First United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: Acts 4:32-5:11
In what (I think) was meant as a compliment, one of you recently said to me: “How come the Bible is always so dull when I read it and so interesting when you read it?” For which I have no answer. Unless it consists in the fact that, in addition to reading the Bible as a very holy book, I also read it as a very human book. Meaning that when I read (or retell) one of its stories, I try to bring out every thing that is there, and every one who is there….letting them be who they are…. and letting them live among you as they lived once (with all of their agony and ecstasy, humor and pathos, warts and halos). I never short-circuit the plot on the way to the point. Neither do I airbrush the humanity on the way to the divinity.
I sometimes tell people (who claim to find the Bible “dull”) to read the Book of Acts. For those who like adventure, it’s got stonings, floggings, riots and prison breaks. It’s got storms, shipwrecks, beatings and blindings. It’s got soothsayers, snake oil salesmen, silver barons, along with a sufficient number of church fights to keep a mediator in business for a lifetime. And if that isn’t enough to curdle your cocoa, it’s got a guy who fell asleep during the sermon, tumbled from the windowsill on which he was sitting, and all but died from his fall to the ground, three stories below.
But you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Virtually everybody agrees that the most dramatic story that circulated through the early church was this little story I just read….concerning the unhappy and unholy demise of a man named Ananias and his wife, Sapphira. I preached this story years ago. But, if you’ll take my word for it, I didn’t go back to find what I said then (or reread what I wrote then). I wanted to come to it “clean,” the better to serve it up “fresh.” Not many sermons defrost well. If they did, I could move tomorrow and coast the rest of the way on a succession of “golden oldies.”
Enough of that, however. Back to our story. It is early in the first century A.D. It is after Jesus…. but before Paul. It is after Pentecost….but before the mission to the Mediterranean. It is a story growing out of the house church movement of “Jesus people” in Jerusalem. It concerns a church that was very small in number, and very poor of pocket. So how did they pay the bills?
For a brief period, they practiced a simple form of communism. Not Russian communism. Not Chinese communism. Not Iron Curtain, McCarthy hearings, or “Big Red Menace” communism. Just a simple form of “collectivism,” wherein they pooled their possessions and mutually ministered to each other’s needs. One feature of this program involved the sale of real estate. Once a field (or house) was sold, fresh money was contributed to the pool….provided the seller followed through with the promise of being a donor. Which was true of a certain Cypriot named Joseph….who the apostles renamed Barnabas (meaning Son of Encouragement or Son of Exhortation). To this day, Barnabas is the only saint….beyond the 12 apostles and Paul….who is honored with his own red-letter day in the Anglican Church.
And why was Barnabas such a big deal? Because he sold a field in the very earliest days of the movement and laid it at the apostles’ feet. Not the field, mind you. The money. Barnabas showed them the money. All of the money. As to the agent’s commission, the Bible says nothing. But if you see Kathy Dalton afterward, she’ll probably know how the agent made out at the end of the day. Good realtors have a network by which they track such things.
Very few people know this, but Neil Ferguson told me (just before the service) that several of our members who have property on Walloon Lake have recently taken this text to heart. Which means that, any day now, there should be a ton of new listings in the Petoskey Times Herald, and an infusion of fresh cash into the coffers of First Church.
So much for background. As to how long this practice persisted, we cannot say. There is no evidence that it lasted to the end of the century. The repeated appeals of Paul to the churches of Greece and Asia Minor to send generous offerings to “support the saints of Jerusalem,” would tend to suggest that either the “saints of Jerusalem” ran out of people with Walloon Lake property, or that the Mother Church came to feel that the “mother lode” was in its rich daughter churches, more than in its cash-depleted members. Darned if I know. And the Bible doesn’t say.
What it does say is that shortly after this “encouraging” act of Barnabas, two other people peddled some real estate and held back part of the price. Which was not sinful, in and of itself. They were under no obligation to give it to the church. For while such donations were a commended practice, not everybody made them. The issue was that they “said” they were going to give the proceeds to the church….all of the proceeds….from the first dollar to the last dollar. For all we know, they probably made a “big deal” of their projected gift. But they didn’t follow through on it. In short, they lied.
They, being Ananias and Sapphira. The word “Ananias” means “God is gracious.” The word “Sapphira” means “beautiful” (or better yet, “lovely”). At any rate, they sold the land and then held back on the pledge. Which Peter figured out….either by himself, or with the help of Joan Benner in the Finance office. So Peter called Ananias on the carpet, saying (in effect): “What got into you….or who got into you….so as to lead you to lie about what you sold….about what you got for what you sold….about what you gave out of what you got for what you sold….and about what you pocketed for yourself out of what you got for what you sold?”
I know that there are very good reasons as to why people don’t always follow through on what they say they are going to do. Sickness comes. Unemployment comes. Expenses rise. Market dies. Car fails. Plumbing goes. Everybody makes allowances for that.
But such is not the case, here. The biblical implication is that Ananias conspires (with the help of his wife) to make things “look” one way, while having them “turn out” a very different way. I’ll never forget the guy in Dearborn (over 30 years ago) who had it figured out to the “T.” He knew that the counting team always prepared the bank deposit (following the 11:00 service) in a hard-to-find locked room in the basement. So every Sunday he would appear about 12:45, knock on the door, and offer up another version of the same story.
He was a member who owned a retail store, meaning that he regularly made change. Which left him in need of both coins and small bills. So he would offer to buy all the silver and all the singles, writing a check for the total. Which would lighten the load of the deposit bag, while simplifying the work of the counters. And there was no reason not to trust him. I mean, they knew him. They knew his wife. They knew his kids. Besides, his check was always good. Always cleared. Never bounced. Because, you see, he wasn’t cheating the church. He was cheating the government. How, you ask? On his taxes, that’s how. At the end of every year, he totaled those checks written to First Church and declared them as charitable deductions. They weren’t, of course. But the government had no way of knowing that. If he hadn’t gotten greedy, he’d have never been audited. And the IRS would have never called the church. And the church treasurer would have never blown the whistle….on a very clever scam….by a very nice man….at a very trusting church. Stick around long enough and you’ll see it all.
But back to Ananias. Peter puts it to him. And, upon hearing Peter’s words, Ananias falls down and dies. Whereupon, the text says, “great awe came over everybody.” Several young men got up….wrapped him up….bore him up….carried him out….and laid him down. Down under. Six feet under. What do you call those men? “Pallbearers.” That’s what you call those men.
Three hours go by….(why does everything in the Bible take either three hours or forty days?). And what happens after three hours go by? The lovely Sapphira drops by the church, no doubt wondering why Ananias hasn’t come home for lunch (or to rake the leaves). So Peter questions her. “Did you have a field?” “Did you sell it for such and such a price?” “Did your gift to the church equal your stated intentions?” “And, if not, were you in on this little scheme with your husband?”
Whereupon Peter suddenly changes the subject, saying to her: “You see those young men coming through the door with shovels in their hands and mud on their boots? Bet you can’t guess where they’ve been.” So Peter tells her where they’ve been. They’ve been out burying the body of her hubby. Leading her to fall on the floor in a faint….just as fast….just as dead. So the young men buried her, too. Right beside him. And it was said, once more, “that great awe fell upon the church, and all who heard these things.”
So who killed them? Well, nobody did. Peter didn’t. The pallbearers didn’t. The power of God didn’t. Assuming they died (and who would make up a story like this, let alone perpetuate it, were it grounded in a falsehood), they died from something inside rather than from something outside. You figure out what it was. You’re a bright congregation. Most of you have taken an introductory course in psychology. I’ve got to believe you’ll come up with something over lunch. And I expect your explanation will be every bit as good as mine.
The question that interests me more is this. “If you cheat the church, are you gonna die?” I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. But, if you do, it’ll be an inside job again. I mean, God’s not gonna kill you. Religion needs to lay to rest all that “striking people dead” language. You hear it all the time. “Better watch out, God’s gonna strike you dead.” “Better not sit too close to Carl in case God decides to strike him dead.” That’s hogwash. And it’s long past time for someone to say: “That’s hogwash.”
But generous people do live longer, don’t you know. Better, too. There is a demonstrable medical correlation between open hands and strong hearts. And there is a sense that if you live with internal integrity….so that all of the parts of your life are working as one….you are going to fare far better than if all the parts of your body are working as two (or three, or four). I have always known this. But I haven’t always talked about this. Especially as concerns the issue of giving. Or, more to the point, tithing.
As is usually the case when a preacher doesn’t talk about something, the silence is usually rooted in the subconscious of one’s own embarrassment. More simply put, one is unlikely to preach what one hasn’t been inclined to practice. And if that were the case, I could understand it. But that wasn’t the case then. And it isn’t the case now. For virtually all my ministry, I have believed in tithing. And for virtually all my ministry, I have practiced tithing. In other words, my “soft sell” from the pulpit was a betrayal of my own philosophy and practice. As I analyze it now, that betrayal was rooted in the feeling that I needed to protect and coddle you. I suppose that in protecting you, I figured that I was protecting myself. But the terrible fact of the matter is that I didn’t protect you at all. I cheated you. I cheated you out of a marvelous discipline that could have made all the difference in your lives.
You see, tithing is not some nifty little scheme the Jews thought up in order to balance the budget of the Temple. Instead, tithing is a God-given principle that enables people to order their lives so that everything runs more smoothly. So, if your life isn’t running all that smoothly….and if finances are one of the reasons….this may be the most important word I will say to you all season.
Tithing can straighten out your financial life more effectively than any money-management seminar you could attend or any budget-building book you could read. I am serious. Hear me out. My colleague, David Church, writes:
I used to be mystified by the fact that when persons began to tithe, they inevitably discovered that the remaining 90 percent of their income seemed to go farther than did the 100 percent when they kept it for themselves. This has been the universal experience of everyone I have known who has started to tithe. Tithers are happier. Tithers are more fulfilled. And tithers have more of the things they want and need, than those who keep all of their income for themselves. It’s a fact. Check it out.
Right on, David. I agree. What’s more, I know why. It has nothing to do with God smiling on tithers and tipping the storehouse of heaven’s goodies so that good fortune rains more frequently on those who tithe than on those who don’t. No, things work out for tithers because the very act of tithing puts God at the center of their decision making. Which means that God becomes a part of the process of figuring out what to do, not only with the 10 percent that is given to the church, but with the 90 percent that is kept. And when people become intentional about the way they spend all of their money, they inevitably get more joy out of what they do with it, while avoiding the problems that arise from a spending plan that has no focus or purpose. The absolute genius of tithing consists in the fact that tithers say: “This is where I start.” And when you start from the right place, things tend to fall in the right order.
Lots of things fall in the right order. Including your health. It’s a spiritual law. You can look it up. But save that for later. For now, simply hang onto your hat. Because we’re going to Tulsa. Which is where my friend Bob Pierson preaches….in a Methodist church….a big Methodist church….where they collect lots and lots of money, each and every Sunday morning. Whereupon they stuff it in a safe until Monday….when they count it, total it and bank it.
Oh, don’t worry. It’s a big safe. And a safe safe. Nobody’s every cracked it. Or lifted it. I mean, you’d have to take half of the floor with it. Which is exactly what someone did. Or several someones did. It happened a few weeks back….on a Sunday night….when the safe was full. Bob said he got a call from the alarm company along about 2:00 in the morning (“Gee, Rev….we don’t want to bother you….but we’ve detected a slight variance on our motion detector.”). “A slight variance?” cried Bob. “These guys had to have used a backhoe to get that safe out of there.”
Well, they wrote everybody a letter. First thing. Told ‘em what happened. Got everybody to tell the church….Scout’s honor….what they’d given that day. And when the shock died down, people seemed to be taking it pretty well. And the leadership, from Bob on down, was working pretty hard.
Until several days later, when Bob was called out of a meeting by his secretary to speak to a fellow who had come to the office and wouldn’t go away. So Bob went out to help him go away. Whereupon the fellow said: “Reverend, I think you recently lost something. And I might….just might….be able to help you find it. Can we talk?”
Well, as it turned out, the young man (by his own admission) wasn’t always a very nice man. But he had gotten his life straightened out. Now he was trying to help others get their lives straightened out. Which was how he happened to learn about the safe….whose it was….where it was….and what was in it. Then he said:
Reverend, that ain’t right. I know that. I’ve always known that. So I’ve told the people who have your safe that what they’ve got is the Lord’s money….from the Lord’s house….for the Lord’s work. And when I found out where that money belonged, I knew that if I didn’t come to see you, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I’d rather not tell you my name. But if you trust me, I’ll call you and let you know where you can get your safe. And, I guarantee you, that even though it will have been opened, there won’t be one dollar (or one dime) missing from its contents.
Whereupon he did. They did. And there wasn’t.
True story? Yeah.
Good story? Yeah.
Straight story? You tell me.
* * * * *
The Lord’s money!
Some people hold it back.
Some people bring it back.
It’s all in a day’s work….right?
Wrong! Some days, it’s a matter of life and death.
