Sermon: The Good Shepherd’s Economy

Acts 2:42-47 

Last week we wandered together inside Psalm 23. We ate the green grass. We walked through the dark valley. We felt the protection of the Good Shepherd. And we held the tension the psalm itself holds — between abundance and suffering. I want to stay inside that tension today, because this passage from Acts 2 won’t let us leave it just yet.

And now we get this passage from Luke 2, set just a few verses after Pentecost happened — after the Spirit descended and came upon the disciples in the upper room. Those apostles immediately went outside and, through the gift of the Spirit, were able to speak to and be understood by Jewish pilgrims who had come to Jerusalem from all over the known world for Shavuot. Three thousand people, we are told, instantly become a part of this Jesus movement. 

The scene Luke describes in Acts 2 is often seen through a kind of gauze-y, sepia-toned filter  — the early church at its most beautiful, most pure, most idealistic. Three thousand people, sharing all things in common, breaking bread with glad and generous hearts. That passage launched hundreds of intentional communities in the 1970s. And we may hear those words with a kind of wistfulness, the way you might look at a photograph of something you know you can never get back. 

But there’s nothing nostalgic or sentimental about what this community was actually facing. They had aligned themselves publicly with a man the Romans had executed as a troublemaker. They were enemies of the empire — and they knew it. The gladness Luke describes — the Greek word denotes something ecstatic, jubilant, overflowing — this was not the gladness of people without a care in the world. It was the gladness of people who had decided, together, that the Good Shepherd’s economy was more real than the empire’s economy, that the kindom of God was more real than the Empire, and that they were going to live as if that were true, starting now, at this table, with this bread.

This matters for us, in this moment, in this room. Because we, too, are not living in stable times. We are living through the unraveling of institutions and laws we thought were durable, the systematic dismantling of safety nets that took generations to build, a potential economic crisis brought on by a foolish, stupid war, an AI revolution that is going to dramatically reshape how and if we work. The question this text asks is not: Can we recover a lost golden age? The question is: What does a community do when the outside pressure mounts?

They look to their own living tradition. What Luke describes in Acts 2 was not, to Jewish ears, a novel idea. For nearly two centuries, a Jewish sect called the Essenes had been practicing the sharing of property, communal meals, resources distributed according to need — not just at their desert community at Qumran, but in towns and villages throughout Judaea. The ancient historian Josephus tells us there were more than 4,000 Essene men spread in communities across the region. When someone entered the community, they transferred their property to the common pool. Even food and clothing were held in common.

So some of those people on that Pentecost morning almost certainly knew this model. They weren’t being asked to do something unimaginable. They were being invited into a living Jewish practice, now animated by a new conviction: that the God who raised Jesus from the dead was the same God who had always insisted, through Torah and prophet and psalmist, that life was meant to flow toward need rather than accumulate at the top.

The community that had just formed also had an immediate, practical problem. Many of those 3,000 were diaspora Jews who had come for the feast and planned to go home. Now they weren’t going home. They had no local housing, no local income, no local support network. The Good Shepherd’s economy was meeting a real and urgent human need.

So what is this economy, exactly?

Last week I talked about how we can learn about the Creator from looking at creation. And I think we can also learn about the Creator’s economy by looking at creation. It’s simple: The grass grows without being asked. The water runs without being rationed. The sun shines on everyone, just and unjust, human and more than human. The early church was attempting to become, in human community, what the earth already is — a system where abundance flows to everyone rather than accumulating in a few hands. 

The Creator’s economy also runs on a different physics than the empire’s. The empire’s physics is scarcity: there is not enough, so we must compete, hoard, extract, protect what is “ours.” The Creator’s physics is based on abundance: There is enough, and the way to keep it flowing is to keep it moving. 

Bible scholar Ched Myers points out that understanding is written into the oldest rhythms of Torah: the seventh day of rest, the seventh year of release — when enslaved people were freed and debts cancelled — and the fiftieth year of Jubilee, when even the land was returned to its original owners, a full reset of fifty years of accumulated inequality. Torah assumes — this is the part I find most wise — that hoarding will happen. So it builds in not occasional generosity, but structural, rhythmic redistribution. You don’t wait until someone is moved to give. You build the giving into the calendar. Into the law. Into the operating system of the community.

The early church in Acts wasn’t inventing something. They were, under pressure, doing what Torah had always asked of them.

What’s interesting is that the common life described in Acts 2 seems to be specific to that community, in that crisis, in that moment. Scholars note that nowhere else in Acts does Paul tell his churches to practice communal sharing in this particular way. Luke is not writing a universal blueprint. He is describing what the Spirit did, in that place, among those people, at that time.

Which means — and this is actually liberating — we are not failing if we don’t live like the Acts 2 community, sharing all things in common. The text is not accusing us if we don’t — because we don’t — but it is asking us: What is the Spirit asking of us here, in this community, in this particular moment of pressure? 

I want to try to answer that concretely. Because I think we are already doing some of it, and I want us to see it clearly.

There are a number of people in this community who have quietly given money or major possessions to someone in need and called it a loan, without expecting repayment on any particular schedule or even at all. They have held that debt loosely, subordinating repayment to the relationship, trusting that if repayment comes it will do so when it can. The debt exists, but it doesn’t get to be the most important thing in the room.

And we regularly, quietly fundraise regularly for people whose needs outpace what our Sharing Fund can address. We can’t always address every need, but we try to do what we can. That is koinōnia — the word the early church used for fellowship, which meant not just warmth and goodwill but the actual sharing of material life — not charity flowing downward from those who have to those who don’t, but a commons to which we all contribute and from which any of us might someday need to draw.

Every time we hold a debt loosely, every time we raise money for an unmet need, we are enacting the Good Shepherd’s economy. We are practicing what the early church practiced, what the Essenes practiced before them, and what Torah asked of Israel before that.

And yet I think this moment is asking more of us. Not because we have been inadequate, but because the pressure is increasing, and the Good Shepherd’s economy scales with the need. These, by the way, are just the ideas the I, Joanna and Pat came up with at our last staff meeting — but we need our collective imagination to address what is coming.

I wonder about a more organized mutual aid network — one that goes beyond financial gifts. What if we kept a simple shared document where people could list possessions or skills they were willing to offer? Who among us has a spare room? A truck? Legal or medical knowledge? Who is willing to offer child care, or host a potluck? We are informally doing this kind of sharing all the time — but I think we are leaving real gifts on the table because we’re not organized around it. Might two or three of us be willing to take this on?

What about a shared emergency fund — a pool of savings, contributed to by those who are able, available to anyone facing an unexpected crisis? A car repair that exceeds your savings. A medical bill that arrives before a paycheck. Instead of going into debt, you draw from the pool and repay it in whatever increments make sense. It would take some trust and some structure to make it work — but I think it is possible among us. One of our former members, Claire Haas, proposed this years ago and might have made it happen had she not moved away. Is it time to return to this idea? 

And I want to raise again: What would it look like for some among us to choose some form of intentional community? Not all of us — but some. We know these communities are not utopias. They can be hard at times. But I think they are the most honest form of the Good Shepherd’s economy, the one that strips away the fiction that we can practice radical sharing while keeping our lives fully separate.

One last word. The Good Shepherd’s economy requires that we practice receiving, not just giving. One of its quiet barriers is shame — shame at needing help, shame at asking for it. Learning to receive is its own spiritual discipline: the willingness to be vulnerable, to be held by the community, to need something and say so, to trust that the asking will not diminish you.

I want to end where we ended last week, because I don’t think we’ve left Psalm 23 behind. We’ve gone deeper into it. The table is being set in the presence of enemies. That is where Acts 2 finds the early church — not after the danger, not instead of the danger, but inside it, eating together, glad and generous, in the valley’s shadow.

The viriditas — that greening power Hildegard of Bingen named — is not only what runs through the soil and splits open the seeds and drives the cosmos toward life. It is also what ran through that room in Jerusalem, through those frightened, exhilarated, newly-gathered people who decided to pool their resources and eat together daily It is what runs through us, when we hold a debt loosely. When we pass the hat. When we receive. When we look to our living traditions to come up ways that make sense now to practice radical sharing.

The valley is real. The pressure is real. And the table is being prepared right in the middle of it — here with this bread, in this community, today. Amen.