We all thirst

A sermon on Isaiah 55:1 

“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters”

Everyone who thirsts, everyone thirsts, we all thirst.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to chat with a friend who is due to have a baby in around 3 month.  She thirsts.  She thirsts for change in the world because she fears for her child’s future.  She thirsts especially for action on climate change because she believes it is the biggest challenge her children will face.

We all thirst.

Last Sunday a young international student was found unconscious near the pool at Southbank.  He died a few days later.  On Wednesday his parents arrived.  One can only think that they thirst.  The thirst to see their son.  They thirst for meaning and understanding of what happened.  They thirst for healing of their broken hearts.

We all thirst.

Over the past week I have met dozens of students starting University for the first time.  They thirst. They thirst for knowledge, they thirst for friendship, they thirst for the opportunity show that they are adults, filled with life they thirst!

We all thirst.

During the week the Church Council met.  We thirst.  We thirst for God’s renewal of this congregation.  We thirst for God’s comfort for those among us who are facing death.  We thirst for new opportunities for the students who come here year by year.  We thirst for the energy and capacity to lead the congregation into a new future filled with God’s love and generosity.

We all thirst.

Take a moment thinking about the things for which you thirst.  Maybe it is a sign of God’s presence in your life.  Maybe it is for more time to do the things you want to do.  Maybe it is for comfort and peace as you face difficult health issues.  Maybe it is something for someone you love: your children, your spouse, your parents.

We all thirst.

Now turn and consider each other look at the people gathered here this day.  Do you know what they thirst for?  Have you asked?  Have you shared their journey?  As God’s people we are called to be here for each other. To uphold one another on a this journey through what at times seems such a  dry land.

We all thirst.

And now see, see with me and look at a man hanging discarded on a cross.  He is God’s son, he walked the earth, the dusty roads of Galilee and he shared the good news of God.  He healed people, he forgave them, the taught people of God’s presence and love! He opened the doors of hope for a relationship with God for all people.  But he was betrayed and left to die at the hands of the government of his time – the Roman Empire.  And the words that trickle from his dry lips “I thirst”.

Our God thirsts with us.

Jesus cries out.  “I thirst” and he is mocked and he is offered sour wine on a sponge but God, God hears, God hears Jesus cries as he descends into death and lies in the cold grave for three days.

But Isaiah’s prophesy is sure and true:

Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,

and delight yourselves in rich food.

Incline your ear, and come to me;

listen, so that you may live.

Jesus is raised from the tomb.  The rich feast of God is coming.  A feast not of human hands but a feast of God’s love in which we are all satisfied.  This is our hope, our hope in an eternal feast of God’s love – celebrating as we enjoy:

a feast of rich foods,

a feast of well-aged wines,

of rich food filled with marrow,

of well-strained wines strained clear.

A feast for all nations.

This is our hope. This why we come.  This is why we share this journey.  We are not perfect and holy people.  We are a people who thirst.  And we are people who have heard that Jesus thirsts with us and that he has been raised form among the dead. 

We come to listen.  We come really listen.  We come to seek the Lord whilst he is near and in coming we become witnesses to each other of God’s love and generosity.

The temptation for us is satisfy the deep thirsts of our life at the well of consumption – where the 

buying a selling of goods has been sanctified and our happiness is equated to what we own and what we have.  But in the words of the great Mick Jagger “I can’t get no satisfaction.”  We can’t get no satisfaction but filling our lives with more and more things, cramming more and more into our time, to fill our empty lives.

The invitation is to come and to listen for God, to encounter God, to share God with one another and with anyone else that we encounter in our daily life, or who walks through the doors of this place. 

God has opened the doors wide, all arewelcome.

We may find that we continue to thirst.  We may feel that God is not alongside us.  We might bear little or no fruit.  But take heart for God’s message is that in Christ he has come not to tear down but to open up the possibilities and to be patient with us. 

The parable of the fig tree reminds us that God’s desire is not to cut down but to bring what need the manure of life itself, the food, the water that we need to sustain us and to make sense of who we are and where we are going.  Our place is not to judge God or one another but to nurture one another and to be patient as God tends the garden of our lives and the lives of others.  The fruit will come.

“Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters”

Everyone who thirsts. Everyone thirsts. We all thirst.

Hear the good news, the one who thirsted has been raised from the dead.  All our thirsts can be satisfied and we can drink deeply from the well of living water – eternal life.

Psalm 63:2-15

So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips

Where is the joy?

May the Words of my mouth
And the meditations of our hearts
Be acceptable in your sight, O Lord
Our strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

Today on the third Sunday of Advent the readings encourage us to contemplate the theme of joy.

In Isaiah 61:

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God”

In Psalm 126:

“Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with shouts of joy”

In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians:

“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing”

This theme of joy is etched into our Christian existence; it is a response to God’s grace and goodness, it is part of the Christian DNA. So strong is this theme of joy that the word for joy is found over 300 times in the New Testament.

Christians are meant to be people filled with joy.

But what does joy sound like, what does joy look like, what does it feel like?

Is joy found in the pursuit of happiness?

Is joy found in the ownership of goods?

Is joy found in status and wealth?

Or even in a bar of chocolate?


If one were to examine the Western culture in which we live one might think that the answer to these things is yes. In fact much of our advertising encourages us to think that if we consume a particular product we will be happier.

A recent campaign by Cadbury chocolate called ‘share the joy’ included the slogan “A glass and half full of joy”, whilst more recently the current Coca-Cola advertising carries the catch phrase “Open Happiness”.

Ultimately, a great deal of our advertising does the same – it suggests that by owning or consuming a particular product we will be more fulfilled and that we will be imbued with joy or happiness or contentment.

Of course most of us see through the advertising and know that products do not necessarily produce the joy in life that we seek. In fact it seems that our very opulent lifestyle is failing to fulfil us let alone bring us joy.

Despite the indications of how high a standard of living we as Australians enjoy, how wealthy we are on a world scale, we continue to speak of ourselves as Aussie battlers and wear that badge with a sense of pride. And there are clear indicators as Australians that we are not a very happy people.

Statistics indicate that at any given time one in six Australian men is suffering from depression and that women are twice as likely as men to suffer depression after puberty.

Now whilst mental illness is a complex issue this is a disturbing statistic in such a wealthy culture. This statistic is made more concerning but the figures of suicide rates in Australia. More than one in five deaths which occur in 15-24 year old men occurs through suicide.

Timothy Radcliffe, the former head of the world Dominican order, noted in his devotional book “Seven last Words” that in his travels around the world it was in the wealthiest countries that he found that people seemed to be the most worried. It appears that we are afflicted by our anxiety despite our wealth or maybe even because of it!

We have not found joy! This seems somewhat paradoxical given our Western culture has its roots in Christendom. If joy is meant to be etched into our Christian existence where have we gone wrong? Where is the joy?

As I examined the passages set down for today apart from the theme of joy another theme came through, a theme which anchors that joy of which I am speaking and for which I think we long.

Listen for the theme in Isaiah:

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me

And,

I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness,

He goes on,

so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

Do you hear it? Do you get it? Isaiah’s confidence, his task, his joy was there because he believed and trusted that God had acted, was acting and that God would act again in human history.

So too in the Psalm

“the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion”

The Lord has done great things for us, and we rejoiced.

And again in Paul’s letter the strength of hope expressed in a trust in God’s faithfulness:

“The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do this.”

People of faith through history have found their joy in knowing and believing in a God who acts.

The God who we are told sent John into the world to prepare the way for Jesus coming into the world.

I wonder whether as a culture we have become so reliant on our own abilities, so disconnected from the struggle to survive, so individualistic in our pursuit of happiness that we have lost focus on the heart of our faith – the faithfulness of God. The faithfulness of God expressed to the whole creation in his willingness to share our human existence in Jesus and to point a way forward into the hope, peace and joy of life with God.

To recover our joy as Christians means that maybe we should stop pursuing happiness as it is being sold to us and rather pursue God: to pursue God, knowing that the joy that we find in relationship with him has led Christians through the millennia to face hardship and peril with a sense of joy and peace. The joy of the Christian life is a joy which can and does transcend personal hardships.

When the Psalmist fills mouths with laughter it is done so in the face of adversity.

So the first step may be to stop trying to pursue joy and happiness and rather focus again on God.

But more than this, the reading from Isaiah should also bring to mind that Jesus chose these words from Isaiah to preach the good news to his home town of Galilee.

The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to provide for those who mourn in Zion— to give them a garland instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.

Jesus declared that the year of the Lord’s favour had come in him and truly if we understand this it should be a source of joy for us.

The year of the Lord’s favour, the year of Jubilee, was meant to occur every 50 years. When the year of Jubilee came it “was a time of social renewal when all debts were forgiven, slaves were set free, and every dispossessed family returned to their ancestral lands that may have been sold or lost over the decades. (Leviticus 25) People may lose their land, their freedom, their stake in civil society for many reasons—whether by natural calamity, parental mismanagement, oppressive government, or moral failure—it does not matter. A new generation gets a stake in life. All is graciously restored in the year of Jubilee.” (http://shalomconnections.org/SC/SC07Sp2H.pdf)

If we place our confidence, our faith, our trust in God and if we listen for Jesus words our joy comes from a shared hope in renewed community, in renewed relationship with God and with each other. It is about shared joy not simply individual happiness. Our joy runs deep as we live with hope that all will share in the joy of life lived in God’s creation.

I think sometimes the difficulty for we who have so much is to find joy in God and not our possessions and luxury. To be grateful for what we have and not constantly seek after more, but this is such a counter cultural idea. Yet not only this but to take seriously the concept of the year of the Lord’s favour in which we hear a vision to bring good news to the oppressed and to forgive debts and to bind up the broken hearted and to comfort those who mourn. It is meant to be an eternal year of Jubilee.

Personally I find that the struggle that I have with joy at times is that it is difficult to be joyful about how good my life is when so many are suffering in the world. Yet part of this conundrum is that not to be thankful for the things that I have and the opportunities would somehow seem ungrateful.

I believe Jesus presence in the world releases me and all of us from this conundrum and invites us to live celebrating joyfully the salvation we have found in him whilst at the same time caring so that others may know and experience salvation: life and life in all its fullness. To put it another way to be joyful in our thanksgiving but also to care until all people can share in the joy.

To rejoice in the Lord always means being set from our anxieties about the future and trusting in the God who acts and so to share his concerns for others. I don’t think we can respond to a command to be joyful rather having encountered God and heard that we can place our trust in him we can be liberated from our anxieties and so rejoice.

For me this is about getting things in the right order. Seek after God and we will find joy.

The Christian story has a theme of rejoicing a tone of celebration. This joy comes from the hope we have in Christ and the peace that we have been given in our relationship with God. It is a joy that causes us to take stock of our lives in this community of creation and as we do so to share in Christ’s ministry as his disciples in the world.

The facade of joy that surrounds us is a sales pitch that has no depth. As we edge closer to celebrating the birth of Jesus let us be surprised by the joy of our relationship with God and share that joy with others, especially those in the world who need it most as we say with Isaiah:

“I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness”

Advent 1: Dirty Undies

by Peter Lockhart

“We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.”

Today we begin what is known as Advent. It is a time of reorienting ourselves towards the promise of the coming of Jesus into the world – not simply his historical coming but his promised coming in the future.

As we begin this journey of 4 weeks leading into remembering the birth of Jesus, the very first reading, recorded in the lectionary from Isaiah, confronts us with a Psalm of lamentation of the Jewish people about their feeling of separation from God, including this confession of sin.

Isaiah’s prophecy occurred in tumultuous times for the people of God threatened as they were by internal divisions and external pressures especially from the ancient Assyrian power.

It is this confession that draws us into our own contemplation of who we are, and of whose we are.

For Isaiah the confession found in verse 6 begins with an admission that the people had become unclean. The language here is beyond most of our everyday understanding because for the Jewish people to be unclean was to be unable to come into God’s presence and God’s holiness. Someone who was unclean could not approach God and the source of such uncleanness was sin.

The description in the verse of sin is twofold: firstly, so-called righteous deeds gone wrong; and secondly, iniquities, or wrong doing, carrying the people away.

I want to dwell on the first of these issues for a moment, “all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.” The criticism and confession contained within these words are confronting. Even the deeds that the people had done thinking that they were doing the right thing are no better than filthy clothes.

As I was reading about this image a couple of the commentaries pointed out that this phrase actually means dirty undergarments. To rephrase Isaiah it is like saying that those things that you think you are doing that are good are really like that pile of dirty undies on your floor.

But it is not just that they were missing the mark when it came to doing good deeds it was also that they had been caught up in their iniquities as if being blown by a strong wind. A seemingly small error catapulted into the path of a rushing wind and so caught up in the wind unable to resist its power and force.

The consequences of their iniquities were having effects beyond their vision and understanding. Like an avalanche of idolatry their behaviours drove them away from God and had escalating consequences. These are strong words but any time people are moving away from God they are moving into idolatry – replacing God and God’s ways with something else.

Now Isaiah sites one of the reasons for this as God’s silence and supposed inaction, saying, “because you hid yourself we transgressed.”

Of course, blaming God’s silence for transgression doesn’t really cut the mustard but Isaiah’s lament reminds the people and prophesies appealing to God and reminding the people: “Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.”

At the heart of Isaiah’s lament is this conviction that even if God’s people have become immersed and enmeshed in their transgression they are still God’s people and God is their God, silent or not!

In this the lament beginning in Isaiah 63 and carrying into chapter 64 is focussed on memory. It is about God remembering the covenant relationship with the Israelites and the people remembering that they are indeed God’s people.

As an aside the liturgical act of remembrance within the life of the church is called anamnesis. It is a word that I appreciate because it sounds so close to that word for forgetting in our won language amnesia. In the church and for Israel anamnesis is the antidote to amnesia – remembering the story of God even if we did not know we had forgotten it!

This serves as a bridge from Isaiah’s time to our own. The Israelites were really struggling to be faithful in their relationship with God and it was the lonely voice of the prophet that confronted them with their errant ways. The people had been seduced into idolatry without even being aware.

This is the same issue present in every age of Israel and the church: the forgetting of God and God’s ways and the seduction of alternate views of life and the world. As the book of Ecclesiastes might say, “there is nothing new under the sun”.

In our era we might speak of the Babylonian Captivity of the church in terms of the consequences of things like the enlightenment and humanism. The enlightenment which was so full of promise for humanity and has no doubt brought many blessings with it but like Isaiah’s lament may be seen as being like dirty undies on the floor.

It has brought us great thinking and high standards of living and even notions of the possibilities of humanity but it has also bought with it the rise of rampant individualism, where my rights are more important than the notion of community. It has brought with it the rejection of God and the rise atheism, in favour of an anthropocentric view of the Universe.

We might also speak of the problems of imperialism and nationalism which have lead nations to war and to the subjugation and exploitation of other nations.

We might speak of free market capitalism and liberal democracy which seem to have within them some right ideas but so often seem to get perverted.

And then there is consumerism and the incessant desire for growth, a logical impossibility in a finite world: consumerism which has clearly subverted our holy celebrations in the West. I want to share a brief video about this from Gruen World last week.

What struck me about these video exposés about Christmas is that mention nothing about Christianity. So far removed from the Christian narrative by the avalanche of idolatry around Christmas are these videos that Jesus gets no mention at all. For me this is a slap in the face a wake-up call to all of us in our faith and how we might express our hope in Christ’s coming.

As with Isaiah we find our hope in remembering, in anamnesis. Hearing the reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians we hear of the promise of God’s graciously at work in each one of us already: “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind.”

Our hope remains in God, even when we find ourselves hurtling down the mountain trapped in the avalanche of idolatry moving away from God, God reaches out to give us hope and to reorient our lives in the life of Jesus, the promised coming one.

As Paul goes on to say, “the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”

It is in this fellowship with the son that we remember and look at the weeks ahead with hope. As we wait with patience anticipating that we are not preparing to have a nice Christmas day but that in the fullness of God’s time Jesus will come and correct those things which are not of life but of death in this world.

In this our preparation shifts in focus away from the commercialism and obligation we may feel to give gifts to those who have no need of them into reconsidering what it means that in Christ we know that all people are loved by God. The hope of Christmas is about the kingdom coming near in all people’s lives in our present age as we wait for the coming of the new creation which is begun in Christ and the church already and is promised for all things.

What kind of King?

A sermon for Christ the King Sunday by Rev Peter Lockhart

May the words of my mouth
And the meditations of our hearts
Be acceptable in your sight O Lord
Our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

On the day that we celebrate the Reign of Christ the King the gospel of Matthew gives to us a clear indication of who Jesus is as king and how we are to serve and follow him.

In the vision of the coming of the Son of Man having separate the sheep from the goats, Jesus acknowledges the righteous ones saying, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

Jesus kingship is defined by his presence in and among the poor, Jesus kingship is defined by his place alongside the oppressed, Jesus kingship by his companionship with the stranger and the sick and the prisoner.

In this Jesus kingship alters our world view. It redefines notions of power and authority and sets a marker for those who are number among his followers, the righteous one.

What I find most surprising in the passage is that those who are numbered among the righteous and among those who are accursed is that neither group is aware of their state of being blessed or cursed.

This mystery of salvation indicates to me that it is God’s grace that invigorates and transforms people as his servants rather than their choice to go and serve the poor or the needy or the oppressed that means that they are counted among God’s chosen ones.

This may seem a little arbitrary but what I believe is being indicated in this passage is that our relationship with God and the coming kingdom is not determined by what we do but rather our works are signs or markers of the gift of grace we have received, even unknowingly.

I want to share the story of two of my friends who I believe reflect such markers in the conduct of their lives and their service and following of Jesus.

One is my friend Jason who I first met as Youth Worker student in college. Over the last couple of years Jason has devoted himself to a self funded project called “Street Dreams”. Jason has spent time in the Philippines making a documentary to raise awareness of the plight of girls and women who work in the sex industry in that country and beyond. At great personal expense and at some risk to himself Jason has worked with his team to bring this project to its final stages.

Surely, Jason has met Jesus, the coming king, in those oppressed and abused women. Christ the King alive in the poor and oppressed.

A second is my friend Greg whom I have known for over twenty years. Greg and his wife have spent most their time since graduating from university working among poor and outcaste in India. Both are highly trained professionals but have forgone the possibilities of highly lucrative careers in Australia in preference for serving the poor in India. Once again, I have little doubt that the have seen Christ the King in the impoverished people among whom they have worked.

It is my view that it is not their choice to do these good works that brings them into a relationship with God but it because God has come in into both of their lives in a real and personal way that they have been inspired to share in Christ ministry and so possibility without knowing meet Christ in those whom they have served.

These views of Christ as King and defining Christ as King in this way, as being present among the broken and oppressed, certainly challenges any false regal notions that we might have as people about Jesus.

Now whilst I do not believe we can go and serve the poor to save ourselves maybe in the realisation of how God’s grace is poured out we will be personally challenged by what it means for us to celebrate the love that has been shown to us, not by simply building a respectable and bland experience of faith, but following Jesus even into places where we would rather not necessarily go, but places where Christ indeed calls us to follow and to meet him.

A few months back a congregation member approached me with information about Abolitionist Sunday, which coincides today with Christ the King. It seems appropriate then to weave into this sermon a comment about Jesus who we will meet in the prisoner.

For most of us the notion that there are slaves in the world or that the illegal trafficking of people occurs or that children are exploited on a daily basis in a variety of industries seems somehow a fanciful dream. Yet even the Australian Government has recognised that the trafficking of people into Australia is occurring and is a real issue.

For many of us, me included, these issues seem to big and too unreal for us to handle yet as people who follow Jesus there should be an awareness that not only does God care and love these people but in fact it is in helping and serving these people that we may in fact meet Christ amongst us.

I want to share a video made for abolition Sunday to raise awareness of the issues associated with slavery and to promote a more just way of living as Christian people...

The grace of God and mystery of our salvation at one level remains hidden from our view. The sheep and the goats were not aware of which group they were in until they had been divided. Yet the story reminds us that not only is Christ the King a king in a way which remains somewhat perplexing as he is identified in the poor and the oppressed of this world but that as people if we are seek out and meet the one who has shown us grace and mercy he is to be found among those whom we might consider to be the least likely candidates.

37Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? 38And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? 39And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ 40And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

Living Faithfully: Collaborative Consumption?!

Peter Lockhart

“We believe we will look back and see this epoch as a time when we took a leap and re-created a sustainable system built to serve basic human needs... a revolution, so to speak, when society, faced with grave challenges, started to make seismic shift from an unfettered zeal for individual getting and spending toward a rediscovery of collective good.” (p. 224-225 Botsman & Rogers What’s mine is yOURS: The rise of collaborative consumption 2010)

So ends Botsman & Roger's book about the rise of collaborative consumption. The book explore emerging new ways of exchanging and sharing goods and lives. Ways which raise questions about our current preoccupation with personal ownership.

On one level some of the stuff which they explore reminded me of meeting people who still lived in communes near Nimbin when I was growing up at Kyogle, people who had caught a Utopian dream for alternative living in the 1960s. The book also had echoes of some of the emerging church models.

What challenged me most in reading the book was the irony that many who have sought to live differently have done so departing from a culture in which Christian ideals were supposed to be dominant. A culture in which personal achievement and individual success appears to have come to outweight the so called common good.

However, reading the New Testament one gets a sense that the early Christian communities were places people sought to live sharing their lives and goods in a more intimate and intentional way. The question then is how did we lose sight of this aspect of faithful living in response to the good news. Whilst the vision shared in the book is not Christian I believe there are some thoughts about who we are and what our priorities may be that may need revisiting as we consider how to live as Christians.

Acts: All things in common

by Peter Lockhart

Late last year playing golf one of my playing partners discovered that I was minister and proceeded to criticise the church in general until finally declaring something along the lines, “All Christians are communists”.

My response was to suggest that in reality the Bible paints a far more radical vision of life.

Consider for a moment Luke’s words to Theophilus in the book of Acts:

“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.”

I have always read these words as some of the most profoundly confronting in the New Testament. I once received a letter from a friend who had become a missionary in India who wrote to me something similar, obviously alluding to Jesus words in Matthew chapter 6, he said “sell everything you have, come and join me, and build up treasures for yourself in heaven.”

Such visions of the Christian life are positively Franciscan in orientation and certainly far beyond any concepts of socialism or communism as I understand them. The idea of “sharing all things in common” is about a new way of living and being human community which is far more confronting than communism.

However, when Luke writes these words to Theophilus it may be that what Luke is doing is idealising the situation of the early Christian community as a new beginning for humanity.

Luke would have come across a similar idea of people sharing all things in common in the Greco-Roman philosophical world. For example, in Plato’s Critias, Plato ‘pictures the early days of Athens as a time when “none of its members possessed any private property, but they regarded all they had as the common property of all.” Whilst in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses the description of the Golden Age contains similar themes of community.

So when Luke describes the early Christian community in the way he does to Theophilus one of the things he appears to be doing is capturing these ancient visions of utopian communities and declaring a new beginning for humanity, a new way of civilization.

In actuality the early Christian community, inspired by the Holy Spirit, may have lived a far more communal life although it may not have been quite as radical as Luke suggests. Nonetheless, the vision was for a different way of living based on a new beginning.

The new beginning was of course the advent of Jesus Christ in the world who claims a unique union with the Father in heaven and invites us into the peace and joy of that unity. The Christian community sought to live together in koinonia with each other in that new relationship established by God with human beings in and through Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This concept of koinonia implies more than is often translated in the word ‘community’. I have often referred to our lives being intertwined in each other’s lives as we are drawn into God’s life in Jesus. My life in yours and your life in mine and ours in God: mutuality in existence.

As I suggested this implies far more than concepts of community and sometimes the word used to describe koinonia is communion, but that in itself can create some confusion as we also use the word communion in a variety of ways as well.

In the book of Acts by suggesting that the people held “all things in common” Luke is trying to help establish the understanding that Jesus Christ brings about a new way of human community and life. This way of life was clearly understand as a consequence of encountering God’s grace, a joyful response to what Jesus had done, as opposed to a way of earning God’s favour.

There can be no doubt it was counter cultural and a challenge to the accepted norms of life at the time – social, economic, religious and political.

What do you want...

by Peter Lockhart

The beginning of Psalm 23 challenges the very core of our Western culture. "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." Yet wanting things drives our Western consumerist culture, and dare I say even the Church in the West. We are consumers par excellence and we are taught to want, we are goaded into coveting, and without our continued consumption our economy is headed for disaster.

How do we as Christians live with this tension of wanting so much and finding that our true contentment and peace comes as a gift from God? How do we consider our wanting in terms of the issue that so much that we consume is produced by people who live in abject poverty? How do we understand our not wanting in relationship to the Lord being our Shepherd?

Hear Peter's sermon on Psalm 23 on 'Family Worship' on the Brisbane Family Radio Station 96.5 FM Sunday 11 April at 9am.