A Sermon preached on April 7, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells
Reading for address: Acts 4: 32-5
The question that dominates the season of Easter is the question that pervades the book of Acts. So what? Ok, so Jesus has risen: so what? What difference does that make to human existence, in the face of war, famine, disease and conquest? What difference does that make to poverty, adversity, misery, debt? What difference does it make to gender, race and class? What difference does it make to money, sex and power?
You’ll be glad to know I’m not going to address all these questions this morning. I’m going to focus on just one. And that’s the one our first reading speaks to: money. The New Testament unambiguously asserts that what Christianity shapes as much as anything else is our attitude to money. So here’s today’s question: what is money for?
The resurrection certainly changed the way Jesus’ first disciples thought about money. In Acts chapter 4 the apostles give their testimony to Jesus’ resurrection with grace and power. But it’s also about money. It says no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. There wasn’t a needy person among them, for those who owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to those who had need.
I want to look closely at these words to see what they do and don’t say about money.
The first thing these words tell us is that money has a moral purpose. That’s not as obvious as it sounds. It’s quite common to find people who talk about money as something that’s bad in itself. First Timothy tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil, but that’s not the same as saying money is a bad thing. The early disciples don’t seem to have regarded money as a bad thing. There’s a lot of good things money can help you do.
Perhaps the person above all others who’s helped the church to understand this is John Wesley. Wesley was a genius at showing how ordinary people can live lives of genuine holiness. His advice is inspiring and liberating, because he doesn’t treat money as something bad in itself. For Wesley, having money doesn’t make you a selfish person, and doesn’t separate you from the poor. On the contrary, your money becomes an extension of your ministry. He says ‘Consider yourself simply the first in the number of poor you must care for.’ Isn’t that so simple, and yet so liberating? Suddenly it’s not a choice between being selfish or selfless, it’s a simple way of standing alongside people in distress. ‘Consider yourself simply the first in the number of poor you must care for.’ And then he goes on, ‘Care for yourself as for the poor, by tending to necessities and nothing beyond.’ Wesley isn’t interested in us punishing ourselves for the sake of it. For him the encounter with the poor person is an opportunity to rediscover what really matters. So where does that put our attitude to money? He has an answer to that one, too. ‘The problem is not possessing wealth, but possessing more than is employed according to God’s will.’ Like the early apostles, Wesley isn’t content that we give God 10% and then go ahead and use the other 90% any way we please. We needn’t necessarily give all 100% away, but we certainly put all 100% to work for God’s realm.
This is liberating because it shows us our personal interests are not inherently sinful. Anyone who tries to live with other people discovers that trying to be selfless the whole time results rapidly in anger, bitterness and accusations of hypocrisy. The point is not to pretend that we don’t have profound needs, but to distinguish between our wants from our needs, and find ways of communicating those needs to one another that are mutually enriching without becoming manipulative. The resurrection of Jesus doesn’t make us all into God, but transforms the possibilities of our humanity. The true joy of community is to discover that your need and mine become ingredients that build up rather than diminish our common life.
To say money has a moral purpose is also a challenge to those who would like to make money irrelevant to the gospel. Money isn’t a bad thing – but neither is it a small thing. It’s funny how those who are so sure about what the Bible says about morality and often insist their views should be translated into national legislation seldom seem to dwell on these verses about the first apostles. It’s surprisingly common to find people who say Christianity is about going to heaven, and since money isn’t about going to heaven, money’s irrelevant to Christianity. But money wasn’t irrelevant to the first witnesses of the resurrection. Their use of money was the most visible way others could see what they believed about Jesus’ resurrection. Today it’s the same. Our use of money is the most visible way others can see what we believe about the resurrection.
So money isn’t bad, and money isn’t irrelevant. Money has a moral purpose. But the next thing this passage shows us is that money isn’t everything. The apostles knew one thing for certain – and that was that God raised Jesus from the dead and took him back to heaven and sent the Holy Spirit to infuse their common life with the power of the resurrection. All other information had to get in line behind that overwhelming reality.
In recent centuries it’s become more common to think about money without reference to God. The two most famous thinkers to do so are Adam Smith and Karl Marx. What both these thinkers show is that, when God ceases to be everything, money becomes everything. For Adam Smith, God is a distant judge who remains to us for ever a stranger. As a result, we are fundamentally strangers to one another. Smith evaluates all our transactions as interchanges between strangers. He places his whole confidence in the market and its ability to enable strangers to make contracts with one another. By what he called an ‘invisible hand,’ individuals pursuing their own self-interest tend simultaneously to promote the good of their community as a whole. This is pretty much the opposite of the vision of Acts chapter 4, because Smith sees human beings as isolated entities bent on meeting their own needs, rather than members of a body designed for worship.
If Adam Smith’s view of human nature is bleak, Karl Marx’ view is bleaker still. Marx saw our economic relations as a form of warfare. For Smith, we’re all strangers. For Marx, we’re all enemies. Marx’ vision undoubtedly owes much to Acts chapter 4. The phrase ‘from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs’ is rooted in this very passage of scripture. Marx’ vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat is a secular resurrection. But in the absence of God, money has become everything. We’re not children of God made for worship; instead we’ve become economic animals built to fight with anyone but people of our own class.
The scary part of Acts chapter 4 for many of us is that it seems to chisel away at the notion of private property. The words ‘they held all things in common’ feels seriously scary. Acts chapter 4 is telling us that, like money, private property isn’t everything. It’s never more than what we might call a ‘useful fiction.’ It’s useful, because those who want to take your property away from you are seldom doing so for noble reasons, and usually need deterring by force of law. But it’s a fiction, because, as we all know, you can’t take it with you. Money isn’t a mechanism for ensuring earthly immortality, but a means of exchange whose fleeting quality reminds us of our utter dependence on God. The things that most matter, money can’t buy.
So money has a moral purpose, but money isn’t everything. And the third thing we discover in Acts chapter 4 is what money is, in fact, for. In the history of the church only one group has ever seriously gone about living in an Acts 4 kind of a way over a sustained period. And that’s the Benedictine monks. St Benedict lived in the early sixth century. Under his name and around his famous Rule countless communities have formed in the spirit of Acts chapter 4, looking to embody the resurrection life by sharing possessions. Benedict’s Rule isn’t designed for fanatics: it’s said that ‘a lamb can bathe in it without drowning, while an elephant can swim in it;’ in other words it’s known for its humane and flexible approach to communal living. Benedict noted from Acts chapter 4 and other passages that the resurrection isn’t fundamentally an individual experience. It’s a communal practice. Benedict discovered that money is for making community, not for protecting us from other people. This is what money is for.
When visitors encounter Benedictine communities for the first time, they’re often disappointed, or even shocked, that the monks don’t live in bare poverty. But if you notice, Acts chapter 4 isn’t about poverty. It’s about having all things in common. Remember our first discovery about Acts chapter 4 was that money isn’t a bad thing. Money only becomes a bad thing when you forget what it’s for or make it everything. For Benedict, money exists to create community by requiring the disciplines of sacrifice, sharing and obedience. The resurrection is a communal experience, discovered in worship, discovered in obedience, but discovered also in the power that’s released by the sharing of money.
From Benedict we learn that money is never fundamentally a device for avoiding dependence on one another, but should always be ultimately a means for discovering our need of one another. It’s scary to think of life without insurance, without a safety net should we need to go into a care facility. But these things aren’t much good to us without the relationships that make our lives worth living. Acts 4 teaches us to use money to make relationships, rather than use relationships to make money. The lesson is this. Make money your friend in the business of making friends. Don’t make money your idol in the business of making idols. Never use relationships to make money. Always use money to make relationships. Money isn’t a device for protecting us from dependence on each other. Money is for creating new kinds of interdependence by the kinds of community created when we stop regarding one another fundamentally as strangers.
And one last thing. Remember Acts chapter 4 is fundamentally a story about God. The Sprit calls the disciples to do what the Father has already done in Christ; which is to sell all he has, and lay it at our, his apostles’, feet.
