirm that imperfect people are a part of the church's first stories, and the divine can meet us in our fear to bring about healing and all kinds of second chances. So let's pray together, and then we'll talk about Ananias and Sapphira and Simon the sorcerer. Let's pray. Loving God, you are a God of infinite details. There is no end to exploring who you are.
Speaker 2:And there are dramatic seasons in our lives that feel like they are headed for tidy conclusions, but it seems that as long as we're living with our feet on this earth, most endings are some kind of new beginning. So today, for those of us feeling nostalgic for a time and a place that maybe felt a bit easier, neater, and sturdier. God, will you remind us that we can't go backwards? What you have for us is up ahead. And for those of us aware of places in our lives where we are afraid, maybe we're afraid our actions will catch up to us.
Speaker 2:Maybe we're afraid that people we trust are going to let us down. Maybe we're afraid that we've got something so terribly wrong. Will you Jesus through the presence of your Holy Spirit draw us into grace? Remind us of your persistent love and even in the face of pain and uncertainty, God, will you invite us to move forward partnering with your gospel, your good news for all, good news for those who need it most. Amen.
Speaker 2:Okay. So we are headed to Acts chapter five, the story of Ananias and Sapphira. But before we get to their story, we need to go back to the story before theirs. For you see, this is the story of two fields. And the story of the first field is all thumbs up emoji.
Speaker 2:It's a big smiley face emoji. It's hands raised emoji. We read that the believers were of one heart and mind. They share what they have. They make sure that the people who have need in their midst are taken care of.
Speaker 2:Their generous way of life is made possible by people like a guy nicknamed Barnabas. So we read, Joseph, a Levite from Cyprus whom the apostles called Barnabas, which means son of encouragement, sold a field he owned and brought the money and put it at the apostles' feet. Luke tells us that his nickname Barnabas means he's a master encourager, but truthfully, that's not what Barnabas actually means. So Luke seems to have made it up to make a point. Luke is shaping a story that tells you more than the words on the page.
Speaker 2:He bends meaning to point to bigger themes. It's like Luke is saying, okay. Maybe Barnabas doesn't actually mean encouragement, but I'm not wrong here. Because Barnabas' whole life is an encouragement. Starting here with the generosity he shows and stretching over to encourage the whole church in Antioch later in Acts.
Speaker 2:So Luke is like, yeah. Okay. Come at me with your picky attention to detail, but I'm telling a bigger story here. Some scholars, they put it this way. Acts is a work of historical fact and historical fiction.
Speaker 2:Meaning, it's not historically airtight, but it holds the truth of bigger tradition. And this is important because we need to find the bigger story when we get to Ananias and Sapphira and the story of the second field. The story of the second field is a thumbs down story. It's bag of a money emoji. It's skull and crossbones emoji.
Speaker 2:We read, now a man named Ananias together with his wife Sapphira also sold a piece of property. With his wife's full knowledge, he kept back part of the money for himself but brought the rest and put it at the apostles' feet. And the Greek word for kept back, signals that the action of this couple is in fact super shady. The word refers to the misappropriation of funds that belong to others. The detail of the money dumped at the apostles' feet has Ananias and Sapphira publicly playing the part of a very generous couple all while holding secret the motives of their hearts.
Speaker 2:So Peter looks down at the bag of money, and he fires off four pointed questions. He asks Ananias, how is it that evil has so filled your heart that you lie to the spirit, the holy one, the lordly one by keeping back money for yourself? Didn't the field already belong to you? Even after you sold it, wasn't the money yours to do whatever you want with it? What would make you do such a thing?
Speaker 2:Peter. He's a great question asker. Have you ever been asked questions like this? Questions that cut right to the heart of the matter that kinda put you in your place? Like how Peter's questions walk Ananias to the root of his behavior saying, you didn't need to do what you just did over there because everything that you want is already yours.
Speaker 2:I wonder what would happen if we became better question askers rather than opinion sharers. Questions help you own your own story. Questions help you find the truth behind your own decisions. Things just start to bubble up. Questions help lead you to the heart of the matter, where you find that everything that matters, everything that you strive for is already yours.
Speaker 2:Acceptance, love, compassion, difference, gentleness, grace. The message of the gospel is that there is enough of all of that to go around and it's way more fun when we share it. Sharing won't cost you your life. The power of Peter's questions are so strong that Ananias doesn't even have time to respond. There's no defense.
Speaker 2:His whole body, it answers for him. His body just stops working. His heart stops beating. His actions possibly just catch him right in the face, and he takes his last breath. Literally, Ananias falls down dead.
Speaker 2:And we read, great fear seized all who heard what had happened. And then some men rush in and they wrap his body and they carry him out to bury him. Three hours later, Ananias' wife Sapphira comes in and without knowing what happened she's greeted with Peter's questions. He asked, tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land? Yes.
Speaker 2:This is the price Sapphira replies. Peter asks, how could you conspire to test the spirit? Then he shouts, listen. The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door and they will carry you out too. And we read, at that moment, she fell down at his feet and died.
Speaker 2:Then the young men came in finding her dead, carried her out, and buried her beside her husband. Great fear sees the whole church and all who heard about these events. If you're like me, this story makes you uncomfortable. We read that the people who heard about the fate of Ananias and Sapphira were afraid. Of course, they were afraid.
Speaker 2:It's a terrifying story. I mean, many of us in this room have done things much worse than pocket a little extra coin and pass it off as generosity. And we're still sitting here breathing. So if we want to take this story seriously, and we do, then we need to evaluate it in the tradition that props it up. The writer of acts shapes fact and sometimes fiction to retell Israel's story as fulfilled in Christ.
Speaker 2:So asking the question, so what's the story within the story here? It helps us make sense of all this fear. Now there are Old Testament connecting points to the Ananias and Sapphira story with the Adam and Eve's deception, and there are connecting points with the deception of a man named Achan in the book of Joshua, but I think we can do better. The really compelling story within the story goes back to the book of Leviticus. And back in Leviticus, people believe God's holiness is deadly.
Speaker 2:So there are laws and there are rules about how to come close to God without getting yourself killed. And in the time of the movable temple, the tabernacle, the sons of Aaron are priests, and they mediate the space between the holy and the profane. And the tabernacle or the temple later in Israel's story is the space on earth where God's presence dwells in their midst midst. So these priests, they make offerings to the tabernacle on behalf of the people and they lay them at the feet of God. In Leviticus chapter 10, there are two young priests.
Speaker 2:Their names are Nadab and Abihu. And these two priests, Nadab and Abihu, they ignore the law. They make an offering to Yahweh that is abhorrent, and they fall down dead because of it. Now there's the story within the story. So by the time we get to Acts chapter five, we know this.
Speaker 2:Jesus is the new tabernacle. Wherever Jesus is, that's where God's presence is on Earth. John's gospel literally says, the word who is Jesus tabernacled among us. And in Jesus' ascension, he says to his followers, now you go and tabernacle the world, The holy one whom you sought in the holy of holies now lives in you. Now that's serious business.
Speaker 2:So serious that when we forget that we are the tabernacles of God's presence, that we are the temple of the Holy Spirit, that everything we long for already lives inside of us. When we forget all of that, life gets terrifying. And here's what that can look like. A couple of weeks ago, The Daily Podcast hosted by Michael Barbaro, whom I dig, did back to back episodes about the opioid epidemic. And the first episode is called assigning blame for the opioid crisis.
Speaker 2:It aired on July 3. And in this episode, journalists tell the story of Kimberly Elkins and Erin Rost. Kimberly is a woman who struggles with chronic pain. Her doctor prescribed fentanyl patches for her to manage her pain, and fentanyl is a synthetic opioid. Kimberly is an addict, and it is common practice for an addict to split their drugs with their partner.
Speaker 2:So on a Saturday in December twenty fifteen, Aaron, Kimberly's partner, wakes up to go hunting like he usually does. Before he leaves, they split a patch of fentanyl. They both swallow the drug, and their plan is for Aaron to go hunting and for Kim to stay at home. But instead, they drop to the floor. For Aaron, it's fatal.
Speaker 2:He dies. Kimberly checks into a treatment center. She knows it's time to get help, but one day on her road to recovery, Kimberly is arrested and charged with third degree murder of Erin, her partner. And there's more to the story about how these laws in America are shaped for charges like this to be dropped or to be held. But even knowing that, we don't have the full story here.
Speaker 2:Addiction is incredibly complicated with layers of trauma and pain. It's never just black and white. Especially when it comes to the opioid crisis, it is not black and white. So there's a follow-up podcast. The second episode is called how the opioid crisis started, and it aired on July 5.
Speaker 2:And this episode explains a bigger story, a story within the story. And Michael Barbaro opens the podcast with these words. I can't do his voice, but these are his words. Today, in seeking accountability for the opioid epidemic, prosecutors have been targeting the bottom rung, users themselves. But the family who made billions off the sales of the painkiller at the center of the epidemic has gone largely unpunished.
Speaker 2:The podcast goes into the decision making of three Sackler brothers and how these brothers built a pharmaceutical company called Purdue Pharma into a multibillion dollar empire. And over the years, those who work for Purdue redesign how marketing and medicine are used to make a lot of rich people a whole lot richer. Purdue Pharma made false claims about the drugs that they formulated. They implemented an incentivized bonus system laced with false data about addiction and pain. They lied.
Speaker 2:And they failed to make take action when alarm bells were ringing all over the place about these drugs being illegally trafficked and destroying communities. So The Daily sums it up like this. What Purdue did was took standard marketing techniques and used them to promote a high powered, addictive, narcotic pain killer. The opioid crisis has affected hundreds of thousands of people in The United States. Over one hundred and seventy five people die every day.
Speaker 2:And just last year, four thousand people in Canada died from an opioid overdose. These numbers alone could bring down life expectancy in Canada. It's a huge public health crisis. Now, again, I'm just gonna be a little bit honest about how this story makes me feel. After I heard these podcasts, I thought, Erin and Kimberly do not deserve to drop dead or to stand accused.
Speaker 2:They were in pain, and their pain was taken over by addiction. They needed healing, but what they got was deadly medication. Honestly, I thought, the Sackler family should be punished. Imagine the harm that would have been stopped in its tracks if they would have dropped to their deaths. I know.
Speaker 2:I know. That's harsh. I know. But the people of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family pretended to offer helping hands while holding billions of dollars behind their backs. Around the globe, the Sackler family is known for great philanthropy.
Speaker 2:World class art galleries have the Sackler name on the walls. But when my anger just calms down a little bit, I'm honestly sad for the Sacklers too. The joy of being alive isn't in having your family name on gallery walls. It's knowing that you have the divine breath flowing in you and that you can do so much good in the world. It's serious business.
Speaker 2:Being a person, being a temple, being the place where God's presence dwells, ignoring your sacred call to make your corner of the world just a little bit better, not worse. It can be deadly. But let's remember that no one, not one person in the gospels in the gospels who interacted with Jesus dropped to their death. The one who could see every motive, every deceit, and greed in each human life did not strike out and kill. Oh, hey.
Speaker 2:Look. There's the high priest's servant whose ear Peter just chops off just before the servant turned Jesus over to be crucified. And Jesus, he heals that ear. And look, there's the criminal crucified beside Jesus, and Jesus promised him eternal life. Oh, hey.
Speaker 2:Look. There's the Roman soldiers gambling over Jesus' own clothes while he suffers on a cross and Jesus forgives them. Jesus didn't kill anyone. Instead, he let himself be killed so that all of our shadowy hearts could be filled with light. The human path is not a path of quick fixes.
Speaker 2:It's hard work. But instead of medicating us, Jesus came to heal us. And when Jesus came and when Jesus went away, he gave us the Holy Spirit and said, now you have what you need. Go heal each other. And that's exactly what can happen.
Speaker 2:Even after the failure of Ananias and Sapphira to live as temples of the holy spirit, their story continues. The apostles performed many signs and wonders. The believers, they kept meeting together as baffled as they were even though some of them were so freaked out. Nevertheless, we're told more and more women and men believed in the Lord, and their numbers, they grew. People came from everywhere just so Peter's shadow might fall on their brokenness, and they would be made whole.
Speaker 2:The sick in body and those tormented in their minds were told, quote, all of them were healed. The failure of Ananias and Sapphira does not come from outside. It's right there. It's in their midst. It's part of them, these first Christ followers.
Speaker 2:They're far from perfect, and healing, it keeps happening in spite of their imperfections. Have you ever been face to face with your own far from perfect self and were given a second chance? I'm sure that you were. Maybe your partner said to you, I feel like you could be just a little bit better here, and you heard that and you got to work at trying to be better. Maybe you paid attention to some deep dissatisfaction inside of you and you thought, okay.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna focus on what's going on here. I'm gonna face what's hard. I'm not gonna numb out. Maybe you were confronted with the possibility of being found out and you said to yourself, yeah, it is time for me to come clean. On the other side of a shocking story, a shameful story even, there can be all kinds of healing.
Speaker 2:And that's the beauty of second chances. So in Acts chapter eight, there's a story about a man called Simon the Sorcerer. And Simon the Sorcerer got his name because he amazed the people of Samaria. Now take note, Samaria had all kinds of historical and devotional disrepute for Jewish people. But on account of persecution in Jerusalem, these first Christ followers, they find themselves in, of all places, Samaria, and they're preaching and healing.
Speaker 2:And Simon the sorcerer falls in with the apostle Philip and the disciples, And he watches people get healed and he starts to believe in the good news for himself and he even gets himself baptized. There's so much hype in Samaria that Peter and John are sent to support the work. But Simon, the sorcerer, begins to waver. He sees the power of God, and he wants it for himself. Simon wants power so bad that he's willing to pay for it.
Speaker 2:And Peter says to Simon, your money, it can't buy the gift of God. Step back. You have no part in this ministry. Peter says, repent and pray. And Simon the sorcerer who I started calling Simon of second chances, he says, please pray for me.
Speaker 2:May nothing bad happen to me. So second chance Simon, he doesn't drop dead. His road to healing, it might be long, but at least he's alive and he's on it. Theologian Willie James Jennings calls this Simon's waiting space of repentance. Maybe you need a little waiting space too.
Speaker 2:A little, I just need a minute. I gotta work this out. Well, believe you can have that. You can have that space. You can have all kinds of second chances.
Speaker 2:So the start of this act story, it's kinda creepy. Right? But sometimes you start a story and something truly awful happens, and the best thing that you can do is to learn from it and to keep learning from it. Keep going. We will, all of us, live through a story that confounds us.
Speaker 2:Heck, the world right now will confound us every five minutes. But you need to know that while great fear sees the whole church, the story of the church, it did not go into the graves with Ananias and Sapphira. God rest their souls. The story of the church, it takes a lively new turn and there's healing and second chances for all. So we are kind of the leftovers and we have more stories of wholeness up ahead.
Speaker 2:Let's pray together. Loving God, as we breathe in, as we breathe out, we thank you for life. We thank you for second chances. We thank you for stories that confound us and challenge us because we can see stories like this in our own lives where we don't know the answer to why or how come. But still, we are invited to recognize you, the holy one, even in our pain.
Speaker 2:And we want to trust that you are healing us even if it's hard work. So, God, will you show us the joy of doing this work in facing what's hard and taking steps forward towards wholeness? Help us to be people who do not harm but heal each other. This week, will you show us how our presence in the world, even in our small circles and our families, even in our own hearts can be used for your good. Help us to be kind.
Speaker 2:Help us to be humble. Help us to live with genuine love and honest faith. God, you are good. You are the ground of our being, and we give you thanks. Amen.