Acts 4:32 Now 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. 33 With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. 34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. 35 They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
We had our very first worship service 5 years ago today. That’s 5 years of gathering together, sometimes physically, sometimes virtually. That’s 5 years of reminding each other that God calls us to love as if another world is possible, and to remind each other we can do that because God is Love and so the powers of this world, the structures and systems and stories that dominate our lives and even our thoughts, are not what is ultimately real. That’s 5 years of paying what people owed on rent and utilities and insulin and antidepressants and groceries and $8 million of medical debt. That’s 5 years of bringing people meals when we’re sick, walking each other’s dogs when we’re recovering from surgery, supporting each other when we’ve lost loved ones and welcoming babies who’re almost in kindergarten now. That’s 5 years of praying for our teachers union and the Duke Press union and the city workers union through struggles and victories. That’s 5 years of communion, of finding ways to hold our lives in common.
That’s what we mean when we say “love as if a different world is possible,” we mean communion, practicing the commons. And that’s the kind of life that our Scriptures describe as the way of the church. The life of God looks like holding all things in common. If you’re going to say that God is in any sense real, if you’re going to say that God took on flesh in Jesus, if you’re going to say that the powers of this world found Jesus so threatening that they crucified him, and if you’re going to say that Jesus rose from the dead anyway, then it doesn’t make any sense to live our lives, to organize our community as if those powers are still something to be scared of. It doesn’t make any sense to say that you still have to live according to what those powers think is practical and responsible and realistic. So the early church practiced organizing themselves in a different way. They shared their money. They demolished the distinctions between haves and have nots, rich and poor, blessed and wretched. They engaged in class struggle. They held all things in common. That’s what the presence of God’s Spirit looks like in the world.
And that’s what the Scriptures mean by “unity,” they mean that kind of communion, where we hold all things in common, which means workers pooling our resources together because we know we need each other, and if anyone in the ruling class wants in, they have to sacrifice their position, they have to become traitors to their class, not because we’re gatekeeping or being exclusive, but because the very existence of a ruling class at all is antagonistic to communion. That way of dividing up the world goes against God’s life but it’s how the powers of this world work, so you can’t make a different world according to those patterns.
I think this is important to recognize because there is another way of talking about “unity” in our world, and that a lot of churches have taken up too, a way that laments “polarization” as the biggest problem we have. And I have some sympathy to what people are trying to name there. Unless you’re a billionaire or someone who’s living off your stock dividends, most of us have more in common than we don’t. We’re tired, we’re overworked, we’re one health issue or HVAC failure from being in a bad way, so getting angry with each other over political parties (which really function more like sports franchises) doesn’t make a ton of sense and does ratchet up the pressure on our lives without actually doing anything.
But the problem is that when people talk about “polarization” like that, they lump that kind of antagonism (which doesn’t really make sense) together with very real material differences (that do matter) like whether or not how much money you make determines how good your healthcare is, or whether or not you should be able to make choices about the medical procedures you need (particularly if you have a uterus), or whether or not your taxes should fund genocide, or whether or not you deserve a wage that allows you to live in the city where you work. And it turns out that most of us who aren’t billionaires have pretty broad agreement on how to answer those questions, and yet the powers of this world want the opposite.
But, the answer the ruling class gives to both kinds of antagonism is a vague appeal to “civility,” which basically just means, “Hey just shut up and be nice.” In that case, unity means keeping quiet and going about your business without bothering anyone because whatever conflict might emerge from you speaking up will “disrupt the peace.” And so pretty soon, everything is violent (except for the violence of the state): breaking a window with a hammer is violent; collapsing a building with a drone is a nation’s right to defend itself. Shouting is violent, a curse word on a sign is violent, damaging the grass on a college campus is violent.
And so to maintain unity, to keep civility, to prevent polarization, requires sacrifice. We’re expected to sacrifice our speech, we sacrifice our beliefs, and sometimes we sacrifice the very people who are speaking up and disrupting the peace to make an example of them, so that the rest of us won’t try it. We see this in our day with the arrest of college students protesting for Palestine, we see it with corporations retaliating against union organizers, we see it with police departments harassing Black Lives Matter activists, all in the name of keeping the peace, preserving civility, upholding unity.
It’s actually a very old idea, that a community offers sacrifices to keep the peace. And in ancient times it was more explicit, they were more honest in some ways, that you sacrificed the innocent to reconcile yourself to the powers that run your life. This was the logic of sacrifice. When you are lacking unity, when you’re alienated from reality, you offer a sacrifice to satisfy power. Sacrifice is something people have to do to bring ourselves into communion. And it’s not too much of a leap from this idea of the gods, from this idea of reality, to the belief that whoever’s in charge of society has to be ready to sacrifice those who don’t keep the peace.
In the story we tell, this is exactly what happens to Jesus. Jesus threatens the Pax Romana, the peace of the Caesars. He comes, as a laborer, saying that the kingdom of God is at hand, he starts gathering a movement made up of both devout religious people and also sex workers and tax collectors (all workers, but workers who had been in some sense “polarized”), he starts feeding people and healing them, which is supposed to be Caesar’s job, and then he goes into the Temple and starts whipping bankers, which is a bit of a provocation. And so the powers that be crucify him. They sacrifice him for the sake of peace, to maintain a kind of unity. They put him on a cross so that the money changers can set their tables up again, so the sex workers and the devout can go back to hating each other even though they’re in the same struggles.
But then, in the story we tell, Jesus gets up anyway. There is a true peace that civility can’t hold down. There is a true grace that doesn’t fear polarization but pushes through those contradictions to new relations. There is a unity founded not on silence but speaking the truth of our needs. Jesus rises and in so doing shows a different order, a different way of relating to each other, a different kind of world.
In the letter of 1 John, the storyteller says, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that God loved us and sent the Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” Now I know many of us have complicated feelings about this notion of sacrifice, but notice how this takes the idea of sacrifice and reverses the polarity. Instead of an angry deity, a gaping maw in need of constant satiation, we have a God acting on humanity’s behalf. If sacrifice is the language that people had for wanting to find a way into communion when all we know is alienation, then John is saying that in Jesus such communion is already real and so we don’t have to place ourselves on the alter of Sin and Death anymore, Jesus went to their alter and broke it. In this moment, John is using the language of sacrifice to undo the logic of sacrifice.
And this means that we don’t find communion by throwing each other under the bus when someone “disrupts the peace.” We don’t find communion by appealing to the good will of powers that have no good will toward us. We find communion by holding all things in common. Earlier in the same letter, the storyteller says “We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a sibling in need and yet refuses help?” Love, unity, communion—these look like holding all things in common. Jesus doesn’t make us feel better about the contradictions that shape our lives; Jesus comes to push through those contradictions to new kinds of relationship.
And this is why today, as we celebrate the 5th anniversary of Jubilee, we also celebrate Labor Sunday. Our problem is not polarization, our problem is alienation, that our economy alienates us from our labor, from our neighbors, from our own desires so that we’ll be more productive even as we’re more and more tired. And so the answer to that problem isn’t to be really really really polite. It’s to practice working class solidarity. I think the Spirit of God is moving in our unions. I think the pattern of antagonism toward the bosses for the sake of caring for the masses is a pattern that the church was always supposed to follow, too. If it was up to the bosses, we never would’ve had a weekend, we’d still be working 16 hour days, we’d never have any health insurance—during the early labor movement the bosses hired gangsters to beat up union members who demanded those very minimal things! And many of the workers’ pastors told them to be civil, because the bosses were their donors.
But at the same time there were always workers who recognized Jesus’ kinship with them and their kinship with Jesus’ work. They were the ones who started practicing Labor Sunday, as a way of reminding everyone that God came in the flesh of a worker to rise again despite the bosses best efforts so that all of us can hold all things in common.
Friends, just imagine what that would be like, to hold all things in common. To live without need because there are so many people around you who care about you, to live offering your gifts because they’re valued and needed, too. To have the time and the funds to help your neighbors. To not be wondering if you’ll make rent or be able to get groceries or your medicine, because you know you’re not on your own. To not feel at your wits end with your kids because you’ve got time and space and people supporting you. Hold that feeling. Let yourself long for that. That’s a thought worth struggling for. In your union, in your church, wherever we can commune with each other, and know that in that communion, we commune with the very Spirit of God. Amen.
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