Revolutionary belonging and the problem of couples

Last week, we began our series studying the book of Acts in the New Testament (written about 80s or 90s CE) that traces the story of the early church from Jesus’ heavenly ascent to well into Paul’s ministry. As Jon wrote about and shared last week, we are using scholar Willie James Jennings’s commentary on Acts as a significant pillar of our studies (he is so brilliant and also we are finding we need plenty of time to metabolize his work). Jennings understands the book of Acts to be a portrayal of revolution: the Spirit of God disrupting in the midst of empire and diaspora. One of the most significant ways the Spirit of God disrupts is through revolutionary intimate belonging. This is the essence of the new way of the Church—deep and disrupting intimate belonging to one another. 

The message of Acts is about God’s desire for this belonging:

“That desire has the power to press through centuries of animosity and hatred and beckon people to want one another and envision lives woven together. Such a life never asks people to forget their past or deny their present, but to step together into a future that will not yield to the given order of isolations, but yields to the Spirit that is poured out on all flesh.”

The story of Acts is one of a group of people radically belonging to one another without the hindrance of isolation, segregation, or individualism. The writer of Acts, traditionally considered to be Luke, describes the belonging like this: “The community of believers was of one mind and one heart. None of them claimed anything of their own; rather, everything was held in common” (Acts 4:32). 

There are many curious stories in the book of Acts. One of them is in Acts 5:1-11, when a couple in the community, Ananias and Sapphira, decide to keep some of the proceeds of a property sale. Members of the community agreed to give all proceeds and income to the group, but the couple conspired to keep some proceeds for themselves. The story does not end well for this couple. And while there is much to unpack about the violence within the story, let’s reflect on the role of couples. How does a couple function within a revolutionary community like the one in Acts?

In Jennings’s dissection of Acts 5:1-11, he suggests the Church has wrongfully idolized the concept of the married couple and has placed power and priority on couples—rather than the community. By idolizing marriage, the community fails to see the full vision of intimate belonging. “Modern coupling is an energy-drained vortex that seeks to capture all our imaginative capacity for intimacy.” For Jennings, the revolution of intimacy of Acts is about deep, radical belonging to one another, not about splitting off to who you are married to or related to. 

We will be discussing this story and detangling the Church’s impressions of marriage and singleness in more depth on Thursday night. As we prepare, I want to leave us with this quote from Jennings: 

“No longer will the couple be the keeper of the secret, the owner of the intimate, or the custodian of the closed field of dreams, both personal and private. The community of Jesus confronts the couple with a new truth: you belong to us. We do not belong to you.”