Inspired and Skilled Communities: Acts 2:42-47
Ordinary Time/World Communion Sunday
"Great Choice" series on discernment
October 2026
The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’
teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers. 43 A
sense of awe came over everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through
the apostles. 44 All the believers were united and
shared everything. 45 They would sell pieces of
property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed
them. 46 Every day, they met together in the temple
and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity. 47 They
praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily
to the community those who were being saved. (CEB)
Yesterday
was the Southside Fest here at New City Center, an afternoon of food and music
and learning about some of the organizations doing the good and hard work of
community here in South Minneapolis. We
had tables for pushing against the prison system, working for migrants’ rights,
lobbying to end invasive pipelines, working in food reclamation, and more. It was a fabulous display of the social
safety net paired with mindful activism, a clear showcase of how many people are
doing good work in a world that can seem bleakly lacking in that.
The
end of the fest was music by Brass Solidarity.
Since I’m relatively new here, I didn’t know who Brass Solidarity was;
you may not, either, whether you’re new or not.
They’re a band of trumpets and trombones and tubas, some clarinets and
saxophones, percussionists, and a marvelous electric guitarist. They formed in
2021 in response to George Floyd’s murder with a self-description of being “a
sonic occupation for Black liberation.”[1] Brass Solidarity plays at protests, picket
lines, local parks, and every Monday at George Floyd Square.
One
of the songs they performed last night was a cover of Ben E. King’s R&B
classic “Stand by Me,” but with a twist.
Where that’s a bit of a love song asking “darlin’, darlin’” to stand by
the singer, Brass Solidarity encouraged us to sing instead, “oh neighbor,
neighbor, stand by me.”
“All
the believers were united and shared everything,” writes Luke, the gospel
writer who loved the story so much he wrote a sequel. The Acts of the Apostles, or simply “Acts,”
is a bridging book between the life of Jesus and the longevity of the Church,
detailing in sometimes hyperbolic stories how people went from walking with God
to walking with each other living the things they’d learned. It’s a wild ride of a book, and I look
forward to hearing from the folks in our small group studying Acts over the
next few months how that goes for them.
This early snapshot of the Church is often held up in church circles as
the ideal form of ourselves, the kind of Church we were meant to be and to
which we would return if only we read the right book or did the right
discipleship programming. The difficulty
there is that people are very rarely the ideal forms of ourselves.
To
give this a little more context, the believers who devoted themselves are the
ones who were very recently converted.
The beginning of the chapter is the story of Pentecost when the Holy
Spirit descended in tongues of fire and everyone could suddenly understand each
other across languages. Peter—yep, brash
and ornery and redeemed-on-a-beach Peter—got up and preached a sermon that,
combined with the miracle of languages, was so full of God’s grace that several
thousand people converted.
So
now there’s a massive community of people fresh off an incredible miracle and
the equivalent of the best worship conference ever and they have to figure out
the rhythm of what’s next. Things
like Pentecost are sometimes called “mountaintop experiences,” that incredible
combination of adrenaline and dopamine that makes you feel like there’s
sweeping orchestral music forming the soundtrack of the moment where everything
is good and possible and beautiful.
And
then the day after happens. The newly
converted have to figure out how to live together, how to worship together, how
to untangle the inevitable moments of frustration when they understand Jesus’
teachings differently or bicker over what the purpose of their community
is. This description in Acts is
beautiful indeed and lauded by many, but we only have to glance at the letters
of Paul to know that the early Church maintained this kind of utopia for about
3.2 seconds. People be people, no matter
the time period, but people be people together is what this snapshot
invites us to see.
Rev.
Meg Jenista Kuykendall writes, “When God’s people continuously respond to the
infiltrating, infusing power of the Holy Spirit, it isn’t just a moment of
salvation but a process of learning to live differently. It isn’t just an
initial decision but a complicated, demanding and fascinating work of
follow-through that will take Luke roughly 26 more chapters to tell.”[2] The people at Pentecost responded to the Holy
Spirit and that response was a lifelong change that required figuring out how
to build community.
Luke
writes that “a sense of awe came over everyone” not because of the Holy
Spirit’s dramatic appearance—although that too—but because of the shared meals,
prayers, and teachings. The radical
nature of the new Church was less about flames on people’s heads and more about
the dedication they had to sitting down man and woman equally, slave and master
side by side, Jew and Gentile on equal footing.
And not only did they eat together, pray together, learn together, they
leaned into each other.
“They
would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to
everyone who needed them. Every day,
they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with
gladness and simplicity.” It’s almost
funny to watch modern commentators twist themselves into knots trying to defend
or rewrite this vision of the Church, especially once the dreaded language of
“socialism” gets thrown into the mix.
Some folks are virulently against the notion that this is something we should
ever recreate because the individualism of white patriarchal capitalism is fierce. How good it is, then, that white patriarchal
capitalism isn’t the only system in the world.
Filipino-American scholar Dr. Jordan J. Cruz Ryan writes, ““The focus on
the activities of teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, and prayer signals a
group with a robust community life. This
diverse group has emerged united. This
is the effect of baptism, as [Filipino theologian] Yanan Melo writes, ‘We all
rise from the waters as disciples—as followers of Jesus unified in diversity.’
“…The
communal spirit represented by the actions of the believers in Acts 2:44-45
finds a recontextual expression in the community orientation of immigrant
communities in North America whose cultural values eschew individualism…
Gabriel Catanus writes, Filipino American Christian ethics are in part a
‘spirituality of belonging.’ In the koinonia
of the Jerusalem church, there is an overlap of the ancient context with our
own in the concept of the bayanihan spirit, the spirit
of community.”[3]
“Oh
neighbor, neighbor, stand by me.” The
song becomes a template, a prayer, a realized hope. The church of Acts was changed forever by the
events of Pentecost but they were transformed by the reality of living in koinonia,
in bayanihan, in deliberate awareness that none of them could follow
this new path alone. Everyone around
them was a partner in the journey of faith building a different kind of Kingdom
that cared little for Roman hierarchies and much for holistic wellbeing.
We are in a
series on discernment, on how we go about the process of decision-making in our
day-to-day lives. We’ve talked about how
it starts with knowing what propels us, what values shape who we want to
be. We’ve talked about the guidelines of
the fruit of the Spirit and how God has given us a starter list of what can
shape us in our decisions. And we’ve
talked about how making decisions for appearances’ sake rather than because the
foundation of the decision lives within us will twist us around.
All of that
focuses a lot on us individually and what we want or don’t want and know or
don’t know, but none of us live in a vacuum.
Here in the book of Acts, we broaden the lens: how do the people around
us shape our decision making? Who
teaches us to choose the things we do, and how can different perspectives help
us see beyond what our lived experiences have shown us?
Professor
Matt Skinner writes, “The idea of community simultaneously attracts and repels
most of us. We long for the life-affirming benefits that community can bestow,
but we resist the demands that community makes…It is noteworthy that this
sketch of corporate life describes a state of affairs for which others in the
ancient world longed. Terminology in this passage echoes other Greek
philosophical writings that describe an ethic of friendship and mutuality that
can be realized through ideal social and political arrangements. Some elements
of the text also recall promises made in the Old Testament about the just
society that God longs to see established in Israel.”[4]
The
empire’s notion of “go it alone,” of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” has
no place in the Church’s understanding of “stand by me.” Today is World Communion Sunday, a day in the
Church year that celebrates that Christianity comes in a thousand different
tongues and a hundred thousand flavors, that no single one of us has a lock on
Who God is or how we enter into worship.
We may not have the whole world here in New City, but we have quite a
lot of different entry points. When we
ask “what does God want us to do,” we have Scripture interpreted by people from
as close as St. Paul and as far as Korea; we who take time every Sunday to
thank our spiritual ancestors know that there are traditions aplenty to help us
hear the Spirit among us. We only have
to ask. We have to be willing to admit
that the life of faith is not one we can live alone, and sometimes that’s
wicked hard. But “all the believers were
united” is not a matter of “everyone was on the same page all the time,” it was
“everyone understood we were in this together, pooling the resources of our
histories and thoughts and hopes and strengths.” In all the tongues of Pentecost and more
besides, we throw out the idea that God is only ever for me and with me
personally and take in the Filipino or Ghanan or Anishnaabean or Mexican
recognition that the community stands together, leans on each other, is united
in the love of the God Who calls us.
What a gift
it is, to be able to ask for help and guidance.
What a hard and counter-cultural thing it is here in the US to ask for
help and guidance. What a necessary and
beautiful task, to be community together, standing by each other, that we all
might know we are not alone. Thanks be
to God for the reassurance, the resources, the relationships. Amen.
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