The House Where Nobody Went Without

About three thousand people were baptized on the day the Holy Spirit came, and the next morning every one of them woke up hungry.

Plenty of them did not even live in Jerusalem. They had come from Egypt and Crete and Rome for the feast, meaning to go home in a week. Now they had heard about Jesus, and they could not bear to leave. (No city keeps three thousand spare beds. Jerusalem was about to find out how many people fit under one roof.)

So the friends of Jesus stuck together, the way a family does.

Every day they went up to the temple courts, where Peter and the other apostles taught them what Jesus had said and done. Every day they prayed. And every evening they crowded into each other's houses to eat.

In one of those houses, a mother looked at her pot of lentils, then at the people all over her floor, and laughed. "We are going to need a bigger pot!"

"Then borrow mine," said her neighbor, who had come with three loaves and four children.

Before anyone ate, Peter took a loaf, thanked God, and broke it. He remembered another table, on the night before Jesus died, and Jesus breaking bread and saying, "Do this to remember me." So they did, in house after house, night after night, with glad and generous hearts.

One morning a man came to the apostles with a heavy, clinking bag. "I sold my field," he said. "Give the money to whoever needs it."

"All of it?" someone asked.

"All of it! Some of my new brothers and sisters have nothing to eat."

People sold land and houses and things they could spare, and the money was shared out to anyone in need. A widow got flour. A traveler got a warm cloak for the cold nights. They treated everything they owned as if it belonged to all of them together. (Ask anyone who has tried to share the last biscuit: giving things away does not come naturally. These people were doing it with fields.)

God was doing great wonders through the apostles too, and a trembling awe came over everyone who saw them.

The rest of Jerusalem noticed.

"Have you seen those Jesus people?" a shopkeeper said to his wife. "They eat together every night, they sing, and they keep giving their things away!"

"Have they gone crazy?"

"They look happy."

Most of the city thought well of them. And day after day, the Lord added more people to the family, people who were being saved.

Bread runs out, though. Every loaf they broke was gone by bedtime, and by morning everyone was hungry again. However many cushions they squeezed onto the floor, somebody always ended up sitting in the doorway.

The kingdom had already begun, right there among the lentils and the borrowed pot.

But each of those suppers looks ahead to a bigger house. "My Father's house has many rooms," the Lord had told his friends on the night he broke the bread. "I am going there to get a place ready for you." In that house the door is always open, the bread is never gone by bedtime, and there is room for everyone who belongs to him. At the head of its table sits Jesus.