Abundant Life

Abundant Life

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 7, 2017

Scripture: Acts 2:42-47; John 10:1-10

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

It’s shocking, I know. It’s shocking, but there it is. Right in the book of Acts. Jesus’ first followers were communists! They weren’t Marxist communists of course like the Communists of the Soviet Union were. Marx, after all, didn’t come along for another 1,800 years; and Marx denied the reality of God, which these first followers of Jesus certainly did not. But still, there it is. Right after Jesus’ death and resurrection his followers were communists. I can tell you this, based on my years of study of Russian history and my experience of having spent time in the USSR. Marx pretty clearly got his vision of a blissful future from the Judeo-Christian tradition. What, after all, was Marx’s vision of an ideal society? It was a vision of a society in which all were equal and property (or at least the means of production) was held in common for the common good, not by individuals for private gain. The Soviets of course turned that blissful vision into a hell on earth. That happened at least in part because the denial of God that the Soviets got from Marx eliminated any need to treat human life as sacrosanct. People became mere means to a goal not a goal in themselves. So if you needed to kill millions of them so what. Still, that hellish Soviet reality doesn’t change what Marx’s vision was. It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that Marx got his vision from the book of Acts.

Just what does the book of Acts tell us about those earliest Christians? We just heard it. Acts says that in the earliest days of the Christian movement “all the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as [they] had need.” I guess maybe there were like some 1960s hippies who lived in communes and treated all property and income as belonging to the group not to an individual. Resources were there for anyone who needed them. That essentially is a communist way of living. If you really can’t stand the word communist use communalist instead. For our purposes they mean the same thing. Acts tells us that those first Christians were communists, or communalists if you prefer. Acts gives us a vision of a way of living very different from the way the people in western cultures, ourselves included, actually live.

Our reading from the Gospel of John gives us a vision of a way of living too. It’s less specific than the one in Acts, but it’s still a vision of a way to live. Our passage from John is, frankly, odd. I’ve never quite understood any of it except the last line. It talks of someone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate and says that one of a thief and a robber. Clearly Jesus is using a metaphor here, but it’s not one I understand very well. What does the sheep pen symbolize? The Christian community? Maybe. Who are the sheep? Christians? Jews? All people? Beats me. Then Jesus says he is the “gate for the sheep.” Really? A person is a gate? Maybe the Gospel means here that Jesus is the access to God. For us he certainly is that, but if that’s what this passage mans it sure could have said it more clearly.

The last line of this passage speaks more clearly to me. That line reads: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” A more traditional translation of that line, or at least one I’m more used to, is “I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” Either way, the Gospel of John tells us here that Jesus is about life not death; and he’s not about just any old life. He’s about abundant life. Life to the full. The fullness of life. Thanks be to God!

Well, thanks be to God, yes; but of course that line immediately raises a question, namely, just what is “abundant life,” or life “to the full”? This passage doesn’t say. Maybe the Gospel of John means the same thing by life to the full as it means by its thematic phrase “eternal life.” If so, then abundant life means life in the knowledge of the one true God and Jesus Christ, the one God sent. See John 17:3. But I think we can get a more specific notion of what the abundant life is if we turn back to our passage from Acts.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that I think we all need to sell everything we own, move into a commune, and own all our property collectively. I mean, doing things like that has gotten a pretty bad aura about it in our time. Think, for example of the tragedies of Jonestown and Waco. I have no interest in either being a cult leader or following one. Still, I think there is something we can learn from those verses from Acts that we heard this morning if we look not at the specifics of how it says those earliest Christians lived but at the spirit behind those specifics.

Acts says all the Christians lived together, shared all their possessions, and gave to each person as each person had need. That tells us, I think, that these people had committed themselves to living not for themselves alone but for a bigger cause, for a community, for others more than themselves. This passage tells us that whatever the specifics of a truly Christian life are, the spirit of that life calls us to transcend our selfish concerns about our own private desires and to live out of ourselves for others, for the world, for God. That’s what those earliest Christians seem to have thought the Christian life was about, what they thought abundant life was about.

Now, it may be rather easy for us to agree in our minds that that’s what the abundant life that Jesus came to enable is about. We can give intellectual assent to that idea relatively easily. If we’re honest, however, I’m pretty sure we all have to confess that living that kind of life is a whole lot harder than just thinking it’s a good idea. I know living that kind of life is a whole lot harder for me than just thinking about it is. Perhaps it is harder for you too. Yet Acts tells us that our earliest forbears in the faith were doing it. John says Jesus came to make it possible, and apparently for his earliest followers he did. How? What is it about Jesus that makes living the abundant life of faith for others possible?

Maybe try thinking of it this way. Jesus makes the abundant life of living for others possible because in Jesus we know that we need not be overly concerned with ourselves. We know that because in Jesus we know that God is ultimately concerned with us, with each and every one of us, with each and every person in the world. In Jesus we know that we are ultimately, cosmically, eternally safe. In Jesus we know that we need not be overly concerned with our own safety and wellbeing because God has already guaranteed our safety and our wellbeing. God does that on the spiritual plane not necessarily the material one, but in Jesus we know that the spiritual plane is what ultimately matters. On the level of things that really matter we know in Jesus Christ that we are safe with God. Because we are safe with God we can turn our attention outward not inward. We can live as ourselves not only for ourselves but for others.

Of course, just what that kind of living looks like in any specific situation can be a complex problem, but the principles we are called to live into aren’t really that complex at all. In any situation we face we ask not what do I want but what is best for the common good. Then we act on our answer to that question. That’s the abundant life. That’s life to the full. It’s the life Jesus came to make possible. It’s the life he calls us to live. It’s not easy, but in Jesus Christ, relying on God’s grace, we can do it. Amen.