Acts 2:14a, 36-41
But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified."Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, "Brothers, what should we do?"Peter said to them, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him." And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, "Save yourselves from this corrupt generation."So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.
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So the lectionary selection for today breaks up the second chapter of Acts into shorter selections heading into Pentecost. Given that I think we can't understand Peter's bold speech proclaiming the crucified Jesus as the Messiah outside of the Spirit's in-breaking, I think it is worth our revisiting the whole of the story.
The resurrected Jesus has just ascended to heaven, and the disciples have returned to Jerusalem. Huddled in the upper room, they choose Matthias to replace Judas and thus are restored to twelve, invoking the traditional twelve tribes of Israel and heralding their renewal. They do so, it seems, through gambling. As someone who grew up in a church tradition that didn't allow card playing until the 60's, I find this hilarious and more than a bit ironic. I can imagine them sitting around the table saying 'I don't know, should we just roll the dice?' It's as if the narrator is saying God needs to send them someone wise - and soon.
And lo and behold, look what happens in the very next verse. The Spirit descends on the room where they are gathered, rushing in like a violent wind. The disciples are baptized by the Holy Spirit and with fire, as the prophet turned martyr John had spoken of years before. Empowered by the Spirit, they begin to speak new languages, their tongues of fire igniting all whom they encounter.
Jews from every nation, gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Feast of Weeks, begin to hear the story of this Jesus - the one that was crucified by Rome yet rose - in their native languages. Their astonishment grows as they see the ones speaking are Galileans, uneducated backwoods folk not known for their world travels or multicultural awareness. The crowd asks 'what is going on?' Others wonder 'are they drunk?' Particularly curious is that if the disciples just wanted to get across some basic message about Jesus they could have easily spoken Greek - as the official language of the eastern empire it would have been well known by the pilgrims and migrants gathered there. The Sprit is telling us something here about the sacredness of cultural and linguistic diversity - it must be both celebrated and defended against imperial assimilation. Perhaps the scattering of tongues at the Tower of Babel was a blessing rather than a curse…
Standing before people from all corners of the earth, Peter boldly proclaims the coming of the Messiah in the person of Jesus, the humble yet radical rabbi from Nazareth. No longer ashamed or afraid as he had been in the hours preceding Jesus' execution, he launches a loud monologue well within earshot of the imperial authorities. Locating the events of the past weeks within the last days, he says that the words of the Prophet Joel are now being fulfilled - young men are seeing visions, old men are dreaming dreams, women and slaves have begun to prophesy and claim their equality under the Sprit. The new age has arrived in and through the resurrection of Jesus, and the entire house of Israel is invited to the inaugural feast.
And then the second miracle of the day commences. Rather than dismissing Peter as some crazed hillbilly or fearing that his subversive message would get them all killed, they listen. Something connects for them in a way it never had before, and they know their lives will never be the same again. Their path has taken an unexpected divergence, and they join in this radical renewal of Israel through being baptized. Over three thousand people, speaking every language under heaven, come to be part of this new community.
And this new community takes very seriously the Spirit's call to being-in-common, as we see in the following verses. They share what they have, redistributing wealth in reclamation of the Jubilee tradition. They break bread together in each other's homes, creating intimacy where they had once been estrangement or indifference. They enjoy one another, reveling in their creatureliness before the creator. Unsurprisingly, those looking on at the edges begin to desire this different way of life, 'and day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.'
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Now while Luke can be a little prone to smoothing out the rough edges in his re-telling of things, perhaps not unlike our own beloved Elizabeth O'Connor on this point, this story serves as the founding act of communal memory for what later came to be known as the Christian church. And we are right to return to it today, at a time when so many of us are asking what faithful evolution looks like on this Eighth Day of Creation. Reflecting on the passage, there are three questions that arise within me that I want to place before us.
Question 1: Is this Story reallyfor everyone? I have to confess that if I was one of the disciples present on the day of Pentecost, it probably wouldn't take me long to pull the brakes on all the celebration. I would move quickly from awe and wonder to anxiety about how all these new people are watering it down. They didn't even know Jesus - and they haven't been part of this struggle. How could they possibly get it? And why do they get to show up now and experience salvation? How much of the story will they forget, screw up, or re-write when they tell everyone about this back home?
The Spirit doesn't seem to bother with such questions, swiftly transforming the Galilee-centered movement into a global phenomenon. And we know the story here is only a foretaste of the more radical inclusion to come, when Gentiles receive the Spirit and become part of Israel's story, too. The Spirit leaks and flows where it will, creating unlikely assemblages that are beyond our control or anticipation. So doing, it unmasks our temptation to conflate Christian identity with always being 'the radical minority.' We don't know where the way of Jesus will find resonance, and cannot predict in advance the kinds or numbers of people that will respond to the Spirit's claim on their lives.
It comes down to this: do we believe that deep down other people want what we want? That across differences and despite appearances they share our longing for community and hope for justice? Will we seek to reach them, to be with them by sharing their lives, or will we remain huddled in the upper room, in fear or resentment of the new world breaking in?
Question 2, and not unrelated to the first: What new languages will we have to learn?On the day of Pentecost, the disciples found themselves speaking in a tongue other than their native one, which I imagine came as quite a surprise, both to them and those who heard them. Called out of their own cultural logics, these followers of Jesus were drawn to into deeper connection with the life patterns and linguistic textures of strangers. And in the process their vision of 'we' shifted, growing more expansive and perhaps a little strange. Rising to meet God's queer future, as my friend Jay put it several weeks ago, often means acquiring new vocabulary.
Learning new languages is not always easy, and often doesn't happen with the rush of a violent wind. Our journey to become an antiracist church is one powerful example. We are learning what it means to speak the Gospel in a society still very much marked by white supremacy and domination, something that can be very uncomfortable because it calls us to change in the process. But we are beginning to understand what James Cone meant when he wrote 40 years ago that God is black – and it is changing everything. Our passion for justice and hope for liberation have grown stronger, more rooted. And we're becoming a more beautiful, colorful, and beloved community than ever before.
What other dialects will we apprentice ourselves to in the days ahead? What strange places will we find that the good news is already there, and that we just hadn't noticed it before? Are we willing to transgress boundaries and explore new idioms for the sake of deeper becoming?
Question 3: What other forms of life might the Spirit lead us into?The story doesn't end with Peter's speech and the baptizing of the three thousand - this is only where it begins. Drawn together with strangers, the followers of Jesus begin to unfold utterly novel forms of life. Refusing the imperial economics of inequality and extraction, they experiment with the Jubilee economics of generosity and abundance. Abandoning millennia-old assumptions about the proper ordering of the household, they look to women, slaves, outsiders as their new leaders. Oriented around a different vision of power –a power-with rather than a power-over –these communities spread rhizomatically throughout the empire, cracking the official edifices and confounding the dominant order of things.
When Eighth Day was founded in 1976, it was with a deep conviction that we participate in God's ongoing creation of the world. The initial members, several of whom are here today, wanted to explore more deeply the multicultural nature of God's creation on Columbia Rd. and respond to its challenges. Doing so required them to be open to new ways, and even to let go of some of the things about The Church of the Saviour that they had held dear. The community has continued to evolve – through standing in solidarity with Latin Americans struggling for liberation, birthing new missions to support low-income folks here in DC, growing more inclusive in our worship service, and in countless other ways. And if we remain open to the Spirit and its coming through the Other, we will always be evolving. Doing so, we just might set this city ablaze.
In our remaining time together, I would love to hear from other voices in the community, particularly those that don't often share from the space of the pulpit. How do we see Eighth Day evolving faithfully in the years ahead? How might our structures need to adapt or our story need to expand in order to welcome the Spirit's in-breaking through the Other? What new languages might we need to learn as we partner with the renewed Potter's House?