Community
In 1937, the German secret police shut down a seminary in a town called Finkenwalde. The seminary had been created in secret to train ministers for the Confessing Church — the part of the German church that had refused to go along with the Nazi government. It was led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor in his early thirties. For the two years the seminary operated, the students and teachers in Finkenwalde knew that they were under threat. But still they prayed together, studied together, and ate together.
A few months after the Gestapo closed the seminary, Bonhoeffer wrote a book about Christian community that we’re currently talking about in our Adult Education program. The book is called Life Together.
There’s a paradox in Bonhoeffer’s writing. His book reads as if it was written for all Christians in all times and places — and it was. But it was also written by a man who was eventually arrested and executed, about a community that practiced Christian life together knowing that they did so in the face of the very real threat of persecution.
The first Christians knew that same threat.
The passage we heard this morning from Acts talks about a time that began fifty days after Easter. The resurrection has happened. The Spirit has descended at Pentecost. Peter has just preached in the streets of Jerusalem, and three thousand people have joined the movement in a single day.
But the world hasn’t changed. Rome still occupies Jerusalem. The authorities who killed Jesus are still in power. And adding three thousand new members in an afternoon is a really good way to attract the wrong kind of attention. These first followers of Jesus are meeting in the Temple and in each other’s homes. But they’re not safe. They’re not comfortable. The upheaval that followed Jesus wherever he went hasn’t gone away.
The book of Acts speaks of a community that seems utopian: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.”
We often read those words and turn them into an argument about economics. Some see a model for Christian socialism. Others see a cautionary tale. But I don’t think those first followers of Jesus were drawing up an economic system. I think they were simply living a Christian life.
Bonhoeffer helps us see why we keep falling into the trap of idealizing what the church can and should be. Many of us come to church — and to the church in scripture — carrying a picture in our heads of what it’s supposed to look like. Filled with children, but also quiet and reverent. Open to new ideas, but also solidly orthodox. There when we need it, but not too demanding the rest of the time. Safe and comfortable, but also grounded in courage and conviction. Bonhoeffer says that ideal is precisely what gets in the way of true community. The community we imagine becomes the enemy of the community we’re actually a part of.
Look again at what the book of Acts is actually describing. They “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” They ate together with glad and generous hearts. They shared what they had because they were practicing life together, day by day, in the middle of real risk and real fear.
That’s exactly what was happening in Finkenwalde. Morning and evening prayer. Scripture reading. Singing together. Sharing meals. The book Bonhoeffer wrote afterward isn’t a theory. It’s a description of what they actually practiced, day by day, knowing that hostile authorities were watching.
What the church in Acts and the church in Finkenwalde practiced is also what we practice here. We gather for scripture and prayer and the breaking of bread. We study together — including, right now, the very book Bonhoeffer wrote about his own community. Different centuries, different circumstances — but the same practices, passed down through communities like theirs. Practices that can give us strength for whatever burdens we carry in our own lives and whatever challenges we face in our own time.
God is present even — maybe especially — when things are hard.
It’s the old familiar prayer, lived out in community: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me.” There’s no pretense that risk and danger and fear aren’t real. There’s no guarantee of safety. There’s just one promise. It’s the promise that the church in Acts learned. The promise that those seminary students in Germany trusted in. A promise that holds still today. “You are with me. You spread a table before me in the presence of my enemies. My cup runneth over.”
Trusting in that promise, may we, like those who came before us, devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.