I was a high school English teacher before coming to seminary and one of the practices that I used in the

classroom was to pause at a point in the story and ask the students to predict what was going to happen based on what they knew about the characters that far. This required the students to use their imaginations but within the confines of the narrative up to that point. With the Book of Acts we find ourselves in the middle of the story that Luke is attempting to tell about Jesus and the community created in his name. At the end of the Gospel the disciples have witnessed the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, if we are attempting to imagine where the story line is heading with the resurrection all bets are off we can kind of let our imaginations run wild. Then in the first chapters of Acts the great power that brought Jesus back from the dead falls on the disciples in Jerusalem and a community is formed. A community that begins to practice resurrection as Charlie suggested last week. If we pause today this first week after Easter to ask where is the story heading. What might our predictions be about how the life of this community will be changed by Easter? What will happen to the church as we begin to embody the resurrection as we begin to become more skilled at the resurrection practices Charlie spoke of last week? Well when we turn to Acts chapter 2:43-47 and chapter 4:32-35 to get the synopsis of what the community will look like I think their resurrection practices are surprising and to be generous you might say they give us pause. (Read 2:43-47) The repeated theme that they had all things in common, that they sold their possessions and did not claim private ownership to the point that no one had any need among them would probably not have been among most of our predictions for where the story was going. In fact commentators on this passage often try to down play its veracity or the duration of such practices. At the same time what is most striking is that if we catch the echoes that Luke is making to the story of Gods movement in and among His people from the giving of the law by Moses up through the life of Jesus we see that the picture of the life

of the community of believers described in Acts is the most logical and consistent picture if we were making our predictions based on the story of God's will for the people of God in every time and place. That is to say that if we had been good students of God's story up to this point our imagination would have immediately began to form images like those found in our text for today. If we listen again to the key phrase in the middle of Luke's summary statement "there was not a needy person among them." We here a clear echo to the Old Testament text that we read this morning. In the Deuteronomy text the scene is the giving of the Torah (those guiding principles for living the life God intended) to the people as they were about to pass over into the Promised Land. God has set them free from captivity and bondage they were to adopt liberation practices. Verse 4 suggests that with the lord's blessing there would be no need among them. In Deuteronomy the Lord is saying to the liberated people on the verge of the Promised Land: you should not have those among you whose cry for help goes unheeded because you are here today because I heeded your call for help. There is a constant thread throughout the Old Testament calling for a loose grip on possessions and a constant call for blessings to be used for the mission of God. Deuteronomy speaks of the remission of debts, the breaking down of walls around fields and crops so that the needy may glean from one's abundance. Consistently the mission of God involved meeting the needs of the poor and marginalized. Even more, in the other main Torah text explaining the way that God wants the people to live in the new land, Leviticus, there is talk of the jubilee, the year of the Lord's favor when debts are forgiven, land's that had been sold out of need were returned to the seller, slaves freed and more. These Torah texts are only the foundation of God's continued call throughout the Psalms and the prophets for justice, and protection and care for the orphan, widow and alien -- the needy. It is this golden thread of God's love for the creation and humanity that runs throughout the

scriptures. And it is this golden thread in the terms of the jubilee, the year of the Lord's favor that we find as the mission statement of Jesus in the first part of Luke's story in Luke 4:18-19. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." As in our text the coming together of the spirit of the Lord and the push to meet the needs of all in the community is what God is about in the world. There is a moment when the powers of empire and power hungry religious authorities seek to make God's dream into a tragic nightmare by crucifying the messiah. There are the mocking taunts that this type of love is impractical and will not keep you safe and secure. This reckless generosity without regard for personal property or even ones own life is dangerous and for Jesus can get you killed. So on Good Friday there is a question. Should we seek to care for those who are in need or should we start right away protecting ourselves, denying that we once dared to dream that a day when there would be no need among us could come. But come Easter the dream is back in full force. Jesus and his mission could not be kept underground. In the first chapters of Acts we see the dream of God for creation bubble up and begin to spill out upon those who have been given the ability to see and experience the power and promise of the resurrection. When we read Acts 4:32-35 we get this glimpse of a people who clearly saw the future that God desired and immediately started practicing for it. We see that this is the reality that God is pulling us into from the future that is so clearly suggested in the final book of the scriptures. Hear these words of the dream God has in store for us. See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself

will be with them; 4 he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away. So here we are on the other side of Easter. We know God's desire for us. We know that nothing can separate us from the love of God, neither sin, nor death, principalities nor powers. We know that God is in the business of creating a people, building a community and calling each of us into this new community that is defined by new loyalties and a new story. In the text from Acts, Revelation and the mission statement of Jesus we have been given a glimpse into what type of story God is calling us to act out. But we know that there are strong counter-narratives in the world that compel us to practice self-regard and to protect ourselves and our own through the accumulation of things that we are told will keep us safe from shame, want, discomfort, and dependence. Society teaches us a particular version of success and happiness. Now the statements about common ownership and not claiming private ownership in the Acts text are closer to the idea that when needs arouse people were not beyond the selling of their land to help those in need. We can recognize that the aim is not to simply pool everything and begin a commune. The acknowledgement of the text and the early church is that God is calling them to recognize that nowhere is death's power more evident in society that in the relentless push to have more, to get more and to hold more. We will be constantly challenged starting this afternoon or Monday morning to use our imagination to motivate us to perform well as we are asked to picture our fame, wealth, security, self-promotion and self-preservation as self-evident values. We know that in themselves the dreams that society compels us with to accumulate and consume lead to death. This community where we find ourselves this morning is founded on the conquering of that death. We experience here the moments of the dream of God breaking into our day to day lives. In the resurrection practices of this community: worship, sacraments, fellowship, nurture, love and

service we are caught up into the new community that God seeks to create where God's great grace is anointing us and compelling us to be a place where there is not a needy person among us. Caught up in the story God is attempting to tell through us we counter the death dealing nightmares of self-promotion and self-preservation with a resurrected imagination that dares to dream along with God of the coming of God's reign on earth. No more need, no more tears. We began by trying to use our imagination to predict where God's story was going postresurrection, but we saw that there have been spoilers to that plot since the giving of Torah. We know what God is calling us to in the description of the Spirit created community of Acts and in the resurrection we know that there is nothing that can thwart God's dream. So now we have to use our imagination in a different way. Not to predict, but to boldly hope and dream. To use our resurrected imaginations to find our place in the new community God is forming, to live into the dream that God is dreaming.