“Partners for Christian Transformation” by Pat Conover

April 12, 2015

The Second Sunday of Easter

Reference: Acts 4:21-37

Seekers is not alone. We often image ourselves as alone, but we are not alone. We are not part of a denomination but we are part of a Christian movement with roots in the 1960s and 1970s, the Christian flank of the alternate culture that was suspicious of institutional authority in general and institutionalized Christianity in particular.

We have contributed to the movement in various ways but my sense is that we have not thought of ourselves as responsible partners in the movement. We are not responsible to any ecclesiastical authority but we are responsible to God for our own community and for contributing to the wider church in the wider world. God has given us our lives, our world, each other. God has given us guidance for our lives, guidance for building community and for our ministries in Seekers and in the wider world, guidance for caring for the Earth and for the life forms that have emerged on Earth and are with us today. We have traditions, scripture, stories of Jesus, church history to guide us. We have the Spirit of God to inspire us and to help us understand what matters, what matters most, in our personal and shared lives. God has given all we need to become active partners in emerging Twenty-first Century Christianity.

We have things to share and things to learn a lot from others who are living, worshiping, and offering ministries in different settings. As individual Seekers we are spread out into a lot of situations where we find partners for our personal ministries. Collectively, we give a lot of money to other groups that we recognize as following the inspiration of the Spirit of God to do their parts in their settings. But who do we recognize as partners?

Think for a moment about the groups or organizations you personally relate to and ask yourself, could they be partners with Seekers, could they be more than just your friends, could they be more than just friends of Seekers?

What marks of the Spirit do you refer to when you consider such a question?

The lectionary scripture in Acts offers a mark of the Divine Presence that was a mark of partnership of the early diaspora Christian churches.

The Acts story has several theological and historical problems that I would he happy to discuss during coffee hour. I want to zoom in on the good news in this passage.

The story in the Fourth Chapter of Acts is placed soon after the regathering of the disciples in Jerusalem, not in Galilee as Mark and Matthew tell the story. Mark ends the story of Peter as refusing to claim a relationship with Jesus and with no mention of forgiveness. Mark tells a story of Judas as a disciple traitor, and generally pictures the disciples as fools who never understood Jesus while he was alive.

Peter and John return to their friends. Peter gives his friends a great speech on being united in heart and soul. Then we get the first of several stories of the early churches gathering their money into a common pot, of selling their land for money to put into the common pot. Then we get stories of distributing the pot to widows. We also have stories of Paul gathering an offering from the diaspora churches to support those in need in the Jerusalem Christian synagogue. The First Church of Jerusalem had caring partners. So did the First Church of Antioch where people were first named as Christians.

Their abandonment of investing for spending makes sense in light of the shared but wrong belief that Judgment Day was coming soon. The twelve disciples would return and judge the twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus would judge the Gentile believers. And yes, the likely reason that twelve disciples were are named in the gospels, and that most of them disappear after being named, is the theological need to have them as judges on Judgment Day. In addition, this story can be understood as the authors effort to inspire giving within, and sharing between the early diaspora congregations on the way to becoming primarily Gentile congregations.

When I was coming into Seekers twenty-nine years ago I was inspired by the sharing of some Seekers who stepped forward to meet the big housing need of Abigail and Gary so that they could follow their call to be parents to developmentally limited children born to parents who were crack cocaine addicts. Twenty-nine years later we still have the marks of Seekers stepping forward through the Seekers budget, and independent of the Seekers budget, to meet the needs of low-income members. Better yet, Seekers does a pretty good, if imperfect, job of making it clear that low income members are just as important to us as members with higher incomes.

My sense is that we take the spiritual challenge of the lectionary scripture seriously with regard to Seekers Community and many of us are concerned about how we might be more practically and spiritually effective in the financial aspect our stewardship practices. This morning I offer the challenge of possibly becoming mutually responsible, and not merely friendly, with possible partner churches and religious communities.

Money is just one aspect of being all in it together. Indeed, the money part becomes much easier once we following the pleading of Peter, Paul, and Luke to become united in heart and soul.

First of all, the Christian diaspora followed the Jewish diaspora and that indicates that Jews were important parts of the Christian communities in Gentile lands. Diaspora Jews commonly read the Pentateuch in its Greek translation called the Septuagint, a translation made at least two hundred years before Jesus. The Septuagint, rather than the Hebrew text, is quoted in portions of the Christian Testament and further points to the Hellenization of many diaspora Christian Jews. Paul was a Roman citizen and quite possibly read the Pentateuch as the Septuagint.

The second thing to recognize is that in the time of Jesus there were meaningful numbers of Gentile converts who worshiped in Jewish synagogues even though a lot of the male believers were not willing to submit to circumcision as a mark of becoming Jews, a cross-cultural issue up close and personal. We can recognize that there were serious conflicts between Jews and Gentiles in the late First Century without giving into enemy pictures of Jews, Gentiles, and the Roman Empire.

Paul, Luke, and the other Christian Testament authors offer inspiration and guidance for Hellenized Jews, Gentile Believers, and other converts aimed at sharing one heart and soul, even while arguing about the contents of being of one mind. The gospels and Acts repeatedly point to dramatic marks of the Divine Presence as a source of spiritual unity including spiritual healing, speaking in tongues, and charismatic preaching. The mark of loving one another with financial sharing was an additional mark of being all in this together.

The theme of being all in it together lives in a very different context today than in the early churches of Paul and Luke. The poorest among us in Seekers have food and shelter beyond the imagination of First Century Jews and Gentiles. The poorest among us would be fools to trade their access to health care for the health care available to the Caesars. But the spiritual guidance of becoming all in it together, of taking care of each other in Christian community, is still a hard challenge.

I have a personal story to tell and I hope it will help you think about your challenges of being all in with Seekers, of risking putting your full weight down in Seekers, of taking personal responsibility for your share in providing caring, mutuality, ministries, and resources so that all in the community can thrive as well as survive. I also hope it will help you consider the possibilities of Seekers becoming partners with other groups.

In 1971 when I was thirty-one years old I moved from Tallahassee to Greensboro, North Carolina with my wife Joyce and our two children, Daniel and Dawn. I had my newly minted Ph. D. and an Assistant professorship to teach sociological theory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. One of my reasons for choosing UNC-G was the opportunity to reunite with Bill Love, a childhood friend. Earlier our two families, and a third family, came very close to buying a rundown resort hotel and a couple of hundred acres of land in central Kentucky. I remember us walking that land and loving it. It had a cave with Native American art and two small unobtrusive oil wells. Out hope was to start a Christian Community and retreat center. We passed when we tried to justify a business plan to each other and recognized its folly.

In three years we cleared the trash, cleared the springs and stream, rehabbed the dwellings and several of the outbuildings and moved to the land. We built the first phase of a new common dwelling and began to offer retreat and conferences that became a catalyst for creating the first two of what would now be called public charter schools in Greensboro. We had a road and a well and an architectural design for a lovely small retreat center overlooking the lake.

Our worship times were informal and powerful. A spiritual healing as dramatic as any mentioned in the Christian Testament occurred, as well as other more modest healings. People found and claimed their callings and we mutually financially supported two graduate degrees and one of our members who spent a couple of years as a missionary in Africa. Our life together was also shaped by a steady stream of visitors and sojourners, particularly a sojourner from the Findhorn Community in Northern Scotland.

Life in Shalom Community ended for me when Joyce and I divorced. The divorce happened to follow losing my job at UNC-G for reasons I am proud of. Because I had made a lifetime commitment to Shalom Community, I had made no effort to seek an academic job elsewhere. At the same time my mother collapsed with a stroke back in Tallahassee. I managed to move mother to a nursing home, distribute all her furniture, sort out her confused finances, sell her house, and protect her treasures in one weekend.

The full intensity of being all in it together looks like Shalom Community to me. I left Shalom Community with my clothes. Our family owned two cars and both stayed in Shalom Community because they were key elements of shared motor pool. I wasted no energy on resentment or regret and treated my new financial challenges as just that, challenges I needed to meet and somehow met.