Homage to Acts 4

In Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, the author recounts his personal experience of the civil war in Spain. It is a story of hardship and betrayals. A time of madness in Spain when, anarchists fought fascists, who were supported by other fascists, while the anarchists were loosely supported by communists, who didn’t actually get along with the anarchists they were supporting. The politics of the story is too complicated to explain here, but there is one very interesting part of the story in which Orwell describes the city of Barcelona whose social stratification had been completely dissolved by the socialist ideas of the anarchists. Working class people ran the city, and they demanded respect, not only on a large scale but also personally. People in the service industry looked people who had once been considered their superiors in the eyes and didn’t use formal Spanish forms of address to show special respect. Everyone spoke to one another as if they were friends and equals. Perhaps the most striking thing to me is the fact that there were no private cars in the city. Cars were held in common by all the people.

Imagine what that would look like. You take a car to the grocery store, but come home in a different car because someone else has taken the one you took from home. Cars would be much cleaner on the inside because you wouldn’t have time for trash or personal items to accumulate. Every car would be a taxi and every person would be a taxi driver. I can’t imagine how angry Uber and Lyft would be. Aside from not wanting to drive home after a night at the bars, why would anyone need to use their ride sharing apps? We share all our cars all the time and we don’t need some company to make billions of dollars in profits from it.

Of course, you might be imagining this and thinking that it would never work. Obviously, the anarchist reign in Barcelona was cut short. Some would blame the communists for that. Some would blame the fascists. Some would blame other European countries for not intervening at all against the fascist takeover of Spain, leaving international support for the workers of Spain completely to the Soviets. Whatever the case, it didn’t last. And even if we didn’t run into the same problems of international politics fighting locally, we would have other problems. What if there weren’t enough cars to go around and you go stranded somewhere? What if people drove recklessly? Now that they don’t have a car of their own, getting into a crash hurts everybody, not them personally, so maybe they wouldn’t be quite as safe. What if everyone having access to cars meant they got overused, especially by the poor who might not have had access to them before? And doesn’t this take an important status symbol away from the rich? Why shouldn’t they exclusively be able to drive expensive cars if their hard work paid for them? Everyone driving spacious, fuel efficient cars, the things that workers would want for commuting, would be unfair for the people who like to use cars to flex their affluence.

Obviously, to live in a world in which we shared cars publicly, would require a tremendous amount of trust in other people. We would need to rely on others to respect the safety of all. We would need to rely on others to not abuse the power to access a car whenever they wanted and ruin this freedom for everyone. And maybe we simply cannot rely on others that much. We have been too disappointed in what people do with their own resources to allow them to have access to our own. It doesn’t help that the media constantly fills our heads with images of how dangerous other people can be. We isolate ourselves in our own homes, afraid to encounter people who might hurt us, rob us, disagree with us publicly, or simply be rude to us. If we stay within the confines of our own private lives and never interact with the public, then we can avoid all the pain and discomfort of dealing with strangers. That’s why we want our own private cars. We don’t trust people, and we don’t want to engage with the public any more than we absolutely need to.

While the idea of sharing our cars seems fanciful today, even if we could trust each other better, the idea of holding all things in common was standard in the early church. In Acts 4:32-35, the author is explicit. “No one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” Land was sold and the proceeds were distributed according to need. While these could be small properties that we wouldn't consider major agricultural production sites today, in the ancient world, a family home was a place of economic production. People giving up their homes and lands is the equivalent of people giving up farms and factories today.

I don’t want to suggest that we should give up our homes and farms to redistribute wealth to the poorer members of our community. At least, I don’t want to say such a thing is necessary. If you truly feel moved by the Spirit to donate property, then act faithfully according to what the Spirit says. However, we should take note of the underlying trust in this community. They believed in each other enough to share everything because they believed in God enough to know that everything could be shared. This didn’t mean that all members of the community were perfectly faithful. The next chapter gives us the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who lied about the value of the property they sold so they could keep some for themselves. The chapter after that describes how some people were neglected in the distributions of resources, a problem that was resolved by the appointing of the first deacons in the church. The community wasn’t perfect. They had problems in acquisition and distribution of resources, and all the while they faced real persecution and threats. However, they relied on the faithfulness of God enough to trust the community that God had gathered. It may not be perfect, but it is enough to be trustworthy.

I don’t think there will ever be a time in my life when all cars will be public, when workers run the world and everyone is taken care of. And even if such a day were to dawn, I suspect it would be short lived. The powerful will always seek to take back power, even if it is wrested from their hands for a time. However, I do hope that we can learn to trust each other better. We so often retreat into our own private spaces and private lives because we are afraid or ashamed of the world. If we are waiting for the world to be perfect, we will never leave our homes. But if we trust God enough to care for us, then we can go out into the world faithfully, and even when heartbroken and disappointed by the failures of our fellow man, we can rise and rise again by God’s grace to trust the world that God has created to do the good God has created it for.