The book of Acts offers this provocative description of early Christian life: “All the believers were united and shared everything. They would sell pieces of property and possessions and distribute the proceeds to everyone who needed them. Every day, they met together in the temple and ate in their homes. They shared food with gladness and simplicity” (Acts 2:44).
Most people I know, especially westerns, have complicated feelings about this scene. On the one hand, it would be nice for someone to have our back when medical bills stack up. On the other hand, there’s the freeloader problem—not to mention the fear of what others would say if they saw our monthly takeout receipts.
In my own preoccupation with the practical complexities of sharing possessions, I only recently began to register the larger social and theological context within which such a notion emerged. In a letter to the Christian community in the city of Corinth, early Christian leader Paul describes the church as a body made up of diverse parts. Each part of the body has its own strength, its own power, its own function—you might say, its own forms of abundance. It also has its own deficits, its own lack, its particular forms of need. The conviction of the early church was that if each person shared from their unique form of abundance, there would be enough of everything to spread between.
Imagine the situation like this—God is constantly sending care packages to each of our houses. They are piling up outside our doors like the week before Christmas. But most of these packages arrive with someone else’s name on them. They belong to a different household. We have merely been entrusted with their delivery.
This is the economic system of God’s new world, which Jesus invites his followers to join. Most of what I have, of the abundance of resources I call “mine”—whether material, intellectual, emotional, physical, or spiritual—was inscribed by heaven’s warehouse with someone else’s name. These gifts were never meant to belong to me, only to pass through my hands. Others, meanwhile, are receiving the packages containing what I need.
Not recognizing how God’s new economy works, we don’t notice the names on the labels. We fill our own closets with what shows up at our doors. The practical result is that we often end up fifty cases of tube socks and not a single toothbrush.
One might reasonably ask why on earth God would run an economy this way. Imagine the chaos if Amazon shipped your toilet paper to some random neighbor’s house. I mean, why not just send the package directly to the person who needs it?
It seems that God prefers an economy that only works when goods constantly change hands and people show up for each other. Such an economy mirrors in some profound way the eternal movement in the heart of the Trinity. God-in-three-persons is always giving and always receiving, emptying and filling. In passing packages back and forth, we meet other people in the neighborhood, learn to know and to love each other, discover the joy of having something that is ours to give. Through the very act of moving gifts between hands, we gain additional gifts.
If this is what God’s economy looks like, we shouldn’t expect to be able to live a whole, abundant life apart from a community of other Jesus-followers. Some of the things we need most, by design, will only come to us through others’ hands.
If this is what God’s economy look like, we should expect to find ourselves with some form of abundance that is meant to be passed out of our hands. So then…where does my own current abundance lie? And whose names might be on the package?
