Arlington
Presbyterian Church
March 8,
2018
2nd
Sunday of Easter Year B
Psalm 133, 1 John 1:1-2:2, Acts 4:32-35
Last Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of the
assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. There were events around
the country commemorating his time in Memphis at Mason Temple Church of God in
Christ with the sanitation workers the night before his death at the Lorraine
Motel. COGIC and AFSCME gathered at Mason Temple on the evening of the 3rd
and at the Lorraine Motel, now museum, on the 4th to remember his
life and his death.
It was a descent size for a Wednesday after Easter and just
weeks after the March for Our Lives. But I was telling Derrick that I was
disappointed that I hadn’t been more involved given the importance of Dr. King
on my own spiritual journey.
But the tensions between the groups who felt a stake in
remembering and celebrating Dr. King along with the challenge of making
connections between the civil rights movement and the current movements for
justice, whether it’ BlackLivesMatter or the march for our lives or the
struggle for queer and trans people’s equality under the law.
I was struck, however as I was reading this for this morning.
The book of Acts and the books of 1, 2, and 3 John are communications from
people who were there with Jesus during his life, his mission, his death, and
his resurrection. They have person encounters and experiences of Jesus that
bring them into fellowship with God. And in the 1st John passage,
the author is inviting the new believers into that same fellowship and
communion with God though the community together.
This element of community is central to the lives of the
followers in the early church. And it was central to Dr. King’s own theology. He argued that through God’s love for us, we
too can transcend the barriers of evil and hate and injustice to love those we
might perceive as our enemies. He believed that by reconciling the natural
conflicts in our world through non-violent means, that we could achieve the
beloved community. A community grounded in God’s love that runs through us to
love those around us.
He believed that through cultivating relationships with love,
addressing conflicts in a non-violent practice, that it is possible to
challenge the systems of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. Racism,
that defines people not by the content of their character, but by the color of
their skin. Materialism fools us into a scarcity mentality that drives us to
ignore those who suffer from hunger and poverty and homelessness. Militarism
which values dominance and violence to keep the peace instead of a peace built
from non-violent resolution to conflict.
The Acts text this morning gets to the heart of Dr. King’s
philosophy of the beloved community. A colleague of mine writes this about the
opening lines of the passage.
Acts envisions the community as intrinsically belonging to
one another, such that we can’t separate ourselves from those in need. Acts
4:32 tells us that “the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and
one soul.” The Greek phrase “one heart and soul” (kardia kai psyche mia)
refers to the entire essence of one’s being. It recalls the command in
Deuteronomy Deuteronomy 6:5 to “love the LORD your God with all your heart (kardia), and with
all your soul (psyche), and with all your might.” Deuteronomy means
that we should love God with our whole selves—with everything we’ve got. In the
same way, Acts 4:32 means that we belong to each other with everything that we
have—heart and soul, we are as one. The community belongs to each other as
though we share one heart and one soul. We are one entity, inseparable one from
the other.
Thus, for the earliest believers, sharing what you had
with another wasn’t understood as an act of charity. It wasn’t a deed of
kindness from one person to another. Rather, sharing what one had was tending to
one’s own life, which could not be separated from the lives of others. The
community thrived or suffered as a whole. It succeeded or failed as a whole. Each
belonged to the other, and, as such, their material goods belonged to the whole
and not to any individual among them.[i]
This is what Dr. King meant when he said “We are caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever
affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We
Can't Wait.
We enter our relationship with God not solo, but connected
through those who have encountered Jesus Christ. Whether that is the disciples
literal encounter with the risen Christ showing new believers that same love
and service as Christ showed them…leading them to their own encounters with
Christ. Or generations and centuries down the line of people who have come into
the fellowship of Jesus Christ to have their own encounters and share that love
and service with those around them.
We are called to fellowship—to community. And this fellowship
and community is not just for a chosen few, but for all of the world. We
encounter this in the way that we treat our selves, the way we think of
ourselves and whether we experience God’s love. It gets expressed in our personal encounters
with those with whom we are in fellowship in our daily lives. But also in the
public square. We are intricately connected, with one heart and one soul.
This leads us down a path of evangelism through resistance.
Resistance to the values inherent in racism, extreme materialism and militarism
define our sense of self and others, contorting the image of God inside each of
us, so that we feel like we have separate hearts and souls and that the others
don’t carry the image of God.
We are called to resist by being true to the self God created
in us and searching for that same true self in those around us. By staying
present in the conflicts that arise, even when we want to run away. It calls us
to remember our history and the history we are making with clear and honest
eyes. And it calls us to take loving and nonviolent action to disrupt the
powers of evil and death in the world.
This is what evangelism looks like—the spreading of the
beloved community. It is a demonstration of the love that we encounter from the
risen Christ. And the truth is that all of this is possible because we are an
Easter people. We are a people defined by a love that is more powerful than
death or racism or materialism or violent militarism. And we can be comforted
in the knowledge that in Christ’s death and resurrection, forgiveness is
available when we get snared by these.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i]
Rev. Dr. Robert Williamson, Jr. https://robertwilliamsonjr.com/the-economic-imperative-of-the-gospel-acts-432-35/
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