To Whom Does This Belong?
To Whom Does This Belong? by Rev. L. John Gable
June 28, 2020
As we continue our study of Acts everything up to this point has been powerful and positive. Following the resurrection and ascension the disciples and that first cohort of believers have shown themselves to be prayerful and obedient; on the Day of Pentecost God pours out His Holy Spirit, Peter preaches the first Christian sermon, 3000 people come to faith; this growing company of believers commit themselves to “the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread together and the prayers”; the apostles demonstrate the ability to heal and the willingness to witness despite persecution and imprisonment. Everything is going along swimmingly until we get to chapter 5 and suddenly all that up to this point was powerful and positive suddenly sounds tragic and terrifying. Chapter 5 opens, “But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife, Sapphira”. “BUT”, as in “However”, “hold on there”, “wait a second…everything is not quite as great as it sounds.”
The story of Ananias and Sapphira is the first real crisis to hit the early church and it is shocking! It sounds like a story we’d expect perhaps to find in the Old Testament, not the New, as when someone inadvertently got too close to the mountain of God, or accidently touched the Ark of the Covenant or inappropriately rose up in rebellion against Moses or another of the leaders and suddenly they were struck down or the earth opened up and swallowed them. What is going on here? And why on earth did Luke include it in the telling of this story?
My suspicion is that it was included because it was a shock to the system of the early church and a story that was most assuredly being told and retold as a cautionary tale. For these same reasons there are three observations I would like to make that we can find applicable to our practice of the faith today.
The first is, there is a remarkable, perhaps unexpected, honesty to Scripture. There is no attempt by the author of any of the stories we read, Old or New Testaments, to sanitize or whitewash or sugarcoat the characters involved. In this sense, the Bible speaks the truth to us. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “I know the Bible is true because when I poke it, it pokes me back.” Read the stories of any Biblical hero or heroine of your choosing and you will find, while there is much to admire in them, not a single one of them is anything more than human. Every one of them was as humanly flawed as are any one of us and Scripture gives us an unblinkingly honest look at each of them, “warts and all.”
I know you are familiar with that saying, “Warts and all”, but do you know where it came from? Once a court painter painted a portrait of Oliver Cromwell, the 17th century English statesman. Cromwell was disfigured by warts on his face, so the painter, thinking to please the great man, omitted the disfiguring growths. When Cromwell saw the painting he immediately said, “Take it away and paint me warts and all.” It is one of the great virtues and values of the Bible that it shows its heroes, “warts and all.”
Such honesty in God’s Word is intended to set the standard for God’s people. We don’t need to posture or present ourselves as being perfect and pious because we are not; we know that about ourselves and others know that about us, whether we admit it or not. We are not the heroes in this story of faith, only God is. This is why we enter in to God’s presence in worship by offering not only our praise and prayers but also with the confession of our sin. As we openly acknowledge our brokenness and weakness and sin we open ourselves to God’s healing forgiveness and strength. That is the first take-away: the honesty of Scripture encourages our honesty with God, with ourselves and with one another, “Warts and all”.
The second take-away again has to do with our honesty, this time with regards to our giving and the use of the resources we have at our disposal. In telling the story of the practices being established in the early church Luke could have ended this section by noting that “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common” and then illustrated that principle by telling the story of this fellow named Barnabas who sold a plot of land and laid the proceeds at the apostles’ feet. That would have been a very inspiring story, but instead, Luke goes on to tell the tragic tale of Ananias and Sapphira who did not practice such integrity in their giving.
At issue here is not so much that this couple had a piece of property and sold it for a profit. They certainly had the right to do that. What they broke was not a formal contract, but an agreement that those first believers had come to as to how they were going to do life together. I thought Oscar spoke powerfully about this last week. To call oneself a Christian is something more than the confession of a particular set of doctrines or an adherence to a particular set of rules and regulations. Rather it is an understanding of how we are going to agree to do life together in a new way, under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. It is mutual submission, not only to Jesus as Lord, but also to the shared values and teachings and mores of the community. Ananias and Sapphira broke the covenant of agreement with the community of believers when they lied about the profits they made by selling this piece of property. They broke faith, not only with God, but with the people of God.
In a similar way today, we share certain values and teachings and mores which bind us together as the Church, some are written, such as rules and regulations voted on and adopted, but most are common agreements that we share. Some are essentials of our shared faith, such as the Lordship of Jesus Christ or the authority of Scripture as the Word of God, but others are simply agreements which guide our life together, such as the willingness to allow for disagreement over issues out of the conviction that “persons of good character and principle may differ”; that we will act respectfully, with honesty and integrity, with one another; that we will care for the needs of one another and our neighbors as best we can. These agreements are fluid and constantly in flux, but they are grounded in our shared desire to “do life together”, such as our willingness to wear a mask during a time of pandemic, annoying and inconvenient as they may be, because we know doing so is for the well-being of our neighbor; or of our being willing to say “Yes, Black Lives Matter” because our neighbors need to hear us say that and then to see us act on that out of our shared values of justice and equality for all people.
There are certain principles and practices which bind us together, and when those are broken or abandoned, the fellowship of the community is also broken.
So, in the case of Ananias and Sapphira, they broke the covenant code which that early community of believers had agreed on and their lies had a disastrous effect on them which sent a shock wave through the infant community.
So, the take-away is this: we are called to be honest with ourselves, with the community of faith of which we are a part, and with God, not just in our giving, but in every aspect of our life together.
Let me tell you one short story that actually does have to do with the giving aspect of this story. You are aware that I have made it a practice in my ministry not to know what anyone gives to the Church. I have found this a good spiritual practice for me. However, in one of the previous churches I served the bookkeeper came in to my office one day to tell me that one our members, someone considered to be a prominent member, had the practice of making a pledge every year to the annual budget, but then never making any payments toward fulfilling it. She wondered what she should do about it because he did it year after year. We determined that it would be best if she simply did not include his pledged amount in the expected total. The kicker was, she then told me, even though he never made an effort to fulfil it, every year he increased his pledge!
Friends, part of our agreement together is that we can be honest with ourselves, with one another and with God, even in our giving.
The third and final point I’d like to make from this passage is the awareness and acknowledgement of the death-grip money and our possessions can have on all of us. This is not an issue for Ananias and Sapphira alone; it belongs to each of us. We too will confess that we look to the numbers in our funds and accounts and investments, to the accumulation of our possessions, our things, our stuff, in search of some measure of our worth or value or meaning or sense of security, in the present and for the future.
Let’s agree that Ananias and Sapphira were not bad people, in fact they were probably very much like you and me when it came to the sale of this piece of property and the proceeds they garnered from it. They sat down and calculated, “This is how much we made off the sale and this is how much we think we need to set aside for our expenses and this is how much we want to put in our IRA (not that they had one of those, but you get my point) and the rest we will lay at the apostles’ feet.” That sounds reasonable and familiar, doesn’t it? That sounds like something we would do today, so what’s the problem? Besides their breaking of the covenant of agreement they had made with that early church community, their actions lie in conflict with a very central confession of our faith: they were seeking to find their sense of security not in God but in their accumulation of wealth and possessions. And in that way, their story names the struggle we all feel.
There is something natural about the lies they told the apostles and themselves for we too rationalize our own covetousness, aquisitiveness and greed. Deep down they knew what we know, that we don’t own our stuff, our stuff owns us and that ultimately we are caught by the things we chase; yet despite that awareness we all make attempts to deal with our own sense of insecurity and finitude by trying to “take things into our own hands” in order to gain some control. For some reason, even we, have subtly bought in to the lie that “the person who dies with the most toys wins” without considering the implication that even “the person who dies with the most toys still dies”, and then what? Then we have to face the One who says your identity is not in the title you hold or the rank you achieve, but only in that you are a Child of God, created in the image of God; that your sense of worth and value is not measured by the size of your boat or your bank account, your house or your holdings, your toys or your trusts, but is measured only by the value placed on you by the God who loves you so much He was willing to send His Son to die for you.
So what can we do to gain our freedom from this death-grip our stuff has over us and the false sense of security it gives to us? We name it, we own it, we confess it, we pray about it and then we take steps to peel our fingers off of the stuff we cling so tightly to. One of the remedies the early church discovered was their willingness to share all they had with any who had need. They discovered that generous giving is a wonderful antidote to anxious accumulation, and many of us have discovered the same today.
Luke includes this story about Ananias and Sapphira because it offers a cautionary tale, then and now. It is important that we talk about these things because Jesus talked a lot about these things. It is important that we assess our relationship with money, with our assets and possessions and stuff, not as a part of a fund-raising campaign to meet the annual budget, but as a spiritual issue. The story of Ananias and Sapphira tells the tragic tale that if we live like them we die, perhaps not as dramatically as they, but that something within us dies every time we are anything less than honest with ourselves, with the community of faith we choose to associate with, and with God about those things which have a grip on us. But, t2672heir story also offers us another way to live, under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, in full fellowship with God and God’s people, and that being the way that leads to life, abundant and eternal.
The title I’ve given to this message is, “To Whom Does This Belong?”, but the real question we need to be asking of ourselves is, “To Whom Do I Belong?”, and what difference does that make in the way I live my life? So let us say together and with the great community of believers, “In life and in death, I belong to God.”