A Counterculture of Caring and Love
One of the first academic papers I ever gave was at the University of Edinburgh on the ethics of stewardship and property rights. One of the passages my paper focused on was the one from Acts that we will be reading this Sunday (Acts 4). At the conclusion of my paper I made the claim that for Christians we should not think of ourselves as owners of private property, but stewards who are called to take care of what we have been given for the good of others within the Church. At the end of the paper, I made this point by suggesting to a room of academics that their massive libraries of books that they had accumulated over years and years were for the good of the church and not exclusively themselves, and that they should be generous in their lending of these resources for the education of the church. This suggestion was met with, and I’m not exaggerating, resounding laughter. I didn’t get much push back on this point, but I think my argument touched a nerve.
One of the amazing things about the shared life of the church is the way that we create a counterculture of caring and love. This is a counterculture because we have been taught at least from the age of enlightenment, that toxic self-interest is a good thing, the highest thing. Philosophers during the enlightenment went out of their way to make us believe that ethics is not about love of neighbor and love of God, and thus had to turn what was traditionally understood as vice into virtues. Charging interest on a loan, for example, was universally considered to be grossly immoral in medieval and early modern Christian ethics. But this is something that we take for granted as the ‘price of doing business’ today.
One of my favorite theologians of the last few years, Willie James Jennings, notes in his commentary on Acts that the church calls us as believers to a “new kind of giving…one that binds bodies together as the first reciprocal donation where the followers will give themselves to one another.” From here, he claims, “the possessions will follow.”
The focus on possessions is step number two, but first we must realize that through the Holy Spirit, we are bound together in a spiritual way that could never have been achieved through any other means. And it is from this place that we offer what was gifted to us by God for the care of others. Jennings further notes,
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, cloth the naked, or shelter the homeless, using it to create the bonds of shared life.
Many people are uncomfortable with Acts 4, but for me it is one of the most powerful portions of the entire book of Acts. It shows us what the church was at its inception when the Holy Spirit fell upon it, and how people responded to the Holy Spirit. It further shows us (again, counterculturally) that spirituality is not personal or private. It's not exclusively inward. One cannot hope to be both spiritual and totally isolated from others; only doing ministry and loving others on their own terms or in only comfortable ways. The church is where we meet needs, and where our needs can be met. May we be a community where it is said of us, “there was not a needy person among them.”