pentecost

Acts 2:14a, 36-41

This passage in Acts reports that three thousand people joined the Christian movement as a result of one sermon – a very humbling statistic for any preacher. In contrast, where I live, if you confess to being a Christian you’re likely to get funny looks. Recently I learned there are people describing themselves as Christians who say empathy is toxic, a means of manipulating people’s emotions to accomplish a “liberal” agenda. Yikes. No wonder we get funny looks.

At first blush, it seems that the words of Peter’s Pentecost sermon would be the last thing we’d say to people who already think we Christians are curiosities at best, loathsome at worst. “Repent, and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven … Save yourselves from this corrupt generation,” preaches Peter. It isn’t only our un-churched friends and neighbors who are uncomfortable with that kind of language. A pastoral intern I worked with called words like these – repent, sins, save – “stained-glass words.” They are churchy words, words that have been trivialized in our culture, shrunken into something simple and even punitive when they have a deeper, richer, more life-affirming and more hopeful meaning than most people outside the faith, and many within it, assume.

Sin might be the scariest of these words. Maybe it’s easiest to think about sin in the context of another of these stained-glass words, repent. In Scripture, repent is not feeling really sorry for what you’ve done, nor is it feeling ashamed of the horrible person you are. In the Hebrew Bible, to repent means to return to God, to reconnect with God. According to this definition of repent, sin is being disconnected from God. This disconnection happens when, individually and corporately, we ignore God, turn from God, don’t take God into account. Which we all do, at least some of the time.

Repent has the same meaning in the New Testament, with one nuance. The Greek roots of the word combine to mean “go beyond the mind that you have.” Go beyond the mind shaped by culture to the mind that you have in Christ. In the New Testament, repentance is the path of reconnection, the path of transformation.

Salvation simply means to be saved from our predicament. What is our predicament? Peter says we need to be saved from this corrupt or crooked generation. These words have a hellfire and brimstone sound to them, but what they require us to do is look at sin as something that surrounds us. Sin isn’t just personal peccadillos but is pervasive in the structures and systems of society. When Peter says to the crowd, “this Jesus whom you crucified,” he isn’t talking to the people who hammered the nails into Jesus’ hands, or even to the crowd who shouted, “Crucify him!” He’s not looking for particular people to blame. He’s referring to this systemic aspect of sin. We are not all equally blameworthy for the systems of violence, injustice, and death that surround our personal lives, our society, and our world. But we are all caught up in vicious cycles of violence and injustice, whether as victims or victimizers or some of both.

That is our predicament. This predicament looks different for different people. We can look around us and see victims of obvious violence and oppression: victims of war, punitive immigration policies, racism or sexism or homophobia, and we can say, yes, those people are in a predicament. Those people need to be saved. But for others, the predicament might feel like something’s missing or wrong or broken. Your daughter is getting a divorce. Your son is trapped in an addiction. You’re in debt, you hate your job, your relationships give you more pain than joy. You can’t get off the hamster wheel of getting ahead or spending or worrying. You’re afraid that this is all there is.

Peter’s listeners are “cut to the heart.” Perhaps the story of the crucifixion has opened their eyes to their predicament and to their need for rescue from all that led to the crucifixion: empire, domination, injustice, the fear of losing privilege and power. Or perhaps they’re overwhelmed with the good news of great joy that God is willing to die at the hands of God’s people and then come back again, not to make them pay, but to give them more love.

It turns out it isn’t Peter’s preaching that saves three thousand people. What saves them, what saves all of us, is the story itself. A better translation of “save yourselves” is “let yourselves be saved.” Salvation is an experience more than a doctrine; it is that moment when you feel cut to the heart, and you have a clarity about God’s love that both reveals your predicament and empowers you to address it. When the people ask Peter what they should do next, it isn’t to get step-by-step instructions for salvation – it’s to respond to what they have already received by the grace of God through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit. Peter says, “Be baptized.” Baptism is just the symbol of that new power and new life.

Grace, baptism, the power of the Holy Spirit. More stained-glass words. This story in Acts is about God’s mission in Christ to us as well as to Peter’s First Century audience. We are included in the promise he proclaims: “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls.” But it is also about God’s mission through us. As Christ’s disciples, we are given the task of spreading the Good News of the promise we have received – the promise, as Frederick Buechner put it, “that Jesus lives on among us not just as another haunting memory, but as the outlandish, holy and invisible power of God working not just through the sacraments [of baptism and the Lord’s Supper] but in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off ourselves.”

That is the Good News. How do we spread it? How do we do that in a culture that not only doesn’t like the word salvation, but much of the time, is oblivious to any predicament calling for it? A culture that often seems to be actively working to maintain our predicament, even to the extent of treating empathy as toxic – unless, of course, that empathy is directed toward people in their own group, and toward efforts that support the structures that privilege that group and deny the humanity of other groups?

At a church I served, carved into the wood on the inside of the pulpit where no one but the preacher could see it was a verse from John’s gospel: “Sir, we would see Jesus” (John 12:21). That reminder is not just for preachers. It is for all of us. Individually but even more, as the church, the body of Christ in the world, it is our job to show people Jesus. To show them the loving, empathetic, compassionate Jesus who relentlessly sided with outsiders and the downtrodden, who forgave sinners and preached peace, who stood up to empire rather than collaborating with it, whose cross tells us how far God’s love will go to bring us back to God. Who “lives on among us not just as another haunting memory, but as the outlandish, holy and invisible power of God working … in countless hidden ways to make even slobs like us loving and whole beyond anything we could conceivably pull off ourselves.”

When George Buttrick was the chaplain at Harvard, a student came to his office and announced that he didn’t believe in God. Buttrick responded, “Sit down and tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in. I probably don’t believe in that God either.” I wonder what I’d hear if I asked one of my neighbors who is likely to give me a funny look, “Tell me what it is you think Christians believe and do that is so threatening. I probably don’t believe those things either. Tell me what kind of church you mistrust. I’m willing to bet that I don’t go to that kind of church. Tell me.”

Resources:

Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancico, 2003).

Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991).

Debbie Blue, “Reflections on the Lectionary,” in The Christian Century, March 25, 2008.

William H. Willimon, Interpretation: Acts (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1988).

Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew (New York: Walker and Co., 1995).

Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-21

The story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis is an origin myth, the kind of myth that explains how something came to be. The Tower of Babel explained to the ancient Hebrews why there are many languages, but the story goes much deeper than a “how the tiger got its stripes” kind of story. The Tower of Babel deals with the consequences of human hubris. Hubris is more than pride in doing things well. Hubris is arrogance, an over-confidence usually due in part to a failure to recognize that we have limitations; that we don’t know and understand everything.

The hubris of the people who decide to build the tower includes the conviction that this tower is the right way to reach God – the right way for everyone. Usually, what we think is good we are likely to think is good for everybody. What we think is bad we are likely to think is bad for everybody. It’s hard to get outside our own perspective to see the way things look to others. The tower builders in Genesis are so sure of their perspective that their stairway to heaven becomes a monument to their conviction that they’re right, a colossal stone sign that says, “My way or the highway.” The problem is that “My way or the highway” always leads to violence; it leads to forcing something on someone else, against that person’s will. Three times in the Genesis passage the people say, “Let us” – let us make bricks, let us build, let us make a name. But the “us” doesn’t really include everyone because not everyone has a voice in this; I suspect the enslaved people carrying the bricks didn’t. “Us” also doesn’t include God. My way or the highway is not God’s way. In the story, mid-way through the tower’s construction, God confuses the people’s speech, bringing the entire project to a halt.

The Acts passage tells the story of Pentecost. It’s a story that doesn’t see different languages as a threat. The disciples were scattered in fear after Jesus’ crucifixion. On Easter, they were amazed when the risen Jesus appeared to them, but in the first chapter of Acts, Jesus abandons them again. He promises that they will receive the Holy Spirit, which will give them the power to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. Until then, he says, they are to wait in Jerusalem. And then he’s gone.

They’re waiting in Jerusalem, gathered in one place, when suddenly there is the sound of the rush of a mighty wind. Flames appear above each of the disciples. Without warning, these Galilean fishermen begin speaking languages that every Jew gathered from the Diaspora can understand. The message they hear, each in their own native tongue, is the good news of God’s deeds of power. The skeptics in the crowd believe the disciples might just be drunk, but Peter stands before the crowd and quotes from the prophet Joel. Joel says God’s Spirit will be poured out on all flesh – all people – men and women, slave and free. All people will have the power to tell the truth, to reveal God’s truth on God’s behalf.

Marcus Borg writes, “The coming of the Spirit is the reversal of Babel, the beginning of the reunion of the human community.” We are in the middle of the ongoing Pentecost; the wind of Pentecost is pushing us even now to speak and listen to new languages. The different languages in Acts are a metaphor for being able to reach across the chasms of difference that can divide us, but our reaching across the divide has less to do with what we say and everything to do with the way we say it. In our increasingly polarized culture, our reach across the divide must begin with a rejection of hubris, a reclaiming of Christ-like humility, and time spent learning about each other, learning to understand each other.

Perhaps the Spirit is blowing us toward a deeper understanding and respect for what it means to be “spiritual but not religious,” or what it means to be suspicious of organized religion, or even what it means to believe nothing at all. The Church doesn’t own or control the Holy Spirit. As Jesus told Nicodemus, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” The world in which we live is a world of many languages and perspectives, many ways of being, but it is a world in which God is already at work, and not just through people who believe what we believe or who want what we want; not just in the Church but far beyond it.

Perhaps the Holy Spirit is blowing us towards reinventing the church, and I don’t just mean what kind of music we listen to on Sunday mornings. Pentecost is a never-ending story, and the Spirit surprises us all.

Resources:

Chapter 2, “The Tower of Babel,” Reinhold Niebuhr’s Beyond Tragedy.

Robert Coote and Robert Ord, The Bible’s First History.

Solvitur Ambulando

Putting one foot in front of the other on the path of faith

Cut to the Heart

The Ongoing Pentecost