St Albans Uniting Parish

Readings

Acts 2: 1-21

This is the classic Pentecost reading where the failed frightened disciples become the transformed and transforming apostles of the Risen Christ. 

The feast of Pentecost was one of the important Jewish festivals and in understanding the multi-translating of the apostles preaching it needs to be remembered that most people were bi-lingual and the apostles, like most Jews, probably spoke Aramaic and Greek.[1]

We also need to be open to Luke’s use of symbolism and metaphor in relating the miraculous birth of the church.  It was a time when there was a wide spread interest in monotheism, a search for mythic tradition and a practise to forge such interest into a viable religion.  This is apparent in this episode by the mention of proselytes, which were also called ‘god fearers’.  The language of trade, Greek, was widely understood throughout the known world which meant the apostles’ message could move from culture to culture. 

Travel was relatively easy on good roads and safer in the first century than any previous time in history and indeed safer than it was for centuries after that time.  Add to that the subsequent destruction of the Temple, the dispersal of the surviving Jews and the forced separation of Jesus’ followers from main-stream Judaism.  There was also dispersion through spasmodic persecution. 

With all these factors combining we can understand that the establishment of the church had all the encouragement and fuel it needed to spread out like a bush fire, fanned not by the hot dry wind of the Australian outback, but the creative breath of the divine Spirit.

Bill Loader also notes that the focus on language reverses the curse of Babel because communication is restored regardless of first language.

Like a movie director, Loader writes, Luke creates a scene with wind and fire. The scene is a commentary on the whole movie to follow. The God of Sinai and the Law is acting again. The promise of an abundant flow of God's Spirit is being fulfilled. God's Word, God's Law, is being declared. These people with flames shooting from their heads are again the true Israel, committed to obey God's Word. History is repeating itself, but in a new way. The focus on Israel is reinforced when we realise that Luke is talking here about people from all parts of the empire.[2]

John 20:19-23

The Christian community that produced Luke and Acts developed a very structured organisation.  We can see this beginning in the first chapter where they added Matthias to the group to keep the number at twelve.  We have just read of the dramatic commissioning of the first disciples as apostles—the Greek word for a military ambassador who has the authority to act for the person who has commissioned the apostle.  That commissioning was public in as much as it happened among the believers and they all witnessed it.  Then the wider public immediately witnessed the resulting transformation.

The community that produced John’s Gospel, who probably lived in Ephesus, had a different understanding of a Christian community and put greater focus on spiritual guidance rather than apostolic leadership.  Therefore the arrival of the Holy Spirit is in the privacy of a locked room and comes directly from the Risen Christ.

In great wisdom the early church has elected to keep both these visions of the response to God’s Spirit.  Without doubt some people experience a dramatic and public empowering by the Holy Spirit but many others experience the inspiration of the Risen Christ through quiet contemplation in their own private space. 

John has never referred to the disciples as apostles up to this point and it is in this episode that the disciples are commissioned as apostles through the Holy Spirit.  Their mission is one that is passed on from God to Jesus and then from Jesus to the disciples who are commissioned as apostles through the action of the Holy Spirit.[3]

Sermon

Last weekend we took our guest for a walk through the city and there was an open air evangelist preaching to nobody in the square.  He had a sound system which spread his message through the chilly winter air but absolutely nobody was listening to him.  People were walking through the square, looking at and photographing the damaged cathedral and taking selfies against the artwork.  They were all totally oblivious of the earnest evangelist who was giving intimate details of the variety of surgical procedures he had endured until Jesus finally healed him.  I think that is roughly what he was on about because I wasn’t really listening either. 

What that particular open air campaigner was obviously unaware of was the difference between the people wandering through the square and those Peter addressed in our Acts reading.   The evangelist in the square was speaking to the wandering collection of disaster tourists who were busy taking ‘I’ve been there photographs’ and had no interest in what he had to say.  Furthermore he was making claims for his faith that opposed our Western cultures’ trust of medical science.

By contrast those that Peter preached to were in Jerusalem for a Jewish religious festival and they were already intrigued by the fact that, although they all had different first languages, they could understand what the disciples were saying. 

Peter spoke to a religiously interested crowd and answered the question that was of immediate interest to them.  Peter told them that the disciples were not drunk and their linguistic ability came from the Spirit’s empowerment.  Furthermore he based his argument on the religious tradition that had brought them all to Jerusalem.  Judaism was the tradition of the disciples and the tradition of those who had come to the festival.

The disciples, and those who had come to the festival, were all part of a broad religious community and by coming to the festival of Pentecost they both affirmed their membership of that community.  They also formed a smaller community of people who were in Jerusalem for that particular Pentecost festival.  

Based on Jesus’ command to love one another as he has loved us Dr Bill Loader reminds us that community is inseparable from Christ’s mission. Christian mission is mission within community and by a community.   Peter spoke as part of the community of disciples, all of whom were part of a wider community of those attending a Jewish religious festival. 

Many of us have been to conventions or conferences, or travelled with tour groups and will remember how quickly the assembled group from diverse places and backgrounds becomes a community with very little effort.  That sense of community makes the participants interested in each other and concerned for each other, at least for the time of the event.  Some friendships formed at such events can also last for the rest of people’s lives. 

Imagine being at such an event and a rowdy group of eleven members of the group comes into breakfast, all excited and all talking at once.  Some of the wider group will be listening trying to hear what they are saying.  Others will be too busy with the full cooked breakfast and quietly mutter that it appears the noisy group must have continued partying all night.

In such a setting it is easy to imagine that when one of the rowdy eleven stands up to speak the whole dining room would at least start to listen.

Our Acts reading tells us that there were both Jews and proselytes attending the festival and the proselytes would have been particularly interested in what Peter had to say because they were non Jews who wanted to convert to Judaism. 

For anyone who doesn’t have a Jewish mother converting to Judaism has always been difficult but as the followers of Jesus became inclusive of non-Jews those Greeks, Romans and others who were interested in a faith in one God found the immerging church very attractive. 

Writing of our John reading Bill Loader suggests that the disciples are being directed to create an ordered community which faces up to itself, dealing with its own issues.  He believes that John appears to be drawing on a tradition about church discipline that grounds flights of idealism, which want to take off at the sound of the word, ‘Spirit’ and brings them back to accountability.  Loader notes that John’s Gospel consistently undermines faith which depends solely on sensational miracles.[4]

Certainly Luke’s description of the Spirit descending like tongues of fire and empowering the linguistic ability of those eleven previously timid and despondent disciples sounds like a sensational miracle.  Indeed many denominations and Christians have viewed it this way and demanded such a spiritual experience of converts even to the point of requiring that they garble in tongues as proof of receiving the spirit. 

John’s Risen Christ, who arrives in a private space and breathes the Spirit into his followers, is indeed a useful foil to such demands for public empowerment.

However if we unpack the Pentecost episode as we have done we can discover lots of normal things happening.  There is attention shared by a community of common purpose, the presence of proselytes indicating an interest by non-Jews in Judaism but inhibited by racial exclusivity and minor surgery for males.  If we add to that safe travel and forced dispersion following the temple destruction we can see that Peter stood with the eleven to make his claim about Jesus at exactly the right time.  

In fact we could also include the destruction of the temple as an urgent reason to either redefine Judaism or form a new faith out of Jewish tradition.  Indeed both happened.  Judaism moved from its temple sacrifices to a synagogue based faith that focussed on exegesis of scripture.  Christianity also focussed on the exegesis of scripture but included the way Jesus lived that understanding into a faith of compassion and community.

So we can conclude that the church began and spread rapidly simply because the right ideas came together at the right time in history. 

But then we must also ask ourselves how we might describe all the elements to create a new faith coming together at exactly the right place at exactly the right time in history to form what is now one of the three great faiths of the modern world.

Perhaps we might just call such serendipity a miracle. 

If we do call that a miracle then we can certainly grab hold of the imagery of the Spirit of the Risen Christ coming down from heaven and dividing like tongues of fire and empowering each of Jesus’ followers.

We can also envision each of those fired up followers spreading that fire throughout the tinder dry foliage of a faith seeking Mediterranean.  Furthermore we can draw on the image of an Australian bush fire sending sparks along the trade routes into Asia and north into Europe with roman colonisation.

Inspired by such imagery we must remember that we too are bearers of the spirit fire empowered to live as Christ in our community. 

We live in noisy neighbourhood of diversity that does not always hear the lone voice that speaks when no one listens.  Nevertheless we live in a city that grieves from its own experience of destruction and searches for meaning in an age of instant worldwide communication and a desperate need for caring compassion.

In such a world the message of the church’s birth calls us to ponder on its rebirth in this ‘now’ that is our time and place.   

We at St Albans Uniting are challenged by these texts to open ourselves to the Spirit fire that ignites us in mission that is exactly right for the time and place that is ours.