March 30, 2025 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA
Acts 4:32-5:11
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. 36 There was a Levite from Cyprus, Joseph, to whom the apostles gave the name Barnabas (which means “son of encouragement”). 37 He sold a field that belonged to him, then brought the money and laid it at the apostles’ feet.
But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property; 2 with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back some of the proceeds and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet. 3 “Ananias,” Peter asked, “why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back part of the proceeds of the land? 4 While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, were not the proceeds at your disposal? How is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You did not lie to us but to God!” 5 Now when Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard of it. 6 The young men came and wrapped up his body, then carried him out and buried him.
7 After an interval of about three hours his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. 8 Peter said to her, “Tell me whether you and your husband sold the land for such and such a price.” And she said, “Yes, that was the price.” 9 Then Peter said to her, “How is it that you have agreed together to put the Spirit of the Lord to the test? Look, the feet of those who have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out.” 10 Immediately she fell down at his feet and died. When the young men came in they found her dead, so they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. 11 And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard of these things.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
I’ve been thinking this week of the time a church I was leading decided to lay carpet in their reception room. It was a great idea – the room had been tiled, maybe before World War II, and the tiling had long since hit its use-by date. We used the room for a million things, but it was the week where we did three funeral receptions in five days that finally made us get going.
There’s a whole other story about what we did to that room, once we got clear about how we wanted to focus one welcoming others, but today’s story is about what happened when we had to choose the color of the carpet… was it going to be light grey with red flecks? …or dark grey with red flecks.
Yes, I’m sure you’re wondering why that was a hard decision and, in fact, it really wasn’t, except that it was. You see, we were mostly set on one color, but on the morning we were to make the decision one of our most respected women leaders came into the meeting, all jazzed up, and passionately plead for the other color… and she persuaded everyone to go for it.
Then we all went home and heard the rest of the story. Between church and our meeting, our leader’s husband had discovered her on the church’s phone talking to her lover. They had the kind of unpleasant conversation you can all imagine, and then she came to the meeting and talked us into her favorite color. She had then left the church, her husband and their toddler son, to go off with the love of her life.
Parenthetically, I can report that the following week, the women of the church met again, and this time, chose the other color…. But this story isn’t about the color, it’s about the woman. Because, you see, even though every one there thought she’d done the wrong thing in leaving her husband and son, no one quite knew what to do about it.
We didn’t want to say anything because we didn’t know the ins and outs of her marriage.
We didn’t want to say anything because we had all done wrong things ourselves.
We didn’t want to say anything because we too had been hurt; we’d lost a friend, a leader, felt betrayed.
I imagine the same thing happening to the people of that early church when they heard about Ananias and Sapphira. I imagine that they were leaders, that they were liked, trusted, admired… and then it turned out they weren’t what folks had expected, and the folks gulped and stood in the shadows wondering what to do.
The story tells us that being seen as important was so central to Ananias and Sapphira that when Peter named their deception, the shock of being exposed caused them to die. Maybe that’s another reason we hesitate to name the wrong when we see it – we’re cautious about what being exposed will mean for the perpetrator and the family?
And yet, in there, is a truth we need to realize. It is not good for a community to close its eyes to wrong that’s being done, whether that’s within the community or in the world outside the door.
If God is in charge, we have a responsibility to name wrong as wrong, to say the truth we see.
Here’s another church story, this time from a reliable friend. My friend once pastored a church that was losing members – and this was before that was true of so many churches. Their church regularly brought in new people, who usually stayed maybe as long as six months before they quietly dropped out. It didn’t take long to realize, once they saw the problem, that they had a member who would capture those newbies, tell them mean stories about other members, and eventually would start to make mean remarks to them. The healthiest new folks left first, but over a period of time, just about all the new people walked back out the door. Then the mean member started in on the church’s leaders. Again, leaders began to leave the church. Over a period of two to three years, they lost every leader under 50 but one and attendance on Sundays dropped from over 80 to right around 30.
They tried every thing they could think of… quiet chats with those who had left, kind letters, even sitting down with the mean member. Every deacon’s meeting was consumed with dealing with this person and the aftereffects of the continual attacks. It became clear that if things continued in this path, the pastor would leave and the church would close. Finally, the mean member attacked the one person who’d been most actively mounting her defense; losing that support, the church was freed to name and take seriously the viciousness of the attacks and they expelled her from the church.
It’s been more than twenty years since that happened… it took a long time for the church to recover, because those folks who’d left didn’t come back.
Now, here in Massachusetts we’ve seen what happens in churches when we don’t name evil. The Roman Catholic Church in this area may never recover from the betrayals of their lay members to save the reputations of evil priests.
There are, I believe, no times, no places where closing our eyes to the wrong is good for an organization or good for people. Pretending the bad is not happening, or telling lies to cover it up only makes things worse.
Closing our eyes to evil not only destroys trust, but it warps reality. If God is God, and if we have decided to follow Jesus, then it is our work to stand up for the good, to be people who can teach the difference between good and evil. We have been called, raised up and trained to stand up for kindness, compassion, justice, fairness.
When we see the values of diversity, equity and inclusion trashed as cons which promote injustice, we have an absolute obligation to speak up, to say that it is always and in every case wrong to build communities where all the people cannot participate.
Years ago, when I first joined the church, up in Vermont, I remember asking one time, if Jesus’s death and resurrection had conquered evil, why did evil still exist? Our pastor said that while the final conquest of evil was assured, the day-to-day struggle continues. That is as true today as it was when he first said it.
We who believe that God is in charge have accepted the call to name evil, to work for good. Let us continue to build a world where love is found.
Amen.
© 2025, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 