Poolesville Presbyterian Church
04.15.12; Rev. David Williams
Despite the somewhat bizarre claim of Florida House Representative Allen West this week that somewhere between 78 and 81 members of Congress are Communists, things aren’t looking nearly that good for the Reds these days. In fact, this hasn’t been the best few decades for communism.
Back when I was a lad, just a bit younger than my boys, communism was a major force in the world. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics still sat like a great red blot on most maps, sprawled across a huge swath of the Northern Hemisphere. The nations of the Warsaw Pact were a significant presence in Europe, which bristled with deep thickets of tanks and strike fighters and mid range nuclear missiles. China, North Korea and Vietnam were a potent presence in Asia. Cuba sat just below Florida, which I guess it still...um...does. But back then, it was supplied and connected deeply with the global network of socialist states.
As the capitalist democracies squared off against the Red Menace, it wasn’t hard to pick a side. The autocratic oppression of the socialist states didn’t exactly make them particularly appealing. They seemed grim and joyless places, and that was in their own propaganda. When I was a teen, I’d go down to Georgetown on weekend nights to hang out and people watch, and would sometimes pick up the English language version of Pravda..the mouthpiece of the Supreme Soviet...to read with friends. It was like entering bizarro world. Sometimes it was just sentence after sentence of flowery praise for the glorious glories of the revolution, which were as embarrassingly overpositive as that big trophy your second grader got for almost getting that first word right in the spelling bee. Who’d have thought the USSR needed so much help with it’s self-esteem?
But mostly, Pravda was crushingly dull. Take, for instance, an actual front page Pravda headline from 1985. The breaking news of the day in Soviet Russia on August 17, 1985? “Four rotors for centrifugal compressors were sent to oil drillers by the Borislavski Experimental Foundry-Mechanical Factory Collective.” Wow. That’s...yawn...um...what? Frankly, though, would we rather be told about the Borislavski Experimental Foundry-Mechanical Factory Collective or be bombarded with information about Kim and Kanye?
Why do I even know about Kim and Kanye? I don’t want to know about Kim and Kanye. I keep pressing delete, but I can’t seem to get rid of that data, which worms it’s way into my mind like a virus I got in the supermarket checkout line. When MacAfee comes out with a program that will delete everything having to do with the Kardashians from my memory, I’m so there.
Then there was Communist moviemaking, which would typically involve musical numbers in which hale and hearty red-cheeked peasantry sang about how they’d successfully attained their harvest quota. I think an early draft of the book for West Side Story had a song about harvest quotas, but Bernstein convinced Sondheim to change it. Probably for the best. “Maria, we just met our quota, Maria” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
And now? Global communism is nothing. Oh, there are still communist states. China seems to be doing well for itself by becoming more or less capitalist. Cuba still makes do with 1952 Buicks. North Korea is mostly just hungry and insane. Communism itself has mostly crumbled to nothing as a global movement, no matter what Representative West might think.
Reading through the odd passage in today’s selection from the Book of Acts is particularly strange for those of us who lived through the failure of 20th century communism. Here we are, the week after Easter, reflecting with Luke on the very earliest days of the Jesus Movement following the resurrection and the fires of Pentecost.
The Book of Acts is the second part of a single narrative, with the first being Luke’s Gospel. Of all of the Gospels, Luke’s is the one that most highlights the spiritual challenges of wealth. In Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, for example, the Beatitudes are followed by the Woes, all of which are directed at those who were doing well in this life.
That’s reinforced by parables unique to Luke, many of which recount the tension between faith and wealth. Luke gives us the parable of the two debtors in 7:41-43. We get the parable of the Rich Fool in 12:16-21. The Unrighteous Manager? That’s 16:1-9. The Rich Man and Lazarus? Luke 16:19-31. This Gospel focuses intently on the economic stories told by Jesus, which is likely a factor of the educated community into which these stories were originally written. It’s just a consistent and sustained feature of Luke, one which still echoes in our ears as we come to the Acts of the Apostles.
From that context, the description of the character of the primal church is in direct opposition to the ethics of self-seeking wealth. It does, however, sound more than a little tiny bit pinko, the sort of gathering that might freak out Rep. West or his inspiration, the legendary Red Scare Senator Joe McCarthy.
Acts tells us that this early church involved no-one who claimed private ownership. Everything was held in common, and to each was given according to their need. That last part was actually a Karl Marx quote, which makes it even more bizarre. Here we have the church at the height of the church, with the passion and energy of the movement at a high peak. Here we have the most essential church, before it had absorbed the values of Greco-Roman culture and become co-opted by Empire, and it looks...well...very very different from the way that we experience church.
How are we meant to process this rather fundamental difference? We don’t approach our lives together as a church this way. Because if we did, I’m just not sure how well it would be received. If the next time Poolesville Presbyterian Church talked about a stewardship campaign, I just told everyone to dump their entire income and the full contents of their bank accounts and their 401Ks into the church accounts, I’m reasonably sure that 1) we’d miss that goal and 2) I’d find myself having to consider an exciting new calling to a career in retail.
And even if we all decided to go that route, what experiments in collective living have shown us over the millennia is that as great as it might seem in principle, actually making it happen is considerably harder. Trying it on a grand scale clearly failed in the 20th century, as the natural human inclination to seek power over one another turned communist idealism into the cold hard power of the centralized state.
Even trying it on a smaller scale is hard. This little building we find ourselves worshipping in today was a product of the mid 19th century, and in the mid 19th century, there was a surge of efforts to create utopian communities where everyone shared everything.
Some of these efforts, like the Amana Colonies of Iowa and the Shaker Christian communities, lasted for nearly a century. Others, like the Fruitland community founded by New England Transcendentalist and radical vegetarian Amos Bronson Alcott, lasted from June 1844 to January of 1845, which is barely longer than a typical middle school relationship. Utopian dreams fade quickly when confronted with the reality of actual human beings. That’s why the word “utopia” literally means “nowhere.” If you share everything in common, it’s hard to get past the problem of what to do about folks who’d just rather take it easy.
So what are we to do with this passage? Does it have nothing to teach us about life together in the right here and the right now, in a culture and a context that couldn’t be more different? It does, of course, although less as a schematic for how to organize community than as a value-set that can govern the direction of any community.
It is in verse 32 that we find that essential ethic: that they were “...of one heart and soul.” This state of being models the most essential value of human relationship as taught by Jesus. We are to love our neighbors...meaning all those around us...as ourselves. It is that way of approaching life that is the measure of any healthy gathering of human beings, no matter how they choose to organize their life together.
It is true for towns, and for nations, and it is particularly true for gatherings of Jesus folk. Whether we’re Presbyterian or Methodist, Episcopalian or Baptist, Catholic or nondenominational, the mechanisms of how we make decisions are of less importance than the Spirit that governs that togetherness. Systems and rules can be really remarkably helpful as we work our way through our walk with Him.
But what matters in life together is that willingness to recognize our fundamental connectedness to one another, and that this connectedness goes deeper than rules and systems. Our Creator has woven us together into the fabric of existence. Though we can at times struggle to see it through eyes clouded with self-absorbed hungers and tribal prejudices, we do share the creation in which we find ourselves.
And in this life, which we hold in common, the gift of recognizing that basic unity is one of the greatest blessings of the Spirit. It is the essential bond of any healthy community. That’s not communist, certainly not in the Marxist-Leninist sense of the word. Nor does it have to involve everyone owning everything. But that life of mutual care and mutual support is the purpose of every Christian fellowship.
Let it be so for us, for you and for me, AMEN
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