Jul 3 2019 Acts 8:14-25

But Peter said to him, "May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God's gift with money!

We pick up the story of the early disciples, after Jesus has died. I can imagine they’re still trying to figure out what it means to be followers of Jesus Christ, without Jesus Christ still there – sort of like us.

Peter and John are off in Samaria, an area formerly one of the many enemies of Israel. But now, word is that the Samaritans have accepted the word of God, so now Peter and John head there to pray. When they lay hands on the locals, they receive the Holy Spirit. A man named Simon watches this and offers them silver, so that he too might be given power. They rebuke him, upset that Simon thought he could obtain God’s gift with money.

There are a couple of parts of this that make me want to explore further. First, Simon wasn’t asking for anything worldly, or horrible. He offered to pay for the power to do the same thing as Peter and John – that when he laid his hands on someone, they would receive the Spirit. Was he offering to pay for a gift he wanted to receive – the gift of receiving that power? Or was he offering to pay so he could give that gift away – laying on of hands and giving others the Holy Spirit? It seems to me that the two are conflated in this story. Simon’s request was for him to receive something to allow him to give something.

His motives are good – he wanted to offer the Holy Spirit to others. But he’s made God’s gift transactional – I give you money, you give me this ability to share God’s spirit. We are such a transactional culture – in our love, vocation, gift giving. Because of that, I think this is a really really hard message to unpack.

Maybe this is about decoupling these two things. I give you something, you give me something in return. No. Instead, God’s gifts and grace happen are given, regardless of our gifts. To presume it’s conditional on our offering sets up the second thing I’m thinking about.

While we hear that God’s gift and grace are freely given, not contingent on our offering, we because we’re in a transactional society, and we need money to pay bills, the Church can sometimes unintentionally buy into the transactional nature of God’s grace. I have been in meetings of a church governing body, where the discussion was whether we should do some building-related beautification, versus some outreach in the community to share God’s love. The money was there to do one, but not both. Alas, the people who’d given the money to the church expected the beautification. If I give you silver, will you beautify the building? The answer was yes. So for very practical reasons, like paying the light bill, church leaders allow silver gifts to influence the sharing of God’s gifts.

This is not only bad for the church, but it’s also bad for the people who offer silver in return for a transactional experience of God’s grace. It allows people to create a mental hierarchy of God’s love and gifts. I give more, I get more. Those people give less – or not at all, so they get less of God’s love and gifts.

This morning I’m thinking about how we decouple money and God’s gifts. If only we could believe and convince others to believe that if they are at all coupled, it’s the gifts from God that come first. In return for the good graces I’ve received, I offer a small portion of them back to God. If I’ve received more graces and gifts from God, I offer more of that. Yes, the church needs money to operate. But what if we actually said to the entitled transactional faithful that their silver will perish with them, because they thought they could obtain God’s gift with money?