Hilton Head Island, SC – May 7, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Acts 2:37-47; Acts 5:1-11
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – When Ananias heard these words, he fell down and died, and great fear came upon all who heard it. - Acts 5:5; Immediately she fell down at his feet and died. When the young men came in they found her dead, and they carried her out and buried her beside her husband. - Acts 5:10 (RSV)
Only once in my life did I ever hear any preacher talk about the story of Ananias and Sapphira. It was in St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Ingersoll, Ontario, and I must have been between ten and fifteen years of age when I heard the sermon. The preacher was the Rev. Dilwyn Evans, who had a powerful tenor voice. I don’t know exactly why this sermon impressed me so much, but it did. Maybe it was because it is bizarre in the extreme.
To understand why this couple came to such an abrupt ending to their lives so close together, we need to recall the unique circumstances surrounding their story. The second chapter of Acts explains what happened during the first Christian Pentecost. Tongues of fire from heaven descended upon the disciples, and immediately they were empowered to speak in foreign languages to all the foreigners gathered in Jerusalem for the Pentecost holiday. Then Peter addressed the large crowd, and the narrative says that three thousand people were baptized that day. Apparently they all thought that the world was about to end. Then it says, “And all who believed were together and had all things in common, and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45).
This, in other words, was what we today would call total socialism, and some people would call Marxism, but this was eighteen hundred before Marx. In theory, socialism is an ideal means for taking care of everyone. The problem is that most people are unwilling to share everything they have with everyone else. Those who have the least like this idea the most, and those who have the most like it the least. In between on the misty flats, as John Oxenham said, the rest go to and fro. Nevertheless, that’s how Acts says the first Christians decided to live their lives in preparation for the apocalypse. Few if any of us would choose to do that, but that was the utopian basis upon which these people had agreed to prepare for Apocalypse Now, which never came.
It is with that background that we come to the unique if also far too briefly explained saga of Ananias and Sapphira. They were a married couple who sold a piece of property they owned. But instead of putting all the proceeds of the sale into the communal treasury, Ananias kept part of it for themselves. Somehow Peter sensed what he had done, and he accused Ananias of his dastardly deed. When Peter did that, Ananias immediately fell down dead. The young men wrapped him in a shroud and buried him, forthwith.
We are told that three hours later Sapphira came sauntering into the presence of the assembled saints, not knowing what had befallen her dear departed husband. Without telling her, Peter asked her if they had sold their property for such and such an amount, and she said yes. “How is it that you have agreed to tempt the Spirit of the Lord?” Peter demanded to know. Then, in the tones of the fiercest judge in Judea, Peter proclaimed, “Hark, the feet of those that have buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out!” “Immediately,” it says, “she fell down at his feet and died.” Luke, who wrote the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, concludes this story with these words: “And great fear came upon the whole church, and upon all who heard of these things.” To say the least. Not surprising. If it actually happened as we are told, who wouldn’t be alarmed?
George W. Bush said that he didn’t “do nuance.” Neither does the Bible, or not very much, anyway. All that we know about Ananias and Sapphira is compacted into the first eleven verses of the fifth chapter of Acts. We don’t know if they were pillars of the community or the odd couple who lived in an odd house on the wrong side of the tracks. Had they been widely admired philanthropists, or were they the tightest misers in town? All we know is that they sold a piece of property and they didn’t turn over all the proceeds to the socially agreed-upon communal treasury, which is what they were expected to do.
Several weeks back, and for a few weeks running, the Lowcountry of South Carolina was in local, state, national, and international headlines. A pillar of Hampton County, Alex Murdaugh, was indicted for the murder of his wife Maggie and son Paul. But that alleged crime occurred only after a string of financial crimes were also alleged to have occurred.
The Murdaugh name was widely known in Hampton County for over a century. Alex’s father and grandfather and great-grandfather had all been attorneys and prosecutors in the court system, and we learned that Alex himself was a volunteer prosecutor, whatever in the ever-inscrutable Palmetto State that might be. For a couple of years prior to the murder trial, there were rumblings in the press about financial irregularities of a major nature, and there also were previous mysterious deaths connected to the Murdaugh family.
Walterboro, South Carolina became the byline for many stories emanating from the Colleton County Courthouse. The entire trial was telecast on a cable news network. It was a riveting event; how could a man who was so renowned fall so far so fast? Was he guilty of everything of which he was charged? Might he be guilty of yet more crimes?
Testimony confirmed that Mr. Murdaugh was addicted to drugs, and that over the years he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to feed his habit. One fiscal misstep led to another, and another, until he was millions of dollars in debt. It all came to a climax on that fateful night in which his cellphone proved to be his undoing, and the jury found him guilty of the unfathomable murders of his wife and son.
How could all that have happened? How could a man who had for so long been so respected fall so far into a chasm of his own making? “O what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” said Sir Walter Scott.
Enough time has passed that the volatile mixture of thoughts and emotions which engulfed us during the turbulence of the trial has subsided, and we can reflect calmly about human frailty under severe stress. Alex Murdaugh is a Lowcountry Bernie Madoff. He is the Enron implosion writ small. But you or I could also be Alex Murdaugh. We could be Ananias or Sapphira, or Bonnie and Clyde. As St. Augustine declared so long ago, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” Such a plummet for almost all of us is highly unlikely, but, given the wrong set of circumstances, anyone could become a blaring headline.
Probably very few people, if indeed any at all, set out systematically to engage in unspeakable acts of depravity. Momentary or lifelong insanity may explain the actions of most mass killers. Often, after the fact, parents admit that their sons showed signs of instability, but they did not know how to deal with it, nor could they find anyone else who could. What leads a policeman to handcuff a man, and then kneel on his neck until he suffocates to death? What impels a young white man to put a choke hold on a young Black man until he dies? Why are white policemen more likely to shoot Blacks than whites? Lately it seems as though there is a mass killing in America every other day or so. Why is that?
We can be thankful that most sins or crimes are relatively minor. Minor factors usually explain them. When major crimes occur, however, there likely are a series of major factors which provide the rationale for their occurrence. Were it not for the extended addiction to drugs, Alex Murdaugh would probably never have engaged in breaking any laws. He apparently became incapable of following laws and norms which most people follow for their entire lives.
As Christians, what should be our attitude toward those who engage in heinous crimes? In minor sins or crimes, such as unbridled gossip or shoplifting, we can quite easily “hate the sin but love the sinner.” But what should be our stance toward someone who takes an AR-15 and massacres five or ten people, or toward convicted rapists or child molesters, or toward those who murder their own children or spouses? In such instances, would we ever blithely declare, “There, but for the grace of God, go I”? No, we probably would think the worst of them.
The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden suggests that all of us are not only capable of infractions of God’s laws as well as those of humanity, but that we do break them on an occasional if not regular basis. That being the case, are we justified in judging anyone harshly for their infractions, either large or small?
The Greek language was one of the greatest accomplishments in the Western World. From it are derived the meanings of thousands of words in all the languages which evolved in Europe and wherever Europeans settled in other places in the world. Two of those words have particular relevance to this sermon: sympathy and empathy.
My dictionary defines sympathy as follows: “an affinity, association, or relationship between persons or things wherein what affects one similarly affects the other; unity or harmony in action or affect.” There are several other definitions and illustrations, but those two suffice for our purposes. When we are positive toward anyone, we feel sympathy for that person.
The dictionary says that persons or things can have sympathy for one another. There are two feral cats that live outside the back entrance of Building 2 in the Seabrook. A friend named them Mischief and Mayhem, and we call them that too. (They have never divulged what they call one another.) Mischief is a tiger cat and Mayhem is a black cat. They are inseparable chums. Wherever one is, the other is sure to be somewhere nearby. Some people in our building feed the cats, including my wife, who gives them treats both morning and evening. She puts the treats in two piles that are separated from one another. So far as we have been able to observe, Mischief eats only his (or her) treats, and Mayhem only hers (or his). Neither swipes the other’s snacks. They appear to have deep sympathy for one another. We have frequently seen them huddled together under the overhanging eaves on rainy or cold days. Mayhem is friendlier than Mischief, but because they choose to remain feral, and they are cats, they don’t show nearly as much sympathy for humans as they do for one another.
If cats or dogs or frogs or elephants have sympathy, shouldn’t people? Aren’t we a more advanced form of being than animals? Or are we?
The dictionary defines empathy similarly to sympathy, but it is not exactly the same. Empathy is “1.the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it.” Frankly, it takes too long to wrap one’s mind around that particular sequence of words, so definition No. 2 is much more immediately comprehensible. “2. The capacity for participation in another’s feelings or ideas.”
Psychologists often give a shorter but more helpful explanation of the similarities --- and differences --- between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy, they say, is to feel for someone or something, but empathy is to feel with someone or something. When a small child or pet is hurting, we feel sympathetic, but we also are more likely to be empathetic, to feel with them. We feel their pain within ourselves. When an adult human is hurting, we are more likely to feel for them than with them, especially if they are the cause of their own discomfort, or so it seems to me. (Probably on the way out of church I will get agreements or disagreements about this, and alas, that may be the only thing anyone remembers from this sermon. Ananias, Sapphira, and Alex Murdaugh may forever be gone with the wind, but my perhaps flawed attempt to explain sympathy and empathy may last in your mind indefinitely.)
Nevertheless, I shall now attempt to emphasize the single point of this sermon. God has both sympathy and empathy for everyone, regardless of the degree of their misdeeds, and we should always try to emulate God in that same beneficent attitude. Some people sin much more egregiously than nearly everyone else, but everyone deserves our sympathy in all instances and our empathy to whatever degree we are capable of feeling with them in whatever it is they are feeling.
If God judged all of us as we deserve, especially in our judgments of one another, we would all feel like hopeless misfits who should be banished to Antarctica for our various sins and peccadilloes. I think Peter may have been a tad too hard on the greedy couple. Happily for everyone, God is able to take everything into account regarding the actions of everyone, and thus, by His sympathy and empathy, we are spared being shipped off to the South Pole. Still, we must always try to do the right in everything, even if sometimes we do not succeed in doing it.
The terrible tragedy of Alex Murdaugh and his family should be a cautionary tale for all of us. Whether he shall ever learn his lesson is not for us to judge. Fortunately for him, and for us, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.” Therefore, “Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.”