Acts 2:42-47 Commentary

Illustration

A magazine profile of celebrity chef turned daytime television host, Rachael Ray, boasted this headline on their cover: “Rachael Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog.”

It matters where you put the comma. Giving Rachel Ray the benefit of the doubt, one assumes she likes three things — cooking (COMMA) her family (COMMA — or not, depending on your loyalty to Oxford) and her dog. Again, giving Rachel Ray the benefit of the doubt, one assumes she does not enjoy cooking her family and cooking her dog. And that’s why it matters where you put the comma.

Or, as in the case of this morning’s lectionary reading, it matters where you split the text.

Commentary:

The Biblical text wasn’t originally written with chapters or verses. The original text didn’t have headings. Those are all conventions we’ve invented in order to access the text more easily. A dandy idea, except that, when poorly placed, these tabs for ease-of-use might inadvertently mis-shape our interpretation and, more drastically still, our discipleship. What do I mean by that?

Well, take the way the lectionary has subdivided Acts 2.  Our first stop is the story of Jesus. And then we go home for a week.  Our second stop is the arrival of the Holy Spirit while Peter is preaching so that the people are convicted and respond by being baptized and “about 3,000 were added to their number that day.” There endeth the lesson and we all went home for another week.

Which makes it feel like verse 42-47 are, somehow, a separate thought. But what if we’ve placed the comma wrong? What if people’s response to the infiltrating, infusing power of the Holy Spirit isn’t just in their initial response to Peter’s sermon? It isn’t just their salvation or their personal conviction, that initial decision or the affective reaction of being “cut to the heart”? What if — in fact — the whole of verses 37 through 47 (perhaps even the whole book of Acts) is intended to tell us how it is that God’s people continuously respond to the infiltrating, infusing power of the Holy Spirit in new and remarkably self-sacrificing ways?

And 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. To put a comma in the text between verses 41 and 42 creates the impression that responding to the Holy Spirit and figuring out how to share a common life with God’s people are two different activities.

A bifurcated text leads to a bifurcated faith, which can lead people to bifurcated lives. So that, somehow, it’s become perfectly possible to have an enthusiastic experience on Sunday and to go back to work stealing money from people on Monday. It’s possible to proclaim that Jesus is LORD on Sunday and to pledge allegiance to unjust systems of governing people the rest of the week. It’s possible to be a thoroughly spiritual being on Sunday and to use your body as you see fit the weekend before and after. It’s possible — and in some circles even lauded — to think about the world one way from Monday through Saturday and then to flip a switch to turn that part of our brains off for Sunday. At the heart of every accusation of hypocrisy against Christians is a startlingly accurate observation that we have split our faith and our lives, a bifurcation that begins with the way we read the Scripture text. To a watching world, you see, it matters where we put our comma.

The miraculous presence of the Spirit doesn’t disappear between the disciples going to sleep after the busy-ness of Acts 2:41 and their waking up to a new day in Acts 2:42. The church isn’t what happens after that day when the Holy Spirit showed up. The church is the place where the Holy Spirit keeps showing up. This isn’t just the day after the Holy Spirit Hooplah. This is the day of the Holy Spirit’s ongoing power and enabling. We see it in the actions of verses 42 through 47, not bifurcated from the Spirit’s presence but of a piece with it.

We are told that the early church held their prayers in common, seeing evidence of the Spirit’s ongoing empowerment. Surely there is evidence of supernatural gifts in the early church, but I think we are overlooking the obvious if we don’t see that the rest of this paragraph already has the Holy Spirit woven in and through it. Listen to this:

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.” The church remains faithful to the truth. They don’t sand down the rough edges, to say less than what the Biblical text requires.

They share everything they have. When one person in the church has a need, another person sells some land in order to meet that need. In a culture not too different from our own, with desire for wealth and accumulation of status through extravagant expenditure, only the Holy Spirit can rid people of greed, self-interest and pride in their relationships with one another.

They devote themselves to fellowship — common meals, common purse, common concerns, common prayers. A frankly uncommon sense of holding all things in common. Willie Jennings says, “The space of this common was where life stories, life projects, plans and purposes were being intercepted by a new orientation. This common is created by the Holy Spirit.”

We aren’t told the specifics of how this happens — it doesn’t look like a separate curriculum or program or outreach initiative. Instead, as they do this work of building a common life, the watching world sees just how uncommon it is for individuals with not much in common to shape their lives around a common purpose. Married and single; children and senior citizens, multiple doctorates and those with barely a GED; living their lives together, mending what the world is intent on ripping apart.

As the church does the uncommonly common work of being the church, the world sees that they — that we? — are mending what has been ripped apart. Robert Wall writes of the early church’s activities, “The Acts model of Christian community is one of common worship, common practice, common good and common witness.” An uncommon common sense by which “the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”