Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 24, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Some of us here are old enough to remember the Cold War, the ideological struggle backed by massive military might, between the Soviet Union and the western democracies led by the United States. In those days many of us learned at least a little bit about Marxist Communism, the official ideology of the Soviet Union. Many of us learned a catchphrase that characterized the social vision of Marxism—in theory at least if hardly in practice. It went: “From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.” We were taught to be appalled by those words. They represented “godless Communism,” the greatest threat there was to everything we believed in—freedom, individualism, capitalism, the American Way. Certainly Soviet-style Communism represented a great deal that was evil. I know. I studied it professionally. I lived under it for a year, in the belly of the beast as it were, in the capital city of Moscow. I have no illusions about Soviet Communism and the evil it did.

That being said, it must also be said that the first Christians were communists. A shocking claim I’m sure, even if I add that they were small c communists and certainly not Marxists. Still, a shocking claim, but consider this. We just heard a few lines from the book of Acts. They tell us that among those first Christians “no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” And it says that any of the believers who owned land or houses sold them and gave the proceeds to the apostles, who distributed them “to each as any had need.” In other words, they practiced that old catchphrase about Communism, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Indeed, as an historical matter, this passage from Acts is the source of that saying. Marx took his vision of the ideal society directly from the Judeo-Christian tradition, as hard as that may be for most Americans to believe. He just took the religious stuff out.

So we should all be Communists, only with the religious stuff put back in, right? We should all go out and sell our land and our houses and give the proceeds to me to distribute as anyone has need, right? Well, no. Of course not. No one could seriously advocate such a thing, and I don’t. I know that those lines from Acts are about and for a very small community in a far simpler age. I know that the people who sold their property expected the world to end very soon, and then they wouldn’t need it. We don’t expect that, or at least I don’t. So no. I’m not telling you to go sell your house and give the money to me. That’s not what I think these verses are saying to us today.

I do think, however, that these verses from Acts are saying something important to us, something that we need to hear and to heed. In this description of the earliest Christian community we see that one of their primary concerns was to see that the needs of every member of the community were met. In that very much simpler time people’s needs were pretty basic: A place to live, clothes to wear, food to eat, water to drink. That’s about it. So we aren’t talking about supplying anyone with luxuries here. We are talking about making sure that everyone has what they need to live. These lines from Acts tell us that Christians are, or should be, concerned that all people have what they need to live.

Now, in a society and culture like our it doesn’t make much sense to call on people to give up private property. Even if we thought that was a good idea—and I don’t particularly— we’d have to concede that it just isn’t going to happen. But the idea behind this practice of the earliest Christians is not obsolete or irrelevant. It has a modern expression that puts the matter in terms that are more relevant to us. As near as I have been able to determine this quote is anonymous, but it goes: “The worth of any society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members.” Or some close variation of those words. That’s really what that story of the first disciples sharing their wealth is all about. The members of the community with means saw that there were members of the community in need. They saw that there was something wrong with that circumstance. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t loving or compassionate for them to live in relative luxury while their fellow believers struggled just to keep body and soul together. So they did something about it. What they did was pretty radical, but they did what they thought was right. They sold their property and let the proceeds be used in a way that made sure everyone had enough even if it meant that no one, themselves included, had much more than enough. They didn’t consider their society to be moral, to be just, until they had done what they could to care for the most vulnerable among them, to care for the poor and the hungry among them.

That, I think, is the lesson for us this morning, with one slight change. The passage in Acts talks only about the first Christians caring for other members of that small community. We, on the other hand, know that God’s care and concern are not limited to any one little community but extend to the entire world. So we need to expand the lesson. It tells us not that we need to care about the members of this little community of faith, although of course we do. It tells us that we need to care about all of God’s children everywhere. In our local community. In our state. In our nation. Everywhere in God’s world. The lesson tells us that we must judge the moral worth of our own society by how well we care for the most vulnerable among us, for the poor, those ill in body or mind, the disabled, the lost souls among us. And not just among us but everywhere in the world, for they all belong to God’s community.

My friends, I don’t know how you evaluate the matter, but when I hold American society up to that test of how it treats the least among us I can’t say that we come off very well. There are tens of millions of people here in what we always call the richest nation in the world without health insurance. There are hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who go to bed hungry every night, if they even have a bed to go to, which a great many of them do not. I saw something on the television yesterday that said that one in five American children lives in poverty. The mentally ill wander our streets in large numbers because years ago we closed the residential hospitals for mental illness promising to build community based treatment facilities, facilities we never built in anything like adequate numbers. And I haven’t even mentioned the rest of the world, where we tolerate tens of thousands of child deaths every day from preventable diseases and preventable malnutrition. We Americans like to think of ourselves as generous people, and many of us are. Yet as a nation we consume an enormously disproportionate amount of the world’s resources and give back a smaller percentage of our gross national product than many other countries, some very small ones like Denmark among them.

Tomorrow is Memorial Day. I don’t usually mention secular holidays that are not part of the church calendar in my sermons, but I want to mention this one. This weekend we remember those who died fighting for the United States. We always say they died fighting for freedom, and many of them did. My personal commitment to nonviolence doesn’t prevent me from honoring those brave men and women who had a different vision and who answered what they perceived was the call of duty to military service. Yet I am convinced that the greatest homage we can pay them is to work to make America the country that they believed they were fighting and dying for. A country committed to democracy. A country committed to peace. But beyond that a country committed to justice, a country where the promise of opportunity for all is not a bunch of hollow words but a living reality. A country of great moral worth because it cares greatly for its most vulnerable members. A country that isn’t Communist. Of course not. But a country that cares, a country that shares, a country of compassion and real justice. That’s a vision that honors those who died and is true to our Christian calling, the calling to give as any have need. May we work together to make it a reality. Amen.