Not My Favorite Bible Story

I just finished a sermon series on the psalms. One of the passages was Psalm 69, which is a lament psalm that cries out to God for help (“Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.” -Psalm 69:1). It was a tough passage and I told the congregation from the sermon that it’s okay to admit you’re not okay. And sometimes these hard passages in the bible remind us that it’s okay to not be okay.

            And then there are passages that just…don’t seem okay. Those passages that you read and think, “Thank God THAT story never comes up in the lectionary!” In an article from 2006, Barbara Brown Taylor calls these the “terror stories.” In her article, called “Preaching the Terrors: When Your Text Is Bad News,” Taylor wrote that the Bible is “a book about a sovereign God’s covenant with a chosen people, as full of holy terrors as it is of holy wonders, none of which we may avoid without avoiding part of the truth.”

            That hit me in a raw way because I had just finished telling an adult Bible study group we were going to skip Acts 5:1-11 in our Acts study. We were skipping it, I said, because it drove me crazy and I couldn’t tackle it in the Bible study with them. It’s the story of a married couple, Ananias and Sapphira. In the story, Ananias sells a piece of property, keeps some of the proceeds, and gives a portion of the money to the community chest – the financial pot of the apostles. Simon Peter accuses Ananias of having Satan in his heart, accuses him of lying, and when he hears these words, Ananias falls down dead.

            Wham. Just dead.

            Three hours go by. Three hours. Finally, his wife shows up, presumably wondering how it went with her husband when he went to give his money. When she gets there, Peter asks her if the price is right. “Tell me whether you and your husband sold the land for such and such a price” (NRSV, v. 8). She says yes, he accuses of her of not only backing up her husband but in doing so, putting the Spirit of the Lord to the test, and she falls down dead, too.

            Wham. Just dead.

            And I read that story and I think, “Wow. I am SO GLAD this story never comes up in the lectionary, because I do not want to talk about these two.” Mostly because I don’t understand the story. Like Barbara Brown Taylor said in the article, I don’t do so well with the terror part. And I have questions about this story that I can’t answer!

            Why was there no opportunity to repent?

            What would have happened if Sapphira hadn’t backed her husband up? Would history call her a “bad wife”?

            What is the deadliest sin in the story?

            From the story, it sounds like the biggest problem is the lie. Peter accuses Ananias of lying to God. Maybe Ananias handed in a pledge card that promised the whole price of the property, but he wasn’t honest about what that price happened to be. He wasn’t just lying to the church; he was lying to God.

            Reminds me of Matthew 25. “Truly, I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.”

            In the passages of Acts that follow, the people face incredible persecution. The body of Christ has to be strong. They have to be all in with each other because they are all each other has. They are stronger together. Honesty is a key part of togetherness. Deceit from within can be deadly.

            “It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren,” said Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor from Germany.

            Barbara Brown Taylor offers this hope for approaching “texts of terror”: “The best hope of all is that because the terrors are included here, as part of the covenant story, they may turn out to be redemptive in the end.” That’s a hope I looked for in the story of Ananias and Sapphira. If there is any redemption at all, I think it is in our call, as a church, to do all we can to encourage and support our community of faith. It is our call to do everything we can to act with integrity and honesty. Pastor and Biblical commentator, William Willimon put it nicely when he said, “Not to confront lies and deceit, greed and self-service among people like Ananias and Sapphira, would be the death of the church.” It’s hard to be faithful all the time. But we do as a community of faith and as individual members of that community, we do for the common good of the whole community. Anything less than that is a sin not just against the church, but against God.

            The Bible is not all lambs and rainbows. Life isn’t, either. The challenge is to wrestle with the hard texts. To not back away from them. To name and claim the reasons we want to back away from them, and then to face them head on anyway.

I still don’t like the story of Ananias and Sapphira. I don’t like it because I still find it harsh. But I appreciate Barbara Brown Taylor’s encouragement to seek the redemption in the texts of terror. It’s a story that reminds me, as Brown-Taylor puts it, that we serve and worship “a sovereign God who is radically different from me, whose mind I cannot read, whose decisions I cannot predict, whose actions I cannot control.”

             Do you have a Bible story that challenges you? I encourage you to read the story again and spend some reflecting on it. Where might you find redemption in the story? What is it about the story that bothers you? If you’ve wrestled with a story in the past, what gives you hope through that wrestling? Share your thoughts with me here in the comment section! I would love to hear from you!