Reading Luke/Acts Together #59 – Idolatry of the Couple

If you think the Bible is full of warm fuzzy words of comfort, or of clumps of solid advice to have a happy life or even marriage, skip over Acts chapter 5. For 4 chapters, we’ve been puzzled or perhaps impressed by the radical level of commitment of the first Christians, deadly serious about sharing in a common life together, and being sure any and all needy among them or out there are cared for.

Acts 5 introduces us to Ananias and Sapphira, people who aren’t quite a weird as the Acts 1-4 Christians; they’re “normal,” or even praiseworthy. They sell a piece of property. Normal people might re-invest, or plop it into an annuity. But they bring some (what percentage?) to the work of the church. Noble – and I thank you guys for doing this any time you do this!

Ananias, perhaps expecting to be thanked, is surprised that Peter somehow knows he kept back some for himself. And he falls over and dies. Three hours later, Sapphira comes, not having learned yet that her husband had died. She also fibs that they had brought all the money – and she also drops dead. Then, in the greatest understatement in all of Scripture, we read "And great fear came upon the whole church.” Indeed.

We recoil from this story. Aren’t miracles supposed to be positive? A cure, something beneficial? What was the sin anyhow? The withholding? Or the lying about it? Willie Jennings shrewdly suggests that “The withholding signifies resistance to the new order where possessions will no longer divide and establish social hierarchies where living by faith overcomes the worship of the other gods: money and possessions.” Ah. Christianity was supposed to be a radical, godly experiment in genuine community where whatever normally separates people doesn’t – which is why the plan was to avoid some having a lot, and some having only a little or nothing. No rich or poor neighborhoods – and certainly no rich or poor churches, and no homeless, hungry or disenfranchised people out there.

It’s the me-first, the Our life comes first, God can wait and take what we have leftover that’s the trouble here. Yes, the church’s projects are limited by our failures of generosity, by what we cling to for ourselves. But it’s the loss of what could be a most amazing community in a terribly fractured world – that capitalist world where we think division is a sign of success! – that wounds.

Jennings also dissects something that’s gone wrong in Ananias and Sapphira’s marriage. They seem close; they’re very much together! But their plans for themselves trump in over their dedication to God’s community, and God’s work in the world.

Whatever you make of them and Acts 5, can we catch a glimpse of “the idolatry of the couple”? It’s all about us. Just be a couple and you’ll be happy. What does your church have for us as a couple? Weddings aren’t reverent acts before God but glitzy parties where for a day you’re the center of attention. Jennings’s words move me, and worry me: “Christians often turn marriage from an act of worship into an object of worship.” Indeed, the church speaks a new truth to this couple, and to all couples: “You belong to us; we do not belong to you.”

Our generation has gotten derailed by fretting endlessly and often smugly over who can marry whom – instead of what marriage was intended to be: not getting the gender alignment correct so much as inviting two people to see their lives as from and for God, and that all they do and have belongs to God. Much to ponder here…