Last week, Easter weekend meant fulfilling a tradition for my fiancée and me.  For the third year since we have been together, Melissa and I sat down for Easter weekend and played several games of Monopoly.  Those of you familiar with the game are probably wondering how one can fit several games of Monopoly into one weekend.  To put it bluntly, Melissa almost always wins and she wins fairly quickly.  While she is busy scooping up property after property, I have a great skill for touring Community Chest, Luxury Tax, and Free Parking with each turn around the board.  Eventually, I’m left holding on to a few properties that keep Melissa from gaining more monopolies and I’m praying to land on “Go to Jail” in order to avoid her hotels.  Out of the 10 or so times we have played the game, I have won one game and one has ended in a draw.

In the infinite wisdom and humor possessed by God, the Monday following an Easter full of playing Monopoly found me reading our text from Acts.  We are faced with a story of a community that is obviously unfamiliar with the goals and strategies of this beloved board game.  This community is described as holding all their possessions in common.  They are selling their property and allowing the proceeds to be given to the needy.  I’m fairly certain Parker Brothers would have a difficult time making a game out of this model for life.  It’s a model that tends to make us squeamish, especially as 21^st Century American Christians.  I could easily play off our discomforts with the Acts story and preach a guilt-provoking sermon on how we should all be this way, if the example didn’t make me so uncomfortable as well.

Besides my own discomfort, that sermon would be missing the point of what is happening in the text.  The apostles aren’t preaching that Christians with lots of stuff should sell it all to give the money to the poor.  They aren’t making a rule for membership that must be followed.  This isn’t an apostolic guilt trip.  Instead, verse 33 tells us that, “With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all.”  The apostles were telling the same story we heard last Sunday!  Christ had died, but now he is risen!  He came among them and put his Spirit upon them.  God was not some distant rule-maker; God walked among us, lived life as a human, died for our sins and had been raised from the dead.  It’s not a sermon of guilt, but a testimony of grace and hope.  Hallelujah!

It is this great grace that is the catalyst of our story from Acts.  The believers heard the witness of the apostles, and moved by grace, they responded.  Their response was equally powerful and counter to the examples they saw in the world around them.  They saw poverty in their community, a reality which was all too common at the time, and those who owned land and homes sold them, giving the proceeds to the apostles to distribute to those in need.  The believers experienced God’s grace toward them, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and they responded with grace toward others.  We don’t get an explanation as to how they decided this would be their response to the story of Easter.  We do know they decided and acted as a community of believers, not as individuals.  The group is said to be of one heart and soul.  In God’s grace they were bound as a family, a community, and they responded as a community.  They became committed to living life in a way that enacted the grace of Easter.  Their response was beyond logic and reason.  As is the case today, the ownership of property was a sign of social standing.  What this church was doing was culturally uncommon.  Relying on their faith that Christ’s resurrection had changed the world, they set out to live as a community centered on God’s transforming love embodied on Easter.

While Acts gives us insight into one community, our passage from First John illustrates how another community is called to respond to God’s grace revealed in the events of Easter.  Instead of a narrative, we have gotten to listen in on an address to a group of believers by one who claims to be a part of the apostolic tradition, someone who witnessed the resurrection of Christ.  This author’s testimony to Easter Day leads to a proclamation to this community of what this event has done in the world, and how it should affect their lives.  Once again, it is a proclamation of hope and joy, not of guilt.  The hope of Christ’s resurrection is that God is light and as an Easter community, these believers are to walk in the light.  The light is the knowledge of Christ’s atoning sacrifice on Good Friday.  It is the affirmation that we live in the life of Christ’s resurrection on Easter, a life cleansed of the sins that we confess to God in faith.  This community is called to live in a morally different state than they would outside the knowledge of Easter, a state of forgiveness.  It is a forgiveness extended to the whole world, and their life as a community ought to be a witness to that forgiveness.  Once again, it is a response that defies reason.  These believers knew they sinned and it was painful to admit these sins.  And they had been wronged by others and it was easier to remember those wrongs indefinitely than to forgive them.  Culturally, wronging individuals brought shame upon families, with a social structure dominated by honor.  But this author reminds this church that their fellowship with God and with one another depends on a moral and cultural shift, despite logic.  Atonement by Christ meant gaining honor through grace.  Their joy should be in the forgiveness they experience by walking in the light as a community.  Their corporate life should be one that has been perpetually altered by their faith in Christ’s grace-filling resurrection.

What about our community?  How do we respond to the witness we heard last week?  How does God’s grace revealed in the resurrection of Christ affect our corporate existence?  These are important questions.  As we have seen from our spiritual ancestors, grace and power of this magnitude elicits a response, a shift that defies logic, one bound to our faith as a group.
This morning we have one such example of how we respond as a community to Easter.  Shortly, we will all bear witness to the sacrament of Baptism.  Through this sacrament, we will inextricably bind the life of Conrad Otts to the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  We believe that in the waters of baptism, we are buried with Christ in his death.  We also believe that from these waters, we are raised to share in Christ’s resurrection.  Think about those words for a second. As a community, we are taking an infant, a boy who is brand new to life, and spiritually burying him with Christ.  How illogical does that sound?  It sounds a little bit scary. This isn’t something we do because it is socially and culturally normal.  We do this because we have been greatly affected by what we heard last week, on Easter Day.  We are driven by our faith in God to pour the waters of baptism over this baby’s head with the hope that he will also be joined with Christ in the new life of resurrection.  We will vow to teach him and live as an example of a people who are cleansed of sin, grafted into the body of Christ, filled with the Spirit, delivered into eternal life, called to do God’s will, a community responding to God’s overwhelming grace.  In such a competitive, individualistic age, this sacrament and these vows are an amazing testimony to how we are transformed by living in the light of Easter.

How else do we let the good news of Easter affect our lives?  Where do we find ourselves empowered by the Spirit to respond to God’s grace in a new way as a people?  The news of Christ’s resurrection certainly has the power to move us beyond the social and cultural norms of this world, as we glimpse the reality God intends for us as an Easter-centered community.  Do we follow the example of the Acts community, sharing our possessions and going out of our way to relieve neediness where we see it?  It would be an unprecedented, counter-cultural way to behave, especially in the face of the problems around us today.  We wouldn’t be following the rules of the Monopoly game life can sometimes be.  But guided by the Spirit, it would be a faithful, gracious response to the love we experience from God.  Should we hear the message of First John as if it were written to us, finding our fellowship in the light of God, in the forgiveness and new life of Christ?  We could.  We know from Christ’s life that forgiveness isn’t cheap or easy.  But in the many examples of his life, we could enact forgiveness in ways unimaginable outside the story of the resurrection.  Should we set limits on our response to Easter, or should we be continually and communally pushing what the limits seem to be?  Do the gifts of God’s grace run out?  Will our response to that grace eventually wear us out?  If these gifts are the living water Jesus speaks of to the woman by the well in John’s Gospel, then they will become like a spring of water gushing up to eternal life within us.  The more we respond, the more we give from this grace, the greater the flow of God’s grace will be into us.

As we go from here today, be thinking about how we are called as a people to respond to Christ’s resurrection.  Remember the ties that bind us as an Easter community as you go to work, go to school, interact with others you meet.  And don’t forget the abundant, overflowing grace we receive as a gift from God, a gift that pushes us to faithfully enact God’s will and love in the world.  Amen.