Scripture Sunday: Everything Held in Common

by Ashtyn Adams

Acts 4:32-35 (NRSV)
32 Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. 33 With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. 34 There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. 35 They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

The early church is often romanticized, but usually not for the things that made it interesting, subversive, and radically egalitarian. This week’s lectionary brings us to the very beginnings of the Christian movement as told in the book of Acts, where we hear about a community fundamentally unlike the ones we now know: private ownership was abolished, land was sold and redistributed to benefit the needy, everything was held in common so that all would have enough. These were not small acts of charity, but complete rejections of the dominant and extractive narratives of Empire. Every single aspect of life, including, most shockingly to us, the financial and economic operations, were re-oriented towards “The Way” (Acts 9:2).

At the heart of the liberative movement of the followers of “The Way,” as they were known at the time, was the affirmation of God as Creator of the good creation. Before the sharing and distribution of possessions begins, Peter and John pray with the community, “Sovereign Lord, you made the heavens and the earth and the sea, and everything in them” (Acts 4:24). The land is first and foremost recognized as a gift which God alone “owns” and has given for our responsible use and enjoyment. Following this affirmation, creation, the land itself, is liberated from the bonds of private ownership to once again display the munificence of God in “what Richard Rohr refers to as ‘the eternal pattern of generosity’ — how God created the world as the ultimate act of generosity and how creation exists within the cycle of continued generosity.”

At the heart of the liberative movement of the followers of “The Way,” as they were known at the time, was the affirmation of God as Creator of the good creation.

The climate crisis is one of the many convicting pieces of evidence that those who claim the name of Christ are so often not followers of “The Way,” at least not that particular generous, Spirit-infused way. We prefer the way of American hypercapitalism, which “reinforce the illusion of scarcity and justify the extraction of maximum profits at the expense of the labor force, land, and resources.” We operate with the logic that amassing more and more is a sign of virtue for the imagined category of the “deserving,” believing that money and power will save us, and thinking that the Earth exists purely for our benefit, if we think of it at all. Our refusal to attend to Christ in the over-extracted land and the poor renders us, as Dorothy Day would say, practicing atheists.

The question thus arises, as it has for all of church history, “Is it Christian to own land? To have private possessions?” The reality is that, especially after Christianity got into bed with Rome and Constantine, the answer has been yes. It must also be said there are many avenues to serve The Way which must be contextualized and discerned. However, the early church and subsequent centuries of saints and prophets, from Saint Francis to Martin Luther King Jr., challenge us to, at the very, very least, consider how our economic practices implicate us in evil, how all we prize and possess is often stolen from some other person or part of the created order. The Book of Acts dispels the myth that we are isolated individuals, testifying to the One who created us to be responsible to one another, entering into a dance with the generous, life-giving rhythms of all of creation. As the planet cries out for relief from our harmful practices, we must realize how far our mindsets truly are from those who were closest to Christ, and perhaps be haunted by it.

The life of the early church, in some shape or form, ought to ultimately be an ideal and inspiration. For those of us trying to faithfully live into The Way in the Anthropocene, can we say our communities, churches, schools, and political bodies are spaces where “No one claimed private ownership of the Earth, but everything of the Earth was held in common”? Likely not, yet the pursuit of “all things held in common” is a worthy and holy one. After all, the early Church behaved so radically not because they “had to,” but because in the true affection for fellow creatures and creation, there is the deepest well of satisfaction, joy, and happiness to be found; as Simone Weil says, “real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

Web Articles:
https://sojo.net/magazine/november-2023/good-news-about-money 
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/jesus-started-a-movement-2022-11-14/

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Ashtyn Adams is a Seminary Intern at Creation Justice Ministries. Ashtyn earned her B.A. in Religion from Pepperdine University and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Divinity at Duke University.

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