"Sharing in Community"
Acts 2:42-47
Rev. Emily Labrecque, Westmoreland UCC
April 19, 2026
[Pray.]
As many of you know, in the 1980s this church established the Westmoreland Service Corps – a program that offered five young adults the opportunity to embrace simple living, intentional community, spiritual growth, and meaningful service. Chosen from applicants around the country, these young people lived in our former parsonage while serving various local social service agencies.
After college, I participated in a similar, albeit national, program. I spent a year in Los Angeles the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, living in a worn-down house in Koreatown and working with unhoused young adults in Hollywood.
I shared that house with six other recent college graduates from across the country. We each received a small stipend, which we pooled together – drawing out just $100 a month in spending money. The point was to live simply, to get a real taste of what it means to be poor in this country. The rest covered rent, utilities, and food. We took turns cooking, shopped for groceries together, and spent our dinners processing the day's work at our various agencies. We even held Bible study nights – where I, the lone Protestant in a sea of Catholics and the only one headed toward ministry, was the obvious choice to lead.
Every day I took the bus from Western and 11th up to Hollywood Boulevard – and the contrast was breathtaking. Just blocks from where I stepped off stood the Dolby Theater, the Walk of Fame, Grauman's Chinese Theater. Tourists fresh from Beverly Hills with designer bags, celebrities dressed to the nines – and inevitably, some of the same kids I worked with every day, sitting on the sidewalk asking for help.
Two worlds, inches apart.
That year changed something in me permanently. I had arrived in Los Angeles thinking I was going to serve – and I did – but what I didn't expect was how profoundly that community would reorient my understanding of what it means to live well. The simplicity wasn't just a sacrifice. It was a revelation. Pooling our resources, sharing our meals, processing our days together around a table – it turned out we didn't need nearly as much as we thought we did. And what we gave up in comfort, we more than gained in meaning.
I didn't have a name for what we were doing at the time. But it turns out people have been doing this for a long time – and doing it far more radically than we were.
These kinds of programs are modeled after the Catholic Worker Movement, which honestly deserves far more attention than I can give it in this sermon – but if you're unfamiliar, I encourage you to look it up. Their Aims and Means document states that the movement seeks to live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ, and that doing so requires beginning to live differently. Dorothy Day, one of its founders, put it simply: "God meant things to be much easier than we have made them."
I look around at our world today and find myself thinking the same thing: there has got to be another way. For those who join the Catholic Worker Movement, there is – and it requires much of what we encounter in our passage today: voluntary poverty, manual labor, works of mercy, and nonviolence, all rooted in Scripture, the life of Jesus, and the witness of the saints who have gone before.
This movement resonates deeply with our text, doesn't it?
The book of Acts was written by Luke – the same author as the Gospel of Luke – roughly fifty years after the crucifixion. It recounts the founding of the Christian church and the spread of the Gospel across the Roman Empire. While scholars often treat it as historiography, it is really better understood as Luke's theological vision, shaped by what he hopes the early Christian community will become.
We often lift up this passage as an ancient yet radically progressive picture of what the church might be: holding things in common, selling possessions to care for the poor, breaking bread together in small communities, devoting themselves to teaching and fellowship. It offers continuity with Jesus' own ministry of life-giving abundance. At the same time, it is an idealized portrait. As the story continues, this fragile experiment will fracture – most notably in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, which we'll explore together in a few weeks.
I do believe that in the Peaceable Realm, life looks something like this – holding things in common, sharing equitably, caring for one another across every divide. But our society, our government, and our current systems make it very difficult to truly operate that way. When I left the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, I carried real grief about the fact that the life we had built together couldn't simply continue. I had come to love that way of living – even if I didn't always love all of my roommates. It felt more aligned with who I know Jesus to be and how he calls us into relationship with one another.
So where does that leave us? Somewhere between the radical vision of Acts and the reality of our daily lives – and I think that's actually exactly where most of us live. We are not going to sell our possessions tomorrow. Most of us are not going to move into a Catholic Worker house. And that's okay. But the tension between that vision and our reality is not meant to stop us – it's meant to nudge us. To ask us, as it asked those early Christians, and as Hollywood Boulevard asked me every single day: what am I willing to do?
The good news is that we don't have to start from scratch. We already have a foundation.
As you know, we have a robust Social Justice and Action Committee carrying out a remarkable range of ministries. Members volunteer at Wheaton Woods Elementary with their food distribution program. Others serve at SOME – So Others Might Eat – offering food to the unhoused and vulnerable. Still others support our Refugee Resettlement program, walking alongside families who have newly arrived and need a hand finding their footing. We work diligently to promote liberation for the Palestinian people. We also provide grant funding to a number of organizations whose missions align with our values. We already do truly meaningful work.
But it's easy to see disparities and fill gaps with our time and treasure. The early Christians didn't stop there. They were moved to go further. They asked themselves: How can we claim to be one in the Spirit if some among us lack food, housing, and meaningful work? How can we call one another siblings in Christ while some are destitute and others flourish? They came to see their personal comfort and property as secondary to the well-being of their neighbors. They refused to let two worlds simply brush past each other – the way they do on Hollywood Boulevard. Because as the Aboriginal peoples of Australia have long said: my liberation is bound up in yours.
None of that, however, happens without relationship. We have many connections to agencies and organizations, but what would it look like to invest a little more deeply? For those who haven't yet volunteered at Wheaton Woods or SOME, what might it look like to try? I encourage you to speak with Chris Lawrence or Mary Grossnick about getting involved with our Refugee families.
In a few weeks, we'll begin hosting Mission Moments during worship, when representatives from the organizations we fund will share briefly about their work. If their mission moves you, I hope you'll seek them out during social hour. I'll also be meeting with the principal of Wheaton Woods to explore whether there are additional ways we might support those children and families beyond food distribution.
You know, I still think about that bus ride. Western and 11th, all the way up to Hollywood. Every single day, two worlds inches apart – and the question hanging in the air between them: what am I willing to do?
The early Christians looked. And then they acted. They built something together that the world hadn't seen before – not because they had more resources or more power, but because they were in relationship with one another and refused to let their neighbor's suffering be someone else's problem. We are heirs to that tradition. And we are called to the same action.
So may we leave here today a little less comfortable with the distance between those two worlds. May we invest more deeply in the people and communities around us. And may we trust that in the sharing – of our wealth, our time, and ourselves – we are participating in something ancient, something holy, and something that the world still desperately needs.
Amen.
