Acts 2.42-47 (CEB)
The believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to the community, to their shared meals, and to their prayers. A sense of awe came over everyone. God performed many wonders and signs through the apostles. 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. They praised God and demonstrated God’s goodness to everyone. The Lord added daily to the community those who were being saved.
Boris Johnson
It is easy to make promises — it is hard work to keep them.
The tech world is filled with Terms of Service (ToS) agreements. We all digitally sign these when we use apps like iTunes or Microsoft Word. The ToS is our contract with the company, sometimes called an “end-user agreement.” In return for the company’s service or use of their application, we agree not to abuse or resell the app or service, and we agree to hold the company harmless for a zillion things.
Anyone using a cellphone or computer has agreed to hundreds of these contracts. Most of us have never read any of them because they’re the long, endlessly scrolling text boxes that pop up and force you to click an “I agree” button before finally using your new software. We are bound by these agreements every day but rarely pay them any mind.
In considering the ubiquity of Terms of Service agreements, it occurred to me that there is a ToS to which we should pay much more attention. Because every human being comes with one.
Our human ToS obligates us to be God’s love on earth. That’s it. While we are alive, we are to act, like Jesus, as God in the flesh and be God’s love on earth.
The people of the Bible called this Terms of Service contract a covenant. It was intended to change people’s behavior by coercing them to act communally instead of selfishly, or even tribally.
The author of Acts (the same unknown author as Luke), a Jew, was acutely aware of his people’s covenant obligation to God. He writes that the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus took their divine contract seriously and shared everything: food, knowledge, physical and emotional healthcare, and prayers.
They even redistributed their wealth. Willingly. To care for the community.
Luke tells us that they did this because they were awed by God’s presence among and within each and every one of them. The clear implication is that when God fills us with divine love (which God is doing all the time); when our minds, hearts, and souls are focused on experiencing God’s divine love within and among us; we understand our obligation to the community and rejoice in it.
Of course, this concern with the communal good is understandable since Christianity is a child of Judaism. In Judaism, remember, the people are in covenant with God. Covenant isn’t just a fancy word for relationship. A covenant is a legally binding contract. Covenantal communities consider themselves in a contractual relationship with God.
In covenant, the people are beholden to God to love one another in the same righteous, loving, caring, self-giving manner in which God loves them.
History has been unkind to these awe-filled, communal, covenantal communities. So unkind that the three Abrahamic religions now bear little resemblance to their namesakes. Somewhere along the way as the world industrialized, we lost our tolerance for one another. We lost our sense of covenant.
As outsider religious communities like the one described in Acts, joined or became the mainstream, they shed the clothing of the humble servant and instead robed themselves in the riches of kings.
At one point, the Catholic Church literally became the Holy Roman Empire. That is not what Jesus had in mind, nor does it fulfill our contract with God. Because an empire, even a holy one, is still an empire, concerned more with its own welfare than the people’s. Which is a guaranteed way to lose an empire. And a religion.
Consequently, the world’s great, inspired, covenantal faiths, whose prophets brought messages of peace on earth, goodwill toward everyone, have devolved into remnants of kingdoms that never should have been. Worse, they have defaulted on their covenant with God and left God’s faithful people tattered remnants of jingoistic intolerance and hate.
Our great Abrahamic prophets—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—tell us to live as covenant people.
In today’s world, that means leaving our religious cabals behind and recommitting to our covenant with a God who never divides us but always encourages us to come together, as one people. God’s people. Whether we connect with God through Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Jainism, or any other ism, we are all God’s people, and we are all contractually obligated to not merely serve God, but to be God’s love. Every one of us.
How do we do that? How do we commune as human beings in a world that continually rages negatively about our differences rather than extolling each other’s uniqueness as a remarkable, awe-filling aspect of God’s physical being?
Why do we so readily believe Jesus is God in the flesh but refuse to accept that about ourselves?
Jesus would be heartbroken. Not only because we have such a horrible self-image problem, but also because, until we recognize our Christlike nature, we will be incapable of faithfully executing our divine contract.
Let me say that again, like an old-timey preacher man: Until we recognize our own Christlike nature, we will be incapable of faithfully executing our divine contract.
Despite our exterior appearances, our assumptions and human laws, we are all facets of the being of God. We are, elementally, equal and necessary parts of the whole of God’s creation. Whether we are white, black, Hispanic or Asian, male, female, free or enslaved, whether Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, or Buddhist, we are all God’s work on earth.
And we’re all under contract with God to serve one another.
If religious people—from every faith around the world—would merely recommit to their divine covenant, we would be well on our way to working together as a single global consciousness with the best interests of humanity in mind. Imagine us doing this seemingly impossible thing—actually creating a Star Trek-like world of peaceful cooperation because we have a new understanding of existence: One God, many revelations. One species, many variations. One people. One is all there is.
Once connected through God to each other’s inner divinity, life is no longer about collecting all the toys and winning. It’s about the community. It’s about serving each other because our best purpose is to serve God. Jesus would say it’s about the community of heaven, lived in the here and now.
Our ancestors understood this concept perhaps better than we. And both the early Jewish followers of Jesus and early Muslim followers of Mohammed did their best to create tangible, alternative communities of love, where everything was happily shared as many unique individuals formed one body of believers.
God works through us the same way God worked through Jesus and Mohammed. Still today, God compels us to fashion a communion of souls focused on manifesting a new world of enlightened, selfless love.
Perhaps, to move forward into that new reality, we need to better remember our past.
Then, we might finally fulfill our part of God’s Terms of Service agreement.
Amen.
