There are moles in the housegroups! It’s been reported to me that one of the housegroups has a problem with Acts chapter two. Especially with the notion that the early Christians had everything in common. What is all this about having everything in common, someone has asked?

Well, let’s start here. Clemenceau famously observed that he would disown his son if he were not a Communist at twenty-five or if he was still a communist at thirty. And the first thing for a Christian to feel is to be able to feel nostalgia. . If you can read the account of the innocence of the Garden of Eden and not have a nostalgia for it, you are lacking as a human being. If you can read Acts 2 and not have a nostalgia for that, then you are deficient as a Christian. But there is a need to be a responsible Christian in the long term. There is the figurative age of 25 and the figurative age of 30.

One of the key ingredients in the Acts 2 account is the word koinonia. And this is why people study New Testament Greek – to come across a word like this. Impossible to translate into English. And what’s more, a term chosen from the outside world to describe something that only came into being with the Church. You can imagine the first Christians. They’d discovered a newness in Christ which needed to be described. ‘What can we call this?’ ‘Friendship?’ ‘Too tame!’ ‘Family Love?’ ‘Too loaded and ambiguous’. ‘There’s an element about practicality we need to bring into it – people are actually sharing their goods here!’ ‘Well, I don’t know if this is any good but there’s this word we use in my trade, it’s when people go into a business partnership.’ ‘Nah!’ ‘Wait, that’s not the whole thing, it expresses unity of purpose.’ ‘No good – the relationship is not close enough.’ ‘Well, it so happens that the word is used of the sharing within marriage too.’ ‘Keep talking – I like this, but there’s no Godward aspect.’ ‘That’s where you’re wrong! Epictetus talks about the whole point of religion as trying to get into this kind of contact with Zeus.’ ‘So what’s the word?’ ‘The word’s Koinonia.’ ‘Ah, koine – common! The fact of having things in common! With a godwarda s well as a manward aspect. I’ll buy that!’

And the radical new thing in Christ which they called koinonia has this content in Acts 2: The Christians couldn’t get enough of one another’s company. They ate together, prayed together, got taught together, shared their goods with one another.

And make no mistake about it, you are supposed to feel nostalgic for that. And if you’re not, there is something wrong with you.

But the serpent got in. As Blake puts it, ‘Oh Rose, thou art sick . . .’ The serpent got into Eden on the issue of envy for God. The serpent got into the early church on the issue of envy for the spirituality of others. One shining expression of this radical koinonia in Acts is Barnabas who sold his field and brought the money to the apostles. An indication incidentally of not trying to do good in a scatter gun approach by selling a field and doing good with it. Instead, of bringing it to the church so that a lot of good could be done with a concentrated fund and planning. Or at least that’s how it looks to me – the strength of assocation over private philanthropy. But Ananias and Sapphira want the spiritual status without the koinonia.  Their fall is presented as a sin against transparency towards the believers. A sin against sincerity towards God – koinonia in its manward and godward aspects.

But God has a way of not being thwarted by snakes. In France, there was an uproar at a conference I attended. There were two speakers on the Fall – one evangelical a Baptist and the other liberal ERF. And there was shouting in the room. The evangelical spoke of the fall as the tragedy it was. The liberal speaker was on about the Fall as a fantastic event because it brings human responsibility. And for all the initial shock, that is one possible reading! And it has a venerable history in the idea of the ‘felix culpa’ – the happy fault. The ‘Felix culpa’ leads to the coming of Jesus. And also it leads us to adulthood, to spiritual responsibility.

And sure enough, the next koinonia themes that come out in the book of Acts are quite adult. They’re economics. What happens when you’re doing koinonia but there are Greek speaking people and Aramaic speaking ones? And they fall out?

And then throughout the rest of the book and throughout the New Testament there’s a really big theme. There’s been a mischievous suggestion that if the Early Church had been less naïve, Paul wouldn’t have had to devote all that energy to a collection for the poor Christians in Jerusalem who’d given their property away! Let’s be more charitable and talk about growth! You see, we need to be not only twenty-five year old Christians with nostalgia for Acts 2:42-47. We need to be thirty year old Christians with an eye to Matthew 1:1  to Revelation 22:21 And thinking that Acts 2:42-47 might be a description not a prescription.

And one of the really big New Testament themes is an economic one. Big themes? Ones that appear in lots of places in many guises. You neglect the New Testament if you neglect the big theme of the collection for the saints in Jerusalem. They foretold it. It happened and had to be dealt with. And themes coming out of this are all about the responsibility of well off Christians to less well off ones. The sustainability of such efforts come into the equation too.

The theme shows us some brothers in need and other brothers in plenty. Here are some of the sparks. ‘Your plenty should supply their need’ says Paul. ‘But I don’t want to reduce you to poverty.’ James and the brother in need. Matthew 25 foresees according to many commentators a time when Christians help one another not when Christians help the world.

Now, there are two $60, 000 dollar questions today. Does this mean that  there need to be some rich Christians so that they can help the poorer ones? And more pertinently still, do there need to be some poor Christians so that the rich ones can help them? Christopher Smart – an instrument upon which the children can learn benevolence. Well, power freak behaviour and miserabilism are both down that road and you don’t need to go to Star Wars to see people going over to the dark side - we’ve seen it all in Toulouse.

You may remember that the spiritual status of charity hit the headlines when Mrs Thatcher preaching to the Church of Scotland about the Good Samaritan. It seems to me that Mrs Thatcher may have been right in saying you need resources in order to help the mugged traveler. But it also seems to me that she blew it by denying society.

Here’s what I think is the answer to the first $60000 question. It’s koinonia. What is society but koinonia? Koinonia is a rescue word, it makes the basis of practical help the sharing of things that belong not to individuals but to all of us anyway. Sharing because he is my brother not because I have and he doesn’t. Sharing because what I have belongs to God not to me. And God has given me above all not things but brothers and sisters. Things next. This is an organic thing. The image is a family. Is it sensible in a family to talk about one member as rich and another poor? No,but one administers and others receive.

A striking parable of spiritual growth in the matter of giving from koinonia is provided by Bob Geldof in his thinking and speaking about Live Aid in 1985 and Live 8 in 2005. At the figurative age of 25 you remember that he famously said ‘give me your money’. And we must be nostalgic for that innocence because without it he wouldn’t be who he is today. But today, at the figurative age of 30, he is saying ‘we don’t want people’s money, we want them.’

And, the second 60.000 dollar question? Well, perhaps it’s got to do with Africa. How far does your sense of koinonia stretch?  Has it even reached beyond your seat yet. Or is it a Beethovenian koinonia. Beethovenian? In the words of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, ‘Seid Umschlungen, millionen, diesen kuss der ganzen welt.’ ‘You millions, I embrace you! This kiss goes out to the whole world.’

There was far too much material to go in today. I’ve got stories I haven’t used. All sorts. But instead, I’d like to finish with something I heard last night. I’d sent off for ‘The Hollies’ and this song struck me as exceptionally appropriate. The middle bit you might not catch but I took the trouble to listen to it a number of times to decipher it and it too is exceptionally appropriate and I’ll put the words on the screen at the right moment.

If I’m laden at all

I’m laden with sadness

That everyone’s heart

Isn’t filled with the gladness

Of love