The Common Thread

After Jesus Christ had demonstrated, by his Resurrection, the power of Life over death, he ascended into the eternal realm, leaving behind his disciples and everyone else. In the biblical account of events after his return to heaven, a description was given, in the book of Acts, of the life of his disciples as they were living, congregating and spreading the news of eternal life through Jesus Christ. In the second chapter of Acts, a description of those early Christians’ lifestyle was given: “And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.” Thereafter, as the ages rolled by and years turned into centuries, kingdoms morphed into empires, empires generated wars. Human history is the sometimes-up and sometimes-down intersection of various human institutions, successes and failures, doctrines and debts, with some people coming out ahead in any given situation and others ending up with the short end of the stick. In some applications of human will, effort, blood, sweat and tours, groups of people get conquered by other groups. There were slaves serving masters; workers serving bosses, poor serving rich and, as modernity crept into history, a so-called middle class, such as I am. About 1800 years after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, another well-informed Jewish person came along with a notable theory pertaining to this notion of all things being held in common. Karl Marx proposed that society should be reconstructed in a manner that would put the working people, which he called the proletariat, in charge of all the machinery of production and the management of society. As Marx’s theory were later applied in various nations, most notably the Soviet Union during the 20th century, communism was demonstrated to be a way of doing things that did not actually fill the bill of what human peace and progress requires. So the idea that all things ought to be held in common sort of fell into disrepute. Now it is seen as an unworkable basis upon which to build a society, or even, perhaps, a community. As. for the original Christian practice of holding all things in common. . .it has withered and disappeared amongst the various stages of Church history. It seems that mankind, even the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on the sometimes great notion of communal living and communal property. In American history, a trend toward commonality was initiated by Franklin Roosevelt . . .with his New Deal, designed to help us common folk get by during the Depression. When the second World War erupted, everything got damaged, ditched, rearranged or reconfigured. In America, and the so-called “West” free market policies cranked up prosperity that was unprecedented in world history.

In recent years, there was a faction of the christian religion that broke ranks with those “liberals” who wanted to share the wealth, prosperity and productivity of free society. These secessionists wanted to make us great again by following the dictates of a self-obsessed president who understands nothing except how to make money, which was not the occupation of our original Messiah, or his most fervent followers. All that to say. . . I pecked out these thoughts after reading, this morning, those words from the original guide to Christian living: “And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common.” Just sayin’. Glass half-Full